Abstract
In this book, Stephen Pihlaja delves into Facebook and YouTube to explore religious talk online. His dataset includes videos and the comments attached to them, focusing on talk at the boundaries of religious traditions, where proponents of one tradition seek to unsettle the faith of followers of another. The field of potential data – chronic to online studies – is unmanageably large, so Pihlaja limits his study to instances of interaction, both from video creator to video creator and from those who comment on the Facebook and YouTube pages. When online apologists interact, it presents ‘a unique perspective … about users and communities looking at how positions, affiliations, and arguments shift as users respond to one another’ (p. 35). To capture this perspective, Pihlaja uses a complex dynamic systems approach, following Lynne Cameron’s (2015) work and positioning analysis, adopted from such scholars as Rom Harré (1998) and Michael Bamberg (1997). The former allows him to focus on ‘data which represents the system at particular times’ rather than every possible relevant detail (p. 41). The latter orients his attention to the rhetorical strategies with which users promote themselves and their ideas and encourage or attack others.
Pihlaja identified three social media users who promote their various faith positions – a Christian, a Muslim and an atheist – in ways that can be considered evangelical, though this term is problematised in Pihlaja’s analysis. The initial selection of the sample was neither random nor systemic. Pihlaja identified a Christian apologist in the United States who uploads short videos to a Facebook page. One such video was rhetorically addressed to a generic atheist; however, a specific atheist apologist, also in the United States, who runs a YouTube channel, chose to respond in an aggressive, mocking video. Something of a video slinging match followed, along with comments from each camp supporting the video creators. Similarly, the Christian apologist addressed a generic Muslim, inspiring a video response from a Muslim YouTuber in the United Kingdom. This interaction was not as snide and aggressive, nor did it continue beyond the initial video and response.
Having identified this nucleus of videos, Pihlaja then assembled a corpus of video transcripts and comments to assess the discourse dynamics of these three users and their online communities. From each user, he selected 20 videos that were created and uploaded near the interactive event – more in the case of the Christian user, as his videos are shorter and Pihlaja wanted a comparable volume of text from each user. His sampling was purposive, though he included videos on a range of topics, such as sexual morality and feminism, rather than exclusively following the strands of conflict between the users. This is useful in broadening our understanding of each user and his community – their stylistics and their preoccupations. However, it takes the air out of the interactions that give Pihlaja’s project its verve.
Pihlaja organises his analysis into three categories: conflict (Chapter 3), narrative (Chapter 4) and theme (Chapter 5). The first examines the interaction between these users, as well as comments that reveal how the communities that develop around these users amplify the users’ original messages. This is the strongest chapter in the book, as it demonstrates the pressure test that evangelical discourse faces in a context where multiple voices can interpose.
The following chapter, on stories and storylines, abandons this interaction to examine how each user (and the user’s community) draws on sacred texts, personal narratives, and Internet tropes such as memes to articulate his position or to debase another. This chapter is valuable for its insights into public atheist position-taking. With no agreed doctrine or established canon to support atheist positions, those who present themselves as authorities are setting some of the boundaries and standards by which atheism is known and articulated. Just as Christians argued about the concept of the trinity and which books to include in the Bible, atheists are now debating which scientists are useful to cite and what discovery from biology or quantum physics makes the killer rebuttal to a religious counter-claim. However, the chapter feels discontinuous and limp after the energetic discussion of conflict that precedes it.
Chapter 5 digs into the content of Pihlaja’s dataset, comparing the language in users’ video transcripts to, in sequence, the other sets of videos, online comments and the British National Corpus (BNC). In the first instance, there is both divergence and overlap. The atheist, for example, shows a negative valence and a preponderance of swear words compared with the other users. But, to the extent that users are responding to the others, they are speaking about the same subject, so ‘grace’ and salah may be less frequently intoned than ‘God’ and ‘science’. In the second instance, Pihlaja finds a reasonable match between the terms and tone of video text and comments for both the Christian and the atheist; and they also have more consistent engagement in terms of the volume and dispersal of comments. The Muslim user presents more of a challenge: he draws fewer comments generally, and two of the videos he produced have high spikes of comments – one for his response to the Christian user and one for a video engaging with the nationalist group Britain First. These spikes distort the Muslim subset of data. In the third instance, Pihlaja finds expected variations between the evangelical discourse and the BNC, especially and again, with regard to the Muslim, whose use of Arabic puts him out of step with the BNC. I question Pihlaja’s decision to use the BNC as a reference corpus when two-thirds of his dataset draws on US English. More generally, his study raises an interesting problem for corpus-assisted discourse analysis. How appropriate are generic corpora for assessing the features of online talk? The stylistics of talk on YouTube videos and online comments has evolved in such bespoke directions that we can argue for a new standard, though the conventions of online talk are continually adapting.
Two contributions this volume makes to wider discussions concern the empirical and conceptual definition of modern atheism and the specifically evangelical nature of the online discourse. Pihlaja notes that atheism lacks an established institution or a canon of sacred texts. Arguably, it is the affordances of online communication that have given atheism its public dimension. Leadership and authority are more diffuse, and as his data show, online atheists feel no particular need to conform to a public message track, in the way that a Catholic might, not wanting to contradict Vatican doctrine, or a Muslim might, not wanting to expose divisions when the faith insists God is one. Atheists contradict each other within the comments sections rather than reinforcing group solidarity. By constructing atheism in a religion-like way, Pihlaja makes evangelism a relevant way of describing atheist talk online. Thus, ‘the presence of atheist voices online does serve to embolden people to “come out” as atheists and provides them with a place of connection and discussion’ (p. 163). Further, the atheist user occupies an influential role within his community that outstrips that of the other two, as seen in the comparative volume of views and comments.
An irony emerges in Pihlaja’s data and analysis that he does not quite develop in the study concerning proselytism. He distinguishes the Christian term evangelism from the Islamic term da’wah. Whereas the former is seated in a long historical programme of outreach and conversion, tracing back to scriptural injunctions to make disciples of all people; the latter is commonly seen as an internal concept, challenging Muslims to live their faith better. Pihlaja draws attention to some contemporary examples of da’wah that resemble the external conversion aims of Christian evangelism, and he identifies the Muslim user with this kind of da’wah. Yet the aggressive tone of the Christian and atheist users, the disingenuous motives behind their education, and the lack of consideration of alternative arguments suggest their projects may be less proselytical and more about building up their own communities. In contrast, the Muslim uses a ‘softer, more conciliatory approach to the presentation of his faith’ (p. 82), which Pihlaja interprets as part of a genuine appeal to interested observers and potential converts from other faith traditions. The Muslim YouTuber demonstrates imagined understanding of opposing arguments and roots his own persuasive talk in those arguments. His da’wah, ironically, offers the best example of evangelism among the three users.
Pihlaja’s study is valuable to sociologists of religion for his insights into atheism and modes of proselytism, and his in-depth qualitative study of discourse dynamics makes a compelling argument to sociolinguists that ‘social media offers a uniquely transparent, public, and immediate view of how people talk about religion’ (p. 155). As linguistics endeavours to keep up with advances in technology, this study suggests ways of adapting methodologies to make best use of these affordances.