Many years ago, I coined the term “Big Eva.” While today the term is used as a quick and lazy smear for any well-known figures of a previous generation that a particular X-man happens to dislike, at the time I intended it to be a humorous but pointed reference to a specific phenomenon: the rise of big conference platforms and the promotion of certain speakers — which I called “celebrity pastors” — that supplanted or subverted the role of local congregations, ministers, and denominations in shaping church policy.
By “celebrity pastors,” I did not mean those church leaders who happened to be well-known. I meant those who consciously leveraged their public platforms to exert influence beyond their church, thereby weakening it. These were not simply podcasters or bloggers or op-ed writers. They were key players in large parachurch organizations that sought to operate as denominations but without the typical accountability that denominations are, in theory at least, supposed to involve. At the height of Big Eva’s influence, I once asked a class of students who was the most influential pastor in their lives. Almost none mentioned his or her actual minister, defaulting instead to naming the headline acts at the big Evangelical conferences. Q.E.D.
The era of Big Eva seems to have run its course. The conservative Protestant scene in the U.S. is no longer dominated by a few big-name celebrities or by a handful of large conferences. While those large conferences still exist and are often well-attended, they do not grip the popular Evangelical imagination as they once did. They seem on the whole to have settled into the role that they should always have held: optional supplements to local church life for Christians who are committed to their own congregations but who enjoy connecting to others from elsewhere and hearing preachers from a variety of denominations. But the problems at the heart of Big Eva have not disappeared. They have migrated into new forums, particularly that of social media.
The broader business dynamics in the U.S. are now sometimes referred to as creating the “gig economy,” a term that describes the shift from the traditional business model and institutions as sources of income to the more disparate and informal network of opportunities offered by new media. Ubers have squeezed licensed taxi drivers. Airbnb has opened up the world of short-term accommodation well beyond that once offered by professional hoteliers and the proprietors of guest houses. And so in the world of Evangelicalism, Big Eva is being challenged by what we might call “Gig Eva.”
There are some obvious differences between the Big and the Gig. Even in the world of Big Eva, the headline acts were generally men and women who had first established their reputations through service of local churches or talented writing for established publishers. They had a certain authority that predated their rise to Big Eva influence. In Gig Eva, anyone with the time to spend living online can become a celebrity without having proved himself beforehand in any real service to any church. But there are also similarities, such as in the matter of accountability. Big Eva gurus were accountable only to each other. Their heirs in Gig Eva are accountable to nobody. To put it another way, both tend to marginalize the actual Church by making their own platforms and declarations the source of all wisdom, but Gig Eva has only intensified the problem that led me to coin the term “Big Eva.”
There is a further similarity: Both are shaped by the economy of their chosen media. In the world of big venue conferences, headline names are critical to sell tickets. That led Big Eva at times to be undiscerning about who was welcome on stage. I remember asking one Big Eva boss if he thought a couple of his headline acts were men who offered godly models of what a pastor should be. He said “no,” then did nothing. Both men imploded in public scandal sometime later, and only then did they exit the conference stage.
The economics of social media are different, and this is reflected in the culture of Gig Eva: Building a platform on X, for example, involves constant transgression of boundaries, hence the emergence of Gig Eva personalities whose trademark behavior ranges from attacking the leaders of Big Eva to rehabilitating Hitler. And Gig Eva also has the advantage of the frictionless nature of technologically mediated engagement. Big Eva silenced critics by ignoring them or making quiet phone calls to employers. Gig Eva launches full-frontal personal attacks but does so from the safety offered by tech platforms that have no place for that pesky prerequisite of personal competence. Indeed, X is proving to be the perfect platform for those aspiring to be the modern successors to Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw, who “was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.”
No individual group or writer in Gig Eva will likely enjoy the breadth of influence experienced by their Big Eva forefathers. The diffuse nature of online discourse means that there will never be a focal point of the kind provided by the conference stage in the 10,000-seat convention hall. But Gig Eva may well reshape significant parts of the Christian culture because it is so attuned to the pieties of the dominant expressive individualism of our day. Its advocates validate their personal authenticity by their constant iconoclasm, their decrying of anything that stands in their way, and their priority of disembodied, cost-free online engagement over the more expensive demands of service — and accountability — to real people in real time, in church and in homes.
Big Eva had its problems. Gig Eva is set only to intensify them.
Originally published at First Things.
Carl R. Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumpth of the Modern Self, The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies.
