The American church has always had a thing for celebrity — but something shifted over the past five years.
We used to look to megachurch pastors and high-profile believers like Chris Pratt and Justin Bieber as proof that Christianity still had cultural pull. Then the Carl Lentz scandal happened.
Lentz’s 2020 resignation from Hillsong — after revelations of infidelity and systemic dysfunction — didn’t just end a pastoral career. It marked the end of an era: the collapse of the Christian Celebrity Industrial Complex.
Suddenly, the allure of charismatic pastors in designer clothes felt hollow. For a generation disillusioned by scandal after scandal, the curtain had finally been pulled back.
But while one kind of platform crumbled, another rose. In place of celebrity pastors and mainstream Christian icons, we got something new: the Christian influencer.
These are people who might not lead a church or write books or hold theological degrees, but they rack up millions of likes by talking about God online. They share raw testimonies, Bible verse graphics, aesthetic devotionals and TikToks about what the Holy Spirit told them over coffee. And they’re massively popular.
“There’s been a significant decline in trust in institutions,” said author Katelyn Beaty, whose book Celebrities for Jesus explores how platform culture has changed the American church. “In their place, I think many Americans are predisposed to attach themselves to individual figures, most of whom they’ve never encountered in any personal way. But these individuals come to not only symbolize some kind of value or aspiration or political ideology, but also a theological flavor.”
Social media makes these relationships feel personal. People begin to feel like they know these influencers — that they can trust them, follow them, build their own spiritual frameworks around their content.
But influence doesn’t always mean formation, and visibility doesn’t guarantee wisdom. Often, these creators are new to faith themselves. They may be sincere, even inspiring. But they are not elders. They are not pastors. And they are not accountable.
“Because of the spiritual emphases of the evangelical movement, there tends to be a distrust of institutions,” Beaty said. “You have to have this born again, highly individualistic experience of salvation, and that often comes through the preaching of a specific evangelist or writer. So I think it is something in the water in American evangelicalism, that we are suspicious of institutions because we don’t really believe they do dynamic work for the Kingdom.”
That suspicion now extends to the church itself — especially among younger Christians who have witnessed spiritual abuse, manipulation or hypocrisy up close. Many are disillusioned.
Instead of plugging into churches, they log into Instagram or YouTube to get their spiritual nourishment from someone who feels more relatable, less institutional — more real.
“I wonder if we are actually in a time when the church is going to have to accept becoming smaller and more obscure,” Beaty said. “It’s not going to feel successful. It’s going to feel scary and like maybe God isn’t blessing us. But what if the smaller church and the more localized understanding of Christian discipleship is a way that we are being refined, so that the gospel that we attest to actually has staying power and real credibility among our neighbors?”
But that kind of refinement doesn’t trend. What trends is someone with camera presence, a compelling personal story and the ability to make faith content feel fresh and algorithmically appealing.
The lines between Christian encouragement and influencer branding blur — and so does the line between encouragement and authority.
Beaty is careful not to vilify the instinct.
“Celebrities need Jesus too, so I’m sure there are very good things about these friendships,” she said of celebrity believers.
The same goes for influencers. A video about faith reaching millions of people is not inherently bad. But our habit of turning these public figures into spiritual proof points or cultural victories is worth examining.
“We attach to them, in part because we like that it lends credibility to a faith that seems weird to a lot of our neighbors,” Beaty explained.
This isn’t about theology. It’s about optics. It’s about craving cultural relevance — and using someone else’s platform as evidence that our faith is still cool, still current, still accepted.
“We want to feel like, ‘See? We’re not that weird,’” she said. “It lends cultural credibility to our faith.”
But the metrics of discipleship are not found in follower counts or video views.
“So much of the American church has mimicked secular business principles to evaluate success,” Beaty said. “And what we are after, as people attesting to the reality of God in our lives, is not a number of butts in the pews. The metric of discipleship is that you’re actually becoming a community where people are being formed into the likeness of Christ.”
Which raises a question: Who is forming us? Who are we being discipled by?
If we’re being honest, many of us spend more time listening to Christian influencers than we do talking about our faith in community. We’re not building church families — we’re building playlists.
The problem isn’t that influencers talk about Jesus. It’s that we treat them as spiritual wins. We use their popularity as a proxy for how relevant Christianity still is.
We don’t ask who they’re accountable to. We ask how many followers they have.
But there’s no social media metric for spiritual maturity. There’s no viral moment that substitutes for long-haul discipleship. And there’s no shortcut to Christlikeness — only community, humility and time.
As Beaty put it, “What if the smaller church and the more localized understanding of Christian discipleship is a way that we are being refined?”
That may not be glamorous. But it just might be the kind of quiet credibility the world is actually hungry for.
