NEW YORK — Pastor Paul Swearengin, formerly ordained with evangelical Christian denomination The Vineyard, had been disheartened by the prominence of right-wing politics in Christian spaces for years. In 2019, he left his official ministry position and began his podcast “The Non-Partisan Evangelical.” 

He was hosting discussions and promoting his content on Facebook but found himself trapped in conversations that were going nowhere.

“And I actually had a friend tell me, ‘Hey, you know, the people you're trying to reach are not on Facebook,’” he told Religion Unplugged.

So Pastor Paul started making TikToks. 

He’s not the only clergy or church leader who has found an unconventional, welcoming platform on TikTok, the addictive social video app that’s become a popular hub for Gen Z-ers in quarantine and a birthing ground of the internet’s favorite new memes.

The app reached 2 billion downloads in May 2020 and is estimated to have over 800 million monthly users. Many of these users, creators and viewers alike, are religious, and have made a niche home in their corners of TikTok. 

It’s an unusual worship center for more reasons than the fact that videos can’t be longer than a minute. Clergy are using the platform to welcome Christians who don’t necessarily fit the traditional Christian mold. 

On the night before the 2020 election, Swearengin made a TikTok titled “Why I didn’t vote for Donald Trump” — and went viral overnight. That video has been viewed nearly half a million times. Now Swearengin has 64,400 followers and 690,700 overall likes on his channel.

Swearengin challenges traditional Christian beliefs in many ways. One of these is a “modern parable” video series that applies stories like the Good Samaritan to modern life. More controversial is his series on “great sex stories of the Bible,” which aims to address Christian views of purity. 

“If God is not afraid to deal with the messiness of sex,” Swearengin said, “Why are we so afraid of Cardi B and Lil Nas X and these other guys?”

Swearengin called his audience “deconstructing Christians” who are asking questions and challenging the traditional practice of Christianity in areas like politics and culture. 

“It's part of why I ended up on TikTok,” Swearengin said. “I found that there's an audience of people out there who have been driven from the church because of this ideological mindset. They're out there saying, ‘Hey, I can't be a part of this church anymore, but I still have a faith, and I'm looking for a place to exercise it and have permission to pursue it.’”

His motto of sorts, listed in his bio, reads “God is not a Republican and God is not mad at you!”

One of the most notable figures in the “exvangelical” world on TikTok is Abraham Piper, who was never a pastor but is the son of the popular evangelical theologian John Piper, who runs the Desiring God ministry. Abraham Piper has 924,400 followers and posts advice for creative thinking, explanations of introductory etymology and critiques of the evangelical church. 

As he said in a March video after being accused of attacking Christianity by a viewer, “I don’t attack Christianity. I berate evangelicalism, fundamentalism. It’s a destructive, narrow-minded worldview.”

Rev. Timoth Sylvia is the pastor at Newman Congregational Church, a member of the United Church of Christ denomination. He used the app for months as an observer and then began creating content for fun, but quickly found himself connecting with other progressive clergy and a diverse audience — many of whom are members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

“I started to make connections with a good number of folks who have experienced church trauma, folks who have left Christianity, or are identifying as exvangelicals or ex-Mormons, many times over issues around sexuality,” Sylvia said.

His first TikToks to go viral were ones in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and an affirmation of LGBTQ Christians. Now, Sylvia has 36,300 followers and 543,200 accumulated likes. He’s one of many creators who use #progressiveclergy to promote their videos. 

But politics and discussions of theology aren’t the only thing that populates TikTok accounts run by church leaders. 

Robert B., who goes by @violadagoomba on TikTok, is an Episcopalian choir director in Indiana whose love of music led him to begin creating. He is well-versed in medieval music theory — particularly the use of the Guidonian hand, a mnemonic device popularized by an 11th century monk. 

He created a collaborative “duet” with a pre-existing video of a user singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” to explain the device. 

“I threw on my cassock just so that I could cover whatever I was wearing to work, and I figured out how to do the green screen of the picture of the hand,” he said. “And I sang the song using the hand supports that you'd use in medieval theory.”

It received a moderate amount of traction. Robert quickly became the unofficial CEO of Guidonian hand TikTok. He’s used the hand and medieval chant techniques for the “Halo” theme, popular anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion” theme and more. He now has 48,700 followers and 1.3 million likes. 

Father Matt Lowry is the head youth minister at the Catholic Jacks Center on the Northern Arizona University campus. He said the Catholic Jacks TikTok began when they needed to inform students of a location change for a socially-distanced service during the pandemic.

“People liked it. You know, I mean, it got an okay response — or good response, we thought,” Lowry told Religion Unplugged. “And then we filmed another one. A week later, they're like, ‘We need to film another one.’”

The fifth TikTok Catholic Jacks posted went viral; it’s now been viewed 3.7 million times. 

“We realized, ‘Wow, we can reach people. People are looking for positive Catholic content,’” Lowry said.

Currently, the account has 99,700 followers and a total of 2.2 million likes across its videos, which include weekly homilies under a minute and discussion-based live events. Their focus is to engage young people on the app and to portray Catholicism as something positive.

“People have certain impressions of the Catholic Church from a whole spectrum,” Lowry said. “I was like, this is a great way to show them that we're joyful. And we love life. And perhaps we can add value to them this day.”

The app is populated with Christian leaders gone viral. The most popular names include The Daughters of St. Paul, often referred to as the #MediaNuns, Fr. Frankie Cicero, an evangelical Catholic priest, and Father Simon Esshaki, a Chaldean Catholic priest.

Their videos, for the most part, avoid politics and instead offer a supplement to traditional worship. They post prayers, Bible readings, personal stories and Christianized TikTok trends. 

Regardless of their message or content, many of TikTok’s clergy seek to provide welcoming and affirming spaces — particularly for LGBTQ+ viewers.  

Robert, who is gay and married himself, acknowledged that even if he isn’t a defining theologian, his audience sees him for who he is in full.

“I think my role is just to kind of be visibly both queer and Christian,” he said, “to kind of show that, yes, chant is by a bunch of dead white guys. But I also think it's cool. And maybe, if I like this, maybe there are other things about the church — or about high liturgy or about traditional liturgy — that is not so bad.”

Sylvia, also a gay, married man, cultivates what he calls “brave spaces” for his audience to live and ask questions in, particularly for LGBTQ people who have been hurt by the church in the past. 

In the same way, Lowry said he and the Catholic Jacks Center take their role as a Catholic voice seriously. They have encouraged showing love to LGBTQ+ friends and Christians, addressed disagreements between Catholics and evangelicals and even posted about sex abuse in the Catholic Church. 

Like any social platform, creators with this kind of platform are destined to receive negative comments from viewers, often no matter what they post. Depending on the video, creators have said they get cyber hate from secular people for being Christians or for being the wrong kind of Christians from other religious viewers. 

“Some days it's quite a drag, but you just kind of have to pencil it off to ‘hey, religious people hated Jesus too,’ and kind of keep going,” Swearengin said. 

And, of course, many have criticized TikTok because it’s addictive like other social media sites and has negatively impacted the body image of young women. 

“I myself don't look at TikTok because I have found that it can be a huge time waster,” Lowry said. “And it can also change the way I look at people. I can find myself to perhaps be judgmental, and most tragically, feel negative about my own life. So I do not encourage people to look at TikTok. But the fact that people are there makes me want to go there.”

He isn’t wrong that TikTok is where many people — especially younger users — are. But there’s no guarantee that TikTok will stick around forever, and these creators are aware of the potential impermanence of their platform. 

So some, like Sylvia, have begun expanding beyond the app. 

“The conversation started around, recognizing that my presence on TikTok was really just becoming an extension of my ministry,” Sylvia said. “We said, ‘Let's go ahead and invite folks to consider connecting with us in some way.”

His church is now easily accessible from his TikTok bio. Sylvia says they’ve seen many of his followers join in on virtual worship from all over the world, and he and his church plan to retain a virtual worship even after COVID-19 to provide for these worshipers. 

Many clergy said it’s most important that they’re present on the app now and meeting people where they are. There’s also a level of creativity, from the unique algorithm to the prevalence of video memes, that allows for new invention and the beginning of a discussion about faith. 

“My hope is that the cutesy creative stuff on TikTok intrigues some enough to say, ‘I want to know more and I want to go deeper,’ and then to be able to have that interaction of going deeper together,” Swearengin said. 

Jillian Cheney is a Poynter-Koch fellow for Religion Unplugged who loves consuming good culture and writing about it. She also reports on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.