This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
A few years ago, I started hearing more and more people saying, “Twitter is becoming real life.”
What they meant is that the toxic arguments on the social media app were defining a whole era—shaping and forming the way we communicate with each other in everything from school board meetings to presidential Rose Garden briefings to church business discussions.
What if, however, the Twitter era is closing and the next era of American life will be defined by TikTok? Will that be good news or bad?
That question has lodged in my thinking for several weeks now, after I was surprised to hear the case for some good news about the future of American democracy. I was even more surprised to hear the basis for that projection: TikTok.
On a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, the New York Times journalist joined up with television commentator Chris Hayes to talk about the victory from earlier this summer of socialist Zohran Mamdani over former governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. The part of the conversation that intrigued me was when the two started making fun of Cuomo’s attempts at TikTok skills.
In fact, the two went far afield of Cuomo and discussed the cringe factor of elected officials and candidates awkwardly trying to do TikTok dances, proving with every attempt just how alien they are to this mode of communication.
What if, Klein and Hayes speculated, the most important thing to notice sociologically about Mamdani’s win is not his socialist economics or his anti-Israel foreign policy but instead the way he won: by seeming to be the first major candidate who seems natively comfortable with communicating through TikTok videos and Instagram reels?
“I don’t want to over–Marshall McLuhan everything and say the medium is always the message, and everybody is shaped by their mediums,” Klein said, “because obviously there are a lot of people on TikTok or in vertical video who are not like Zohran Mamdani or don’t even follow what I’m talking about.”
Still, Klein said, we ought to pay attention to how the evolutions of social media platforms have affected the velocity of “vibe shifts” in American political life. To make his point, Klein pointed out that Barack Obama is bad at Twitter. That is not to say that Obama is inept at communicating through digital technologies. He was—after unsuccessful candidate Howard Dean—perhaps the first to really put those media to work at mobilizing and maintaining a constituency. But Obama is not a creature of Twitter. Klein argued,
But with the rise of the populist right, and to a lesser extent, populist left politics all across the world, all at the same time in this punctuated period, starting in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I believe the single strongest force there was not just immigration, and it wasn’t economics, as you can really see in the data. I think it was the rise of central communications platforms of politics being high-conflict, high-engagement, compressed-text platforms.
“These platforms, they’re about groups,” he said. “They’re about engagement within and then against other groups. They’re about drawing these lines very, very carefully. They create, by nature, a more populist form of politics. Or at least they create a communicative structure of politics where it is easier for outsider populist politicians to thrive.”
One needn’t buy into all of Klein’s argument to see the contours of what he’s describing, even within the church.
To be an excellent preacher or a successful evangelist is a wholly different skill set from gaining “influence” by attracting followers on Twitter, now X, which cannot traffic in deliberation or depth but only in the shock tactics of trolling—finding ever more extreme positions, communicated in ways designed to cause anger or fear. In those cases, one’s “enemies” are just as useful as one’s “friends” in amplifying one’s influence.
That technological era, Klein argues, is coming to a close, ending like the “hope and change will bring us all together” vibe of the emerging Facebook era of the mid-2000s.
“The thing coming after it—when you look at TikTok, when you look at Instagram reels: It’s not that no content is high-conflict political content, but most of it is much more day-in-the-life stuff,” he said. “It’s very highly visual.”
What Klein is noticing in some of the new breed of younger political leaders is that their grammar is not Twitter grammar but TikTok grammar. Hayes conceded, “Yes. Fun, kind of goofy.”
Forget for a moment whether it was good or bad, real or fake. Ask what these politicians are trying to portray—walking up to people on the street and listening to them.
If this becomes the dominant ethos of American politics, would that shape culture? Probably. Would it be something other than curating Twitter rage? Possibly. With less combat coming in the cultural ecosystem and more visual performance, does that mean, necessarily, that it’s good for democracy? No.
Philosopher Antón Barba-Kay, writing in Hedgehog Review, identifies some of the same shifts as Klein, calling this new political environment a “TikTokracy.” In such a culture, democracy is no longer rooted in civic education or rational argument but in who can win the algorithmic war for attention—an extension of the Twitter culture, not a turnaround from it.
For Barba-Kay, this is not just a problem of politics. The loss of the ability to follow sustained arguments—and to persuade with them—cuts at the very thing that makes a democratic republic possible. And that’s before we even start to ask what small group of tech entrepreneurs and international powers, corporations and governments, are controlling the algorithms that seize our attention.
The first step to helping people learn to give attention is to treat them as people who can give attention. Politicians might need to learn how to colonize vertical video, but that’s because politicians are responding to the last cultural shift, to people who were shaped by whatever came immediately before.
The church, though, has a responsibility to shape people for the future—their future and the future of those in their area of influence.
In that sense, the call for the church is not so much to figure out how to speak the grammar of TikTok or of whatever follows it. It’s to realize that our cultural grammars are shaping us, forming us, discipling us, right down to the questions we ask.
We don’t simply need answers for questioning seekers—although we need that. We need forms of mentoring, modeling, and internal culture that are counter-algorithms. We need “Thus saith the Lord,” and we also need what Jesus taught us: “Take heed how you hear” (Luke 8:18, ESV).
Lots of things Jesus said to us are countercultural. One of the hardest, for the years ahead, might be words that some of us skipped right over: “Pay attention.”
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
