Hello, fellow wayfarers … How the move from a Twitter culture to a TikTok culture will change the culture and the church … What the beginning of the school year is teaching me about life … What Forky from Toy Story 4 taught me about anxiety, art, faith, and fear … A Texas-sized Desert Island Playlist … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
Will TikTok Save Democracy—or Destroy It?
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.”
The Boys of Summer Are Gone
“Do you think we’re near the end of the world?” a man asked me the other day at a Q&A session after I gave a talk.
I almost said yes. But I wasn’t thinking about the signs of the times. I was thinking about the fact that in just a matter of days, I will be loading up two of my sons to send them off to college, and that kind of feels like the end of a world to me.
I’ve written here before about what it was like to send our son Samuel off to college, and now after a summer with us he’s going back, except that also starting college now will be our son Jonah. I know it’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of an exciting stage of it. And I’ll be happy and proud about that—just not yet. The summer went by too fast, and so did their childhood and adolescence.
I never watched Modern Family when it was on the air, but a clip from it that I happened upon on social media this week wrecked me. In the scene, the dad, played by actor Ed O’Neill, tells a table full of people:
The thing about babies is you fall in love with a baby with the cutest little fat folds, and then … Bam. They’re gone. But it’s okay because in its place is this toddler with the greatest laugh on earth. And then one day the toddler is gone and in its place is a little kid that asks the most interesting questions you’ve ever heard. And this keeps going on like that, but you never get the chance to miss any of them ’cause there’s always a new kid to take the place of the old.
Until they grow up. And then in a moment, all those kids you fell in love with walk out the door at the same time. I’m just saying it goes fast—like the expression, “You never know the last time you pick up your kid.”
Man. That hit hard.
My sons aren’t that far away. They still have their rooms. I hope they’re still home all the time. And I’m glad for these rites of passage reminding me of how proud and grateful I am for the men they’ve become.
That doesn’t mean that I won’t spend this week suppressing tears—wishing I could call a reunion of all those versions of them: baby, toddler, teenager, now young men, even their middle school selves. I love each one of those Samuels, each one of those Jonahs.
But then I will wipe away those tears and smile, because I can’t wait to see the next versions of them—added to all the others—that God in his grace will give.
What Forky from Toy Story 4 Taught Me About Anxiety, Art, and Faith
Maybe you know Tony Hale as the bumbling Buster Bluth from Arrested Development. Or maybe you know him as the bag-toting assistant to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Selina Meyer on Veep. You might even know him as the googly-eyed Forky in Toy Story 4 or Riley’s Fear from Inside Out.
But no matter how you’ve come across him before, perhaps you haven’t heard him like this.
On the podcast this week I talked to Tony—a Christian as well as an accomplished actor. We had a candid conversation about anxiety, art, and faith, and why he’s drawn to characters who never quite have it all together.
We also talked about the themes of his new film Sketch (in theaters August 8), a story about a girl who processes loss by drawing monsters. But this isn’t just a kids’ movie—it’s an honest look at pain, beauty, and what it means to sit with discomfort. Tony shares why he wanted to make a film that respects the emotional complexity of children and adults alike.
We also talk about the influence of Tim Keller, Tony’s early years as an actor, the inner development of his iconic roles, and how to choose roles and shape a career as a Christian in Hollywood.
And be sure to listen until the end, when Tony shares insights on how to be the one Christian among nonbelievers without being either a sellout or a jerk.
You can listen here.
Desert island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Kyle Carlson of Waco, Texas, who writes:
I love your newsletter, and the Desert Island Playlist is one of my favorite features of it. I’ve put mine together—with an embarrassing amount of tension and wrestling, given the vast amount of wonderful music in the world.
Here’s Kyle’s list:
- “Penny Lane” by The Beatles: Is there a better pop/rock song? The cheerful melody, the complex tonic progression, the vivid images (and that piccolo trumpet solo!) … This is history’s best band at its zenith. Can’t live without it.
- “Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean” by Paul Simon: An admittedly obscure track from the greatest American songwriter. Brian Eno’s sonic landscape applied to Simon’s evocative lyrics and virtuosic guitar work creates an utterly unique and irresistible experience.
- “Dixie Flyer” by Randy Newman (Randy Newman Songbook Vol. 2 version): Newman’s under-appreciated genius is on full display in this uncharacteristically autobiographical song. I must insist on the Songbook version, which spotlights his inimitable piano accompaniment, and his unmistakable voice is in finest form.
- “Your Wildest Dreams” by The Moody Blues: This lesser-known English glam rock band is the peak of nostalgia for me, as my dad shared with me his love for their music. Incidentally, nostalgia is the theme of this haunting song, and Justin Hayward’s beautiful voice makes this tune a must-listen.
- “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel: There MUST be a song from the Piano Man on this list, and it’s hard to think of a better example of Joel’s creativity, energy, vocal brilliance, and piano stylings than this seven-minute celebration of music and storytelling.
- “With or Without You” by U2: Perhaps the finest-crafted rock song of all time. The evocative bassline, The Edge’s delay-laden guitars, and Bono’s emotive vocal performance make this one hard to live without.
- “Alive” by Pearl Jam: PJ defined my teen years, and this song from their debut album is the first and best example of their energy and brilliance. It demonstrates why Eddie Vedder would cement his status as one of the best rock vocalists of all time, and it opens with perhaps the greatest rock guitar riff ever recorded.
- “His Heart Beats” by Andrew Peterson: AP is my favorite Christian singer/songwriter, so he has to be on this playlist. And while I’m not sure “His Heart Beats” is necessarily his *best* song, it is undoubtedly one of his most uplifting and celebratory reflections on the person and work of Jesus, so it’ll do nicely as a representative of his fine catalog.
- “Land of My Sojourn” by Rich Mullins: Andrew carries the modern-day mantle of the late Rich Mullins, so it makes sense for Rich to make the list himself. LOMS brilliantly displays Rich’s lyrical poetry and spiritual depth, with a beautiful melody and delightful piano touches. It also boasts maybe the best bridge in any Christian song.
- “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby: One of the best exemplars of piano rock, Hornsby’s classic hit delivers an iconic piano riff, a tremendous melody, and an undeniably good time. I’ll need this lift while I’m chillin’ on the island.
- “Don’t You Ever Get Tired of Hurting Me” by Ronnie Milsap: Ronnie serves as the representative of “old country” on my playlist, and his clear tenor voice and characteristic piano work are on full display in this classic ode to love gone bad.
- “Every Time You Say Goodbye” by Alison Krauss & Union Station: AKUS is a splendid union of country and bluegrass styles, and there’s not a single note in this song that isn’t achingly beautiful. Alison’s angelic voice, the group’s tight vocal harmonies, and virtuosic folk instrumental performances make this a track I wouldn’t want to live without. (If I get to choose, I prefer the version from their 2003 live album.)
Thank you, Kyle!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“When you’re fifteen, your body and mind are still tied to nature. The seasons start inside you. God fashions the new season out of interior materials. You discover the season, now you’re performing it. You’re winter, you’re spring. And the things around start to mimic you.
“It’s why the change in seasons feels like prophecy.
“It’s why, when you grow older and the link between you and nature snaps, you get nostalgic when the seasons change.”
—Nicholas, the troubled protagonist in Michael Clune’s novel Pan
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Jason G. Duesing, ill. Andrés Landazábal, Praise God, All Creatures: A Doxology for Children (B&H Kids)
- George Mackay Brown, Winter Tales (Polygon)
- Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, second edition (Oxford University Press)
- Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love: The Writings of Julian of Norwich, intro. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Trinity Forum)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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