Podcasting in the Christian Peripheries: Constructing Community in The Liturgists, a Post-Evangelical Podcast

Abstract

This thesis studies how The Liturgists Podcast, as a community located at the intersection of new media and religion, harnesses the auditory, technical, and creative affordances of podcasting to construct an online public with warm appeal to the progressive proclivities and cultural frameworks of listeners navigating the tenets of their fundamentalist Christian faith traditions. This analysis shows that TLP fosters a sense of progressive imagined communion through its use of production decisions and discursive constructions. First, TLP draws on podcasting’s production affordances to fashion a listening experience that reproduces and occasionally adapts some of the evangelical theological and narrative traditions, frameworks, and practices familiar to its listeners, invoking the common progressive affective and nostalgic sensibilities of a physically dispersed public. Second, the hosts draw on a series of progressive religious, political, and social discourses that they position in contrast to those of the American evangelical mainstream. By privately nurturing intimate connections between individuals with similar preoccupations, then employing discourses to contest the ideologies and practices of mainstream religious systems, TLP operates according to Fraser’s (1990) notion of a counterpublic (p. 68). However, rather than distancing itself from the Christian tradition altogether, TLP constructs its progressive counterpublic primarily through the framework of a return to a new, enlightened Christianity. This novel reimagining calls alienated listeners back with compassion and acceptance to the faith traditions that betrayed them, establishing their place in a longer history of mediated listening centred around hope in the imagined communion offered through the soundwaves of technology (Schultze, 1987, p. 258).