Christian Social Media: Using Platforms to Express (Not Perform) Your Faith
Jesus Better Team
Christian Social Media: Using Platforms to Express (Not Perform) Your Faith
There are two kinds of Christian social media. One is genuine — warm, real, occasionally messy, full of actual human faith that includes doubt and confusion alongside conviction and joy. The other is a performance: curated faith content designed to signal devotion rather than communicate it. The difference is small and enormous at the same time. Both can look identical from the outside. The distinguishing factor is internal — whether the account exists for an audience or exists because this person's faith is overflowing and can't help but come out. That distinction matters, and it's worth being honest about which kind you're creating.
The Platform Opportunity
The public square has moved online. This is not a metaphor — it's a description of where people actually spend their time, have conversations, form opinions, and encounter ideas and lives different from their own.
The Christian witness that matters most is located in lived spaces: the workplace, the neighborhood, the dinner table, the gym, the group chat. Social media is genuinely one of those spaces now. It's where relationships happen and are maintained. It's where people process their lives publicly. It's where cultural conversations occur in real time.
The people who most need to encounter authentic Christian faith — people who've been hurt by the church, people who've never seen Christianity as anything other than a culture war, people who assume faith and genuine intellectual engagement are incompatible — are already on Instagram, TikTok, and platforms we can't predict. They're not coming to your church on Sunday. But they might stumble across your content on a Tuesday afternoon.
This isn't a mission field metaphor. It's literally where people spend their days. The Christian who is genuinely living their faith and sharing that life online is not doing something different from the Christian who lived their faith in the neighborhood in 1955. The venue has changed; the calling hasn't.
The Performance Trap
Matthew 6:1: "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven." Jesus was addressing a specific cultural context, but the principle translates almost directly to the social media context — perhaps more directly than to any context since.
The performance trap in Christian social media is subtle precisely because it can look exactly like authentic expression. The person who posts Bible verses every morning might be genuinely moved by what they're reading or might be curating a devotional identity. The person who shares their prayer requests publicly might be genuinely seeking community or might be performing vulnerability for engagement.
The Christian influencer identity is different from the Christian person who happens to have an audience. One is organized around the audience's perception; the other is organized around genuine faith that happens to be public.
Here's the test: does your online faith life require an audience? Does it exist when no one is watching? If the devotional Instagram story stopped getting views, would you still do the devotional? If the worship post got no likes, would you still worship? These are honest questions worth sitting with. The answers don't have to be perfectly pure — we're all shaped by feedback — but they're worth examining.
What Authentic Christian Content Looks Like
It includes doubt, not just victory. The person who only posts about answered prayers and breakthroughs is presenting a partial account of what faith actually looks like. Real faith includes the moments when God seems silent. The Psalms include those moments. Your social media can too.
It includes the messy parts of community, not just the beautiful ones. The real life of a church includes conflict, misunderstanding, hard conversations, people who leave, and grief. A social media feed that only shows small group photos and baptism celebrations is incomplete in a way that actually discourages people who are experiencing the harder parts of community life.
It talks about Scripture as something living — actively changing you, surfacing difficult things, challenging your assumptions — not as a caption overlay designed to look thoughtful. "John 3:16 — this!" is not the same as "I've been sitting with this verse for a week and I'm still not sure what to do with it."
It's warm and interesting to people who don't share your faith, not just to people who already agree with you. The best faith content doesn't read as tribal. It reads as human. It invites rather than signals membership.
Practical Guidelines for Christian Social Media
Don't argue in comment sections. It never works. Not once in the history of the internet has someone changed their deeply held belief because of a comment thread argument. What it does accomplish is burning your energy, performing conflict for an audience, and making Christianity look like something you're primarily against rather than primarily for. Disengage. It's not surrender; it's wisdom.
Be quick to listen, slow to speak. James 1:19 is a remarkably practical instruction for social media use: "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry." The platform architecture pushes you toward immediate reaction. The Christian counterculture move is to wait, to consider, to respond thoughtfully or not at all.
Use platforms to invite people in, not correct people out. The posture that works over time is generous and curious, not corrective and defensive. You catch more flies with honey. More importantly: the person who genuinely needs the kind of faith you have will be attracted by the warmth, not persuaded by the argument.
Let your life do most of the talking. The most powerful thing on your social media isn't your Scripture posts — it's the cumulative picture of a life being genuinely lived with faith. How you respond to hard things. What you celebrate. Who you prioritize. What you wear and what it says about what you value. These things add up to a picture that no single post can create.
Wearing Your Faith Online and Offline
The visual language of faith matters. What you wear, what you post, and what you share together create a coherent signal about who you are and what you're about. The person whose feed is warm, authentic, and faith-infused — whose clothing choices, captions, and life choices all point in the same direction — is communicating something unified and credible.
That's part of what Jesus Better is about. The apparel we make is designed to be wearable expression of genuine faith — the kind that shows up on your body and in your photos without needing a caption explaining it. Wearing your faith literally and digitally is a statement about the coherence between what you believe and who you actually are.
Social media is one dimension of a Christian lifestyle that shows up everywhere. Explore the full picture in Christian Lifestyle & Culture: The Complete Guide.