AND UPON THIS NETWORK, I WILL BUILD MY CHURCH: strategies and mediatized processualities of internet preachers
Internet preachers; digital influencers of faith; mediatization of religion; mediatized processualities.
This doctoral research addresses the audiovisual production and performance of digital influencers of faith who produce content with Christian preaching themes on YouTube, taking as empirical objects the productions of Deive Leonardo and Pastor Antônio Júnior. These media-religious agents are responsible for producing a phenomenon that we are calling “internet preachers”, worked out from a methodological operationalization based on the concept of the mediatization of religion. Our research hypothesis is that the production of evangelical content on YouTube gives rise to a specifically media category in the religious field, with less institutional interference. The general objective of the research is to analyze the mediatized strategies and processes of internet preachers, from the YouTube platform, in order to understand how the mediatization of religion articulates the processes of institutionalization of this media-religious phenomenon.