“Christfluencer” – a social figure of new “visibility”

The paper analyzes a phenomenon of religious communication resulting from digital mediatization. The theoretical basis is a perspective influenced by Luckmann’s Invisible Religion. The so-called Christfluencer as a social figure (Moser & Schlechtriemen, 2018) is the subject of an explorative empirical research. The question of social figures, which always attracts the attention of researchers when processes of transformation lead to disruptions of the established social order or to conflicts, arises in a new way in the age of digitalization. Christfluencers in German-speaking countries not only represent the dissolution of boundaries in religious forms of communication. Their appearance also makes the blurring of the distinction between the private and the public sphere very clear. On the one hand, the integration of topics of everyday life by Christfluencers corresponds to Luckmann’s privatization thesis in the classical sense. On the other hand, subjective experiences of transcendence are emphasized in the posts, videos, and comments. Most of them come from an ecclesial context, and through their embeddedness in networks they create a new “visibility” of Christian churches, which is not necessarily always perceived positively. In doing so, the Christfluencer sets markers next to the dissolution of boundaries and interweaves the invisible and the visible.