When sociologist Michael Emerson presented some of his latest research findings during the Covenant Midwinter Conference in January, it was another critical inflection point in an ongoing conversation surrounding the church’s role in pursuing justice and flourishing for all people. That conversation continued the following day in a panel discussion featuring Covenant pastors and also in the days and weeks that followed with people throughout the denomination.
Pastor Jon Fogel has been invested in continuing that conversation. Although he wasn’t present at Emerson’s talk in-person, he found the presentation compelling enough to share it on the social media platform where he’s gotten the most recent engagement—TikTok.
Fogel is the pastor of Hope Covenant Church in Orland Park, Illinois. He originally started posting videos on TikTok about a year ago, mostly sharing light, inconsequential moments from his pets or children. His presence on TikTok was motivated by a strategic intent to relate to the kids in his youth group. “I wanted to know what it was about,” said Fogel. “I wanted to speak that language with them.” Upon hearing about TikTok’s surging popularity, he remembers asking himself, “‘If there was a place in my town where the least-churched population went twice a day every day, would I go there?’ And the answer was resoundingly, yes, of course.”
By that point, the pandemic was in full swing. So Fogel began ramping up his presence on TikTok to compensate for the pause on in-person church services and church-related outreach activities. His goal was to increase engagement with folks who would not otherwise be accessible for honest conversation on substantial topics.
He began making videos on TikTok about racial justice. One was a summary of Emerson’s presentation on the “religion of whiteness.”
“I had started posting videos before , but Michael Emerson’s video focused it,” Fogel said.
The response surprised him. “I kept seeing different variations of the same comment over and over: ‘I’ve never heard a pastor talk about this stuff before.’”
Which might be why Fogel’s new focus on faith and race also netted him new followers. A lot of them.
“Before I started doing this, I had maybe a hundred followers. But it seemed like there was awhile where I was getting like 500 every hour.”
All that momentum stopped one day when Fogel went to refresh the app and found the following message: “This account has been permanently banned.” No more videos, follows, nothing. He was sent a form email, explaining that his account had been flagged for violating the community guidelines in the app’s terms of service.
“Which was news to me, because I was pretty sure I had not violated any of the community guidelines,” said Fogel. “I checked, and there was nothing in there about race or politics or faith or anything like that.” Not only did the ban feel like it came out of nowhere, but it seemed out of step with the normal standards of discipline on the platform. Offending users often face a variety of temporary disciplinary measures, such as being muted (losing commenting privileges) or shadow-banned (where your posts are invisible to other users for a set period of time) before access is permanently revoked.
Based on conversations he’d had with other TikTok users with similar followings, Fogel noticed some similarities between his story and several others’. Most of the negative responses they had received on their videos were from users with identity markers consistently associated with white nationalism. Since many of those folks were likely to be angered by his thoughts about faith and racial justice, he figured that he had been “mass-reported”—that is, several users flagged his videos as containing hate speech.
For a few days, it seemed like there was nothing he could do about it. But he filed an appeal with TikTok and waited several days. Suddenly he was reinstated. The “permanent ban” was not so permanent after all.
Even so, Fogel is convinced that there is racial bias involved in the process of evaluating these kinds of claims. He claims that many other TikTok accounts owned by people of color were mass reported, and most of them have yet to be reinstated. And although Fogel is glad to have his account back—and has since made another video explaining his absence—he’s somewhat circumspect about the whole affair.
“I’m glad that the system worked, that TikTok has a mechanism to remove actual hate speech or other harmful content. Ultimately, social media platforms are—just like in the book of James—mirrors that expose who we really are.”
