Engineered Outrage
Jeffrey Gang July/August 2026In 2018, researchers inside Facebook completed an internal study during which they made a concerning discovery. Facebook’s algorithms rewarded content that exploited the human brain’s attraction to conflict. Left unchecked, their algorithms would increasingly feed users more extreme material. Leadership was warned, but ignored the information. Divisive content kept people engaged, and engagement generated advertising revenue.1 And revenue meant more value for Facebook’s shareholders.
The public might never have learned any of this, except that in 2021 a Facebook employee named Frances Haugen copied tens of thousands of internal pages and gave them to The Wall Street Journal. She eventually testified before Congress that Facebook’s leaders knew their platforms were causing harm and chose profit over safety. Despite public alarm, no significant federal legislation ever followed these events.2
What Haugen exposed is not merely the story of a company’s unethical choices. It is a window into the business model of big tech as it quietly reshapes the conditions under which many of us form our beliefs, fears, loyalties, and sense of belonging. This reshaping carries many consequences for our society that we are only beginning to understand. One such example of this is the recent resurgence of Christian nationalism in the United States.
The Algorithm Has No Creed
The rapid growth of Christian nationalism in recent years did not happen in a vacuum. These trends have been fostered, in part, by the platforms owned and operated by big tech that make up the attention economy, whose algorithms are built to maximize emotional intensity for profit, and by religious and political figures who have learned to use those platforms effectively. However, this is not a partisan story. The attention economy has no theology and no party. It has a profit motive, and it amplifies outrage, fear, and tribal identity wherever they appear. The rise in Christian nationalism is a useful case study precisely because it shows, in sharp relief, what these conditions produce. But these same dynamics fuel progressive and conservative causes, devout and secular alike.
Conservative Protestantism in America has a history of adopting new communication technologies ahead of its rivals. Self-proclaimed fundamentalist Carl McIntire extended the reach of his radio program from two stations in 1957 to more than 100 by 1960, with a weekly audience estimated near 20 million. When the Federal Communications Commission’s fairness doctrine required balanced programming, broadcasters such as McIntire organized against it. The repeal of the fairness doctrine in 1987 opened the door to the one-sided religious and political broadcasting that followed. Television and direct mail extended the same pattern: a new medium appears, a movement grasps its potential before its opponents do and uses it to bypass the gatekeepers—the press, the regulators, the denominational structures—that might otherwise slow its spread. The fight over who controls a medium continues today in debates over social media content moderation and laws such as Section 230, the 1996 statute that shields platforms from liability for most of what their users post.3
In The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, documents the effects of these alternative media ecosystems, demonstrating how they have become a “new catechesis,” making disciples of believers more effectively than their own churches. He recounts how David French, a conservative attorney and evangelical writer, faced a barrage of online harassment after breaking with other conservatives over political issues. The unwanted attention followed French and his family, even when they moved to another church. Alberta is not describing a fringe phenomenon. He is describing something happening in congregations across the country, essentially through engineered outrage programmed into the platforms of big tech.4 In The Power Worshippers, Katherine Stewart documents how this logic has matured into sophisticated political operations. One initiative merged marketing, communications, and data mining to identify sympathetic Christian voters, producing a tool that let pastors run their own congregational rolls against registration and voting turnout records.5 Today big tech’s platforms can automate those types of operations and communications on an unprecedented scale.
Matthew Taylor provides examples of how powerful these platforms can be at bringing people together. In his book The Violent Take It by Force, Taylor documents how the New Apostolic Reformation, once considered a loosely organized network of charismatic Christians, successfully built a parallel digital ecosystem. A prophecy-driven political program on YouTube organized by Lance Wallnau, a prominent voice in the NAR, drew 56,000 views in September 2020, jumping to 32.4 million by January 2021.6 In The Flag and the Cross, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry report that a large majority of Americans who score high on measures of Christian nationalism also affirm core conspiracist beliefs, a correlation consistent with a social media recommendation system that moves users from one kind of extreme content to another.7
Big tech’s platforms also excel at rewarding content that identifies enemies. And according to research, enemies are exactly what defines the center of Christian nationalism. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry define the movement as a framework bound up with nativism and white supremacy, and Gorski and Perry identify whiteness as the thread running through its mythologized history.8 The enemy, in their survey data, is concrete: immigrants and refugees, racial minorities blamed for their own inequality, and Muslims, Jews, and the nonreligious cast as holding inferior and dangerous values. Xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacy are not incidental to the movement these scholars describe.9 They are its raw material, and raw material is what an engagement engine runs on. A system tuned to amplify whatever provokes the strongest reaction will find this content, surface it, and reward it, not because it holds any particular view about race or religion.
When Outrage Becomes Formation
These issues can be challenging to address. In The Paradox of Democracy, Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing argue that open communication environments, the very environments democracy depends on, are permanently vulnerable to demagoguery and spectacle, because nothing guarantees that truth will outperform outrage.10 It is not difficult to see how big tech’s platforms have simply let those forces operate at a scale and speed no earlier communication environment could match, driving religious populism from Hindu nationalism in India, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and illiberal politics in Hungary. While these movements may differ in important ways, each one has used the same platforms to promote persecution narratives, apocalyptic urgency, and moral binaries to grow their majority.
This is the heart of the matter. The platforms produce these outcomes because of the logic embedded in their design, not because of any particular content that happens to flow through them. That logic operates on all of us, religious and secular, conservative and progressive. These information environments were built to make us anxious, certain, and convinced that the people on the other side of our divides are a threat to everything we hold dear.
The deepest dimension of this story is personal, and it bears directly on the free exercise of religion. We tend to assume that we are primarily thinking creatures who gather information, weigh it, and decide, and that if we simply get people better information they will reason their way to better conclusions. However, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger challenged that picture at its foundation, arguing that human beings are shaped first by practices, habits, moods, and relationships that run deeper than any conscious reflection. The philosopher and theologian James K. A. Smith has translated this insight into the language of worship in which we are formed less by what we think than by what we repeatedly do.11 This is why religious traditions have always insisted on gathered worship, prayer, scripture, and sabbath. These are not merely ways to deliver information. They are formative practices, meant to shape the kind of people we become over time, at a level deeper than conscious belief.
What happens when we set this picture of formation against an environment in which the average American spends several hours a day scrolling, reacting, and sharing, with each interaction training the system to deliver more of whatever provoked the strongest response? Such activity is not neutral. It is itself formational, and it is producing a recognizable kind of person: anxious, outraged, tribal, and increasingly unable to encounter difference without experiencing it as threat. People are not so much reasoning their way into extreme commitments as being formed into them, beneath the level of conscious belief. The Canadian communications theorist and cultural critic Marshall McLuhan warned more than a half century ago that the “medium is the message,” that the form of a medium shapes human consciousness apart from whatever content it carries.12 Around the same time the French philosopher, sociologist, and theologian Jacques Ellul argued that propaganda works less through outright lies than by conditioning persons to fit the needs of a technological society.13 Both men described, before the internet ever existed, what the attention economy now does at scale.
Tim Alberta, without using the vocabulary of formation, was making a formation argument. When he calls that alternative media ecosystem a new catechesis, he is saying that something is making disciples of people more effectively than their churches, and that something is the algorithm. For communities of faith, and for anyone who cares about religious freedom, the question this raises is not mainly political but anthropological. What kind of people are we becoming, and what practices, communities, and rhythms of life are capable of forming a different kind of person, one shaped by conviction rather than by engineered outrage? Religious liberty has always assumed citizens capable of forming their beliefs freely, in community, and in good conscience. An attention economy controlled by the business model of big tech and engineered to manufacture fear and certainty for profit puts pressure on that assumption in a way the law has not yet caught up with.
The traditional tools of formation, worship, teaching, service, and shared life matter enormously. But they now compete, every day, with several hours of algorithmic formation that is better resourced, more personalized, and more emotionally sophisticated than anything most congregations can offer. This is not only a concern for the church. It is a concern for any society that depends on free people forming their deepest convictions for themselves and their neighbors.
______________________
1 Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz, “Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier All the Same,” The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2021.
2 Jeff Horwitz, “The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It,” The Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2021; see also “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2021.
3 Paul Matzko, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), ebook, introduction, “Every Hate-Monger, Radio Preacher and Backwoods Evangelist”; chap. 7, “The Radio Right in Decline,” sec. “Bringing the First Amendment to a Radio Fight”; chap. 8, “Conclusion: From Radio Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump’s Tweets,” sec. “ ‘Bad for Country!’ Lessons From the Age of Trump”; Kathryn E. Spier and Rory Van Loo, “Foundations for Platform Liability,” Notre Dame Law Review 100 (2025): 1137; see also Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 123–125.
4 Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (New York: Harper, 2023), ebook, chap. 18, “Brentwood, Tennessee.”
5 Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), ebook, chap. 8: “Converting the Flock to Data.”
6 Matthew D. Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2024), ebook, chap. 5, “Seven Mountains,” sec. “The Prophet Pundits of FlashPoint.”
7 Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), ebook, chap. 4, “Avoiding ‘The Big One.’ ”
8 Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), ebook, chap. 2, “Power,” and chap. 3, “Boundaries”; Gorski and Perry, The Flag and the Cross, chap. 1.
9 Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, ebook, chap. 3, “Boundaries.”
10 Zachary Gershberg and Sean Illing, The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), ebook, introduction; chap. 8, “Democracy, If We Can Keep It.”
11 James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), ebook, chap. 2, sec. “Thick and Thin Practices: Ritual Forces of Cultural Formation.” Smith develops the Heideggerian claim that human beings are formed first by practice and habit rather than by conscious reflection.
12 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2013), ebook, part 1, chap. 1, “The Medium Is the Message.”
13 Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), ebook, chap. 1, sec. 2, “Internal Characteristics.”
Article Author: Jeffrey Gang
Jeffrey A. Gang, D.Min., is an associate professor for relational studies at the School of Religion, Loma Linda University, California.