“At a time the digitized image circulates as a visual shorthand for a complex tangle of social realities, this project examines how religious communities incorporate aspects of digital culture into existing processes of meaning-making. ”
My research investigates how non-white digital media producers at three high-profile Protestant Christian megachurches in the U.S. and South Korea negotiate globalized racial ideologies that conflate whiteness with the good, the beautiful, and the holy. This project analyzes the visual culture that each megachurch—African-American, Korean-American, and Korean— produces both online and offline as they cultivate their church brand. This Trans-Pacific study explores how religious actors cultivate visual representations of the sacred in their digital platforms in ways that affirm the innate worth of people of all races and ethnicities, which counters the centering of racial whiteness in the broader visual content industry. This qualitative study illumines the processes of the social apparatus at work in non-white megachurches that produces visual cultures that align with their moral economy. This dissertation also provides analysis of the images that circulate on walls and screens, bringing to sight God’s Beloved Community in the digital age.