Last Sunday, on a day filled with driving children to church, one child back and forth from a choir practice, then digging out from a snowstorm, then some more driving, serving a few jugs of hot cocoa for the family and a simple dinner that included homemade popcorn for dessert, the Academy Awards were presented. We don’t have a television; I didn’t watch it live online. I caught the reel-version on Monday mid-morning of the Irish actress Jessie Buckley’s acceptance speech as she was awarded the Best Actress award and dedicated it to motherhood. I cheered, made a mental chin-chin to her and all of us mothers who feel chaotic and joyful at heart, and got back to a strategy prospectus before picking up my preschooler at lunch time. And that’s when it dawned on me: Catholic women online are slowly moving away from the death grip that celebrity and influencer culture has held over and on them and are simply living their lives—and I’m here for it.
But I’m not here to linger over social media’s response (part awe, part sneer, as usual) to Jessie Buckley because I’m simply busy living my life as a middle-aged Midwest mom of many. It’s not that I’m not delighted to hear a new mother croon about the beauty of motherhood. I am. It’s not that I’d prefer the “celebrate your abortion” speeches of the past. I would not. It’s that we have been saturated in living through our screens for the past twenty-ish years, and I can safely say that I’m seeing a slow but steady stepping away from influencer culture, the highlight living, and constant pumping of vulnerability for a few bucks. And this I’m going to linger over.
Many Catholic women online with audiences of a variety of sizes are demonstrating setting healthy boundaries with their online presence or simply moving off of it altogether.
Jessie Buckley presumably acted fantastically in her movie (which I didn’t see because I am out of touch with everything except for my Costco order). She then welcomed a baby with her husband, a life-altering, earth-shattering, and heart-heating gift. In her acceptance speech, she celebrated her hard (and exceptional) work in her field of acting and her hard (and holy) work in her family. We’re celebrating with you, Jessie, and it’s not just because your brogue is enchanting! I am soaking in my teenagers’ personalities and lives unfolding, so it only gets more holy (and exceptional). My commentary takes away nothing from the truly refreshing perspective heard from the award stage about the gift of children. Simply put, the pro-life message is shifting from “which celebrity aligns with me” to a personal call to holiness: How am I loving the person in front of me with the loud, dysregulated child? How am I responding to God’s call to love the least likable, pleasant, politically similar, or verbally affirming of my brethren?
The advent of movies in Hollywood certainly served as the twentieth century’s most popular form of entertainment, but its influence (and its audience’s consumption) has shifted with the explosion of the internet. For the demographic of young mothers who were lonely and hungry for inspiration and direction, mommy blogs took a big portion of that already-built-in influence space. They hit the screens in the early 2000s, peaking in readership and volume by the mid-2010s. The raw, authentic, and connective experiences shared were bonding for similarly situated readers. Eventually these personal vignettes were also lucrative for the writers: brand deals, collabs, discount codes, referral links. It felt unlike any sales commercial the reader had ever experienced because it was their “friend” sharing/selling it.
I can safely critique mommy bloggers because I was one! I attended conferences, learned the lingo, had a few modest brand deals, and asked my husband to take photos of me holding a diaper backpack in our backyard. I had four kids under six. It was 2016. I hope you can all understand. I had a front row seat to witness some of the same women bloggers—many of whom were and are wonderful friends of mine—turn into small business owners, podcast hosts, speakers, authors, and now, women who are free from the social media rat-race and living their best Wild West life offline.
The trajectory of influencer culture on the small scale that I witnessed with Catholic women looked something like this: First you share your foliage photos with a dress that you have a coupon code for, and then you’re sharing deeply personal information about your family drama (with a link to the lipstick in bio), and when you’ve run out of ways to monetize your story, you peter out a bit. Maybe you begin to work outside of the home or your children age out of wanting to wear matching neutral linen outfits for your photo shoot (ahem, yes, mine have) or your lifestyled home no longer looks photographable, and that is more than okay. Maybe you are writing in a spiral-bound journal with an ink pen to process your own story instead of reaching for the calming, numbing effect of punching it out in a caption and watching the likes and comments flow in. I am speaking truly and firstly about myself here.
Many Catholic women online with audiences of a variety of sizes are demonstrating setting healthy boundaries with their online presence or simply moving off of it altogether. They’re weary of being told how to think, dress, feel, be as a wife, be as a friend, and that if they only buy this course, then they’d know how to be as a daughter of God too. They’re weary of being the content producers packaging up these instructions. They’d like to connect with real, awkward friends in person where one person interrupts the other and the other’s child shouts, “I have a butt!” at their child, and then they all get to practice working through being real people in a real world and all that the incarnation entails. And this means we have a chance at growing into a culture transformed by Christ. The screen is a starting point, but we must jump off to evangelize face-to-face, heart-to-heart, friend-to-friend. Otherwise we live in a fishbowl of one-way mirrors, and nothing is less interesting than the narcissistic navel-gazing promoted by the dopamine hamster wheel that is social media.
When we can shift from being passively fed content to actively interacting with our local garden—the folks around us at our parishes, neighborhoods, sports teams, and dance recitals—we suddenly are faced with living the pro-life tenets, the Beatitudes’ call, the Eucharistic way of being. No more performative posting! It’s time to set our phones down and maybe even delete apps and unfollow everyone except our friends, that one aunt, and trusted news sources. Regardless of what people are celebrating far away, magically beamed into a tiny box that wedges into your back jeans pocket, Jesus wants you and me to be fully present and animated by God’s love in the here and now. No more influencing or being influenced by somebody and so-and-so. Live your life fully alive in Christ.