Three and a half thousand years ago, or February as it’s otherwise known, my social media feeds were filled with reports of YouTubers and American comedy duo Rhett and Link publicly ‘deconverting’ from their Christian faith.
It was an odd deconversion. In other tragic cases we’ve seen Christian celebrities making an announcement on Instagram, accompanied by moody selfies and the appropriate hashtags: #authentic, #followingmytruth, or #stillbelieveinlove. That’s the pattern, but Rhett and Link took a different turn. They had to because the comedy duo had never, in 15 years, gotten around to telling their audience they were Christian to start with! So the first step was to come clean that they had been Christian – and they really had been very Christian, like missionary-level Christian – and then, having described decades in the faith over the course of a couple of podcasts, they were ready for the true reveal: they weren’t Christians now. Just like most of their fans thought they weren’t anyway! Told you it was an odd deconversion.
For the last decade and a half Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have built an enormous platform on social media. They are among the most recognisable faces on YouTube with over 20million subscribers. Before this, though, they had been missionaries with Cru, one of America’s largest evangelistic ministries, based on over 5,000 campuses. In some ways the transition was seamless. Their schtick on YouTube is like their work for Cru: good-natured pranks and challenges familiar to youth and student workers the world over – ‘Chubby Bunnies’ for a YouTube audience. But they never credited their sources. Or their Source.
