"Your identity is, what God puts into you" -Christian online activism on gender and sexuality politics on TikTok

Katharina Limacher ^1* Michael Hunklinger ²

• ¹ University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
• ² University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Christian and right-wing actors have been able to push their agenda, which includes the idea of Christian supremacy and fundamentalist views on sexual orientation, gender relations, reproductive rights and family concepts, towards the political centre in recent years. In this context, the new Christian Right metapolitics is moving beyond mere debates and ideological discussions to become a way of life. At the same time, we observe an increasing number of progressive Christian actors online, who address gender and sexuality issues from a perspective in line with their (progressive) religious convictions. This is where our paper sets out and explores how Christian activists in the German speaking part of Europe engage in debates on gender and sexuality issues online. Numerous current examples show that the social media platform TikTok is a place of digital activism that is increasingly gaining influence in different social spheres, shaping young people's political attitudes and political participation. Through a multimodal analysis of videos of self-described Christian activists from different denominations in the German speaking part of Europe, we aim to identify the different characteristics that address gender and sexuality issues. We find that both, conservative and progressive Christian TikTokers use similar strategies and techniques and address gender and sexuality issues in three dimension: Gender identity, gender relations and sexual orientation. Our interdisciplinary paper contributes to the growing field of research on religious digital activism by combining insights from political science and religious studies as well as queer studies.