Blog 5

This blog will focus on the idea of authenticity and how it is represented throughout the online culture as a means of shaping and challenging offline ideas and religiosity.

This first meme blatantly challenges the idea that Donald Trump is a Christian or practices what the other views to be an authentic version of Christianity, which in turn makes the claim implicitly that Trump is not a Christian. This meme takes a scene from Pulp Fiction, and is known for the ironic use of "Say [it] One More Time" as a threat, which shows that the thing the person is saying - in this case, that Donald Trump is a Christian - is wrong. Saying Donald Trump is not a Christian, again, challenges and makes the assertion that Trump's Christianity as demonstrated through his lived religion is not an authentic version of Christianity. In this way, the online has become the space in which to influence, challenge, and shape the offline evaluation of Donald Trump as a Christian.

This second meme, much like the first, uses the online context as a means of influencing and shaping the offline ideas. This time, the online context does this by juxtaposing two different quotes of Trump on two different pictures of him in order to demonstrate that Trump is "two-faced" and inauthentic. By aligning the one quote from Trump saying that questioning a person's faith is "disgraceful" and showing that he also questions another person's faith demonstrates that Trump, by his own definition, is "disgraceful". This kind of hypocrisy is used to demonstrate that Trump is inauthentic in-and-of himself, because inconsistencies tend towards inauthenticity. This indirectly challenges the idea that Trump is an authentic Christian by showing that he is not authentic himself, and therefore his practice of Christianity may be inauthentic as well.

Overall, these two memes tie in well with the other groupings of memes, because they all start with the presumption that Trump's version of Christianity - his lived religion - is an inauthentic and incorrect version of Christianity, and use the online context to better demonstrate and convey that idea. The online is used as a means of blurring the online and offline together so that the authenticity of Trump's lived religion can be better challenged and the idea can be better demonstrated online.