2025/05/12 by Kaitlyn Ugoretz · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Media, Religion, Digital Communication #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy #Gender, Feminism, and Media
paper · doi:10.1080/0048721x.2025.2502295
‘Follow the Ten YouTube Commandments and the YouTube gods will bless you. Violate them, and you will not have great success.’ This Christianity-inflected pronouncement from YouTube coach Sean Cannell provides a clear theodicy for aspiring contents creators' experiences on the platform. This article examines the YouTube prosperity gospel, a form of digital religion that deifies the AI-powered YouTube algorithm and invests it with the power to bless creators with health, wealth, and happiness in return for their devotion to the platform. I argue that YouTubers combine religious algorithmic imaginaries with Christian prosperity theology to imagine an optimistic path to personal success and salvation through content creation. Attending to digital religious formations like the YouTube prosperity gospel helps scholars of religion to understand how people transform existing religious discourses and practices to make sense of – and help manage – the power that algorithms hold over their livelihood.