Katelyn Beaty on Celebrity Culture, AI, and the Risks of Disembodied Faith
Good Faith
Good Faith
4.8 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are Megachurches, Christian Influencers, and Artificial Intelligence Breaking the Church?
This week on the Good Faith podcast, Katelyn Beaty joins host Curtis Chang to confront the church's growing addiction to celebrity culture, asking how celebrity pastors, megachurch platforms, and AI are changing the way Christians are formed. Curtis even asks Katelyn to evaluate whether his public persona and the Good Faith platform risk becoming part of the very problem they're critiquing. If faith is becoming more online, more branded, and less embodied, this conversation asks the hard question: what happens to authentic Christian community, spiritual growth, and discipleship when personality starts to outrun the way of Jesus?
02:06 - Defining Persona vs. Fame
04:14 - Embodied Relationships vs. Platform
05:17 - Curtis's Personal Experience with Platform
09:56 - Dangers of Platform Culture for the Church
14:27 - Curtis's Dilemma: Content vs. Persona
17:58 - Navigating Platform Tensions as a Christian Leader
20:09 - Case Studies: Celebrity Gone Wrong and Right
25:34 - Community and Spiritual Formation Beyond Megachurches
30:10 - Technology, Evangelicals, and the Attention Economy
33:00 - AI and the Future of Persona and Platform
36:12 - Final Hope: Embodied, Material Christian Life
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Mentioned in This Episode:
- More about Katelyn Beaty
- Katelyn Beaty's Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church
- TIME: The True Story Behind the FX Documentary Series The Secrets of Hillsong
- Christianity Today's podcast: The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
- New York Times: How the Willow Creek Church Scandal Has Stunned the Evangelical World
- More about Eugene Peterson
- Curtis Chang's The Anxiety Opportunity
More From Katelyn Beaty:
- Katelyn Beaty's Substack The Beaty Beat
- Katelyn Beaty's podcast Saved by the City
- Katelyn Beaty's A Woman's Place Participant Guide: A Bible Study Exploring Every Woman's Call to Work
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The Good Faith Podcast is a production of a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan organization that does not engage in any political campaign activity to support or oppose any candidate for public office. Any views and opinions expressed by any guests on this program are solely those of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Good Faith.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One note of hope that I have because of the national exposure of churches like Hill Song or what happened at Mars Hill, I think even people outside the evangelical world are picking up on these stories and having an increasingly negative perception of celebrity pastors. |
| 0:19.7 | I think celebrity pastor is much more of an |
| 0:22.1 | insult now than it was four years ago. |
| 0:41.1 | Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. |
| 0:45.3 | We're friends who follow Jesus, help each other make sense of the world. |
| 0:47.2 | I'm your host, Curtis Chang. |
| 0:52.0 | This podcast is produced by a nonpartisan 501c3 organization. |
| 0:54.0 | A question for you. Do you follow the lives of people like Taylor Swift, |
| 0:58.0 | Ryan Gosling, LeBron James, Kate Middleton, |
| 1:01.0 | or someone like them? |
| 1:03.0 | If so, you are participating in the culture of celebrity, |
| 1:07.0 | and this participation may be harmless enough by itself. |
| 1:17.6 | But what if that secular culture of celebrity starts infiltrating the church? What's the effect of when Christian preachers, authors, and musicians become famous? |
| 1:23.6 | What happens to your own spiritual life when you follow another Christian similar to the way you follow Taylor Swift? |
| 1:31.6 | These are the questions raised by Caitlin Beatty, author of the influential book, Celebrities for Jesus, |
| 1:38.6 | How Personas, Platforms, and Prophets are hurting the church. |
| 1:42.5 | Together in our conversation, we seek to evaluate how we as Christians are entangled in celebrity |
| 1:48.6 | culture and how we might pursue a more healthy and faithful path. |
| 1:54.0 | Here's my conversation with Caitlin. |
| 1:57.7 | Caitlin, welcome to the Good Faith podcast. It's great to have you on for the first time, I think. |
| 2:02.9 | Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited about this conversation. |
| 2:06.9 | Caitlin, you published your book Celebrities for Jesus four years ago. And I felt like that time it made a very important contribution to the conversation around celebrity culture. |
... |
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