The era of Big Eva seems to have run its course. The conservative Protestant scene in the U.S. is no longer dominated by a few big-name celebrities or by a handful of large conferences. While those large conferences still exist and are often well-attended, they do not grip the popular evangelical imagination as they once did. They seem on the whole to have settled into the role that they should always have held: optional supplements to local church life for Christians who are committed to their own congregations but who enjoy connecting to others from elsewhere and hearing preachers from a variety of denominations. But the problems at the heart of Big Eva have not disappeared. They have migrated into new forums, particularly that of social media.

The broader business dynamics in the U.S. are now sometimes referred to as creating the “gig economy,” a term that describes the shift from the traditional business model and institutions as sources of income to the more disparate and informal network of opportunities offered by new media. Ubers have squeezed licensed taxi drivers. Airbnb has opened up the world of short-term accommodation well beyond that once offered by professional hoteliers and the proprietors of guest houses. And so in the world of evangelicalism, Big Eva is being challenged by what we might call “Gig Eva.”

The economics of social media are different, and this is reflected in the culture of Gig Eva: Building a platform on X, for example, involves constant transgression of boundaries, hence the emergence of Gig Eva personalities whose trademark behaviour ranges from attacking the leaders of Big Eva to rehabilitating Hitler. And Gig Eva also has the advantage of the frictionless nature of technologically mediated engagement. Big Eva silenced critics by ignoring them or making quiet phone calls to employers. Gig Eva launches full-frontal personal attacks but does so from the safety offered by tech platforms that have no place for that pesky prerequisite of personal competence. Indeed, X is proving to be the perfect platform for those aspiring to be the modern successors to Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw, who “was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.”

No individual group or writer in Gig Eva will likely enjoy the breadth of influence experienced by their Big Eva forefathers. The diffuse nature of online discourse means that there will never be a focal point of the kind provided by the conference stage in the ten-thousand-seat convention hall. But Gig Eva may well reshape significant parts of the Christian culture because it is so attuned to the pieties of the dominant expressive individualism of our day. Its advocates validate their personal authenticity by their constant iconoclasm, their decrying of anything that stands in their way, and their priority of disembodied, cost-free online engagement over the more expensive demands of service—and accountability—to real people in real time, in church and in homes. Big Eva had its problems. Gig Eva is set only to intensify them.