CONFLICTING THEORIES BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA PREACHERS AND CONTENT CREATORS: A QUESTION OF TRADITIONAL PREACHINGIN THE ERA OF ST. PAUL AND PROPHERT MUHAMMAD

Abstract

This article investigates a growing tension in the sociology of religious communication: the blurring of the line between preaching, understood as a theologically accountable act of religious authority, and religious content creation, a market-driven pursuit of audience attention. Classical homiletic traditions, the Pauline apostolic model and the Islamic da'wah model, ground preaching legitimacy in doctrinal fidelity, communal accountability, and the deferral of self-interest, whereas social media rewards engagement metrics, algorithmic visibility, and monetisable affect instead, and because both logics increasingly coexist in the same religious figures, this article examines the theological grounds on which the apostolic and early Islamic traditions established preaching authority, asks how contemporary Nigerian and African social media preacher-creators, across Pentecostal and Salafi/Sufi contexts, reconcile or fail to reconcile these two logics, and develops a theoretical framework capable of accounting for the resulting conflicts without collapsing either tradition into the other. Employing a qualitative, document-based comparative-historical design, the study triangulates primary religious texts (the Pauline epistles and Qur'an/Sirah literature), homiletic and rhetorical scholarship, and peer-reviewed and reputable journalistic sources on Nigerian and African religious social media practice (2014–2025), applying content and thematic analysis to identify recurring axes of conflict around authority derivation, audience relation, economic logic, and doctrinal accountability. Findings show that the conflict is not a binary opposition but a spectrum of hybridity in which classical homiletic warrants, calling, doctrinal transmission, and communal discipline, are selectively retained or discarded according to platform incentives: Pentecostal actors tend to preserve communal-charismatic warrants while adopting creator-economy monetisation strategies, whereas segments of the Salafi cyber-imamate retain doctrinal warrants while resisting the individualising, entertainment-driven logic of algorithmic platforms, producing a distinct pattern of internal conflict within Islamic digital da'wah. The article's principal contribution is the Dual Legitimacy Model, a comparative framework for analysing religious digital authority across Christian and Islamic contexts in Africa that extends existing scholarship on algorithmic religiosity (Umar 2024) and the "tribunal of social media" (Ukah 2019) into a single comparative apparatus grounded in classical homiletic theology rather than media theory alone.