TIKTOK THEOLOGY

Biblical scholar Dan McClellan fights the weaponization of the Word.

- BY AL LETSON

I'm the son of a preacher man, and I love that you are demystifying the Bible for your million-plus followers on TikTok and Instagram. How did that happen?

The way scholars and experts talk about the Bible is very, very different from the way the folks on the street or in the pews think and talk about the Bible. There's a very big gap.

The more I learned an academic approach when getting my PhD in theology and religion, the more that gap bothered me, and the more I wanted to share the insights that come from that expertise—which is not easy, not only because it requires packaging complex concepts into things that are more easily digestible, but also because there can be a lot of pushback when you say, “Actually, that’s not what the Bible is like, it’s more like this.”

But I stumbled across TikTok, and suddenly I was able to find an audience interested in someone who is there to call balls and strikes rather than to try to defend one dogma or one identity. There are an awful lot of folks out there who find my work relatable precisely because I do not come across as some stuffed-shirt, ivory tower academic. I'm just another dude who likes to wear graphic tees and read comic books.