Abraham Piper became a sensation on TikTok nearly overnight. He posted his first video in November, and he now has more than 900,000 followers, many of them young people who thank him for capturing their experiences so precisely. His unlikely path to online stardom: irreverent critiques of evangelical Christianity aimed at others who have left the faith.
“If you just want to roll your eyes at how weird it all was, that’s what I’m here for,” Piper said, using a vulgarity, in a clip that has been viewed more than 800,000 times since he posted it to the video-sharing site in February.
Piper is certainly not the only one to use social media to talk about religion. But for millions of current and former evangelicals, there is an extra layer of meaning in his recent emergence as a critic: The household he grew up in was headed by one of the most prominent figures in American evangelicalism. Abraham’s father, John Piper, is a best-selling author and theologian who regularly appears on lists of the most influential pastors in America; he retired as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis in 2013 after 33 years.
Fame tends to develop faster online than in the pulpit. Within less than five months, Abraham Piper’s follower count on TikTok has almost caught up with his father’s 1 million on Twitter. His posts — more than 300 videos to date — tackle the idea of a literal Hell (“How are you going to take your family to Outback after church while millions of people are burning alive?”), the evangelical conception of God (“unequivocal thumbs down”) and the absurdity of youth group missions trips (“a white savior’s evangelical vacation that other people pay for”).
He delivers his monologues in a cheerful version of the didactic tone that thrives on TikTok. And his posts are visually appealing, too, as far as mini-lectures go. He often records while strolling through a formerly industrial area of Minneapolis, his long gray hair peeking out of a series of goofy knit hats. His other interests on TikTok include popular philosophy, language and the jigsaw puzzle company he co-founded. (Piper also co-founded and is on the board of a media company called Brainjolt; he told CNBC in 2017 that the company expected to take in $30 million that year.)
On a snowy day in February, Piper took 59 seconds to explain to his followers why it is absurd for Christians to make their children read the Bible. “While other kids are learning to read with comics or whatever normal parents have around the house, here fundie kids are — 6, 7, 8 years old — devouring stories of Jezebel being defenestrated and then eaten by dogs,” he said with a bemused smile, using a slang term for “fundamentalist.” The Bible is “basically ‘Game of Thrones,’” he added, “except if you don’t read it, you go to Hell.”
Tyler Huckabee, a senior editor at the Christian magazine Relevant, described TikTok as a forum well-suited to following a faith journey like Piper’s. “He’s borrowed a lot of tricks from his dad, in taking complicated ideas and packaging them in quotable, easy-to-understand sound bites,” he said. Unlike the one-time weightiness of a book or the one-dimensionality of text-based Twitter, Huckabee explained, TikTok can offer “an ongoing window into his thought process, and his evolution as a person.”
He is also tapping into the growing appetite online for accounts of rejecting one’s evangelical upbringing. If the New Atheist movement of the early 2000s devoted itself to intellectual combat with the claims of Christianity, the more recent “exvangelical” movement elevates personal stories of people who have walked away.
Melissa Stewart, another popular “exvangelical” personality on TikTok, grew up in an Independent Fundamental Baptist church in Minnesota. When she married at 18, her pastor used John Piper’s work in premarital counseling sessions. She also participated in a church group that studied his best-known book, “Desiring God,” which argues that joy is an essential piece of the Christian life.
Stewart is now divorced and in law school. On TikTok, where she has about 179,000 followers, she posts about feminism, sexuality and atheism. “To see someone who didn’t just come from that world but came from that family, who has clearly done the work to get out, and is so introspective and gentle and grounded” gives a lot of people hope, she said in an interview. “If John Piper’s son can deconstruct and get to this place, I can do this, too.”
For others, Piper’s pedigree is proof that ex-Christians should not be dismissed as people who were never really committed in the first place. “One of the common refrains is that these people were never Christian,” said Blake Chastain, who popularized the term “exvangelical” when he named his podcast in 2016. “But the people who leave over these issues are the people who took it seriously. They were the youth group kids who were on fire for God.”
Piper is one of a number of children of prominent conservative Christians who have publicly rejected elements of their parents’ teaching. Jay Bakker, the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is an advocate for LGBTQ acceptance in the church. The five children of the combative evangelist Rick Joyner recently told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that they vote Democratic.
Abraham Piper was excommunicated from his father’s church at age 19 after rejecting the faith. “At first I pretended that my reasoning was high-minded and philosophical,” he later wrote in a Christian magazine. “But really I just wanted to drink gallons of cheap sangria and sleep around.” Four years later, he returned to the faith, and was welcomed back at the church in what his father has described as a “beautiful restoration service.”
At some point after that, Piper departed again — this time, apparently, for good. In his videos, however, Piper talks only vaguely about growing up in and rejecting what he describes as fundamentalism. He never mentions his lineage, and he declined to participate in this article. John Piper, too, declined to comment.
In his videos, Abraham Piper repeatedly insists he is not trying to convince anyone of anything. “Do you know how boring and soul-sucking it is to base your whole life on making sure other people change to become more like you?” he asked his followers in February. It’s not that nothing matters, he added. “But you get to pick what. You decide what matters. Lighten up, get laid, go bowling.”
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