My original meme

 For my original meme, I chose the "First World Problems" picture coupled with my words to create a meme that reflects my case study of ‘First World Christian Issues’ memes that are prevalent on Pinterest. By employing some of Shifners techniques such as Prestige, humor by incongruity, and provocation of emotions, I was able to create a meme that fit into my meme study that is aimed at practicing Christians. It revealed that knowledge of the Christian culture magnified the humor of the meme so I used the common church issue of overtime sermons as my prestige factor. The incongruity of the depressed woman in the picture coupled with the seemingly trivial church issue created humor for the meme. Christians act like overtime sermons are abominations, so the meme portrays the irony of that thought by using incongruity of the picture and the issue. This leads to the individual coming to a realization that most of our “Christian problems” in developed countries are actually laughable compared to others. This realization creates an emotional response, which moves the person towards clarity on the issue (which in this case would be that many Christians don’t have a church to attend or places to eat at afterwords) which can lead to a greater understanding of their Christian faith.

  

To validate my findings I compared my study to a similar one on mylesmemeblog.blogspot.com. Myles’ meme study is based on another social media, Twitter, and uses the memes as a tool to unite Christians and spread their message to non believers. Her findings communicated that Christian memes are used to uplift others in their community as well as spread their belief of the gospel. Our meme studies are comparable in a sense that we both researched social media Christian memes and how the memes not only bring the Christian community together, but how the memes reinforce Christian beliefs.  Both of our meme studies revealed that strong emotions and prestige play a large part in the humor and reproduction of the memes, which then ultimately lead to lived religion and the deeper understanding of the Christians’ own spirituality. The difference in the two would be the audience; while my selection is focusing on giving Christians a reality check, Myles’ appeals to Christians but also aims to pull in religious outsiders in hopes of spreading the gospel.  

How Memes Frame Religion

This week I will be using numbers 7, 8, and 11 from my sample collection.

Two characteristics of the success of the Christian Memes on Pinterest can be tied into the memes' prestige as well as their use of participation tools. These Christian memes that I have been examining have followed the outline of using common Christian experiences or issues to enact feelings upon the viewer that can then make the meme humorous, allowing its chances of reproduction on the internet to increase. Because Christianity is one of the top world religions, it has a higher prestige, especially in America. According to a 2012 Gallup Poll, about 77% of Americans associate themselves with some branch of Christianity. It would stand to reason then, that memes based on Christian religion and culture would be more prominent and shared than those of a lesser religion such as Buddhism which is comprised of less than 1% of the American people. While one may debate on the amount of "lived religion" Christians and those that simply give themselves a Christian title, it can be assumed that since both groups know enough about the basics of Christianity to consider themselves as such, a majority of Americans would understand these Christian memes.  I actually received a few comments on my Pinterest account regarding my recent postings of multiple religious memes which proves the success of these First World Christian Memes. I was surprised at how many people reposted; one actually messaged me mentioning how much they enjoyed the memes. All of these people share the same faith and were able to comprehend the message and humor, and in turn they wanted to share them adding to the memes' success. 

From the memes studied, I would categorize most of my memes into the Stock Character Macros genre. This genre originated from pictures of animals offering advice (whether accurate or not) and has transformed into using people as well as animals. They do not necessarily continue to offer advice, but follow a common line of thought when used.  For example, the VBS meme above has been used anytime the creator wants to portray a person is going to be overwhelmed (a secular example might be "when a person asks for gum and the whole class hears them").  Another example is the woman crying about not knowing the song lyrics. This has become a popular stereotypical picture for first world problems (for example: "I want to change the channel, but the remote is in another room") and has been incorporated into Christian culture by doing the same thing, but aiming the issues at Christians. 

Meme Memetic and Rhetoric Devices

This week I will be using memes 3, 4 and 10 from my sample list. 

This post will be focusing on the specific rhetoric and memetic techniques employed by the memes, the types of humor used and the way the beliefs and values impact the viral success. These memes present an aspect of dominant features of a culture where "Christian Problems" are portrayed in the context of a typical church service. These memes all focus on the use of physical human expressions to depict their church issues which then add to the understanding of how the creator of the meme feels about those issues. For example, the phrase "went to church, remembered to turn my cell phone on silent" would not mean much, but when paired with success baby, one can understand the meaning behind the sentence.  

That brings us to looking at the humor behind the memes and what makes the pictures paired with the sentences amusing. These memes all employ the use of whimsical and playful content in order to be seen as humorous. Mr. Bean himself is a popular meme because of the nature of his character; a goofy out of sorts man who doesn't take life seriously and usually doesn't react appropriately to situations. The facial expressions he uses are humorous by themselves, so the meme creator sought to combine an already humorous photo with a sentence that would bring out the humor of both the picture and the description, creating a kind of symbiotic relationship between the two. This brings out a joking and whimsical nature of the audience perceiving it and draws attention to the meme. The 4th meme also provokes emotion by the girls expression in conjunction with the sentence. The meme originated when a parent told her daughter she was taking her to Disneyworld, to which the girl responded with a confused look on her face. This internet sensation is known for the ironic response creating the humor of the face which is then paired with the confusion of worship group songs that no one knows creating a playful and whimsical meme. The 3rd meme as mentioned earlier, uses the success baby to illustrate their point. The success baby meme itself falls into the high arousal-"awe" category based on the fact that the meme revolves around a cute baby. The playfulness and whimsey however again come from the pairing of the picture and words. 

These humor devices definitely have an impact on the way their ideas are framed based on the ideas and the way they are portrayed. These types of Christian memes aim to unite the Christian culture by connecting them with situations they can all appreciate, but they also manage to do it in a way that is in line with their beliefs. For example, memes that use other forms of humor and arousal such as Superiority or Anger/Anxious stories could fall in a grey area as far as their humor among Christians. Some might think the memes were acceptable while others would argue they are not in best taste and could fall tarnish their reputation because their memes look no different than secular memes. By using playful and whimsical memes, Christian memes are able to join in the popular culture of meme making and provide a sense of community while at the same time keeping their humor separate from the world without it becoming too cheesy or watered down. 

Meme Communication

For this post, I will be looking at numbers 1, 2 and 6 of my meme samples. 

These memes are not commonly used and do not have specific names (such as Bad luck Brian or Advice God) but rather, all of them depict some sort of Christian "problem" within them. By taking perceived issues and adapting them to an online audience, they portray a level of competition and selection. Movies, children and puppies are all common in American culture so Christians would be familiar with all of them, and are therefore chosen to depict specific American Christian issues for those reasons. Stances within the memes are also thought provoking, and all three of the samples use some form of communicative functions, most notably the emotive approach. In emotive approaches, the meme draws on the feelings and emotions of its audience to produce the desired response. All of these memes describe a common Christian experience that can be somewhat of a hassle such as shopping for modest clothing, having to wait on parents after church, or enduring a frigid church building during services. Because the experiences are not all positive, the memes generated to fit the texts have been exaggerated to match the feelings that come with them like the frozen character to show cold, a passed out pup to express being tired, and a child bored to the point of sleep to show impatience.  What does this expression of emotive type communicative function tell us about Christianity? To an extent, I would argue that the exaggerated pictures aim to bring about a reality check, while at the same time allowing the Christians to feel connected to one another for experiencing similar humorous religious situations. Within American Christianity, there is an abundance of freedom in expression whereas in other countries Christians are not accepted as readily and in some cases are downright persecuted. The memes in these samples bring about a reality check to many "first world Christian problems". When these memes are shown to the American Christian community, they will be embraced not only for their humor but for their message of awareness as well. Christianity emphasizes the Church being a worldwide body, so these memes point out the typical American problems that are laughable compared to others losing their lives for the same belief, and spur the religion on to awareness of their "first world problems" and the dire predicament of others. 

My Meme Samples

My meme analysis will come from religious Christian memes on Pinterest, specifically those coming from the groups called Project Inspired and Faith Hub.  My meme selection all come from pins on Pinterest which take expressions from common Christian lived religion experiences and depict them as memes to portray their feelings about certain issues. The memes to be discussed will be as follows:

1) Waiting After Church
2) Modest Pup
3) Silent Cell Phone Success
4) Overtime Sermons
5) Dont Know the Words
6) Cold Churches
7) Hipster Hillsong
8) VBS Leader
9) Spiritual moments
10) Confused Worshipper
11)Baby Baptism
12) Chick fil a

The first memes I will discuss will be numbers 5, 9, and 12.

The underlying theme and focus of the groups Project Inspired and Faith Hub seem to be connecting Christians with other Christians, giving a sense of online community and encouraging one another to live out their religion through it.  While memes are not the sole focus of these websites, they are used as a sort of comic relief for those involved in what is a very personal and deep topic. These examples shown above give a sense of the type of memes these groups use to unite those in their lived religion. These memes all portray "Christian Problems" which are similar to the commonly known "First World Problems". These memes depict small issues or annoyances that occur within Christian life, and coincide them with a graphic that gives the problem some detrimental feel. The memes all have captions that describe some issue that lived religion Christians may encounter, and then add it to an image that magnifies the issue. The woman crying and the girl who is upset both add to the concept of the memes by exaggerating the actual issue, which is often a non issue to begin with. This puts the issue into perspective with the Christian audience, but also allows irony and humor because most Christians would be able to relate to the issues.

Pinterest Meets Religious Christian Memes

Pinterest is a commonly known online corkboard that allows people to create their own boards and pin anything that they find interesting. Because it is online, anything and everything is fair game which of course includes memes. I have chosen to study Religious Christian memes on Pinterest to analyze how they are portrayed to connect the community of Christian lived religion.

The focus of my meme study will be on how lived religion memes depict different aspects of the Christian lifestyle to create humor and analyze what kinds of humor that Christian memes portray. Because there are very specific rituals, scenarios and beliefs that only Christians understand, it appears that these memes have been used to unite believers thus strengthening their faith and sense of humor. Another aspect I would like to address is the target audience. Pinterest is notoriously a predominantly female website so it will be interesting to see if the boards and pins found regarding Christian memes reflect that label or not. 

For my first meme analysis, I chose a meme from Pirates of the Caribbean depicting the scene where Jack Sparrow is running away from a mob of native tribes who are trying to capture him. The caption reads "Be a VBS leader they said. It will be fun they said". 

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/269019777716805187/

This meme incorporates lived religion into it by describing an aspect of Christianity that most actively involved Christians would have knowledge about. VBS, commonly known as Vacation Bible School, is a popular activity churches hold during the summer where children of all ages come and have interactive learning about different Bible stories. Because it involves caring, watching and teaching kids for an extended period of time, it can be seen as a daunting task which is often undertaken by women. Church members in charge of such events recruit volunteers to help teach classes which is where this memes humor originates. When someone volunteers and doesnt realize the extent of what they are doing, they can feel overwhelmed by the amount of work it takes to carry out the activities and keep up with the needs and questions that the kids come up with, thus depicted in the analogy of the meme. This meme serves to connect those who have been involved with a VBS (especially women) who can understand the extent of the tasks and provide a comedic outlet to how they sometimes feel.