Synecdoche, Aesthetics, and the Sublime Online: Or, What’s a Religious Internet Meme?

ABSTRACT Hoping to court young people increasingly distancing themselves from institutional religious affiliation, religious organizations like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are creating and circulating aesthetic short-form videos (memes) rife with existential cinematic tropes aimed at invoking a sublime, affective viewing experience. Unlike the destabilizing cinema that inspired them, however, these religious memes do not have the luxury of equivocation. Institutional religious messages online must aim to instill divine experiences in spectators even while transcending the constraints of mobile media that circulates them. Responding to this exigency, institutional religious messages overcome these restrictions by using synecdoche to create a necessarily incomplete iteration of the sublime. “Earthly Father, Heavenly Father,” an example of a short video religious meme by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, lets the familiar cinematic tropes innovated by filmmakers such as Terrence Malick do the work of the sublime in order to represent the much larger, transcendent experience of personal communion with God.