God is everywhere. And according to CBS, that includes Facebook.
In the network’s new show, God Friended Me, aspiring atheist podcaster Miles Finer (Brandon Micheal Hall) is just trying to endure his dead-end job—and survive his reverend dad’s upcoming anniversary sermon—until his fledgling radio show, “The Millennial Prophet,” one day lands him his dream gig: a slot on SiriusXM. But when the apparent Almighty asks if he would like to connect on Facebook, Finer’s ardent faithlessness is thrown for a loop. While Finer initially attempts to ignore the seeming hack, “God” begins to suggest he “friend” strangers online. Miraculously, these unknown faces then begin to appear in Finer’s life: a tormented physician (Christopher Redman), then a young journalist (Violett Beane) wrestling with writer’s block. With the divine’s virtual thumbs-up, the characters realize they’re more “connected” than they thought, inspiring Finer to start mending their broken relationships.
Related Stories
For all of its vagueness—two episodes in, viewers still aren’t sure if the account is the real celestial deal or a strangely uplifting catfishing ploy—the God of God Friended Me is an ecumenical, feel-good kind of deity. They surreptitiously direct Miles to do the right thing, like saving Dove from a grim attempt to commit suicide in a New York City subway station. As Suraj Sharma, who plays Finer’s best friend, Hindu programmer Rakesh Sehgal, explained to Entertainment Weekly, the show’s goal is to "put into perspective the multiplicity of perspectives when it comes to religion, or communication in general in today's time." (The journalist character, meanwhile, is Jewish). But if God Friended Me’s mystery account is truly the God (or at least the God of Judeo-Christian tradition), the deity has almost definitely offended the dicta of multiple faith traditions, violated Facebook’s terms-and-services agreement, and perhaps worst of all, been totally unoriginal.
People have been impersonating God for centuries as a strategy of political and religious rebellion. That’s part of a long tradition dating back to the Enlightenment, according to Kathryn Reklis, a Fordham University theologian who researches religion in pop culture. “Social media is an obvious place for that,” she says. “It’s a place full of all kinds of satire.” One prominent example: @TheTweetofGod, a Twitter account conceived by comedian David Javerbaum back in 2012, lampoons the faithful with tweets such as, “I created the entire universe for the sake of one group of one species on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy,” and “My son is 2,000 years old and still lives with his parents. #loser”
And then there’s Jesus.
But on God Friended Me, God’s social media presence is genuine, if sporadic. Listed only as “God”—which, by the way, would have required a special mononym request—the deity has no friends, or followers, until Finer. God’s only listed “interest” is “Nature,” and their profile picture features an unassuming cumulus cloud (which changes to a lightning bolt when it starts to rain). But this divine hacker can also scour through Facebook photos, and manipulate GPS coordinates: Finer’s friend Sehgal says that only a “small pool” of people in the world can write code as developed as the God account’s. Maybe, the protagonists hypothesize, God is just a very, very advanced predictive artificial intelligence.
The real world’s supposedly deity-run accounts are far more vocal. Some, like this one on Facebook, posts cheerful messages like “Don’t Give Up” and “Truth in the Lord.” Accounts like this, Reklis says, may stem from a strain of American Protestantism that emphasizes God as a friend, and in which “Jesus’ humanity is really emphasized, and his likeness to us and other humans is what’s most important.”
But with God’s Facebook comes God’s responsibility. The owner of one atheistic, satirical God Facebook account, which has collected almost four million followers, revealed to the Richard Dawkins Foundation in 2014 that they’ve also had to field messages for users who come to the page seeking help for suicidal thoughts.
That same account lost its blue-check verification in 2017, after right-wing commenters complained to Facebook about a post pointing out that the shooter behind the Quebec mosque attack was not Muslim. Though the account’s many believers lobbied Facebook to return the verification, the social media giant refused–citing its policy that pages must be managed by “official representation,” and not use “generic words” in their names, according to Mashable. (Facebook did not respond to multiple emails inquiring whether a God account might run afoul of the platform’s verifiable identity policies.)
Yet despite God’s historic popularity, these pages have fewer fans than Beyonce, Presidents Trump and Obama, and the even an “I Love My Dog” account. It’s not that people don’t discuss religion online. But there’s something unsettling about the idea that God that could be online alongside all our nefarious internet indulgences—at least according to the show’s protagonists as they race to find God’s true identity.
So perhaps God Friended Me stumbled onto something great with its premise: if an omnipotent deity is here slumming it with us, what are they doing online? Are they worried sick about the millions of hours humans spend on Facebook every day? Perhaps they’re thinking the human race needs a screen time cap, or maybe a new Tower of Babel for programming languages. These are a few of many compelling questions that the show could, but likely won’t, explore.
Still, it’d be good to know if Cambridge Analytica stole God’s data too. Because then we’d finally know if anything’s actually sacred.