You’ve probably seen the viral Instagram Reel about the preacher who came to campus last week. In his red Make America Great Again hat, he shouted about hellfire and sinful students as one audience member countered him by asking the crowd “Who’s your favorite starter Pokemon?” Later in the video, a violin-trombone musical trio attempted to play over him as he danced around in his imagined fiery Pit of theatrical Hell.
Campus preachers aren’t unique to UNC; you can probably find them at any U.S. university. One user commented on this video, saying students at their school treat street preachers as pop-up entertainment: “someone brought out a hentai tapestry, someone else dressed up as Jesus and carried a metal coat hanger and a purple jelly dildo and someone brought out a Bluetooth speaker to play WAP and circus music.”
The MAGA preacher sparked theatrics and our more familiar Pit preachers are usually ignored — so why do they continue coming to our campus? Regardless of whether they realize it or not, their preaching is ultimately performative and self-serving.
Most street preachers are evangelists, and many former evangelists cite an extremely dark outlook on the world that their parents and church instilled in them. Children perform in plays to scare the audience into conversion. They march through Halloween Hell Houses that feature overdose, suicide, abortion and other sins that portray how non-believers seemingly spend their time.
Many ministries enlist campus preachers because college students are the professionals and leaders of the future. They argue that campuses are the stratum of society that must be reached if there’s ever going to be a “national awakening.” Like town criers in a medieval square, these preachers see their voices as a tool to influence the campus pulpit; with crowds of passing students fresh from exercising their intellect in the classroom, it seems to be the perfect place for preaching and discussion.
Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from reality. On UNC’s campus, most students pass by the usual Pit preachers, dodging their pamphlet handouts and turning up their noise-cancelling headphones. Preaching to a mostly absent choir, these churchmen pass up reading verses from the Bible to declare students sinners.
As one Reddit user said about college campus street preachers, “They never seem to share the good news of Jesus Christ, just blind assumptions that everyone on our college campus is going to hell.” They paint religion in the way they were taught to, which comes across to us as undesirable.
And the Pit preachers seem to know this, yet they don’t care. In their undeterred clamor, they’re resorting to a sort of theological fencing; all they care about is fulfilling their own duties of spreading the word of God in an incredibly performative way. If they wanted to effectively convert religiously curious people, they would have meaningful one-on-one conversations and find people who genuinely wanted to listen.
But instead, evangelist doctrine has them force their religion onto unobtrusive students, manufacturing scripture into dramatic verbal harassment. And though Pit preaching seems ineffective at its core, there has to be a better way to street preach other than screeching and hollering.
