Way In
"Follow me"
Jesus has taken second place to Winston Churchill in a poll to
find whom people would most like follow on the social networking
site Twitter. Run by YouGov on Twitter itself, on behalf of
Prospect magazine, this is the second such contest
in which Jesus has come second recently. Last summer
Intelligent Life magazine took an online vote to ascertain
the most important date in history, and the birth of Jesus got 40%
fewer votes than Gutenburg's invention of the printing press.
The Twitter poll was closer, with Churchill on 34 %, Jesus on 30
% and Darwin on 28%.
One can see how Churchill, famously witty and leading a war
against fascism, would seem interesting to follow - though it
perhaps underestimates the secrecy of the war cabinet to imagine
that we'd learn very much. ('Finalised plans for D-day. Going for 6
June. Fingers crossed!')
And Darwin certainly had some interesting theories, but
did well to get on to the main clause of a sentence within
140 characters. ('On the view here given of the important part
which selection by man has played, it becomes at once obvious, how
it is that our domestic…')
But it's striking how well twitter-friendly Jesus is. The
gospels being packed with one-liners ('Judge not, so that you are
not judged,' 'Give Caesar what is Caesar's, give God what what is
God's'), it has long been said that they are an example of what a
biography looks like that lived by word of mouth first. Now it
seems they exemplify what it would look like if it was originally
tweeted.
Whether this point has any significance at all is another
matter. With 140 characters remaining, none has occurred to me, so
instead I'll use them to remind you that you can follow us at twitter.com/thirdway.