The son of one of America’s most prominent pastors has become a sensation on TikTok by posting denunciations of evangelical Christianity on the social media platform.
Abraham Piper’s brief videos are intended to be humorous but often also carry a biting critique of the church culture in which he grew up. In one recent video he insisted he was not attacking Christianity. “I berate evangelicalism. Fundamentalism. It’s a destructive, narrow-minded world-view,” he said.
Piper is an artist, designer of jigsaw puzzles and co-founder of a digital media company. His father is John Piper, 75, who retired as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis in 2013 after 33 years at the pulpit. He has been ranked the 11th most influential pastor of the past 25 years by Preaching.com.
The younger Piper, 39, has more than 900,000 followers and has posted more than 300 videos since he started using TikTok in November. They are typically recorded as he trudges through the streets of his home city of Minneapolis, with his long grey hair flowing out from under a colourful woolly hat.
He was excommunicated from his father’s church when he was 19 because, he wrote: “I just wanted to drink gallons of cheap sangria and sleep around.” He was welcomed back into the faith four years later but has since made an apparently definitive break from it.