‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’: Religion, Performativity, Outrage, and Andrew Tate

While it might be true to say that media have always provided opportunities for individuals to achieve notoriety it is also true that the nature of that notoriety has significantly changed in recent years. People and topics that were scandalous twenty years ago are now acceptably mainstream. There has been a steep and rapid rise of extreme partisanship, misinformation, and deliberate deceit. And one key locus of mediated provocation, disruption, and notoriety – religion – has been particularly connected with the mobilisation of patriarchal and reactionary goals and ideals. One particularly notorious example here is that provided by Andrew Tate, the ‘king of toxic masculinity’ (Sinmaz), who first reached the public eye as a contestant on Big Brother in the UK in 2016. Tate quickly built a strong following online in the so-called manosphere, and his influencer persona leveraged into a multi-platform self-help / self-improvement movement for men. An often-overlooked component of Tate’s persona, however, is his use of religion and religious cultural markers. While there has been some analysis of and commentary on his conversion to Islam and how that links with other aspects of his persona, to date there has been little enquiry into the techniques and tools Tate uses, and the meanings that audience members make of his messages. This article aims to address this gap and will use both thematic and rhetorical analyses to demonstrate how these beliefs and themes are deployed and discussed, and from there, how we might best critically understand this component of his appeal.