This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
Recently, I saw a clip that claimed to show video game players performing the “first Fortnite baptism.”
Fortnite, for those unfamiliar, is an online battle royale-style game that boasts over a million active players. At its peak, it claimed over 14 million players. In the video, two characters, standing in a virtual lake exchange the questions: “Do you confess that Jesus is your Lord and Savior?” “Will you follow him for the rest of your days?” Followed by a Trinitarian baptism, and exclamations of “Let’s goooooo!”
As I watched this theologically questionable exchange, I started thinking about Riley MacLeod. MacLeod is editor and co-owner of Aftermath, a worker-owned publication dedicated to games journalism and blogging. But I also knew MacLeod was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and someone broadly interested in faith and social justice.
Video games may not be your cup of tea. Whether you grew up in a household that banned Pokémon for being demonic or had parents who were wary of the violence and language in Halo and Call of Duty, Christians across the spectrum have questioned the value of video games.
As much as I might want to mock the Fortnite exchange, it reminded me of my own running video game gag: The “Social Justice Madden Playthrough.” This bit is done at least a little tongue-in-cheek, but it involves playing Franchise Mode (for me, in Madden 2004) and taking every actionable step toward justice. Relocate the Washington football team to rename them from their former racial slur. Raise parking prices at your stadium to incentivize public transit. Cut down on advertising to reduce waste. Never ever offer a lower salary to a player in the name of worker justice. If I could increase pensions and health care, I’d do that too. (For the record: The social justice play through does not preclude trading for Michael Vick, the greatest video game player of all time.)
Jokingly fusing my interest in football video games and social justice is an expression of play. I know I’m being silly, but it stretches my brain in creative and energetic ways. Play, McLeod said, is fundamental to all games and fundamental to our humanity.
“It’s about togetherness or experimenting, and it’s a fundamental part of the human condition,” he told Sojourners. “It’s one of the first things that you do as a person.”
In our interview, we discussed the journey from divinity school to prison chaplain to poetry publisher to games journalist and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: What were the things in your life that made you want to attend divinity school?
Riley MacLeod, Aftermath: I grew up Jewish, but sort of socially Jewish. My dad was Catholic, my mom was Jewish, and we had a bar mitzvah and stuff, but we did it because you kind of had to. I always felt like I wanted more than that.
In college, I started learning more, and then—I don’t know if this joke reads to a Christian audience—like many Jews, I became a Buddhist. I got really serious about Zen Buddhism, and I was practicing that very seriously for several years.
Really, what drove me to divinity school was wanting to study faith more seriously, and I wanted more school. I wanted more religion and more school, which seems like the opposite of what you say when you’re in your 20s.
I started studying Buddhism and then got introduced to radical politics. I was dating a Unitarian minister and learning about activism and faith through that lens. Especially for who I was at the time, I got a little bit angry at American Buddhism. It couldn’t quite rise to what I saw as the occasion of politics. I was really mad, and I wanted it to be OK that I was really mad. So, I drifted away from that. I feel bad about it, because being too angry to be a Buddhist seems like the kind of thing that you should bring to your Buddhist practice.
But I focused on the arts and how religion is portrayed in the arts. I was a prison chaplain with the Jesuits for a little bit, which was very, very cool. My joke about going to div school is it’s really good for being really awkward at parties.
What was so cool about your time with the Jesuits?
There was a meme going around on the internet that asks, “What’s a job you think you’d be really good at that you’ll never have?” And I earnestly am a little bit sad that I’ll never be a Jesuit. I think I would be great at that. You get to be religious, and you get to do social justice things—that’s the life a person should be living.
I took a chaplaincy class with Weston Jesuit, which was a seminary at the time. Our teacher was great. Going into a jail in Boston was really intense and interesting. I, at the time, was a big punk. I had a big mohawk, I have all these tattoos, and that was good and bad for talking to folks. A lot of the people in the jail wanted to talk to me; the guards did not like me.
The head chaplain and I had a big conflict, because I felt very strongly that it’s wrong for people to be prison guards, and I would refuse to talk to them. He was like, “Well, you know, we’re here for everyone.” He did a really great job of letting me have my angry little feelings but also pushing me out of them. I remember once he took me into where all the guards sit and said, “Hey, this kid wants to know why you all became prison guards.” And then he left. And I thought, “Wow, Father George!” But I did learn more about who they were as people, even though I was seething the whole time.
How did going to divinity school affect like what you understood about religion and public life?
You learn both the very nitty gritty religious parts—reading texts and everything—and you learn about politics and society.
There’s a rapidly dwindling amount of religion journalists and, I think, a rapidly dwindling amount of people who are both religiously literate and socially, politically literate. [Religion News Service reporter] Jack Jenkins and I talk about this all the time, that there isn’t enough coverage of the breadth of religion—in particular, the religious left.
My argument is that you see a right-wing anti-abortion protest, it reads [as religious]—because you’re used to hearing those narratives. When you see the opposite, it’s harder to understand. I think it requires more religious literacy to understand the roots of where social justice stuff comes out of faith. As a consequence, it doesn’t get covered as much. It’s weird. In America, it seems like religion plays such a big part in our social and increasingly political spheres, but there isn’t a lot of digging into what it really is.
One of my other biggest peeves is when we call things “religion.” Like right now, with artificial intelligence, people are like, “AI is a religion!” Define your terms. What does that mean? What do you mean by that? “Religion” as a catchall that we use when feelings are too big—there’s some imaginary line where secular feelings transcend the secular that does a disservice to the thing we’re talking about and to religion. If we just cast religion as “blind adherence without meaning,” that’s not what religion is.
When you were at divinity school, did you have an idea that you might want to do journalism?
No. I’d always been a writer. After school, I was doing all different kinds of editing and fell into editing more nonfiction stuff. From there, I started doing some freelance writing, freelance games journalism in particular.
In 2016, I got a job as managing editor at Kotaku, which is a very prominent games journalism site. It was kind of my first journalism job.
We’re really lucky that our EIC [editor in chief] at the time was a real journalist and trained in journalism. A lot of games journalism, people don’t quite see it as journalism. It’s more entertainment writing or criticism or review. It is all those things, but he very much drilled into us, “This is journalism, and you’re a journalist.” That has really served me well.
READ MORE: Constructing Religious Worlds With Minecraft
I went on from there to work very briefly at The Washington Post, leading their game section, which they shut down several months after I moved there to run it, which was a real bummer. But, going there and being around Washington Post journalists—I learned more in my time there than I learned in years of other experiences.
I never saw myself as a journalist but definitely came to really love it and take it seriously. You get to talk to people and tell the truth about things that are happening and all of the big complications that come with that. It was kind of an accidental career that now, as journalism jobs are lost by the bucket full, I feel more strongly [about] than ever—I really care about this profession.
What makes Aftermath different from other games journalism outlets?
Well, I was gonna say that we’re worker-owned, but there’s actually a growing number of outlets like that.
We started it ourselves in 2023. There’s five of us. These days, much like journalism at large, games journalism outlets are increasingly either being closed or are owned by three major companies. There are tons of layoffs, things are getting geared more toward [search-engine optimization], tons of places that just employ networks of low-paid freelancers to churn out things for search terms. It’s very important to us not to do any of that.
[We want] to be skeptical and independent and to write about games the way people actually play them and talk about them. We do a lot of writing about labor—unions and layoffs and different models for game studios. We do a lot of writing about the business of games journalism. Just yesterday, I wrote about some layoffs at a major games journalism site. I’ve been really shocked—our readers love that stuff. As a journalist, I always want to talk about journalism, and I love that they love it.
We had all worked together at Kotaku, which was owned by Gawker, which met its untimely end in 2016 when Hulk Hogan sued us. There’s very much a tradition there of casting an eye inward on the business of journalism. I love that we’ve been able to keep that going. Kotaku eventually got bought by a private equity firm and that went the way that, you know, all private equity firms buying journalism outlets go.
It’s been nice to return to form with a bit more maturity.
We’re subscriber-funded, so we have a smaller audience than we had before, but we’re able to really interact with them and give them the things that they are interested in.
How does being worker-owned help you do journalism and the business of journalism in a more ethical way?
We get to decide together what our ethics are. You don’t inherit a model of how you do things. We get to really decide together what our values are. And we get to chase the things we care about. We get to cover stories that I think other outlets we worked at might see as too small or too niche. A private equity firm often did not understand why we wrote about layoffs and unionization.
The flip side is I’m rapidly learning that to do really impactful journalism, you need a lot of support legally. And that costs money. I’m currently deep in the mines of trying to shore up our system so that we can do more hard-hitting work. I was just learning about international indemnification insurance coverage.
One of the challenges of more journalists going independent is that you lose that undergirding that, maybe in a lot of ways, you take for granted. When you need a legal review, where do you get it?
My joke about it is that when you work at a job, and there’s all these departments—I’m all of those departments. My God, it’s so much stuff to do.
How does having a theology degree help you now as a journalist and a business owner?
When religion gets covered or talked about, it’s not often in that intimate space of belief. I find even in my own life, where I’m surrounded by religious leftists of all kinds, when you really talk about “I believe in God,” they’re like “Oh…” We’re not very good at talking about the faith of it all and the feeling of it all.
I’ll be honest. It looks good on a resume! It’s so freaking weird. I’m far enough away from div school that I should probably take my education off my resume, but every time I’ve put it there, people [ask about it].
I don’t know what your experience is as an editor, but I think that there is something similar to pastoral care in editing. A writer, especially new writers, give you their work, and you’re moving with them through it. You’re teaching them not just that piece, but how to find their voice, what kind of writer they want to be. I feel like those skills come in handy a great deal.
As the field changes so much, as these real journalism jobs become less and less, you have less opportunity for new writers to be mentored by older writers and to develop. It harms the whole field, and it harms those writers.
What can people who are interested in religion and social justice learn from gaming?
I wrote an article about Carlo Acutis, who will be the Catholic Church’s first saint who had been a gamer. I interviewed a Jesuit who used to be a game designer about that.
Essentially, games are about play. If you put aside the latest Call of Duty or Fortnite and all the money it makes, it’s about play. It’s about togetherness or experimenting, and it’s a fundamental part of the human condition. It’s one of the first things that you do as a person. It’s really important to honor that in ourselves and to hold on to that.
Games are an art form, and the Jesuit that I interviewed about this said that, for them, seeing God in all things, God is in games too. Games tell stories and they teach us about the human condition. Certainly, some of your readers probably grew up in homes where video games were banned.
During the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of news outlets were like “Video games. What’s that about? Those are for real.” And when the pandemic became less dire, when the lockdowns ended, all these outlets [treated games as] a pandemic thing. It undermines how many people play games, what big parts of our lives they are.
We know for a fact that the MAGA playbook comes from like Gamergate. You see people getting radicalized in these spaces. Much like religious journalism, if people aren’t conversant in these spaces, if they don’t know what’s going on, you’ll miss those signs, or you’ll just write these alarmist pieces. It’s important to be conversant in that space.
[Games] intersect with politics and tech and labor and art. It behooves you to know what’s happening in this space and to take it seriously.
I saw an Instagram reel of a Fortnite baptism.
There are a growing number of churches and religious movements using gaming. I wrote an article years ago about a church for gamers that’s just on Twitch. And from there, I’ve learned about a bunch of different ones. There’s a conference, the Nerd Culture Ministry Summit. I’m really fascinated by what this is.
That kind of thing has dangers. Those things aren’t always legible as churches, and they’re not always legible as to what kind of churches they are. The one that I wrote about definitely has some beliefs that I don’t know that I would agree with. As religion moves into those spaces, there is a certain literacy that people need.
“God is in games too. Games tell stories and they teach us about the human condition.”
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