(RNS) — A meme, as Kyle Hide explains it, is like a gene for culture. A concept first coined by biologist Richard Dawkins, it’s a unit of meaning that evolves and spreads through imitation.
“ A meme functions similarly to a virus,” said Hide, the 34-year-old administrator of the popular Instagram account I Need God in Every Moment of My Life, a self-described culturally non-practicing Catholic and lifelong internet obsessive. “That’s why we might call something online viral. You could think of memes as anything that culturally transmits itself and replicates through culture.”
I Need God in Every Moment of My Life reads like a digital confessional booth filtered through Tumblr-core aesthetics, Catholic iconography and internet absurdism. Posts range from blurry screenshots of tweets about prayer and heartbreak to ironic riffs on spiritual longing.
For Hide, who is known online and on his podcast “I Need God Pod” as “God-lover Kyle,” memes are more than just content striving for virality; they are a form of meaning-making. Posting under the persona allows Hide, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, to maintain both intimacy and distance from followers, he said.
He and three queer friends from different Christian backgrounds turned their God-focused group chat into the Instagram account in 2020.
“We all loved God, and we were like, we need God,” Hide said. “Everything is too godless. We thought that God is coming back in a major way. Let’s just create a page and we’ll all post to it.”
A variety of “I Need God in Every Moment of My Life” Instagram posts. (Screen grab)
Hide, who now solely manages the account and interacts with its 138,000 followers, said of the page’s fallen collaborators …