Content Creation
Find a existing online digital project that you like and has a good following (or use one of the
examples) – this could be for branded goods, a marketing campaign, a personal story, experimental, social, sustainability, nature based etc.
I did a bit of a personal brainstorming session about the things which shaped the content I like. I NEVER watch horror movies and enjoy things that are ‘nice’. I remember watching Laurel and Hardy films which were on TV a lot during my childhood, along with programmes like The Banana Splits and was definitely engaged by humour despite the fact that I was often seen as rather a serious child.
Here’s the list, as they say, in no particular order
- Victoria Wood, Reggie Perrin, That’s Life, B Dylan Hollis, Chloe Charles Queer Sober Therapist, Rev Brandan Robertson, The High Life, Scooch, Scotch and Wry, Kenneth Williams, Are You Being Served, Like serious content in a light-hearted way – realistic attitudes made ridiculous, Laurel and Hardy, The Banana Splits, Round the Horne, Radio comedy, Carry On Movies, Innuendo – Tom Lehrer, Flanders and Swann (I was once in a tribute act!), Polari, Remember seeing a man in a restaurant on my 10th birthday and he was sitting in a chair and made occasional comments and the people broke into gales of laughter, But … I have s serious side and would like to be able to bring together my desire for social change with humour. This list could go on for hours.
Victoria Wood’s Kitty
The Banana Splits
The High Life
Kenneth Williams – Stick up Your Hands
It will be 100 years since Kenneth Williams was born on 22nd February 2026 – I am already celebrating his centenary on BBC Radio 4 Extra. He died by taking his own life on 15th April 1988, just before my 21st Birthday. I remember crying a lot that day.
Rev Brandan Robertson
Chloe Charles – Queer Sober Therapist
There is a clear mix of influences which combine a love of humour with faith and other serious content and more than a smattering of camp, queerness. That’s kind of me in a sentence.
Task 1: Create an online presence.
Find a existing online digital project that you like and has a good following (or use one of the
examples) – this could be for branded goods, a marketing campaign, a personal story, experimental, social, sustainability, nature based etc.
1. In your blog add the link or links to the project, use screen grabs to show the graphics layout,
design and platform.
2. Explain what the storytelling methods is/are and what is the narrative.
3. Explain what the platform/platforms are and why you think they have used those.
4. Explain who you think the audience is.
5. Explain what you think is successful.
6. Explain what you think is engaging.
7. Explain what ethics are involved.
8. Explain what you think could be done to improve.
As a boy, I’d normally sit near the back – though I desperately wanted to be seen and to be a performer, I also wanted to be invisible. I wasn’t a troublemaker, quite the opposite in fact, and I suppose I chose that seat so that I could people watch and I still enjoy people watching.
When I was about 5 years old I got into trouble with my mother for impersonating the way a neighbour ran to chase her own child – it wasn’t nasty but it was funny and I liked the reaction my impression got. Later, in primary school, I was well known for impressions – particularly Dame Edna Everage (voice only sadly) – and as a late teenager had an audition for Spitting Image.
I was always good a telling a story and found I ‘raconteurs’ like Peter Ustinov fascinating even if I didn’t always understand what the were talking about. I was too shy to join the school drama club and eventually came out of my shell (well one of them at least) in hospital radio from around the age of 17.
I grew up on Victoria Wood, which taught me that the funniest things are the most ordinary things, the Breville sandwich toaster, the sad sandwich at a works do, the quiet devastation of being slightly not quite right in a world of people who seemed to have got the memo he hadn’t received. Victoria never punched down. She punched sideways, at the absurdity of life itself.
And I found some LPs (and later CDs) of BBC Radio’s Round the Horne. I loved the fun, the word play, innuendo and electricity of characters like Julian and Sandy – outrageously, flamboyantly, entirely themselves tucked inside the BBC Home Service between the jingles. The straight audience laughed because they half-didn’t-get-it. The queer audience laughed because they entirely did. Polari. The secret language. The wink inside the joke. I learned something profound: you can say the truest thing in the world and disguise it as a punchline.
The Carry On films gave me innuendo as theology. Meaning lives in the gap between what is said and what is understood. Laurel and Hardy showed me the man who doesn’t quite fit the world around him, Stan’s bewilderment, Ollie’s look to camera, the appeal to the audience: you see what I’m dealing with? I understood Stan. He was Stan even though I looked more like Ollie.
On my tenth birthday, I remember being in a pub restaurant. A man sitting in a chair, making occasional comments, quips almost, nothing sustained, nothing performed, and the table erupting. The man wasn’t telling jokes. He was observing. Seeing clearly and saying so, with precise timing. I stored this moment as a precious memory.
One of the first people I followed on Tik Tok was B Dylan Hollis confirmed something: enthusiasm is its own comedy. Deadpan-but-delighted, taking the ridiculous seriously and the serious ridiculously and the odd innuendo and queer-coded comment and ‘set’. And then Chloe Charles – Queer Sober Therapist on TikTok and Brandan Robertson arrived, people dealing with serious topic – psychology and scripture in each case – doing so with kindness and humour while wrestling with their topics honestly.
1. The Project — Links and Visual Identity
Image: I was fortunate enough to meet Brandan at the launch of his book in London in November 2025.
Brandan Robertson is a queer theologian, author, and activist whose digital presence spans YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and his own website. His work directly addresses LGBTQ+ inclusion in Christianity, using scripture as his primary tool rather than his opponent.
You Tube
TikTok
He also has a website which is a kind of central place for all of his work including books for sale, speaking enquiries, blog posts, and links to all platforms. It is the serious anchor beneath the social media accessibility.
2. Storytelling Method and Narrative
Robertson’s storytelling method is the personal-to-universal journey. He consistently begins with the human cost, these passages have been used to harm real people, before moving into the intellectual and scriptural argument. This is a classic narrative arc: establish the stakes emotionally, then satisfy intellectually.
The narrative running beneath every piece of content is the same story told different ways: the Bible has been misread, the misreading has caused suffering, and a careful honest reading reveals something radically different. It is a story of rescue not of people from God, but of people from a bad interpretation of God.
He also employs what might be called the confident explainer mode the narrator who has done the work, is not angry about it (mostly), and is genuinely puzzled that this isn’t more widely known. It moves the viewer from defensive to curious.
There is an autobiography running through everything: Robertson is himself queer and Christian, and the personal weight of that gives every scriptural argument an emotional undertow that pure academic theology lacks.
3. Platform Choices and Why
Robertson uses YouTube as his primary long-form home – 10 to 20 minute videos that allow a full argument. YouTube’s search function means his content is discoverable by people actively looking for answers: the teenager whose pastor just quoted Leviticus at them, the parent trying to understand, the student with a private question they haven’t asked out loud.
Instagram and TikTok serve a completely different function: they are interruption platforms. Someone scrolling who wasn’t looking for theology encounters 60 seconds of Robertson and thinks wait, what? and follows. The short-form content is a door into the long-form argument.
The multi-platform approach is strategically sound because the audience segments don’t overlap neatly. The 45-year-old ally who watches YouTube documentaries is not the same person as the 19-year-old questioning their faith on TikTok. Robertson is fishing in all the relevant waters simultaneously.
The website and books anchor the whole enterprise in credibility he is not just a content creator, he is a published theologian with institutional standing. This matters enormously when your subject is scripture, because the implicit question from a sceptical viewer is always but who are you to say?
4. The Audience
The primary audience is LGBTQ+ Christians and people raised in Christian contexts, people for whom the Clobber Passages are not an abstract intellectual exercise but a lived wound. These are people who need to hear not just that they are welcome, but why the texts that said otherwise were wrong, because for them the texts have authority. Vague affirmation without scriptural engagement doesn’t reach this audience. Robertson knows this, and it shapes everything.
The secondary audience is allies and questioning believers, straight Christians who sense something is wrong with their tradition’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people but lack the theological vocabulary to articulate why, and need someone to do the careful work for them.
Another audience, perhaps underestimated, is the openly hostile viewer, the person who arrives to argue and stays to think. Robertson’s tone, unhurried, calm and rigorous is specifically poorly matched to the person looking for a fight, which is its own kind of genius.
5. What Is Successful
The most successful element is the combination of emotional accessibility and intellectual rigour. Robertson never talks down to his audience, and he never loses the human stakes in academic abstraction. He holds both simultaneously, which is genuinely difficult to do and which most content in this space fails to achieve either too scholarly (and therefore cold) or too personal (and therefore easily dismissed).
The consistency of output is also remarkable. Regular content, across multiple platforms, over years, builds the cumulative effect of a trusted voice. A single video can be argued with. A body of work is harder to dismiss.
The confidence without arrogance of his delivery is also quietly extraordinary. He does not hedge. He has done the work and he states his conclusions clearly, which is reassuring to an audience that has often been made to feel the question is too complicated for a definitive answer.
6. What Is Engaging
The engagement hook is the relief of permission. For an LGBTQ+ person raised in the church, watching Robertson is the experience of someone finally saying aloud what you had hoped might be true. That is an intensely powerful emotional experience, and it creates fierce loyalty.
The “wait, really?” moments are also highly engaging, for example, the discovery that the sin of Sodom is defined in Ezekiel as inhospitality, not homosexuality; that arsenokoitai was a word apparently invented by Paul and its precise meaning is genuinely disputed by scholars; that Jesus says nothing, directly, about same-sex relationships. These are the moments a viewer will clip, share, and return to. They have the quality of the Hollis revelation you’re not going to believe what’s actually in here.
The comments sections on Robertson’s videos are also notably moving — people sharing that a video helped them leave a harmful church, or reconcile with a family member, or stay alive. This community dimension, visible on the platform, becomes itself part of the content’s power.
7. Ethics Involved
Several ethical considerations run through this kind of project and Robertson navigates them with varying degrees of success.
The ethics of authority and qualification: Robertson is an ordained minister with genuine theological training. He is entitled to make the claims he makes. The ethical issue arises for anyone without that background who might present the same material. The project is clear that this is an argument, not a final ruling, and that matters.
The ethics of the audience’s vulnerability: Many viewers arrive already hurt, already in crisis. There is an ethical responsibility not to exploit that emotional state for engagement, and to present even hopeful information carefully. Robertson generally handles this well, though the short-form content necessarily strips out nuance.
The ethics of selective scholarship: All theological argument is selective to some degree, but there is an ethical obligation to represent the strongest version of opposing views before dismantling them. Robertson sometimes moves past the conservative scholarly position too quickly, which leaves the work open to a fair criticism of straw-manning. The ethics of representation: Speaking for or about an LGBTQ+ experience from a position of relative privilege (white, male, ordained, published) while other queer voices, particularly queer people of colour, remain marginalised in mainstream Christian discourse is a genuine tension the project doesn’t always address.
8. What Could Be Improved
The production quality is deliberately modest, which works but the audio quality on earlier videos in particular occasionally undermines the authority of the content. A modest investment in sound would pay dividends without disrupting the intentional unpretentiousness of the visual approach.
The TikTok content sometimes sacrifices too much nuance for brevity, leaving partial arguments floating without their foundations. A pinned comment or link-in-bio system directing short-form viewers to the full argument more efficiently would help.
There is an opportunity for more explicit storytelling bringing in the voices of LGBTQ+ Christians directly, perhaps as interviews or as read correspondence, rather than Robertson always being the sole narrator. The personal-to-universal method would be strengthened by more personal voices alongside his own.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly: the comments need moderation and pastoral care infrastructure. When content reaches people in genuine spiritual and psychological crisis, there is an ethical obligation to have something in place beyond an algorithm. A signposted community resource, or a pinned crisis link, would acknowledge the emotional weight of what the content stirs up.
- In your blog add the title of your project.
I’m thinking of calling it something like ‘Leviticus and the Big Mistake’ but I am not 100% sure at present.
- Explain what is/are the storytelling methods and what is the narrative.
My current thinking is to create short videos – perhaps with myself playing various characters with appropriate props in a style common TikTok. Ideally I’d like there to be a light or comedic element in each video and to the series as a whole but this will depend on whether I can create a ‘script’ which addresses the issues seriously but is also engaging.
- Explain what the platform/platforms could be.
Almost certainly TikTok but I may also consider YouTube and as I am a big fan of radio and audio content I may try an audio platform. I will probably opt for a video based platform as this takes me more out of my comfort zone.
- Explain who you think the audience is.
The primary audience is the LGBTQ+ person who still has one foot in faith or did until one of the Clobber Passages was thrown at them. The secondary audience is the ally who wants to help but keeps losing the argument and finally those who are quietly curious about the subject but who isn’t sure what they think.
- Explain what you think will make it successful.
I think a combination of warmth, humour, information and connection is likely to make the series successful. Although, I am not certain whether success is to be measured by view or by effectively getting the message across in a simple to understand and engaging way. My approach is likely to be more tabloid than Brandan’s perhaps as I am not a well qualified theologian.
- Explain what you think will make it engaging.
Mmmm … a good question. Perhaps like beauty, engagement is in the eye of the beholder. I would like to think that the homespun, amateur nature of the production will attract attention and a novel approach to the subject will encourage people to stop in the knowledge that they will find something interesting by taking time to listen to this video’s content.
- Explain what ethics are involved.
I want to be honest about the ethical questions this project carries, because dishonesty about them would undermine everything it’s trying to do. While this is not academic theology, I do believe that there must be an element of personal interpretation to this work and it is based upon what I believe rather than wholly upon what I can prove to be true – others will definitely disagree with my point of view entirely (which is the point of the exercise, right?). I think the following ethical considerations are involved:
- The ethics of authority. I am not an ordained minister nor qualified theologian. I am a Lay Minister and someone who has read carefully, who has spent a long time with these texts, who has consulted the scholarship seriously. The argument should stand on its own merits, not on institutional authority but viewers deserve to know who is making it and from what position.
- The ethics of the vulnerable audience. Many people who find this content may be in genuine distress people who have been told by their church, their family, their tradition, that they are not welcome with God.
- The ethics of scholarship. Theological argument involves choices about which scholars to cite.
- The ethics of comedy. Humour is power, and power requires responsibility. The comedy in this project punches at misinterpretation, at centuries of careless scholarship, at the absurdity of the situation
Task 3
Leviticus Mind Map
The Clobber Verses
The term “clobber passages” refers to a specific set of biblical texts that have historically been used to condemn homosexuality and marginalize LGBTQ+ individuals.
The primary “clobber passages” (often referred to as the “Big Six”) are:
Old Testament
- Genesis 19:1–38 (Sodom and Gomorrah): This passage tells the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Traditional interpretations argue God destroyed the cities because of homosexuality, while affirming scholars emphasize that the actual sin depicted was inhospitality and the attempted gang rape of strangers.
- Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 (The Holiness Code): These verses forbid a man from lying with a male “as with a woman,” labeling the act an “abomination” (or toevah). Affirming interpretations argue these texts are part of a ritual purity code meant to separate Israelites from surrounding pagan nations, or that they specifically condemn exploitative sex, rather than addressing modern consensual same-sex relationships.
New Testament
- Romans 1:26–27 (Unnatural Relations): In this passage, the Apostle Paul writes of women and men abandoning “natural” relations for “unnatural” ones. Affirming scholars often argue Paul was describing heterosexual people engaging in idol-related sexual excess, pagan temple worship, or violating the patriarchal gender norms of the time, rather than condemning same-sex orientation.
- 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 and 1 Timothy 1:9–10 (The Vice Lists): These passages include lists of wrongdoers who will not inherit the kingdom of God, using the Greek terms malakoi (often translated as “effeminate” or “male prostitutes”) and arsenokoitai (often translated as “sodomites” or “homosexuals”). Scholars debate the exact translation of these words, with many suggesting they refer to economic exploitation, pederasty (exploitative relationships with young boys), or abusive power dynamics.
Additional Passages Sometimes Included While the six passages above are the most common, some sources expand the list to include other verses used as “prooftexts” against homosexuality:
- Jude 1:6–7: Refers to Sodom and Gomorrah going after “strange flesh” (or “other flesh”). While some use this to condemn homosexuality, alternative interpretations suggest it refers to the attempted rape of angels (non-human flesh).
- Deuteronomy 23:17-18 and 1 Kings 14:24 & 15:12: Passages dealing with “temple prostitution”.
- Judges 19: The story of the Levite and his concubine in Gibeah, which parallels the gang-rape narrative of Genesis 19.
- Genesis 1-2: The creation narrative of Adam and Eve, which is sometimes used to argue that God’s intended design is exclusively for male and female sexual relationships.
As a gay Christian for whom these passages have been more than problematic for much of my life, I’d like to focus the creative energy of this project into a fun, light and easily accessible deconstruction of the prejudice and mistranslation which lies behind the traditional interpretation of these verses. I hope it will not be too long before the relationship between my love for camp comedy and this weighty theological topic begins to emerge.
Brandan Robertson: The Bible does not condemn LGBTQ people – Outreach
https://outreach.faith/2022/10/brandan-robertson-the-bible-does-not-condemn-lgbtq-people
As a starting point for this project, I was inspired by the work of Christian theologians who have spent years critically examining these “clobber passages” i.e. the six biblical verses most commonly weaponised against LGBTQ+ people. After a decade of study, one such theologian – Rev Brandan Robertson who wrote the article linked above – concluded that these passages are not straightforward condemnations of same-sex relationships at all, but rather address “sexual exploitation, abuse and idolatry” in very specific cultural and religious contexts.
Taking Leviticus 18 as an example, the chapter is fundamentally about God warning the Israelites away from the ritual practices of neighbouring pagan nations and not laying down universal moral law. Similarly, Romans 1 describes a descent into idolatry, with the sexual behaviour condemned being tied directly to Roman idol worship and exploitation of conquered peoples.
This kind of contextual reading reveals that the clobber passages have been consistently misapplied. That injustice together with the very specific, often bizarre historical contexts behind these verses felt like rich territory for a light-hearted digital content project. If the scholarship is this compelling, there’s real power in making it accessible, engaging, and even fun.
And so I began thinking about how I could do this using inspiration from some of those comedians, films, TV and radio programmes which have long informed my love for humour. After much thought, I have decided to work on a series of TikTok videos which will set the scene and debunk the false theology – taking inspiration from the videos of Brandan Robertson as well as some of the comedic videos of creations like Munya Chawawa – a British based Zimbawean comedian who plays all gender roles in his videos, I am going to attempt to recreated the atmosphere of ‘This Morning with Richard and Judy’ to tell the tale of centuries of misunderstanding of queer people by the church (and churches)
Munya meets Judy for the first time
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