On Twitter: My Christian Followers

I'm both bemused and amused by the growing number of my Twitter followers who are Twitter Christians. These are not my friends and followers who also happen to be Christians, but Jesus-tweeting strangers who have decided that they should follow me. 

It began last week when, much to my delight, I discovered the Christian Coalition had become one of my Twitter followers. And almost every day since then, another Twitter Christian--someone whose tweets have a primarily Christian content, and who usually has a Christian-focused website too--has decided to follow me. I'm not quite sure what to make of this.

My guess is that these are people who follow anyone whose tweets contain a key word like "Jesus" or "Christian." A few weeks ago, something similar to that happened to me when I tweeted some quotes from Olympic ice skater Johnny Weir (who I adore). One of my tweets mentioned Johnny's love for Balenciaga purses, and shortly after, a twit selling designer purses started following me. Later, I tweeted a quote from Johnny that contained "Long Island," and gained a follower who collected and retweeted Long Island related gossip. Both eventually apparently realized that I was unlikely to follow them back, and/or that I wasn't going to provide them with appropriate tweets to retweet, so they stopped following me.

The other two possibilities for my new Twitter Christian followers are a bit more creepy, yet still amusing:

The first is that they're hoping to make me see the error of my atheist ways, and embrace their own particular brand of irrationality. But, really, they need to face reality in at least this instance. I'm not going to follow them back. I'm not going to visit their websites except for material to poke at on this blog. And if they start tweeting me, I'll just block them.

The other possibility that crossed (no pun intended) my mind is that the Twitter Christians are just keeping an eye on me--the old "keep your enemies closer." Although that seems very unlikely given that in the atheist world and the blogosphere, I'm a nobody.

I've tried checking to see if other atheists on Twitter also have a fairly large proportion of Twitter Christian followers, but most of the atheist bloggers I thought of have many more followers than I have--too many to count the number of Twitter Christians among them.

I suspect that if my new Twitter Christian followers actually read what I tweet, and/or follow the links provided in some of them to this blog, they will either be horrified and/or angry, and stop following me. Or, admittedly more unlikely, they will read, learn, think, and see the error of their ways. 

Either way, it's good.