(RNS) — On the penultimate night of his I Love Jesus tour in late March, 22-year-old evangelist Bryce Crawford stepped onstage wearing wide-legged sweatpants, a cross-themed vintage tee and Lightning McQueen-shaped Crocs. 

“Who has their physical Bibles in the room?” he asked with a slight Georgia drawl. Throughout the 975-seat Crest Theatre in Sacramento, hands gripping Bibles sprang up. “Wow, amazing!” he said, before joking, “You know, for everyone who doesn’t have their Bibles … God’s gonna judge the earth.” 

In a few short years, Crawford has become one of the most popular evangelical voices of his generation. He has a combined total of 7 million followers on TikTok and Instagram and a hefty YouTube catalog of sermons and street-preaching videos. His podcast, which sits at third on Spotify’s Religion and Spirituality charts, has hosted influential and contentious figures, including far-right pundit Tucker Carlson and 89-year-old prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland. Crawford has also, of late, aligned himself with MAGA platforms such as Turning Point USA. 

His manager, Divij Vaswani, claims his client reached “a billion and a half people last year” based on view counts. According to Crawford’s website, all but four of his 26 tour dates in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand sold out. 

At a moment when Generation Z’s religiosity is hotly debated, Crawford is clearly resonating. But whether his virality is driving a real movement — and where, exactly, this is all heading — remains to be seen.

Building a brand

Crawford grew up in Cartersville, Georgia, and was raised evangelical, attending a private Christian academy and a Southern Baptist church. He was also, like many boys his age, inspired by YouTube vloggers, including Jake and Logan Paul and Baylen Levine. 

“I wanted to be a prankster,” Crawford told RNS. While his earliest videos were in that vein, like the one where he wrestled an inflatable dinosaur in Times Square, the style ultimately wasn’t a fit for his personality. “I’m a very big stickler on the rules.”

In Crawford’s telling, he projected a gregarious, spiritually mature persona as a teen. Beneath the veneer, though, he struggled with overwhelming anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, he shared in a video.

Over Christmas 2020, Crawford went to his favorite chain restaurant, Waffle House, intending the meal to be his last. While there, he struck up a conversation with a man going through a divorce. “There’s no growth in a relationship that isn’t mutual,” he recalls the man saying.

The words were a revelation for Crawford. In them, he heard Jesus calling him to love God back and use his platform “for God’s glory,” he told a local Christian radio show soon after. “I was like, ‘All right, bet.’” 

After graduating from high school in 2022, Crawford felt God pulling him to Los Angeles to become a “full-time missionary.” It was there, preaching in the streets of LA, that he began building his brand.

With a cameraman in tow, Crawford began traveling around Southern California to “bring hope” to “the darkest places on earth,” as he put it to RNS. Given the locations he chose — skid row, a Pride parade, a Hindu festival, a furry convention — the people he encountered were often marginalized, wary of Christianity or, in the assessment of Crawford and his team, “demonic.” 

@brycecrawford Yt: Bryce Crawford #Jesus #love #bible ♬ original sound – brycecrawford

In his most-viewed TikTok video, he responded to an aggravated unhoused man in Venice Beach, telling him: “I love you, man. When was the last time you heard that?” 

 “A long time,” the man replied quietly, visibly taken aback. 

Increasingly, Crawford’s YouTube videos embraced an algorithm-attuned aesthetic, with provocative video titles (“Infiltrating The Satanic Temple!”) and the rhythms of a man-on-the-street interviewer. “All right, guys, we’re here, Burning Man 2024,” he declared in one video, face half-obscured by ski goggles as he described the desert festival’s culture of “drugs and promiscuity.” “This is the last place people expect Jesus to encounter them. What a better place to be?”

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To Zachary Sheldon, a media studies lecturer at Baylor University who researches Christian influencers, what’s distinctive about Crawford’s content is the packaging and distribution. Otherwise, he sees Crawford as following in the footsteps of the street evangelists who drove the Jesus Movement of the 1960s.

“The things that he’s doing are not necessarily new,” Sheldon said. “It’s just that the audience encountering them hasn’t seen them before.”

Not only does Crawford’s audience get to vicariously experience his street preaching, they’re invited to help fund it. Options to “sow” into his ministry include donations, purchasing branded merchandise or subscribing to his Patreon, where monthly tiered options range from $5 to $100 and get subscribers access to private videos and the “Bryce Crawford Inner-Circle Community Chat.”

For Sheldon, what is most intriguing, and concerning, about Christian influencers is the lack of real-life community that many of them can offer.

“If people like Bryce — without institutional backing, without any kind of formal authority — are the primary source of faith culture for other people without institutional affiliation, that’s just extending the steps of removal away from community,” he said. “Connecting over podcasts and in the comments, that’s real and important. But that’s not the same as being in a church on Sunday.”

Perhaps the closest Crawford has to an institutional affiliation is Liberty University, which he has repeatedly promoted and where he recently graduated with an online degree. During the national tour, Liberty advertised a $50 application discount to attendees, and the school’s in-house band, Liberty Worship Collective, performed at every stop. 

Leveling up

At 29, Divij Vaswani has a few years on Crawford’s team and a previous career in business and private equity. In addition to managing Crawford, Vaswani and his company, Division Media, oversee some of the biggest Christian influencers today, including OnlyFans star-turned-Christian-activist Nala Ray.

Managing “all these anointed Christians” has been a fulfilling career pivot, Vaswani said. “I feel like God has called me to be the guy in the background, helping move things along.”

He first connected with Crawford in 2024 during a brand deal and has managed him ever since. It’s through Vaswani’s guidance and connections, in part, that the “Bryce Crawford Podcast” has leveled up dramatically. 

Over the last year, the podcast has evolved into a platform where high-profile, often controversial figures can speak publicly about faith. In October, for instance, Crawford interviewed Shane Stoffer, a fitness influencer known as TOGI who has been candid about his steroid and drug use and gambling, but less so about his beliefs. “The people I’m friends with, that I do podcasts with, they never talk about Jesus,” he told Crawford. 

In a January Instagram post, Stoffer shared photos of himself being baptized in a pool by Crawford, thanking him.

In recent months, Crawford has also interviewed Christian singer Forrest Frank and Jeffrey Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda. 

Vaswani takes some credit for securing the Copeland interview, the preacher’s first in over 15 years. The manager helped facilitate it after meeting Copeland’s granddaughter at a conference. “She literally said, ‘If I would let anyone interview my grandfather, it would be Bryce,’” Vaswani recalled. 

The interview proved almost instantly polarizing. While many online commended Crawford for taking it on, others argued he failed to sufficiently “confront” Copeland for his lavish lifestyle and prosperity gospel theology and even drew parallels between the two. “Bro, it’s the Spider-Man meme!” the Muslim comedian Sonny Faz joked, referencing the classic comic panel of two Peter Parkers pointing at each other. 

In January, Crawford announced the launch of a new “clean,” “faith forward” energy drink, Praise Energy (tagline: “Fuel the grind and honor the soul”). Critics guffawed at its religious marketing and sugar content. Others noted it was essentially identical to Agape Energy, which bills itself as “the first Christian energy drink.”

Crawford has also stirred controversy for his conservative political associations. He has begun speaking at Turning Point USA events, including the AmericaFest 2025 conference, where he gave a fiery sermon on “the last days” and the Book of Revelation. In a response video, Tim Whitaker, founder of the New Evangelicals and a vocal critic of Christian nationalism, used Crawford’s talk to unpack “the Christian beliefs that undergird the MAGA movement.”

For Crawford, navigating reactions, positive or negative, has mainly meant ignoring them. “The good stuff puffs you up with pride, and the bad stuff shatters your heart like a glass house in a hailstorm,” he said. “Social media is a double-edged sword. I do not believe we were designed to have access to every human being on the planet.”

‘He’s everywhere’

Of course, social media’s global access has also been key to Crawford’s ascendance. Now that the tour is done, Vaswani aims to “expand the ministry like crazy,” he said. Praise Energy is part of that vision. So, too, are Charlie Kirk-style conversations about Jesus on college campuses.

Vaswani is also setting an aspirational bar for future podcast guests, on par with “leaders like Kim Jong Un and Benjamin Netanyahu,” he said. As for a potential sit-down with President Donald Trump, he was noticeably more coy. “We went to the White House, we met the Faith Office. … We’re excited to build that friendship.”

Looking back at his tour and beyond, Crawford is not shy about describing this moment as a “revival.” 

“I’ve learned that there’s hope for America because a lot of people want Jesus, and I’ve learned that many people are ready to start preaching the gospel, which is phenomenal, ” he said. “I think that we’re at the beginning of something that we can’t possibly imagine.”

In terms of a Gen Z revival, most demographers and scholars argue that what’s actually occurring is, at best, a modest resurgence. The generation remains America’s least religious in history, with Pew Research data showing only about 45% identify as Christian and with low rates of church attendance.

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“He has an audience, he has people ostensibly listening, watching and paying attention,” Sheldon said. “As far as influence, that’s a slightly different thing. He’s starting conversations, but what that means, or what that leads to, is still slightly up in the air.” 

Before the Sacramento show, dozens of young Crawford fans began arriving outside, taking selfies in front of the marquee sign or autographing Crawford’s tour bus with Sharpies. Some wore Crawford’s merchandise: a baggy white T-shirt with a heart-shaped waffle, a reference to his Waffle House conversion. 

Two fans, Brayden Swain, 14, and Callen Broadhurst, 18, waited for the doors to open. Broadhurst, who had driven them nearly two hours to be there, was early in his faith journey when he first encountered Crawford. The evangelist’s age made it “easier to connect to him,” Broadhurst said. “He uses common slang, and he goes up to the people people avoid, like the homeless.”

Swain has been especially excited to follow TOGI’s spiritual journey. “There is actual transformation in other people’s lives when they talk to Bryce,” he said. 

These days, Swain noted, Crawford’s content is hard to escape. “He’s everywhere.”

This article was produced as part of the RNS/Interfaith America Religion Journalism Fellowship.