Dan McClellan a New York Times best seller held a lecture at Vaughn Chapel on Nov. 6 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

McClellan is a Biblical Scholar who shares these topics on social media. With his combined use of social media apps he has more than 1 million followers.

“I’ve always been active on social media,” McClellan said. “Social media is a channel for misinformation, so I have always been concerned to try to confront that tendency.”

He said that during the pandemic he saw people sharing ideas related to the Bible on Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram, and then he saw them using TikTok.

“I always thought that was for teenagers to dance on” McClellan said. “I thought I would go lurk to see what discussions they were having about the Bible, so I decided to make an account and start sharing stuff to try to position myself to share what the data is and how scholars talk about these things and confront this information.”

Social media is always a big platform for people to share their opinions on things and gain an audience who may support or may not support them, but it is where people can find your own truth.

McClellan’s lecture was about how text works and to hope people will think more critically and recognize how intuition and experiences influence that process of creating meaning with a text.

He joined the Church of Latter Day Saints at the age of 20, and was asked whether he combines his beliefs when breaking things down academically or whether he separates them.

“I separate them,” he said. ” I get accused a lot of being a Mormon apologist or trying to bring Mormonism in my scholarship, but anyone who knows anything about the LDS church or reads my scholarship will see that.”

During his presentation, he covered topics such as perspective, social identities, cognitive process of thinking.

Afterward he took questions from the audience.