They Came To Be Seen

How Congress Became a Content Creation Platform

Picture the scene.

A congressional hearing room, C-SPAN cameras rolling, a witness seated at the table — a CEO, a cabinet secretary, a bureaucrat called to account for something that went wrong on somebody’s watch. Across from them sits a row of lawmakers, each with five minutes.

They’re not asking questions. They’re performing.

The congresswoman leans into the microphone at the right moment, voice rising, eyes cutting to the camera with the kind of precision you don’t stumble into. She’s not finding out what happened. She’s not building toward anything that will show up in a piece of legislation six months from now. She’s engineering a clip — 45 seconds, maybe a minute — designed to hit TikTok before the gavel falls. The witness is a prop. The hearing is a set. And back in a congressional office, a staffer is already in the edit.

This isn’t rare. This is Tuesday.

The Number Nobody Can Explain

Congress has a 13% approval rating.

Most people will tell you it’s gridlock. Partisan warfare. Two sides so dug in that nothing moves. There’s truth in that. But it’s not the whole story — and the part that’s missing matters more than most people realize.

A significant number of the people currently serving in Congress didn’t come to govern.

They came to be seen.

The Job Description Nobody Is Reading

The office of representative was designed for stewardship. You carry the weight of your district before the governing body. You show up, you vote, you fight for the people who trusted you with the job. That’s it. The description hasn’t changed in 200 years.

What’s changed is who’s applying — and what they’re actually after.

The Record Speaks

Jasmine Crockett spent three years representing Texas’s 30th congressional district. Forty bills sponsored. None became law. She missed votes at twice the congressional median — twice — while managing 120 television appearances and building the largest social media following in the entire Texas delegation, bigger than members who’d been there a decade longer.

Cardi B cut a video for her. Kamala Harris recorded robocalls. Hollywood wrote checks.

Dallas’s 30th district got court fees wiped for ex-convicts and a rule requiring agencies to post regulatory summaries online.

That’s it. Three years. That’s the return on their investment.

Cori Bush. Jamaal Bowman. Same pattern, different district. Both were eventually pushed out — not by Republicans, but by Democrats who looked at the record and said enough. Bowman’s own opponent said it plainly: more interested in cable news than in helping people back home. And then there’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the template all of them are working from. Most followed member of Congress. A brand so large it has swallowed the office whole. The seat isn’t the goal. The seat is what gets you verified.

The Audition Disguised as Oversight

Go back to that hearing room.

A subcommittee hearing exists because something went wrong somewhere and the people’s representatives need to find out what. Ask hard questions. Evaluate the answers. Figure out where the law needs to change. That’s the design. That’s what stewardship looks like when it’s functioning.

What it has become is something else entirely.

Marjorie Taylor Greene — Georgia congresswoman, one of the most polarizing figures on Capitol Hill, known widely as MTG — has made confrontation her signature. Her committee appearances generate more heat than light, and whatever your politics, the pattern is visible: the exchange gets clipped, it gets shared, and it accomplishes the one thing this new class of lawmakers is actually optimizing for. Attention.

Crockett learned the lesson well. Her committee performances were sharp, quotable, and ready-made for a scroll. Watch it carefully.

Notice what’s happening — and notice, just as carefully, what isn’t. No accountability is being established. No policy is being shaped. What’s being built, in real time, on the public’s dime, in the people’s house, is a personal brand.

Congressional offices have become content pipelines. Staff hired not to draft legislation but to cut reels. Hearing rooms that function less like chambers of oversight and more like production studios. And the constituent watching at home thinks their representative is in the fight.

They’re watching a content shoot.

An Ancient Hunger in a Modern City

Jesus didn’t hedge it. Matthew 6: no man can serve two masters. He will love one and hate the other, hold to one and despise the other.

We read that and think: politicians.

But sit with it longer.

The lawmaker-as-influencer didn’t invent the hunger for visibility. They just found a platform large enough to expose it. What drives a person to trade constituent service for camera time isn’t a political pathology — it’s an ancient one. The need to be seen, to be validated, to have the room turn toward you. To matter in a way that other people can measure and confirm. That hunger doesn’t begin in Washington. It begins in the human heart, and it has been there since before there were cameras to feed it.

The Pharisees didn’t have TikTok. They had the synagogue, the marketplace, the corner where the most people would see them pray. Jesus named it without flinching: they have their reward. The audience saw them. The audience approved. And that was the whole transaction — nothing transferred, nothing built, no one actually served. Just the moment, the approval, and the hollow feeling that follows when the crowd moves on.

This is the thing the approval ratings can’t fully capture. It’s not just that Congress isn’t working. It’s that a class of public servants has quietly reoriented around a different god — visibility — and called it representation. The constituent becomes the audience. The office becomes the stage. And the work, the unglamorous, unclipped, untweetable work of actually governing, gets left on the table because it doesn’t feed what they came to feed.

The Mirror You’d Rather Not Pick Up

It would be easy to stop here. To close the tab, shake your head at Washington, and walk away feeling justified.

But the reader who nods along at Crockett and AOC and never turns the mirror around has missed the point entirely.

How many of us have chosen the version of the work that gets seen over the version that actually serves? How many times has the opportunity to be noticed quietly crowded out the obligation to be faithful? The parent who performs for approval rather than parents for formation. The pastor who builds a platform rather than a congregation. The worker who manages perception rather than produces results. The Christian who curates a public faith rather than cultivates a private one.

The lawmaker-as-influencer is not the alien. They are the exaggerated version of something that lives in all of us — the self that wants the reward without the cross, the recognition without the sacrifice, the harvest without the sowing in secret.

Jesus addressed this too. When you give, do it without letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing. When you pray, go into your room, close the door. The father who sees in secret will reward openly. The entire logic of the kingdom runs counter to the logic of visibility. Greatness is not measured by the size of the following. It is measured by the faithfulness of the service when no one is watching.

The Only Representative Who Never Failed His Constituents

There is only one person who ever carried the full weight of others before the governing authority of heaven and earth — and He did it without a platform, without a press team, without a viral moment to his name. He went to the cross outside the city, beyond the cameras, bearing what we could not bear, representing us before the Father not because it would trend but because we needed someone to actually show up.

That is what representation looks like when it is rooted in something real.

Dallas sent Jasmine Crockett to carry their weight. She sent them a highlight reel. Her own people — people who share her politics, people who will never vote Republican — looked at the record and said: not enough.

The question this piece leaves you with isn’t really about Congress.

It’s about what you are building — and for whom.

Are you doing the work, or performing it? Are you serving the people in front of you, or cultivating the audience watching you? Because the two masters are not just fighting over seats in Washington. They are fighting over every life, every vocation, every calling where faithfulness and visibility pull in different directions.

You cannot serve both.

You will love one.

You will despise the other.

Choose carefully. The people depending on you are watching — not the ones on your feed. The ones right in front of you.

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Writing produced by the author, with limited use of digital tools for editing and clarity.

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