(The following is my lightly edited manuscript for the final part of my commentary on Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”, which released on February 7th, 2022. As with all my other manuscripts, this does not reflect any additions or changes made during recording. Breaking the Digital Spell is available wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube (embedded below), or you can listen online here!)

(As a minor editorial note, because many clauses of the book’s thesis statement of the book have both been quoted in prior episodes and are quoted multiple times over in this episode, I have not listed those individual citations to keep the citation list from being bloated. Refer to page 10 of the book.)

A Brief Recap

1.1: In the last episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we covered chapters 5 and 6 of the book, which focused on the two biggest effects the social media prism has on our society: the amplification of extremists, and the muting of moderates. The social media prism distorts our identities and bends our identities and, when it comes to our political identity, the resulting effect is a phenomenon known as “false polarization”, where everyone believes everyone else is more extreme than they truly are. There are surveys that show the average Republican thinks the average Democrat is more extreme than there are actual liberal extremists in America; those same surveys show the average Democrat thinks the average Republican is more extreme than there are actual conservative extremists. Caught in the middle of the mis-perception crossfire are the moderates, who believe that both sides have gone off the deep end and that there are increasingly fewer people willing to have nuanced political stances and dialogue. However, moderates remain the largest voting bloc in the country by far, even though on social media they seem all but invisible. This is because social media amplifies the extremes of both parties, making it seem like there are more extremists (and that people are more extreme in general), and social media empowers extremists - aka trolls - to harass those who do not agree with them. Combined with the fact that most political extremists and online trolls lack real-world significance and find deep and meaningful value in their online status and relationships with online trolls, and you have the perfect storm for moderates to vacate social media and extremists to fill that vacuum. And, as Bail notes, barring any unexpected developments in the social or technological landscape, we can expect this problem to get worse. The social media prism will continue to make extremists more extreme. The social media prism will continue to make moderate voices more and more invisible - and easier for trolls to attack. What we are left with is a vicious cycle of false polarization where people are not as extreme as they appear to be, but everyone operates as though the other side is too far gone down the rabbit hole to be saved.

1.2: In the first three episodes, we have been heavy on problem and little on solution. In this episode, we are going to be heavy on solution and (hopefully) little on problem, and my hope here is that this episode caps off a heavy topic and situation with some encouragement that this situation is not without hope. I am going to break this episode down into two parts, the first of which covers chapters 7-9 of Breaking the Social Media Prism and concludes our commentary on the book itself. I am going to interact with Bail’s proposed solutions and evaluate them on their own terms before moving on to Part Two, which is going to be a critique of the entire book from a Christian perspective and offer some solutions that only Christianity can provide to the problem. Part of the reason why I love this book so much is that even though Bail is not a Christian author, and obviously this book is not a Christian book, his work harmonizes with Christianity very well. My stance in critiquing the book later is not from the standpoint of “this is where you’re wrong”, but rather “we have something that can actually make your argument stronger, and your solutions more effective”. Now with that out of the way, let’s dive into the last three chapters of Breaking the Social Media Prism.

Part One

Should I Delete My Account?

2.1: The first thing that we need to address is likely a question that you had if you listened to the last episode (or something you may just be feeling in general): if social media is having these truly awful and terrible effects upon society, and the way I see others and the way others see me, should I delete my account? That’s actually the title of chapter 7, where Bail addresses probably the most natural question that arises after hearing so much bad news about social media. I want to preface this section by saying that, if you’re a Christian listening to this, I recently did an episode called “On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon”, where I offered a framework unique to Scripture that comes to a few similar conclusions as Bail does, even if for different reasons. One of the reasons that Bail and I share in common is that we both have our issues with the “addictive psychology” framework of social media put forward by several leading ex-Silicon Valley technologists. If you’ve seen “The Great Hack” or “The Social Dilemma”, you’ll know exactly what I mean here: we ought to get off social media because these social media companies have successfully hijacked human physiology and psychology and made us addicted to their products and services, which makes us susceptible to misinformation and outrage from bad actors who want to take advantage of our collective addictive state. The problem with this framework is not that its core claim is false: Bail readily agrees that Silicon Valley has done some tinkering with our brains, and that in this addictive state we may be more prone to ideas or information that we would never encounter outside of endlessly falling down social media rabbit holes. The problem with this framework, as Bail claims, is that there is just very little evidence that any of the claims of these “ex-Silicon Valley apostates” are true. There is very little evidence that shows that Big Tech has made us more susceptible to misinformation and polarization simply by virtue of using their products. More specifically, there is very little evidence that social media algorithms - these nebulous enigmas of modern technology - are directly facilitating radicalization themselves.

2.1.1: Bail cites a few recent studies on YouTube and extreme content to show that while extreme content does exist on YouTube, the algorithm’s role in radicalizing people doesn’t come from serving people increasing extreme content in a vacuum, but from further serving people what they’re already choosing to seek out. In fact, one recent study showed that the amount of time people have spent watching extreme content on YouTube has gone down quite a bit. But to pursue this particular question further, Bail and his team organized a separate study in 2017 that attempted to study how people may be swayed by foreign misinformation and disinformation campaigns. Using a very robust data set of 1,200 Americans, Bail and his team were able to study who interacted with known Russian IRA accounts and whether those interactions actually changed public opinion in any meaningful way. I’ll let Bail explain the results: “Once again, our research findings challenged the prevailing wisdom: we could not detect any significant effects of interacting with IRA accounts on any of the political attitudes and behaviors we studied. Moreover, we found that the people who interacted with IRA accounts were mostly those who already had strong partisan beliefs—precisely the type of people who would be least likely to change their minds in response to trolling. This finding fits into a broader trend that many people don’t know about: most mass media campaigns have minimal effects. Political campaigns are not a hypodermic needle that injects opinion into the masses. Instead, most people ignore the campaigns—and the few who do engage with them already have such strong beliefs that their overall impact is negligible. It is still possible that fake news and foreign misinformation campaigns can influence voting behavior. But studies indicate that even the most sophisticated targeted campaigns to persuade voters in the 2016 election probably had little or no impact—and possibly even a negative impact upon voters who were mistargeted.”[1] While Bail does concede that it is always possible that fake news can have a negative impact on an individual, he notes that the research just does not match the grandiose, sweeping claims made by these ex-Silicon valley tech entrepreneurs. Social media addition is certainly real, but this addiction does not seem to be contributing to radicalization and polarization.

2.1.2: Another problem with the claims of these ex-Sillicon Valley entrepreneurs is that, if their diagnoses are correct, the solution would be to force social media companies to change their algorithms to make them less addicting. But setting aside what we just talked about for a second, we need to ask: what incentive do these companies have to make these changes, and if they made these changes, would they even work? For the former question, we have to reckon with a fact that, despite their obvious harm and damage to the public, social media companies are businesses and, like every other business, they exist to make a profit for their shareholders. They’re not nonprofits or charities, and while we can and should discuss whether the interests of shareholders ought to be the most important interest for a for-profit company (and whether those interests are even good interests to begin with), we can’t fault these big-tech companies for not operating in ways that go against the grain of their very existence. Many of the changes these technologists and entrepreneurs propose would strike at the very heart of how these companies make money for their shareholders, and even if one company bit that bullet and made those changes, all it does it open the door for a competitor to come in and do the same thing. But not only do social media companies not have financial incentives to make these changes, there is plenty of evidence to show that these changes wouldn’t really fix anything to begin with. Think about it: the whole premise of Bail’s book is that the social media prism does something to us based on something that is already inside of us. Social media did not give us our desire to, as Bail says in his thesis, “present different versions of ourselves, observe what other people think of them, and revise our identities accordingly” - this is something that existed as a part of human nature before social media and would continue to exist even if social media disappeared from the planet. Big tech cannot fix human nature, and if, to quote Bail again, “the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves”, then we cannot expect social media companies to be the primary solution, because social media companies are not the primary problem. I said in the last episode that the chief engine fueling false polarization is social media, but like any engine, social media requires a fuel source to operate. We are the fuel source; we are the problem.

2.1.3: Now at this point, you may be thinking “okay, even if social media isn’t as dangerous for me as some of these guys claim, shouldn’t I still get off it to help me if I struggle with false polarization or feelings of intense opposition to my political opponents?” Bail notes that those who got off social media did report feeling less anger and hostility towards the other political party, and for what it’s worth, I think Bail and I both would agree that taking a break from social media is not a bad place to start if this is something you actively struggle with. Bail’s interest, however, is less in the individual response to social media and more in the societal solutions to the problem, and he argues (and I agree with him) that at this point, a mass exodus of social media is not a likely solution to the problem. For one, there have been several cultural moments, such as the 2018 #DeleteFacebook movement, that tried to compel people to leave social media en masse, and while there were plenty of people who did get off Facebook, they didn’t leave Instagram - which had been owned by Facebook for several years by that point - and even if they got off social media completely, it wasn’t long before most of them returned. For most of them, the reason is simple: social media has reached a saturation point where the average person cannot completely avoid interacting with it in some way. The only people who can truly go “off the grid” at this point are people with either enough privilege and power to have people do their social media work for them, or people with a strong support system of family members and friends who collectively agree to build alternate social systems so they can all stay off together. Outside of that, social media has become a staple medium not just for entertainment and fluff, but for keeping up with friend and family members, looking for jobs (for some careers and industries, a social media presence is non-negotiable), staying on top of the news, and more. New home listings and rentals are often first posted on the Facebook marketplace, and then quickly claimed by whoever happened to see them first. Some hobbies or interests thrive on social media, and even the best pro-analog lifestyles, such as the one advocated by Cal Newport in his excellent book “Digital Minimalism”, make caveats that social media can be great for hobbies or other interests, and that carving out social media use just for those things is not a bad idea. Whether its to maintain your life or maintain your weekend hobby (or anything else in between), society has fundamentally re-ordered itself around the permanence of social media in some form, which means that society must completely re-form itself in order for social media to leave the equation. That re-formation will not just require moving away from existing social media structures, but creating new structures that people can transition towards as they leave social media behind. And this raises another problem: writing in the 80s, Neil Postman commented in his landmark classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that it doesn’t really matter if you stop watching television if all your friends, family, and coworkers are watching television: you’re still going to be shaped by television just by virtue of doing life with those who continue to be shaped by the medium. The same is true with social media: even if you think that life will be better for you if you get off social media personally, you are still going to have to interact with a culture and society that is being distorted and bent by the social media prism, and you’ll continue to be distorted yourself in the process. The only way to escape social media is to escape it with a group of individuals who commit to building strong social circles and social bonds outside social media, but an episode on the philosophy of “localism” is an episode for another time.

2.1.4: Bail ends this chapter with an obvious conclusion: if social media cannot be improved from the top-down by social media companies and, to a related extent, government involvement and regulation, the only other way it can be improved is from those who use it: by us. This is the premise from which Bail lays out his suggestions for fixing the social media prism in the next two chapters. Let me say right off the bat that there is a sense in which he is absolutely right - if social media can be fixed, but it can’t be fixed from the top down, the only remaining solution is that it be fixed from the bottom up. Many of his proposals that I am about to cover are quite good in and of themself. But, to put a teaser in for later in the second part of this episode: if, as Bail says, “the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves”, how exactly can we fix social media if we are simultaneously the reason why it is so broken? Is that something we are truly capable of doing by ourselves?

Hacking the Social Media Prism

3.1: Let’s move on to chapter 8: hacking the social media prism. How can we reduce polarization in American society? Bail gives us a very explicit starting point: The latest research suggests that Democrats and Republicans also overestimate how much people from the other party dislike them. When we think that people in the other party dislike us more than they actually do, it makes us more likely to dislike them. A key strategy for reducing political polarization is to find ways to help members of opposing political parties correct the misperceptions they have about each other. If previous research is our guide, closing the perception gap between Democrats and Republicans should be a top priority for reducing polarization[2]. Now hearing this raises an obvious question: what is the “perception gap”? Simply put, the perception gap is the chasm created by false polarization; it’s the distance between how extreme people perceive others to be compared to where people actually are. As I mentioned earlier, the average Republican believes the average Democrat is more extreme than there are actual liberal extremists, and vice-versa for Democrats. This chasm between perception - the sense that the average Democrat or Republican is extreme - versus reality - that the number of both conservative and liberal extremists are a minority of the population - is the essence of the perception gap, and Bail says the first step to hacking (or “fixing”) the social media prism is to close this gap between perception and reality. In fact, Bail himself makes clear that the need to close the perception gap as the first step to addressing political polarization is one of the most important things you could take away from his book. This is a lengthy quote but I want you to hear him in full: “One of the most important messages I’d like readers to take away from this book is that social media has sent false polarization into hyperdrive. In chapter 5, I presented data from nationally representative surveys, as well as stories of individual social media users, to explain why extremists enjoy an outsized role in discussions about politics on social media. In chapter 6, I showed how the gap between perception and reality also causes widespread apathy or political disengagement among moderates—which only increases the amount of real estate that extremists occupy on our platforms. Though I only presented evidence from the United States, the power of social media to distort the political landscape is even more evident when we use a cross-national perspective. In 2016, a group of fourteen scholars examined the gap between perceived and actual polarization in ten countries. Though the researchers found mixed evidence about whether consuming information in legacy media (for example, television news, newspapers, and magazines) contributes to the perception gap, they discovered that online news consumption was the strongest predictor of false polarization in nearly every country. Social media also exacerbate the mass media’s contribution to false polarization. Journalists often use social media to monitor public opinion, and this distorts their reporting on polarization even further. It’s a vicious cycle.”[3]

3.2: So, how can we break this cycle? Can this cycle be broken at all? Bail proposes three strategies for hacking/fixing the social media prism, and we are going to look at each of these strategies individually. The first strategy, “Seeing the Prism”, is as straightforward as it sounds: we need to teach people to see how social media bends and distorts our identities. The second strategy, “Seeing Yourself Through the Prism”, is a bit more complicated: we need to learn how to see how social media distorts us and how we portray ourselves online is often not the same as how people interpret us online. The third strategy, “Breaking the Prism”, builds on the first two strategies to suggest how we can begin taking baby steps to meaningfully reach across the aisle and close the perception gap through finding common ground - perhaps even on social media. Let’s start with the first strategy, “Seeing the Prism”. This is the starting point - the other two strategies hinge on this strategy and its success. We concluded the previous episode in this series with a quote from earlier on in the book that I said would be foundational for this episode, and that quote was “The social media prism exerts its most profound influence when people are not aware that it exists.” Now it’s time to really dive into that quote and unpack it, and that’s exactly what this strategy is all about - helping people perceive the social media prism and, in doing so, diminish its effects. Now, as straightforward as it sounds, it’s not as easy in practice as one would hope. Even before the pandemic forced us to quarantine in our homes and increase our distance from one another, conservatives and liberals (both politically and theologically) were beginning to talk to each other less and less. In the real world, people do not often discuss politics with those they disagree with, and if they do, it’s often on confrontational or uncivil terms. Online, it’s even worse - the social media prism amplifies the presence of extremists and mutes the voices of moderates, meaning you’re far more likely to engage with a political extremist or troll than to have constructive dialogue with another moderate or someone on a different end of the spectrum. The number of opportunities that we have to correct our misconceptions of each other are decreasing, but the good news is that it is possible to have our misconceptions corrected about the other party - in fact, there is good evidence that shows that making people aware of those misconceptions goes a long way towards depolarization, regardless of the topic. This is another lengthy quote but needs to be given in full: “research indicates making people aware of misperceptions has a strong depolarizing effect. In a 2015 study, the political scientists Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood asked 1,000 Republicans and Democrats to answer questions that cued common stereotypes associated with each party. For example, they asked Republicans to estimate what percentage of Democrats are Black; atheist; union members; and gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Next, they asked Democrats to estimate how many Republicans are evangelical Christians, age sixty-five or older, reside in the South, and earn more than $250,000 a year. Remarkably, these scholars found that respondents overestimated the actual proportion of partisans in each of these categories by an average of 342 percent. In a follow-up experiment, the researchers corrected these misperceptions, showing respondents the actual number of people from the opposing party who fit into each category. People who saw this information reported more favorable attitudes toward the opposing party than those who did not. A series of subsequent experiments by the psychologists Jeffrey Lees and Mina Cikara revealed that the depolarizing effect of correcting misperceptions extends into broader policy issues as well—such as attitudes about redistricting for electoral offices or anonymous campaign contributions[4].” I’m going to go into this more later in the second part of this podcast, but I can’t contain my excitement here: if you’re listening to this and you’re a pastor or ministry leader, you should feel empowered to make media literacy a part of your core discipleship curriculum. I’ve said this countless times over this podcast, and I’ll even say it again later in this episode, but media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship, and if you’re concerned about polarization and division among your own congregation and your own people, you have every reason to be confident that tackling this subject and helping people see the social media prism will help bring your people closer together. Taking the time to make people aware of the social media prism - which absolutely falls under the category of “media literacy” - can pay dividends far beyond dealing with political tension in your congregation. But I’ll get more into that later. For everyone else, the first strategy involves being familiar enough with what the social media prism is and how it works before moving on to the next strategy, because you need to be aware of the existence of this thing and what it is before you begin to see how it changes you.

3.3: The second strategy, “Seeing Yourself Through the Prism”, assumes that you’re aware of the social media prism and how it distorts and bends our identities. It also assumes that you have the humility to be willing to admit that how you conduct yourself online is not how people perceive you, and an openness to correction and change. Now, I’ve not mentioned this yet because I was saving this for this section, but Bail has done more than write about these strategies for hacking the social media prism - he and his team has also created a set of free tools that you can use to help you with these three strategies. I mentioned in the first episode of this series a website called polarizationlab.com, which is a website that Bail and his team created for people to [quote] "learn more about how our own behavior is perceived by others, how to avoid trolls and other extremists, and how to identify other users with whom we can find common ground.” For this strategy, Bail invites you to head over to that website and use some of its tools to see where you fall on the political spectrum based on your social media activity, with the caveat that very few people can correctly predict where exactly they fall on the spectrum. So, as I work on this episode, I am going to do just that. One of the first tools that shows up is called “What Do Your Tweets Say About Your Politics?”, and so I log in to my Twitter account and, after a couple of minutes, the website gives me a score of 3.646. The scale breaks down as follows: a “0” is “most liberal” and a 10 is “most conservative”, meaning that I am slightly left-of-center just based on my social media activity. Now - I want to recall that, two episodes ago, I said I put all my cards on that table and that, if you aggregated all my various political stances together, I identify as mostly right-of-center, but according to the tools on Bail’s website, the opposite is true - apparently, I fall left-of-center based on what I actually tweet about. Now, the same result page that gives me this data also makes clear that the model that calculated my score is one model among many models, but that if I was surprised by my results (and I admit that I am), I ought to take their political ideology quiz. It’s a very short quiz, and the instructions say that I need to choose between a pair of statements that best aligns with my views on a given topic even if neither statement best represents my views. There are a couple that I can agree with wholeheartedly, and there are some that I had to begrudgingly choose and wish I could add some caveats and nuances. But, the results surprise me once again: this time, I am just slightly - barely - right of center, as I had said that I thought I was. But to add a third surprise to the mix: neither the average Republican nor the average Democrat was very far from where I landed in terms of my beliefs. Granted, I leaned more towards Republican (again, just barely enough to count), but it would not take but one or two different answers to those questions for me to be just slightly closer to the average Democrat. From there I could go on to see whether I am interacting with a political troll - a tool that is super interesting in itself and something you ought to check out for yourself - but for the purposes of this second strategy, I’ve learned two valuable things about myself. Working in reverse, according to the brief political ideology quiz, I am very much right-of-center like I claimed originally, but my social media activity - if the model is accurate and correct - pins my political beliefs as being left-of-center. The second of Bail’s strategies is understanding how to see ourselves though the social media prism, and I have to freely admit that I am surprised that the way I portray myself online does not align completely with where my actual political beliefs are at. To quote Bail, “understanding how people on social media see you—regardless of who you really are—is very important. Research indicates becoming more aware of how your political views relate to those of others can have a depolarizing effect no matter where you fall on the spectrum. Realizing that the identities we are trying to project are not consistent with the ones other people see may help us realize that other people are not always what they seem either. The key thing I urge you to consider is whether the version of you that is projected through the prism is what you want other people to see. If it isn’t, don’t despair. More than a century of social science suggests that we are very bad at seeing what we look like through the eyes of others. We believe we know what other people think of us, but we are often very wrong.[5]”

3.3.1: This leads into a very important appeal that Bail makes to moderates. If we need to learn how to see ourselves through the prism, we need to learn how to see ourselves based on our absence in the prism as well. Recall what Bail said in the prior episode that moderates often withdraw from social media because, as a part of the prism’s distorting effects, we come to believe that there are not very many other people like us, since all we see are trolls and extremists. But seeing ourselves through the prism ought to show us that social media mutes our voices and makes us invisible when, in actually, moderates are the largest political bloc in the country and vastly dwarf the number of extremists. Bail says that between the two biggest effects of the social media prism - the amplification of extremists and the muting of moderates - that the latter effect is the more serious of the two, and that the best path forward for fixing the social media prism’s effects are not for the trolls to be silenced, but for the moderates to speak up. As Bail says, “the lack of moderate voices on social media may contribute more to political polarization than the abundance of extremists on our platforms, because the absence of the former enables the latter to hijack the public conversation. I beg the moderate Democrats and Republicans who read this book not to delete your accounts: we need you. Look, I get it—I don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations about politics with my relatives at Thanksgiving dinner any more than you do. And like everyone else, I present a carefully manicured version of myself on social media. No one who reads my Twitter feed will learn what I am watching on Netflix or other information that is unbecoming to a college professor. But all of us must carefully balance the desire to preserve our self-image with the consequences of these choices for the public good. We all need to think carefully about the issues we consider to be important enough to weigh in on. Moderate people need to decide which issues are so important to them that they won’t allow extremists to speak on their behalf. We all need to balance our desire not to upset friends, family members, or colleagues with the urgent need to beat back polarization on our platforms.” [6] Now, I am going to say that just because social media may need moderate voices does not need that social media must have moderate voices. I am going to say (and I hope Bail would agree with both) that polarization on social media does not just originate on social media, but overlaps with polarization that is generated through other avenues (such as cable news) and a manifestation of polarization that exists in other spheres and spaces of public society. There may be other avenues for moderates to help reduce polarization that do not require getting back on social media if they do not want to, and - at the risk of sounding too blunt - no specific social media platform absolutely needs to be saved by moderates from being swallowed up in its own polarizing effects. There is nothing inherently worthy about Twitter or Facebook or TikTok as companies or platforms that mandates moderates to intervene for their stability and well-being. It may very well be true that increasing the presence of moderates on social media may fix many of the social media prism’s worse effects, but the social media prism itself is not something that must absolutely be saved - at least, by people working on it from the inside. There will be those who have the fortitude and conviction that they need to add their voices inside of social media, and there will be those who can accomplish depolarizing effects through working around or even against social media. Polarization is a war that is waging on multiple fronts, and as severe as the social media front is, there are other vital areas we need to pay attention to as well. One area that Bail does not address (and I don’t fault him for because it’s outside the scope of the book) is what kind of depolarizing effects moderates could have by committing themselves to the health and stability of local political systems, such as volunteering to help run an election or participating in a voter registration drive. I would venture to say that, done well and wisely, an increased emphasis on participating in local politics could do far more to depolarize the American public than the majority of social media activity. Regardless, I do agree with Bail’s general point - an increase in moderate voices on social media would go a long way to helping fix the social media prism - but where I might disagree with him is the emphasis to which moderates are obligated to enter that fray.

3.4: But, for the rest of this section, I am going to move forward with his appeal, because Bail’s third strategy - aptly titled “Breaking the Prism” - assumes that you want to work to help de-polarize our social media platforms and how to go about doing that. By this point, it ought to be clear that if you want to reach across the aisle relative to where you’re at politically, the first thing you should not do is try to break your own echo chamber. Do not go out and follow the biggest outlets and pundits from the other side - you run the risk of only walking away more confident and confirmed in your pre-existing beliefs! Instead, Bail suggests several different baby steps that you can take that will increase your ability to meaningfully connect with someone on the opposite end of a position as you are. The first of those steps involves understanding a concept called the “latitude of acceptance” - seems like a fancy term, but I promise you’ve either heard of it or experienced it firsthand yourself. The term “latitude of acceptance” simply the range of ideas and arguments that we may not agree with ourselves but will still accept and tolerate as reasonable alternative positions, and the closer an idea is to our “latitude of acceptance” the more open we are to being persuaded by them. If we want to build bridges across the aisle, we need to not only discern our own “latitude of acceptance” for any given topic, but also be willing to speak to other people and aim for their own latitude of acceptance, rather than lobbing the most extreme or provocative version of an argument into their midst and expecting it to respond favorably to it. And this doesn’t just extend to arguments or ideas - it also extends to attitudes and presentation as well. How someone conveys an idea or argument may not make that argument more truthful or correct, but it certainly can make it more persuasive. Bail uses the example of a liberal Rachel Maddow viewer encountering an argument from someone like Rush Limbaugh (who, I should note, passed away right before this book was published). The odds of someone who is a fan of Rachel Maddow being persuaded by someone like Rush Limbaugh (or, to use a living example, someone like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson) is low - both individuals are known for being provocative, and aside from being off-put by their personalities, the version of a particular argument or idea will likely be an extreme version of that argument because that’s what draws viewers to their shows. But, that same core argument - presented in a milder way and from a person who is not combative or incendiary - might fall within that “latitude of acceptance” in a way the same core argument would not from a firery pundit. Building off this concept, Bail suggest that another baby step forward is to learn what someone on the other side cares about, and then pay attention to how they talk about it. A key component to persuading someone is being able to not just speak about issues or ideas they’re interested in, but to use the language, concepts, and arguments they already recognize and use themselves. It’s a hokey quip, but the phrase “now you’re speaking my language!” is more than just a statement of excited agreement - it’s a statement admitting that we are more likely to get behind an idea if that idea is conveyed similarly to how we talk about an idea. Unfortunately, the best way to learn about how other people talk about an idea is to listen intently to them, with a posture of gaining understanding rather than listening to defeat or refute their argument. In our polarized landscape, the notion of suggesting that we actively listen to people on the other side is seen as an invitation to compromise at best, or an invitation towards promoting Nazism or flat-earth theory or something else at worst. American society, especially within the confines of social media, must regain the lost art of listening, and that starts with the foundational principle that listening to someone is not an endorsement or agreement of who you are listening to. It is possible to listen to someone actively, patiently, and intently - and then disagree with everything they’ve said! The difference is that your disagreement with them, at that point, isn’t based on straw man, or a caricature, or a misunderstanding based on ignorance. One of the best ways to confirm whether you’ve truly listened to someone is whether or not you can re-state that person’s idea or argument and they validate that “yes, that’s what I am saying”. A good source of our current polarization - not just politically, but even theologically - is that because we often do not listen to each other, we do not learn how to talk to each other along lines that we find intelligible to us. Paying attention to how people talk about an issue is not something that can be done overnight - it will require constant observation and patience, neither of which are current media ecosystem encourages or rewards. But, if you reach a point where you can dialogue with someone using their own language and arguments as a context for conveying your own ideas, you are already miles ahead of most in terms of being able to persuade someone or, at the very least, make an idea or position more plausible and respectable than it had been before. De-polarization does not mean making Republicans into Democrats and vice-verse - de-polarization simply closes the perception gap that Republicans and Democrats seem further apart from one another than they actually are. Another baby-step strategy is to tap into the fact that even though may have passionate political opinions, most Republicans and Democrats don’t like to talk about politics as an ordinary topic of conversation. Here is an interesting quote from Bail that, while referencing a study from an earlier chapter (and I’ve not included in any of these episodes), may give you a surprising insight into how much people enjoy talking about politics in general: “Remember those studies that I mentioned in chapter 4 that documented a steady increase in the number of Americans who say that they would feel uncomfortable if their child married a member of the other party? The political scientists Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, and John Ryan decided to scrutinize such trends more carefully. They conducted an experiment in which some people in a nationally representative panel of Americans were shown the classic question social scientists used to gauge interparty animosity—the one about their child marrying a member of the opposing party. But other people in the experiment were asked how they would feel if their child married someone who “talks about politics rarely.” Though people with extreme views still reported feeling uncomfortable with the idea of their child marrying someone from the other party, the vast majority preferred a child-in-law who does not discuss politics, regardless of their political party.”[7] Bail suggests two tactics in light of this information: find different starting points for connecting with people across the aisle, and avoid bringing up controversial political leaders by name. That first tactic is easy enough to understand - whether it’s in a hobby, or love for a particular sport, or someone you attend church with, all of us likely know people who are different from us politically who have shared interests in other areas. While we shouldn’t try to politicize topics, interests, hobbies, or activities that are not inherently political, we should not underestimate how much impact we could have at depolarizing individuals through our character and conduct in those shared spaces. One of the best ways to dispel the myth that Republicans and Democrats have nothing in common is to share things in common together, and when political topics or situations inevitably come up, use those shared connections as a starting point for discussing a topic - provided you do so in a way that is gracious, patient, and understanding. The second tactic - not mentioning specific leaders or pundits by name - is a little bit trickier, but again, you may be surprised at how little people want to talk about polarizing leaders and how little trust people have in polarizing leaders overall. This is another quote from Bail that may surprise you: “According to a 2018 Pew Research Center study, only 4 percent of Americans have “a great deal of confidence” in elected officials. Only 15 percent have a great deal of confidence in journalists, and 4 percent have high confidence in business leaders. What about university professors like me? Only 18 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in us. And the handful of opinion leaders who are heroes to people on one side are most often enemies to those on the other. Looking back over hundreds of hours of interviews that my colleagues and I conducted for the research in this book, I can say one thing with extreme confidence: the worst way a Democrat could begin a conversation with a Republican would be to ask why that person voted for Trump (similarly, the worst way a Republican could begin a conversation with a Democrat would be to criticize Obama or Joe Biden). If you do not recognize that someone could vote for Biden and still be offended by people who criticize the police—or that someone could vote for Trump but have grave concerns about climate change—then you are missing an important opportunity to structure conversations around issues instead of the polarizing individuals who too often define them.”[8]

3.5: Now, none of these strategies and tactics have a 100% success rate. It’s entirely possible that, with the best of intentions, you still receive the kind of uncivil response you’re hoping to avoid by taking these small baby steps. Other times, you may make some promising progress and, for reasons entirely unknowable to you, the conversation breaks down and never recovers. The question is not whether these strategies and tactics that Bail lays out are guaranteed to work; it’s a question of whether they’re the only thing that can work. Some people are not interested in being persuaded. Others may be, but social media’s obstacles get in the way. While Bail prescribes this strategy for use largely in the context of social media, I think he would agree that these baby steps and tactics for “Breaking the Prism” work just as well outside the social media prism as well - and may even be more effective. In fact, Bail notes that there are some topics or issues that ought to be avoided on social media, and are better left discussing in-person or in more interpersonal contexts. Regardless, Bail believes that there are meaningful steps that we can take to close the perception gap in how we view other people, and how people view us. We can’t count on Big Tech to close that perception gap for us - that will only happen when people on the left, right, and middle learn to see how the social media prism has exacerbated our perceived differences with one another, and after learning how to see ourselves through the prism first, take small steps to break the effects of the prism through finding the common ground that social media suggests does not exist.

A Better Social Media

4.1: But even though Bail thinks that Big Tech can’t fix the perception gap, Bail does believe that new social media platforms and experiences might result in healthier, less polarized spaces if they’re built differently from the ground up. This is the premise for the final chapter of the book, “A Better Social Media”, and for this chapter, I am going to do something that may come as a total shock for you: I am not going to talk very much about this chapter. There are two reasons why I’m choosing not to do this, and the first reason is this: much of what Bail has to say in this chapter involves the role of anonymity in healthy social media use, and that is a topic that I could very easily devote an entire separate episode towards evaluating and discussing. Given the scope of this episode, and how much time and attention it would take to handle that conversation in a fair and productive manner, it was easier for me to decide to bypass addressing it here - perhaps I will revisit it a separate episode in the future. But even more importantly than that: the bigger reason why I am not going to discuss this chapter is because the whole point of these four episodes is to convince you to buy the book and read it. In doing a commentary on this series, I’ve tried to strike a balance between covering the book in-depth while leaving plenty of material for you to read and discover for yourself. This final chapter of the book is one of the most intriguing and interesting chapters of the book, and I don’t want to taint Bail’s ideas here by introducing you to them through me. His ideas and suggestions are best left to be read in his own words, and as I said at the beginning of this brief series, I am fully convinced that this is one of the most important books that Christians can read right now, and part of the reason why I undertook this whole endeavor is because I want to put this book on the radars of as many people as possible in the hopes they’ll pick it up for themselves. But, just to whet your appetite, here is a quote from that chapter that ought to entice you to spend $20 and read the chapter in full: “What is the purpose of Facebook? The company tells us its mission is to “bring the world closer together.” But the platform began as a sophomoric tool that Harvard undergraduates used to rate each other’s physical attractiveness. What is the purpose of Twitter? Its motto is to “serve the public conversation,” but it was reportedly built to help groups of friends broadcast SMS-style messages to each other. What is the purpose of Instagram? We’re told it is to “capture and share the world’s moments.” But the app was originally called “Burbn” (as in the drink) and was built to help people make plans to hang out with their friends. What is the purpose of TikTok? I’m not even going to go there. Hopefully, my point is already clear: Should we really expect platforms that were originally designed for such sophomoric or banal purposes to seamlessly transform themselves to serve the public good? Should we be surprised when they create the kind of leaderless demagoguery from which anyone can invent a kind of status, no matter how superficial or deleterious to democracy? Is it any wonder that people find themselves so rudderless on social media, when there is no common purpose for posting in the void?”[9]

Part Two

A Theological Roadmap

5.1: I’m going to let that quote stand as the final word on our commentary on the book itself, and now we are going to transition into the second section of this episode: some critiques and suggestions of my own from a Christian point of view. Like I said at the beginning of this episode, these critiques are not meant to bash Bail himself. My stance here is that I see Bail’s work and I believe that Christianity offers some unique perspectives that can not only strengthen and improve upon his arguments, but even strengthen the effectiveness of many of his solutions. Bail, to my knowledge, is not a Christian and likely will not endorse the content of the remainder of this episode, but I believe that - despite not intending to write a book for Christians - that Christians stand to gain immense from Bail’s work. Just to give a roadmap of where the rest of this episode is going to go: we are first going to start by looping back around to a claim Bail makes earlier in the book (and I mention earlier in the episode) and start with an examination of the doctrine of sin: how our disordered loves distort our identities, our belongings, and our worship, and as a result of our sin against God, we are broken in ways that we cannot fix ourselves. I am then going to move to the Gospel and discuss what the Gospel is (and also what it’s not) and what the Gospel does to us, specifically how the Gospel gives us a new identity in Jesus Christ. After that, we are going to look at how the Gospel saves us not just individually, but saves us to belong to a collected group of people who have been saved through the Gospel: the church. Part of that discussion will include detailing what the church is (and what the church is not) as well as what the church ought to be - in explicit to contrast to what the church is usually and most often is not. But, when the church is functioning as it called to function, it has immense potential to play an active role in de-polarizing individuals, and I am going to revisit Bail’s three strategies for closing the perception gap and show how the church is uniquely positioned to execute these strategies within its own walls.

5.2: Lets loop back around to one particular quote from Bail, a part of his thesis statement for the book: “I will argue that our focus upon Silicon Valley obscures a much more unsettling truth: the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves.” By this, Bail means that we are not primarily driven by information, but by identity, and a focus on Big Tech’s role in facilitating and empowering the spread of misinformation misses the bigger picture of what is actually causing polarization to increase. When Bail says that the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep within ourselves, he is talking about our hardwired social desire to “present different versions of ourselves, observe what other people think of them, and revise our identities accordingly.” This is something that humans have always done, and humans continue to do on social media, but the social media prism not only allows to do this at a scale that we can’t really tolerate, but it distorts and bends our identities in directions that amplify extreme positions and extreme attitudes. Here is my critique of Bail on this point: he is absolutely correct in his diagnosis of the problem, but he does not go far enough. He is absolutely correct that the root source of tribalism lies deep inside us, and he is also correct that the reason for this is not strictly because of misinformation or echo-chambers, and that we are not primarily “thinking things” driven simply by what we believe. However, I’d argue that Bail stops short of just how deep the roots of political tribalism lie within us, and that if Bail were to explore the true depth of those roots, he would not only strengthen his case for why we are the reason for political tribalism and polarization, but it would call into doubt the extent to which we can fix the social media prism ourselves.

Theological Contribution #1: A Doctrine of Depravity

5.3: But let’s trace the depths of those roots before we get to that point. Christianity teaches that mankind was created in the image of God, and in our original state we were created morally blameless and in open fellowship with our Creator, who gave us a pure, untainted creation to both steward and enjoy. But, ignoring the full breadth and depth of the pleasures and delights God gave them and focusing on the one single thing they were commanded not to do, our first parents ate from a tree they explicitly commanded not to eat from, and this one single disobedience, they lost both the moral blamelessness as well as their open fellowship with God - and introduced a whole host of consequences they couldn’t have possibly imagined. The Westminster Confession of Faith summarizes well everything that happened as a consequence (and as a quick note, all the references to this Confession both now and going forth have been lightly edited for clarity - it’s not the easiest thing to read aloud in places): “By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and became dead in sin and wholly defined in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin and the same death in sin and corrupted nature was imputed [meaning “credited to” or “charged to”] and convey to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary procreation and childbirth. From this original corruption, where we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.[10]” While I stand by a Reformed understanding of the doctrine of depravity (hence my use of a doctrinal standard here in this episode), every branch of Christianity and every denomination of Protestantism has a concept of both “sin” and “the fall” which resulted in the brokenness of creation and humanity; while not everyone might word the consequences in the same way, it has been a foundational Christian belief from the beginning of the church that humanity is sick with sin, and this sin manifests itself in our lives in multiple ways. One of the most foundational effects of sin is that we do not love the things we ought to love; we were created to love the Lord our God with our whole being, and from this rightly ordered love build our identities as being the children of God who delight in knowing and loving God. Instead, we love things that may destroy us, or our neighbor, and from our disordered loves we build disordered identities for ourselves. In knowing and loving God, we ought to desire to be like him, seeking to imitate his goodness, love, justice, mercy, patience, kindness, and truthfulness with respect to our creaturely limitations. Instead, we desire to be like those who bear the identities that we love, and we take on the attributes of those our hearts truly valuable above all as being the greatest good, whether that is a desire for fame, power, beauty, knowledge, cruelty, riches, success, comfort, or anything else that has taken our Creator’s place in our hearts as being the one thing that we must have at all costs. The term for this is “idolatry”, the worship of created things rather than our Creator, which stands at the front of the law of God in the 10 Commandments: You shall have no other gods before me. From our rejection of our identities in God, our rejection of the joy of fellowship and belonging with God, and our rejection of the rightful worship of God and the worship of the idols of our loves comes the basis from which God’s judgment against us stands, not only having broken one of his commandments, but having broken all of them.

5.4: Political tribalism, extremism, and trolling are all fruits of the inherent sinfulness of man. Tribalism is a distorted love for those who are like us, based on a shallow and incomplete identity that we choose for ourselves, and a willingness to engage in hostility and hypocrisy in order to remain a part of this “inner ring”. Applied to the social media specifically, we turn away from the God who knows us perfectly and instead pursue shallow relationships based on online statuses in our broken and sinful attempts to know and be known. Rather than delighting in being fully know by the God who created us and delighting in loving him as we were created to, we pursue love and acceptance that is conditional, fragile, and even in its best forms, flawed and incomplete. Extremism is a distorted love of righteousness, holiness, and purity, defining these things not in character and being of the God who truly is those things himself, but in temporal allegiances or ideals centered around a desire to maintain power and control. Trolling is a disordered love for evil, a very simple and pure manifestation of sin and our love for our deeds of darkness, both a hatred of the truth and a hatred of our neighbor. The social media prism itself an example of sin in our world, in that the things that we create ourselves cannot ultimately fix the brokenness inside of us and can often be an avenue through which sin and evil is further compounded and empowered - in many ways, the social media prism’s amplification of extremists is an amplification of evil in our world and our lives. And even though the social media prism is a uniquely modern problem, tribalism and political extremism are certainly not unique to modern American society - these are problems that every society has had to deal with in their own ways. Even trolling, a term that came to designate an Internet activity and Internet problem, has always existed in some form or fashion relative to the technology and media options available at the time. A Christian doctrine of depravity not only explains the thorough brokenness and evil caused by the social media prism, but also sets the stage for our inevitable failure to fix this brokenness ourselves, no matter how much progress or improvement we may make. The reality of political tribalism, extremism, and political violence is a shared human experience across time, geography, cultures, and languages. None of these are problems that arise because of a lack of technological progressivement or advance, much like hunger pains arise from a lack of food; these are problems that persist despite technological advancement and, as Bail makes quite clear, appears to get progressively worse the more technological progress we make. Ultimately, we cannot fix the social media prism ourselves, because the root cause of political tribalism and extremism on social media is much deeper than Bail gives it credit, and if Christianity’s account of the sinfulness of man is correct, we cannot fix ourselves, much less fix others or the society around us, simply in our own strength and effort. Springing forth from the sinful nature we inherited from Adam, his guilt - and our own contributions of guilt in our individual sin against God - remain upon us.

Theological Contribution #2: The Gospel

5.5: This is where the Gospel, the Good News, comes in. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the announcement, the proclamation, the declaration of everything Jesus Christ has accomplished and everything Jesus Christ is going to do in light of his accomplishments. The term “Gospel” has its roots in Roman culture and the Roman military system, where after a victorious battle, before the army returned to the city, a herald would be sent ahead to announce the victory of the Roman army and, in light of this victorious battle, the city and its residents ought to prepare themselves to celebrate the return of the Roman soldiers and take heart that their safety has been secured for them. In the case of Jesus, the Gospel of Jesus is the announcement that Jesus Christ has conquered Satan, sin, and death itself through his death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. Having lived a perfect and sinless life in complete obedience to God, in which our first parents failed to do, Jesus Christ was unjustly condemned as a sinner to die a death that he did not deserve, and in fulfillment of all the types and shadows of the Old Testament, Jesus Christ goes to the cross as the sinless sacrificial lamb of atonement. Being both fully God and fully man, Jesus Christ not only dies the death of a man representing men, but being fully divine, he is able to bear the full wrath of God reserved for us as a punishment for our sin - in both body and soul, Jesus Christ stands in our place as our substitute as an atoning sacrifice that we did not deserve. But not even an unjust crucifixion spurned on by Satan, nor the weight of the sin of man, nor even death itself could destroy Christ - having been buried in a grave for three days, he physically rose from the dead with a resurrected body, and in doing so signaled the beginning of the end of Satan, sin, and death. The Gospel, then, is the announcement that Jesus Christ has not only defeated all our enemies - the sinful nature deep inside us, the record of the debt of our sin that stood against us that we could never repay, the brokenness of creation and the death we and everyone we love will face, and our chief spiritual enemy responsible for it all, Satan himself - but it’s also the announcement that, as a result of his victory, Jesus Christ has secured for us a righteousness before God that is apart from being conditioned upon our fulfillment of the law, and that without his righteousness the wrath of God remains on us as we pay the penalty for our sin. But it’s not only an announcement of everything Jesus has accomplished; it’s also an announcement of everything Jesus is going to do because of his accomplishments. Jesus has defeated Satan, sin, and death in the sense that the Allied forces defeated Nazi Germany on D-day; although the outcome of the war has been determined, the battle will continue to rage on as the end closes in. A short time after his resurrection, Jesus physically ascended to heaven and now sits at the right hand of God the Father, serving as our mediator and high priest until he comes again. When he does, Jesus will bring about V-Day against all his enemies, having secured their defeat on the cross and now bringing that defeat to its final conclusion. Not only will Jesus defeat Satan, sin, and death, never to exist again, Jesus is going to make a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth, perfect and greater than anything our minds can comprehend.

5.6: In light of Christ’s victory on the cross and his impending return, what should our response be? Christ’s terms are simple: we are to repent of our sin and place our faith in him as our Savior and Lord and receive from him the righteousness we cannot secure for ourselves. In repenting of our sins, we turn away not just from our individual sins, but from all forms of sin and all forms of participation with Satan and his kingdom. We admit that we cannot attain a righteousness of our own and agree that our sin deserves eternal death and separation from God. We believe that Jesus Christ has attained a righteousness that can save us through his life, death, and resurrection, as the Gospel announcement tells us. We confess that Jesus Christ is our Lord, resigning any attempts to play God in our lives and placing our allegiance to Christ and his coming Kingdom above any other allegiance, including our countries, our families, our heritages, or any other defining identity that we have. To seal this new identity that we have as those who belong to Christ, we receive the Holy Spirit as a deposit and down-payment affirming that we have a new identity, and that we can enjoy a small taste of the life waiting for us now. This new life consists of a new heart, given to us by the Spirit, that loves Christ and desires to know and obey him. Although we remain in a world where Satan, sin, and death rage on, we know that just as their days are numbered and the outcome of the war has already been determined, the same is true for the sinful nature and desires that compete with our new identity and desires, as well as the physical death that awaits us as well. Just as Christ has been victorious over both, we will share in his victory as well. As long as we draw breath, the Gospel announcement compels us to respond, and we can respond in one of two ways. We can reject the Gospel, and pay the full penalty for our sins and experience eternal destruction, or we can accept Christ’s terms put forth in the Gospel, and receive not only his perfect record of righteousness in replacement of our record of sin, but receive a new identity and a small taste of the unimaginable life that is to come for those whose central identity has ceased being in themselves, a country, a political party, a philosophy, a lifestyle, or anything else other than being defined by Jesus Christ.

5.7: The Gospel, then, is not a self-help message. It is not generic encouragement or good vibes. It is not manifested merely in kindness and generosity in a vacuum. The Gospel is not a political platform or voting guide. The Gospel is not a program on how you can clean up your life, or how you can make the world a better place, solve whatever social cause you’re passionate about, etc. The Gospel is an announcement of what Jesus Christ has done, which is something you couldn’t do: save yourself from your sin and defeat the greatest enemies in your life. Our response to the Gospel is predicated entirely as a response to this announcement of what Christ has done and what Christ is going to do because of his victory, and it is through this Gospel proclamation that God transforms us and gives us new identities and new lives built on that new identity. This new identity that we have in Christ does not mean that we abandon our secondary identities; what it means is that those secondary identity can never become the primary identity through which we see ourselves. All our other identities - our family status, our education, where we live, what political affiliations we have, our hobbies or other interests - are moons which orbit around and are defined by our identity in Christ. Furthermore, in this new identity in Christ, it is who you are that determines not what you do; it is because you belong to Christ now that determines how you ought to live for him. Much of the preaching and evangelism in American Christianity today has inverted this: if you do X, Y, and Z for God, then you will be a Christian. Instead, it ought to be that because you are a Christian through repentance and faith in Christ, you ought to do X, Y, and Z in accordance with your new identity.

5.8: Why am I going on so long about all of this? When I say that Christianity offers some unique perspectives on Bail’s work that can not only strengthen and improve upon his arguments and even strengthen the effectiveness of many of his solutions, I do not mean any version or variant of Christianity that one can find out in the wild today, but only one that is robust, thorough, and entirely centered on Christ and his work. Counterfeit forms of Christianity, be it the self-help moralism variant, the political voting bloc variant (for both conservatives and progressives), the various Charismatic, Baptist, or Reformed prosperity gospels, or a cultural lifestyle variant cannot do what biblical Christianity can do. Doing a full theological overview of what exactly constitutes the breadth and depth of said biblical Christianity is neither possible nor helpful here; my only point is to demonstrate that a theologically rich and abundant Christianity is the only possible starting point for improving on Bail’s solutions. It should be said that good theology does not guarantee holy and righteous behavior any more than holy and righteous behavior is automatically an indicator of good theology, but just as our identity in Christ is the basis for understanding how we live for Christ, our theological foundations are the basis for our ethical foundations. This is the pattern for how God deals with his people in the Old Testament, how Christ conducts his ministry in the Gospels, and how Paul and the apostles exhort Christians in the rest of the New Testament, and it must be the pattern for us today as well. This is especially relevant as I transition to the third major theological topic I want to cover: when we respond to the Gospel with repentance and faith, our new identities are not given to us in isolation, but to belong to a larger body of people, the church.

Theological Contribution #3: A Doctrine of the Church

5.9: For this section, I am going to go back to the Westminster Confession of Faith (again, with some light editing for clarity), but I am going to go slightly out of order. When the Bible speaks of “the church”, it speaks about it in two senses: a visible sense, and an invisible sense. Normally, we would begin with the latter, but here I am going to start with the former: the visible church “consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion, together with their children, and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ and the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.” [11] In other words, the church is the public community of those who profess the Christian faith and, collectively acknowledging Christ as their Savior and Lord, physically gather together to worship him as he has instructed us and physically scatter into the world as his ambassadors and representatives. Just as our identity in Christ becomes our primary identity over the secondary identities we have, the church is a group of people united to each other in that identity over and against all their various secondary identities. The church, then, ought to be a wide and diverse group of people who acknowledge their differences and disagreements but collectively agree that Jesus is more important, and we know this because this reflects Christ and his disciples during his earthly ministry. Jesus’ 12 disciples were far from culturally uniform or homogenous; for example, among the 12 disciples you had Jewish fishermen, a Greek-born physician, a Roman tax collector and a member of the Jewish zealot party, a radical sect of Judaism that wanted to violently overthrow the Roman government. These 12 men had little in common (and often much in direct competition with each other); only a greater identity in being a disciple of Christ could bring together a group of men around a shared identity that transcended all other identities. In the same way, the church brings together hundreds, thousands, and millions from all over the world from different backgrounds, stations of life, professions, education levels, income levels, and more because of a shared identity in Jesus Christ.

5.10: Now, in describing that, I am intentionally painting a cheerier and rosier picture than what exists in reality. On paper, the church is the public community of those who profess the Christian faith and, collectively acknowledging Christ as their Savior and Lord, physically gather together to worship him as he has instructed us and physically scatter into the world as his ambassadors and representatives. In practice, it is often the total opposite of that. Many churches that exist today are little more than good-ol-boys social clubs, or are plagued by an obsession or focus on some secondary doctrine or social cause, are driven by a form of Christian nationalism (mostly far-right but far-left versions of Christian nationalism exist as well) or defined entirely by being “not those kind of Christians”, whatever that means in particular to them. My father is a pastor, and I work for a church and am pursuing a calling in vocational ministry; I know very full well that what the church should be on paper is often not what it is in reality. The advent of the #churchtoo and deconstruction movements are heartbreaking to me because many of the stories and experiences recounted in these spaces are not surprising or shocking at all; even though I believe high things about the church, I have to reckon with the reality that the church is capable of severely wounding and hurting people, and this can’t be hand-waved away as though it were just a few bad apples in the batch causing these problems. It’s hard to look out on the landscape of American evangelicalism and the American church and believe the Lord is present amid any of this mess. But, this is where the second sense of “the church” comes in - the invisible church. Going back to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the invisible church “consists of the whole number of the elect that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under the headship of Christ”. [12] It may seem like splitting hairs here, but the distinction between the invisible church and the visible church can be summed up as this: not everyone who belongs to the visible church, or claims to be a Christian, is actually and truly a Christian. The invisible church is a subset of the visible church, just as Israelites who truly worshiped and feared the Lord was a subset of the visible nation of Israel. It is entirely possible for a visible church to have no relation to the invisible church, to claim to belong to Christ but to have nothing to do with him, to claim to love him but who will acknowledge on the last days that “I never knew you.” But, even when the visible church is at its lowest points, there will always be a remnant of the invisible church preserved. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts so well, “the purest churches under heaven are subject both to a mixture of truth and error, and some have so degenerated as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan. Nevertheless, there shall be always a church on earth to worship God according to his will.” [13] When we talk about the church, we most hold both understandings of the church together in tension. It is messy, and uncomfortable, but we cannot jettison one for the other.

5.11: Now, you may be thinking “how can the church play an active role in de-polarizing individuals if you just admitted that it’s often no different than the rest of the polarized world?” This is a very fair question to ask. Hopefully by now, it’s clear that when I say the church can play an active role here, I am not meaning every single church in America, right at this moment, can make a difference here, but only those churches who are, right at this moment, truly and actually based around a shared identity in Christ and practically display that with their worship and their lives. It goes without saying that countless churches and pastors in America are caught up in the social media prism and are currently having their identities distorted and bent by the social media prism, and those churches and pastors are in no position right now to positively contribute to this situation; the first thing they ought to contribute would be their own repentance. Churches that gather around a political identity, or a shared way of life, or some other secondary identity cannot do what churches that gather together to worship Christ as being greater than all things can do. Churches that have substituted their shared identity in Christ for a shared identity around something else need to be reminded of the Gospel proclamation and respond with repentance and faith in Christ as it’s Savior and Lord, and subjugate every lesser status or identity as being secondary to Christ and his kingdom. For churches whose greatest identity is their identity in Christ, and who are marked by the kind of radical hospitality, generosity, forgiveness, and grace that can only come from the transformed lives of those who have responded to the Gospel, there are no limits to how they can contribute to de-polarizing their congregations and their communities. In fact, Bail’s strategies for breaking the social media prism are strategies that can make our churches more powerfully display the transforming power of the Gospel as well.

Seeing the Prism in our Churches

6.1: Let’s get started. For the remainder of this episode, we are going to look at Bail’s three strategies that we outlined earlier for reducing false polarization and closing the perception gap and how churches are uniquely positioned to apply these strategies to their churches and discipleship process and explore what kind of benefits these may have among our congregations and communities. To briefly recap: Bail contends that the social media prism has sent “false polarization”, or the belief that people are more extreme and divided than they truly are, into overdrive. In its wake, a chasm called “the perception gap” is created, which is the distance between how extreme people perceive others to be compared to where people actually are at in their beliefs. As I mentioned earlier, the average Republican believes the average Democrat is more extreme than there are actual liberal extremists, and vice-versa for Democrats. This chasm between perception - the sense that the average Democrat or Republican is extreme - and reality - that the number of both conservative and liberal extremists are a minority of the population - is the essence of the perception gap. Bail says the first step to hacking (or “Fixing”) the social media prism is to close this gap between perception and reality; I say that this first step has immense value even outside of social media, and churches who implement these strategies will not only help in terms of discipling their members on how to conduct themselves on social media, but how to conduct themselves among their family members, in their workplaces, and in other activities in the midst of their communities as well. The first strategy, “seeing the prism”, is the most straightforward of the three: we need to teach people to see how social media bends and distorts our identities. The church can tackle this strategy in a variety of ways. At the most foundational level, there will always be a need to call people back to their identities in Christ after a week of experiencing the distorting effects of not just the social media prism, but living in a sinful and broken world. While we may talk about other aspects of our faith and practice beside the Gospel, we never “graduate” from needing the Gospel or move on to more advance topics without going back to the Gospel. Building on top of that, churches must begin incorporating media literacy and media ecology education as a subject within its core discipleship programs. In fact, these topics need to be given the same level of attention and deliberate focus as marriage discipleship and financial discipleship, because when marriages fail or finances are not being stewarded correctly, everyone in the church feels that impact. Everyone in the church is also presently feeling the impact of having neglected media literacy education - it has been the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship for decades now. We are starting to see the needle move ever so slightly at the publishing level, as there has been a recent spike in books on these topics over the past several years, but the true root of this change cannot come from the top-down; it must come from the bottom up, with individuals doing this work in their individual contexts. Pastors and ministry leaders: you have every incentive you could possibly want right now to tackle this topic head on. You know it’s a problem. You know it’s interfering with your discipleship and ministry efforts. You know it is choking the effectiveness of your evangelism and outreach. You know you need to talk about this, and the good news is that you have every possible reason to pursue this topic head-on for a sustained period of time. You’re not being unfaithful to your calling. You’re not promoting a worldly solution to spiritual problems. You are dealing with perhaps the single biggest collective weed that is choking not only the seed of faith in your people, but corroding your people’s ability to be the salt and light in the world that Christ has called them to be. Recall from earlier: just making people aware of misconceptions can go a long way to depolarizing individuals and has the potential to snowball into other areas as well. If you’re dealing with spiritual or theological division in your church, you must teach your people to see the prism distorting their perceptions of each other. If you’re dealing with political or cultural tension, you must teach your people to see the prism distorting their perceptions of each other. It will not be easy, and you will almost certainly step on toes and speak to idols in your congregation, but you not only have secular support for this work through Chris Bail and several other researchers, but this is absolutely within your calling to shepherd the flocks assigned to you by the Lord. And, just to be clear - this isn’t something that lead pastors need to take on entirely by themselves at the congregational level. Youth minsters, family pastors, college pastors, and all sorts of other leaders and the church can and should play a part in this. Youth ministers, consider taking your students through Brett McCracken’s “The Wisdom Pyramid” - I did a short episode several months ago on what happened when we took some of our students through it - or consider taking mature high school students and parents through Jean Twenge’s “iGen”, one of the most important books anyone connected to youth ministry could read and know about right now. College pastors, consider a book like Alan Noble’s “Disruptive Witness”, a cutting-edge book on evangelism and apologetics and how social media and smartphones are posing brand-new obstacles to sharing and defending the faith. Family pastors, consider Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism” and how parents can model for their children a truly sustainable and life-long vision and framework for tech usage and media consumption. Lead pastors, or pastors in churches with older congregations, you cannot go wrong with Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” - a book that is written about television but almost always applies to social media as well, or Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”, written before the smartphone era but applying just as much to us today as it did when it first came out. It may feel as though that this topic has been neglected for so long that it’s too late to begin plugging this hole, but if this episode or this entire series is any indication, there has never been a better or more urgent time than now to begin this work, and to begin this work slowly and imperfectly is far better than doing nothing at all. Regardless of what your people may specifically need and how you might need to tackle it, you must get your people to see the prism, and if you can get them to meaningful see the prism and acknowledge its existence, your potential for true growth and change begins to grow immensely.

Teaching Others to See Themselves Through the Prism in our Churches

6.2: Bail’s second strategy, “learn to see yourself through the prism”, is only possible after the first strategy has been accomplished, and may not be something you can implement right away. I am going to recall a quote from Bail earlier that summarizes the key point of this strategy: understanding how people on social media see you—regardless of who you really are—is very important. Research indicates becoming more aware of how your political views relate to those of others can have a depolarizing effect no matter where you fall on the spectrum. Realizing that the identities we are trying to project are not consistent with the ones other people see may help us realize that other people are not always what they seem either. The key thing I urge you to consider is whether the version of you that is projected through the prism is what you want other people to see. If it isn’t, don’t despair. More than a century of social science suggests that we are very bad at seeing what we look like through the eyes of others. We believe we know what other people think of us, but we are often very wrong.[14] I don’t think I need to make too much of a case for how this strategy especially relates to problems and challenges we face in the ordinary, everyday course of being the body of Christ. Conflict and tension between church members is a problem even outside of social media, and a common factor for many of these situations are misunderstandings based on misperceptions of the thoughts, words, and actions or others. Pastors, this is such an easy opportunity to bring up the difference between one’s intentions and one’s impact and how one can have the best intentions behind an action or statement but it has the total opposite impact. How many times have you had to deal with a situation with a member who intends nothing more than to magnify the beauty and riches of the depth of Scripture, but unintentionally hurt or grieved another member by the way they talked about it? How many times have you had to deal with a husband who only intends to comfort and support his wife with his advice or input, but makes her feel belittled in the process? How many times have you had to deal with a parent who intends nothing more than to protect her child from embarrassment or shame, but does so in a way that does the very thing she was trying to avoid? How many of our ordinary, everyday ministry situations arise from people not correctly perceiving how others perceive their speech and their conduct? We haven’t even said a word about social media yet! Have you ever had to deal with a situation where a potential member decides not to join your church because a key leader or member who is the kindest and sweetest person in real life is unintentionally portraying himself as a combative and cold partisan online? Have you ever had to deal with a member in your church avoiding another member because they’re afraid the other person is going to jump down their throat when they disagree about a topic based on what they’ve seen from social media? I could go on and on, but the point here should be clear: we not only need to teach our people to see the social media prism, but we need to teach our people how to see themselves though both the social media prism, and if we can teach our people to do that in our social media usage, it will absolutely carry over into our everyday interactions in the church as well.

Breaking the Prism in our Churches

6.3: This leads us to the third and final strategy: breaking the prism. This is the strategy where churches have a unique advantage and, if a congregation is working through these first two strategies, they’re likely making progress on this one as well. Within the context of social media, third strategy involves taking small, intentional, and wise baby steps to build bridges with people who are opposite of you politically, which include understanding (to the best of your ability) their latitude of acceptance, patiently learning how to speak their language, finding connection points outside of controversial political figures and pundits, and - most importantly - not immediately breaking your echo chamber on your own to “get the other side”. Within the context of social media, these steps are very incremental and, because of the limitations and barriers of social media, things could go wrong and break down at any given moment. Bail notes that it could take a lot of time and effort before a quality connection takes root and you have successfully “reached across the aisle” and the perception gap has been narrowed for both parties. But in an embodied context, many of these digital baby steps are steps that happen in the ordinary course of living and socializing well with other people. Listening to others, learning what is persuasive to them, understanding how to speak their language, finding other connection points beyond a contentious issue - these are all normal behaviors in healthy relationships and healthy communities. If a church is successfully working through the first two strategies outlined here, it will likely involve many of the steps that Bail outlines here for use in a limited online context. When combined with the fact that the shared identity for Christians is not (and should not) is first and foremost Christ, the church has a built-in starting point for navigating disagreements and misunderstandings around secondary issues and secondary identities. Christians should not be concerned with having to defend their identity as a conservative, or a liberal, or some other secondary identity as though it were the only thing that defines them and as if it were the only basis for unity and common ground; Christians have received a supernatural identity in Christ through the Gospel that is able to unite people together who would otherwise have nothing to do with each other. This is why I say that Christianity can strengthen many of Bail’s solutions - Christianity offers an identity that has the power to rise above the arena of competing identities, and Christianity offers a community that, when working as it should, has the potential to de-polarize and close the perception gap just by virtue of participating in that community with that shared identity. Churches that are marked by a commitment to Christ, abundant in bearing the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control of the Spirit, can not only take Bail’s work and apply it in their own contexts, but will see the fruit of that work spread not only to their own communities, but also to how their people conduct themselves online. A body that is building itself up on the truth of Scripture and love of Christ and the love of one another is a body that is closing the perception gap among its people, and as Bail has argued throughout the entire book, closing the perception gap must be a high priority for reducing polarization not just among Democrats and Republicans, but reducing polarization along all of the other areas of life where the social media prism, the all-encompassing sphere of influence regardless of your engagement or disengagement, has distorted and bent our behaviors in opposition and hostility towards one another.

6.4: Now, I want to stress: media literacy, closing the perception gap, breaking the social media prism - none of these things can do what the Gospel can do. None of these things are substitutes for doing difficult work of boldly proclaiming the biblical Gospel, through which the Lord works in the hearts of men and women not to make them simply nicer or better, but to make them a new creation. At the same time, media literacy education and closing the perception gap should not be seen as doing a rival work to the Gospel even if it cannot save souls. We ought to be removing obstacles for the Gospel even as we sow its seed. We must be confronting the idols of the people of God as we exhort them to be the people God has called them to be. We must see polarization not just as a problem that impacts people on social media, but as a problem that impacts people who watch cable news, who listen to the radio, or interact with modern mass media in any substantial way. And - most importantly - we must see polarization as something that is not going to go away with regulations on Big Tech or social media platforms, and that the terminal point for this perpetually increasing polarization is not harmless. I don’t want to end this episode and this series on a depressing note, but we need to reckon with the sober reality that American society cannot on this course for too much longer, and that the eventual outcome of this increasingly polarized state is violence and bloodshed. I opened this series back in October with a quote from a piece that disagreement among Republicans and Democrats is not actually based on disagreements on policy - of which there is often some surprising consensus and overlap - but purely on emotion, and both sides are now overwhelmingly convinced that it’s time to split the country because the other party is a clear and present threat to American Democracy. That was in October; on January 1st of this year, a new poll was published indicating that 1 in 3 Americans now believe that political violence can be justified under the right circumstances; ten years ago, it wasn’t even a full 1 in 5. What do you get when you have two political parties who are overwhelmingly convinced the other party is an immediate threat to the existence of America and 1 in 3 Americans believe political violence is justifiable if the situation is dire enough to call for it? Pastors and ministry leaders, you cannot singlehandedly fix this country, or change a political party at a national level. You can, however, work to make sure that should polarization continue to tear this country apart, that your people stand fast together united to Christ. You can help depolarize your own people so they can have the skills necessary to help depolarize others. You can equip your people to share the Gospel and offer an identity and future greater than an ever escalating power struggle, and offer those caught in extremism and potential violence a way out. I do not want to sound alarmist or conspiratorial, nor do I want to end with a guilt-trip that if we don’t tackle this in our churches now that we may face something worse later on. Instead, my whole aim here has been an attempt to help you see an opportunity that you may not know you have to advance the Gospel and the Kingdom of God among your people and your communities in a way you may not have thought possible. We have the advantage here; for the sake of our congregations, communities, families, and friends, let’s take the work that Bail and others have done for us, and let’s make the most of it.

[1] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 95). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 100-101). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 101-102). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 103-104). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 105). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[6] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 106-107). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[7] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 112). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 113-114). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 128). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[10] Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter VI, 2–4

[11] Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter XXV, 1

[12] Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter XXV, 2

[13] Westminster Confession of Faith Chapter XXV, 5

[14] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 105). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.“

(The following is my unedited manuscript for Part 3 of my commentary on Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”, which released on January 3rd, 2022. Breaking the Digital Spell is available wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube (embedded below), or you can listen online here.)

1.1: So far, in our series covering Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”, we have focused on establishing some foundational truths. In the first episode, “Stepping on the Glass of Broken Echo-Chambers”, we covered chapters 1-3 of the book and Bail’s research showing that social media echo chambers are not the problem when it comes to political polarization and tribalism. In fact, we actually make the problem worse when we focus our energy on breaking people out of their echo chambers, and it usually results in a person doubling-down on both their pre-existing beliefs and the intensity of those beliefs. Based on Bail’s research, it is not information that drives our beliefs, but our identities, and when we step outside our echo chambers to get “the other side”, we perceive contrasting perspectives and ideas not as an attack on our beliefs, but an attack on who we are as individuals. In the second episode, “Distorted Beyond the Funhouse Mirror”, we covered Chapter 4 of the book and introduced Bail’s concept of the “social media prism”. When it comes to our identities (how we perceive ourselves and others), the “social media prism” does two things to us: it distorts our identities, and it bends our identities. The first effect is simple enough: social media gives us a very incomplete and skewered picture of reality, including our understanding of ourselves relative to the rest of society and culture. But it’s the second effect where social media ceases being just a funhouse mirror and actually does something to us: Bail contends that social media not only distorts our identities, but bends our behavior to match the distorted identities we see online. If part of our identity is to find belonging and acceptance to a particular group, tribe, or ideology, we will change our behavior to match the behavior we see from those we respect online, even if that behavior doesn’t reflect the attitude or desires of a group as a whole. We often want to use social media as a mirror that we can use to see ourselves relative to the rest of society, but not only does that mirror give us a heavily distorted image of ourselves and society, it changes our behavior in ways that stay with us even after we’ve stopped looking in the mirror.

1.2: In this episode, and in the episode to follow, we are going to start getting more practical and concrete on both how these problems are affecting us, and whether or not we can do anything about them. I recognize that the last two episodes have been heavy on “problem” with little on “solution”, and unfortunately for this episode, that trend is going to continue. In the next episode, we will examine Bail’s solutions to the problem and give some critique and evaluations, and I will provide some potential solutions of my own. This episode is going to be very straightforward: we are going to tackle the two biggest effects the social media prism has on our society, as detailed in chapters 5 and 6 of the book. Those two biggest effects are how the social media prism drives extremism (chapter 5) and how the social media prism mutes moderates (chapter 6).

2.1: For chapter 5, Bail’s goal is very straightforward: “I explain how the social media prism distorts how extremists see themselves and others, which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that pushes people further apart.”[1] Bail notes that while there is no shortage of opinions about extremists on social media, there has been very little academic study on them for an obvious reason: political extremists, or trolls, usually don’t want to be studied and, like they behave on social media, will troll the researchers by leaving out or hiding key details about their lives. Bail illustrates this at the start of the chapter with the story of a man named Jamie, a medical assistant in a hospital in Alabama. Jamie, in his interviews with Bail, claims that he only uses Twitter as an information source for sports and music, and that he didn’t care about other people knowing his opinion. And yet, a cursory survey of Jamie’s social media activity revealed that he was a very extreme liberal troll, often tweeting fly-by insults at conservatives in his ordinary use of the app. Jamie’s self-description of himself omitted the fact that Jamie is a troll, and knows it - when he took the political beliefs survey at the beginning of the survey, he even trolled the survey and said he was a very strong Republican!

2.2: Jamie would later admit a very critical truth: as a liberal with mostly conversation friends living in a very conservative part of the country, Jamie was very lonely. Loneliness is a theme that appears in the lives of many of the extremists that Bail interviewed, even for ones on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Bail’s next illustration is of a conservative troll named Ed, who, unlike Jamie, admits he is a troll and is proud of it. He enjoyed Trump’s social media antics and behavior, and was willing to be bluntly and directly honest with Bail and his research team about his behavior online and the fact that he enjoys being a Twitter troll. Now, take whatever opinion you may have about Ed, and freeze that in time for a second while I fill you in on Ed’s backstory. As Bail says, Ed is a widower in his 60s. He spent most of the 80s working in the financial sector and able to provide a comfortable life for him and his wife, but as changes in the financial sector pushed him out of a job, Ed had to tap early into his retirement in order to make ends meet. Not only that, his wife was dying, and her medical care in her final stages depleted even more of his life savings. Now, Ed lives in a motel in Nebraska, living on food stamps, because he is overqualified for the handful of jobs in the small town he lives in. He doesn’t have any family or friends nearby, and he can’t afford to move back to Fort Collins, CO, the town he spent most of his life in. Ed has so little that he can’t even afford a red Make America Great Again hat. What Ed does have - and what he takes great pride in - is his online status and significance as a troll, because offline, he has nothing.

2.3: Bail argues that when you lack offline status and significance, the ability to influence others is immensely valuable to someone who does not have much control over their real-world circumstances. If you’re someone like Ed, whose life savings from a promising career have all been washed down the drain just trying to survive and taking care of your now-deceased wife, and now live in a motel surviving solely off food stamps, being able to influence people online and make a difference online fills the vacuum of powerlessness in your own offline circumstances. As Bail says, “Besides earning status from people on their own side, many of the extremists we interviewed simply delighted in getting other people worked up. Our ability to influence others, however artificially or temporarily, is valuable to people who feel that they have very little control over their own lives. A team of political scientists in the United States and Denmark conducted a series of studies in both countries to determine who spreads political rumors or fake news online. What they found was somewhat surprising: the people who spread such falsehoods were not simply motivated to see their own side win; rather, the researchers found they have a need for chaos—a desire to see the entire system suffer. This need, the scholars speculated, emerges from the experience of marginalization itself - something I saw very clearly in the case of Ed, Jamie, and most of the other political extremists we interviewed.”[2] And for Ed specifically, he admits that his extreme social media behavior is not only just a coping mechanism, but fills that vacuum of significance that he is missing in his life: “Ed told us he engages in extreme behavior on social media because it is cathartic and helps him cope with social isolation. But it was also clear from speaking with him that such behavior gives him a powerful sense of status. During our interview he repeatedly mentioned that he had “a couple thousand” followers, and he was particularly proud to count several prominent conservative leaders among them. When I analyzed Ed’s social media account several months later, however, I discovered that he only had about two hundred followers. What is more, the high-profile conservatives he thought were following him were actually people with copycat accounts. For Ed and many of the other political extremists we interviewed, social media enables a kind of microcelebrity—even if his influence was exaggerated, or even if many of his followers did not seem like real people who were genuinely interested in his views.”[3] While I am not trying to suggest that the behavior of trolls is ever justified or acceptable, I hope that perhaps somewhere in our hearts, exhausted and worn thin as we are from the state of our world, a small kindling of compassion and pity will light, and that we might consider that the trolls that we see online - at least, the ones who are not public speakers, authors, grifters, or media personalities - are trolls because they’re looking for something to fill a deep hole a grief in their hearts.

2.4: But not only are most trolls likely looking for belonging, acceptance, and status in their lives in their behavior, they’re very likely to find it in the worst possible place - among other trolls who are looking for the same thing. One of the more interesting observations from Bail’s study is how political extremists, whether online or offline, come to form deep communities with other extremists, and in an online context, how those clusters of extremists work together in trolling people. They will share lists of people to follow, and they will work together in targeting individuals to troll - Bail saw some of the extremists he was working with individually make connections with one another online and team up to troll the bots Bail was using! But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this: nearly every political extremist Bail interviewed admitted, to some degree, that they know their trolling doesn’t change anyone’s mind on an issue. One conservative troll he interviewed even went so far as to say, “I have to respond to something like that [referring to an extreme liberal reaction to a political situation] because it’s ridiculous. Not that it’s going to matter, because the people who believe its our fault are going to believe its our fault no matter what the evidence is.”[4] Remember: one of Bail’s biggest claims is that the biggest driving force behind extremism and polarization is not a question of information, but identity, and one thing that every identity shares in common is a desire to be in relationship with others who share our identity. As Bail says, “Though it may seem that social media extremists are most concerned with taking down the other side through superior argumentation—ideally laced with wry humor or sarcasm—my research suggests that these attacks also serve a ritual function that pushes extremists closer together.[5]”

2.5: If you think about it for a bit, this makes a lot of sense. If you have little going for you offline - if your life lacks meaning, status, and significance, it’s no surprise that you would befriend those who also seeking the same thing as you because they’re in a similar state to you. If online status and significance becomes the only meaningful form of status and significance you have in your life, receiving status and significance from others you can relate to and identify with becomes more than just an extra form of social currency; it becomes the only lens through which you can understand yourself. Extremists who are driven towards extremism due to marginalization and suffering in their offline lives, and whose extremist connections and relationships are the most valuable relationships they have, are deeply concerned about suffering any loss to their online status. Like the story with Ed just a bit ago, he believed that he had several thousand followers which included some big-name conservative leaders, but in actuality he had around a couple hundred followers, including copycat accounts of those big-named conservative leaders. In actuality, Ed had nothing offline, and was a nobody online - but he didn’t see it that way. So imagine what would happen if a troll should lose a follower or group of followers - or doesn’t receive the desired attention and recognition from those who aren’t as extreme as them? If trolls are violent and hostile towards those who are opposite of them politically, they are often much worse towards those who unfollow them or who won’t become as extreme as they are. This makes their relationships with others trolls all the more priceless - as Bail says, “The symbolic meaning of the bonds that extremists make with each other became even more apparent to me when I learned how closely extremists monitor their followers. Though social media sites do not alert users when people stop following them, several of the extremists we interviewed used third-party apps to identify such individuals. People who unfollowed the extremists we studied—particularly several of the conservative extremists—were often subject to even more aggressive attacks . . . For me, this type of retribution further underscores how deeply trolls value the status and influence they achieve online, and how much it upsets them when people on their own side sever ties with them.”[6]

2.6: If this is starting to sound like a cult or cultish behavior, that’s because it bears several significant features of being a cult. We normally don’t think of online trolls as belonging to any particular group, much less ones with the features of cults, but according to Bail, that is exactly what is going on here (quick note - in this quote he refers to people and stories I’ve not mentioned here): “The more I delved into communities of political extremists on social media, the more they seemed to have cult-like dynamics. As the famed sociologist Max Weber noted more than a hundred years ago, most extreme religious groups exist in constant tension with established mainstream churches. Proving one’s membership in a cult often becomes a sort of ritual in which members reward each other for take increasingly extreme positions to prove their loyalty to the cause. For Sandy, the former Obama voter who became an ardent Trump supporter, this required frequent rehearsal of her conservative bona fides. For Ellen, this often takes the form of attacking other Democrats for policies that—in her view—are scarcely different from those of her true enemy: Republicans. For still others, it means attacking extremists who challenge their loyalty to their side more forcefully than anyone else. In each of these cases, my research indicates that political extremists are pushed and pulled toward increasingly radical positions by the likes, new follows, and other types of engagement they receive for doing so—or because they fear retribution for showing any sympathy toward the mainstream. These types of behavior mirror the famous finding of the social psychologist Leon Festinger about a doomsday cult from the 1950s: the further people become committed to radical views, the more difficult these commitments become to undo, and the more people come to rely on the status and support system that cults create.”[7] I am going to repeat that last clause because I do not want you to miss this: the further people become committed to radical views, the more difficult these commitments become to undo, and the more people come to rely on the status and support system that cults create. I sincerely hope this flips a switch or turns on a lightbulb in the way you view political extremists or trolls, because - to connect several dots - if the primary driving force of our lives is not the information we believe, but the identity we desire to have and our desire to belong to others who are like us, it means that there is a social and relational dimension to extremism that cannot be undone unless there is a viable social and support system to transition extremists into.

2.7: For cults who practice shunning former members who leave the cult, such as Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses, often times the biggest factor for whether or not someone truly walks away is whether or not they have a place waiting for them to walk towards. If changing these beliefs does not simply cost me intellectually, but also physically and socially, then the “cost of exit” isn’t just a matter of paying an intellectual price, but a price that comprises my entire being. This does not mean that people are not willing to pay that price - when it comes to Christian cults specifically, there are countless testimonies of incredibly courageous and brave men and women who are willing to leave behind everything to follow Christ no matter the cost - but it does make that price significantly higher than what most people are willing to pay. But if that cost can be offset somewhere else - if I have a strong and legitimate community of friends and people who treat me like flesh-and-blood family outside the support system of the cult I want to leave - that lessens the pain of leaving that support system behind and choosing this new social and relational support system to belong to. But I don’t have that alternate system - if I am alone, and if I have no one else to meaningfully turn to for the belonging and acceptance I am designed to seek - then why I should I leave the system that gives me those things? As Bail says, “One of the key functions of the social media prism . . . is that it reflects the social landscape back to us. But in so doing, the prism inevitably distorts what we see, and for many people it creates a delusional form of self-worth. The type of uncivil behavior I described in this chapter results from this process, taken to its extreme. Many people with strong partisan views do not participate in such destructive behavior. behavior. But the people who do often act this way because they feel marginalized, lonely, or disempowered in their off-line lives. Social media offer such social outcasts another path. Even if the fame extremists generate has little significance beyond small groups of other outcasts, the research my colleagues and I conducted suggests that social media give extremists a sense of purpose, community, and—most importantly—self-worth.”[8]

2.8: Now, I want to make clear: none of this, in any way shape or form, excuses or justifies the behavior of online trolls. I also want to stress that this is not a one-sized-fits-all reality for every single troll that you see or encounter online - there are plenty of trolls who are not lonely or suffering offline, and there are some trolls whose trolling is seen as a boon or an asset to their professional life and image. I am not trying to paint a view of trolls as being these poor, misguided souls who are just misunderstood. What I am trying to say is that, for a good number of trolls, their on-line behavior is an extension of their real-world brokenness, and that this behavior is not something that can be argued or fact-checked out of them if it does truly arise from pain and suffering that is often invisible to us. When it comes to the trolls we see online, there is often very little to nothing we can do to meaningfully address or fix that real-world pain and suffering. What we can do is not feed the online status and significance that trolls crave from getting people rilled up - as counterintuitive as it seems, blocking and muting trolls truly is the most helpful thing that we can do if its a person that we do not know and cannot help in real life. If trolls are to have any hope of moving on from this identity towards a healthier one, their identity as a troll will need to be weakened, and the only way to weaken the strength of that identity is to do your part to not contribute oxygen to the burning flame.

3.1: Now, as terrible and depressing as this whole topic is, it’s actually about to get more worse. The amplification and empowerment of extremists is one of two major effects the social media prism has on our society. Bail argues - and I agree with him - that the second of these two effects is actually the worst of the two, and that’s the muting of moderates. If our culture uses social media as a tool to reflect the political and cultural landscape back to us, and if that reflection gives us a heavily distorted image in return, that distortion is going to manifest in two ways. It’s going to make one particular aspect of society seem outsized and aggrandized into something much bigger and much more menacing than it actually is. But in order to do that, it needs to minimize and obscure something else in order to make that smaller feature now seem significantly larger. In our case, social media reflects to us a landscape where the vast majority of people have lost their minds and common ground is increasingly impossible with one another. But - as a little bit of good news - that distorted image we see does not reflect the way American society actually is. Political extremists represent a very small percentage of the American population; political moderates are not any less a political bloc than they’ve been in any point in recent history. And yet, the landscape reflected to us through social media would have us believe the opposite is true - and this belief is far from benign. Like many other lies we believe about ourselves and others, these misconceptions and distortions change the way we think, feel, and behave, and those lies scale very well to society as a whole.

3.2: I had mentioned at the beginning of the episode that there would likely be some sections where you might want to skip ahead for yourself and for anyone listening, and for the next [COUNT TO FIVE AND LEAVE A BLANK SPACE], we will be covering some stories that include online harassment and death threats, so feel free to skip ahead if you need to. When I was reading Breaking the Social Media Prism for the first time, Chapter 6 was the first chapter in the book where I felt, at a personal level, everything Bail was researching and arguing for. As someone who considers themselve a political moderate, one who leans right-of-center if all my various stances were aggregated to one generalized location, I related to many of the individuals and stories that Bail tells in this chapter about how social media makes me, as a moderate, often feel incredibly isolated and lonely on social media - even though, statistically speaking, I belong to the largest political voting bloc in the country. The first story that Bail tells - the story of a woman named Sara - hit home to me for multiple reasons. Bail spends a good amount of timing detailing how Sara’s political beliefs as a moderate Republican are complex and nuanced on many different topics, and how many of Sara’s life and family experiences form and shape her various stances on certain topics. And yet, Sara has largely given up on trying to have discussions about what she believes politically on social media because anytime she does, she is met with immense hostility. One time, in a semi-viral tweet about how her husband owns a gun for visiting a shooting range but isn’t opposed to firearms regulations, someone replied that they were contacting CPS because Sara admitted to having guns in the house where her two children live. Someone else blatantly wished one of her daughters found that gun and shot Sara with it. While responding to a liberal troll who listed that they were a breast cancer survivor in their bio, Sara compassionately tried to find some common ground with this person who was harassing her; Sara herself was also a breast cancer survivor. The troll simply replied, quote, “I hope you die.” This experience of being unable to dialogue about her political beliefs online doesn’t just apply to strangers on the Internet; Sara is also distressed by her inability to talk with her more liberal friends and family members on social media as well. Sara eventually decided that, for the sake of her ability to love her liberal friends and family and enjoy the time she spends with them in person, that she needed to mute or block those friends and family, even if it meant also missing out on life updates and family photos along with their political rants. If one looked at her social media presence now, it would look as though Sara doesn’t care very much about politics, but nothing could be further from the truth; Sara cares very deeply about her political convictions. She just doesn’t believe - as the vast majority of moderates do - that it is neither profitable nor safe to try to add her moderate voice to a discussion dominated by polarized extremes. And, as Bail argues, the cost of that absence is profound.

3.3: It may genuinely surprise you to learn that, contrary to appearances on social media, that the American public is not any more polarized than it has been in recent decades. The American National Election Study and several other large studies show that the number of people who identify as “extremely liberal” or “extremely conservative” is very small percentage of the population, and that the number of people who identify as a moderate, be it left-of-center, right-of-center, or firmly in the center, remain the dominant majority by far. The same firms who conduct these studies also regularly report that most Republicans and Democrats have views that are often out-of-step with the party line, such as a majority of self-professed Republicans having neutral-to-positive views on increasing immigration and a majority of self-professed Democrats having positive views on the police and rural life. So if the vast majority of the American public are moderates in some way, and if the average Republican or Democrat hold political views that may be out of line with the party stereotype, where are all these people at? Based on social media, this almost seems too good to be true - if these people exist, why don’t we see them more often? This is where the distorting and bending effects of the social media prism come into play. Like we talked about in the last episode, social media not only distorts our identities, but it bends our behaviors to conform to those distorted identities. If I identify as a moderate, and I look to social media to see where all my fellow moderates are at and see nothing but extremists and trolls, I am going to conclude that there are not very many people like me. And, on the handful of instances where I see someone try to express a nuanced view on a topic and then get publicly harassed for it, I am going to take that as an example of what will happen to me if I speak up too, and that just keep my mouth shut. Not only is it an unproductive waste of time, something worse may actually happen to me.

3.4: But as it turns out - I am not alone in feeling that way. In fact, many moderates feel that way! According to a 2017 survey from the Pew Research Center, one in four Americans have experienced being harassed online. But even more shocking than that - the same survey reported that 3 out of 4 Americans have observed someone else being harassed online, and 1/3rd of those observations were physical threats of harm and violence. Bail took this particular study and calculated that if you identify as a moderate, or slightly conservative/liberal, you are 40% more likely to report an experience of online harassment over those who identify as extremely liberal or conservative. Social media amplifies the voice of extremists and trolls, giving them an outsized appearance of influence in American society and politics, and also empowering them to ruthlessly harass and attack the moderate majority and intimidate people into silence. But not only do moderates experience attacks from extremists and trolls, moderates also largely feel as though they are caught in a crossfire between two sides of a political spectrum who believe the other side is more extreme than they actually are. According to the American National Election Study I mentioned earlier, only 3% of the American populace identifies as extremely liberal and extremely conservative - a total of 6% of the population. And yet, according to a different survey, if you asked the average Republican what they thought of the Democratic party, 55% think the average Democrat is “extremely liberal”, and 35% of Democrats think the average Republican is “extremely conservative”. How can this possibly be true - how can 6% of the population self-identify as being extremely liberal or conservative but the average Republican or Democrat believe everyone opposite them is extreme by default? The answer is due to a phenomenon known as “false polarization”. Think back to the ending of Bail’s thesis statement for the book [quote]: “The social media prism fuels status-seeking extremists, mutes moderates who think there is little to be gained by discussing politics on social media, and leaves most of us with profound misgivings about those on the other side, and even the scope of polarization itself.” [Endquote] This latter clause is what Bail refers to as “false polarization” - the belief that other people are more extreme in their beliefs than they actually are, and that the current state of polarization is far more dire than it actually is. And this is something that impacts the entire political spectrum, because everyone on the political spectrum interacts with social media in some way, even if it’s avoiding social media due to beliefs formed by false polarization itself! The average Republican thinks the average Democrat is more extremely liberal than there are actual liberal extremists. The average Democrat thinks the average Republican is more extremely conservative than there are actual conservative extremists. And the moderates in the middle believe that both sides have lost their minds and that there are very few people like them who do not tow the party line completely for either party. And just so we are clear - the engine fueling this false polarization is social media itself, regardless of the platform you use. As Bail says, “There is even more evidence that people who use social media tend to develop more inaccurate perceptions of the beliefs and behaviors of those in the other party. Communications scholar Matthew Barnidge polled a representative sample of Americans about their social media usage and political views in 2015. He found that people who use social media frequently perceive significantly more political disagreement in their daily lives than those who do not. In her study of political polarization on Facebook, the political scientist Jaime Settle observed a similar phenomenon. She showed people sample Facebook posts on a range of topics and discovered that the participants were far more likely to exaggerate the ideological extremity of people from the other political party than their own party. In a separate analysis, Settle examined how social network structure shapes false polarization. Interestingly, she found that the amount of perceived polarization grows as the social distance between people increases. If people have no direct connections on social media—such as being a friend of another person’s friend—they tend to perceive each other as even more polarized than those who have direct connection.”[9]

3.5: False polarization is an incredibly powerful motivator for moderates to avoid discussing politics (and, I should add, theology and a whole host of other topics) on social media. I freely admit that there are people I know and love in my personal life that I have muted and blocked on social media because, like Sara, I want to preserve my ability to spend time with them in real life - and because I believe that they’re likely too far gone down the rabbit hole for it to be worth my time trying to understand them. But there is another powerful motivation that makes it all the easier for me to avoid discussing politics online - I actually stand to lose much by getting wrapped up in political controversy online. Bail describes that moderates, unlike extremists, have real-world status and significance that they care deeply about, and, also unlike extremists, usually have real-world identities that are far more meaningful and valuable than anything an online identity could ever get them. For me, I am a devout Christian who cares very deeply not only about my faith, but about my witness and reputation for my faith. I am married. My wife works for the state of Texas. I work for a church that I have been attending for nearly ten years and with people I love very dearly. I am working through seminary. I have a wonderful family and amazing friends. I live in a city and community that I love and call my home. These are just a small sampling of my real-world life that give me deep meaning, significance, and value, and comprise many of the key details of my identity and how I see myself - and these are all things that I stand to damage if I get into too much trouble online. If I get into the political fray, I may put unnecessary stumbling blocks for the Gospel or grieve and wound my neighbor for no good reason. My wife’s job for the state explicitly requires her - and, by extension, me - to avoid getting into trouble online. It may genuinely impact the reputation of my church or my relationship with people who attend my church and who I am called to serve - in my past life as a pest control technician, it could’ve cost us customers. It may put an unnecessary and completely avoidable wedge between the family and friends who give me so much life and joy. Given everything that is at stake for me - and given that I have watched and known people who have lost these things because of one Facebook post that got out of hand, or one Tweet that wasn’t sufficiently nuanced enough - why in the world would I throw my two cents in on gun control, or immigration, or Covid, or anything else where I may get torn to shreds?

3.6: Trolls and political extremists often have very little real-world status or significance, which makes their online status and significance as a troll and among other trolls all the more valuable to them since it is the only meaningful form of status they have in the vacuum of significance in their real-world lives. The opposite is true for moderates; moderates often have deep and meaningful real-world identities and do not care about having an online identity or persona. This is the perfect cocktail for moderates to withdraw to their real-world lives and for extremists to fill the gulf of social media and give the appearance that society and both political parties are more extreme than they actually are. As Bail summarizes, “the social media prism makes the other side appear monolithic, unflinching, and unreasonable. While extremists captivate our attention, moderates can seem all but invisible. Moderates disengage from politics on social media for several different reasons. Some do so after they are attacked by extremists. Others are so appalled by the breakdown in civility that they see little point to wading into the fray. Still others disengage because they worry that posting about politics might sacrifice the hard-fought status they’ve achieved in their off-line lives. Challenging extremists can come back to haunt moderates, disrupting their livelihoods, friendships, or relationships with family members they will see every year at Thanksgiving.”[10] And Bail (rightly) believes this problem is going to get worse, and not better. Unless we build active and counter-formational structures where we are able to form respectful and civil mutual understanding with people we disagree with, we can and should expect the social media prism to give us an increasingly distorted image of ourselves, and for our behaviors to be bent according to those distorted identities. The extremists will get more extreme. The moderates will become more and more invisible. Barring an unexpected development in the social media or technological landscape, we can and should expect the problem to get worse, and not better.

4.1: And, like we have been talking about this entire time, this is not an issue of information; what is driving this entire situation is our identity and how social media shapes our identities and the identities of others. While getting Big Tech involved in curtailing misinformation and disinformation is a part of the puzzle, it is not the primary problem and should not be seen as the primary solution. We cannot think or fact-check our way out of our hardwired desire to craft meaningful identities for ourselves based on what we love. But as this episode closes out, I want to leave us with an image that can help us understand the core of what it is that drives all of this, and it’s an image that comes from an unlikely source. Many of us know the name “C.S. Lewis” from the Chronicles of Narnia, or to a lesser extent, Mere Christianity or the Screwtape Letters, but Lewis was a very prolific writer and speaker who secondary catalogue of work - his essays, his public speeches, his letters to friends and colleagues - is just as rich as his more popular works. One idea that shows up in a handful of places, including his space trilogy (did you know Lewis wrote a science fiction trilogy?) and some essays and speeches is this idea of “the inner Ring”, and in my opinion it’s one of the most profound insights Lewis ever had. Andrew Cameron and Brian Rosner summarize Lewis’ “Inner Ring” idea as “our passion to belong to some ‘inner circle’ of people who hover temptingly beyond our reach. When gripped by this passion, to be excluded from these circles drives us slightly mad, and to enter them leaves us smugly exultant. This very person and subjective experience can drive dozens of our daily decisions. C.S. Lewis calls this ‘the quest for the Inner Ring.’”[11] In other words: all of us want to belong to the in-group, and we will do whatever it takes to avoid being excluded and kicked to the out-group. This raises the question though: which in-group are we talking about here? That all depends on what we love, and at our deepest core, who we desire to be and what we desire to be known for.

4.2: Not everyone aspires to the same in-group or “inner Ring”. For some of us, it’s belonging to a particular social circle - a band, a club, a team, the group of guys who get invited to board game night or group of women who go on trips together. For some of us, it’s belonging to a group of people who have attained a particular status or accomplishment - being in a relationship or married, having kids, finishing school with a particular degree (or getting a particular degree from a particular school), working for a particular job or in a particular industry, or being considered an authority or expert in a particular field. For some of us, it’s belonging to the elite of a particular organization or movement - being on the board of a company, a senior leader in a church or ministry, or on the personal invite list for a party hosted by a particular pundit or personality. All of us have a group of people in our lives that we tell ourselves that if we successfully became “one of them” - if you could legitimately speak in terms of “we” when referring to one particular group of people - that we would feel as though we’ve made it, or accomplished something truly important, or that our lives would finally have meaning. All of us also know what it’s like to be excluded from that particular group - to be in orbit but slightly out of reach, to briefly be “in” one moment but “out” the next, to yearn and to fantasize about how much your life would be better if these particular people considered you one of them and to grow despondent when reality sets in that they don’t see you that way. I could go on, but I hope that right now, you know exactly what those “inner rings” are for you, and you know that whether you want to admit it or not, much of what you do is driven by a desire to belong to that one inner ring.

4.3: Now, to make some things clear: inner rings or inner circles are not bad simply because they exist. Nor is it bad that we want to belong to a tightly-knit community of like minded people. Every healthy relationship - whether it’s in a marriage, a family, a community of belief, a hobby, whatever it may be - requires some degree of gatekeeping and exclusion in order for that relationship or community to be healthy. Contrary to what I heard growing up in evangelical youth ministry culture, cliques are not bad in of themselves, and what one person considers a handful of trusted individuals and confidants is what another person considers the good-ol-boys club. The problem, as Lewis identifies it, is not that these things exist in and of themselves: the problem is that “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things”. [12] Our desire to belong to these inner rings, for these particular circles of influence become part of our identity, will drive us to do or believe things that we would otherwise never do, and if we aren’t careful, we will be guided along by this desire to belong from one inner ring to the next for our whole lives without ever realizing it. As Lewis says, “My main purpose … is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it - this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, great, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing - the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an ‘inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in - one way or another you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man.” [13] What if all the fighting, the posturing, the signaling, and the positioning of social media isn’t because social media is the marketplace of ideas, but because social media is one giant arena for people to compete for the various inner rings of culture and society - and what if trolls and the communities they form is an example of an inner ring at work on a public scale?

4.4: Recall the story of Ed earlier in this episode, the widower living in a motel in Nebraska. Remember how he bragged about having thousands of followers on Twitter and how some of those followers were big-name conservative leaders? What is the essence of Ed’s boast here? I’d posit that Ed is describing that he has made it into the Inner Ring that he had been chasing - that he has attained the status of being “one of them” for a group of people who gives him the significance he is seeking. Of course, it turns out that Ed doesn’t actually have thousands of followers and is followed by copycat accounts, but for Ed, that doesn’t matter; it’s his mistaken belief that he belongs that gives him an identity that matters to him. And what if this isn’t true for just Ed, but also true for other trolls and extremists like him? I’m going to recall three quotes from earlier in the episode from Bail and link them together. The first one is this: Even if the fame extremists generate has little significance beyond small groups of other outcasts, the research my colleagues and I conducted suggests that social media give extremists a sense of purpose, community, and—most importantly—self-worth.[14] The second one is this: “Though it may seem that social media extremists are most concerned with taking down the other side through superior argumentation—ideally laced with wry humor or sarcasm—my research suggests that these attacks also serve a ritual function that pushes extremists closer together.[15]” The third one is this: the further people become committed to radical views, the more difficult these commitments become to undo, and the more people come to rely on the status and support system that cults create.[16] What if Bail is describing an Inner Ring at work? What if trolling is the fruit of what Lewis describes when he says “passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things”? And if Bail and Lewis are describing the same problem, what if the solution is similar?

4.5: Lewis argues that the only way to avoid being driven by the passion to always belong to an Inner Ring is to recognize this passion and desire and actively choose to resist it and fight against it - and that those who are the most susceptible to being led away by this passion and destroyed by it are the ones who are not aware that they have this passion at all. This is a quote from Breaking the Social Media Prism that I have been waiting until this moment to bring into the discussion, not only because it’s a relatively simple quote but because it’s going to be something that we look at heavily in the next episode as we get to Bail’s proposed solutions, and that quote is simply this: The social media prism exerts its most profound influence when people are not aware that it exists. I’m going to quote that again: the social media prism exerts its most profound influence when people are not aware that it exists. For Lewis, those who are unaware of their desire to belong to the inner ring will suffer the most from being swept away by this desire to do whatever it takes to belong to whatever inner ring we desire to belong to. For Bail, those who are unaware of the social media prism and how it distorts and bends our identities will suffer the most from having their identities be bent and their behaviors be distorted to conform to distorted identities. For Lewis, we must actively recognize this passion if we are to resist it; for Bail, we must actively recognize these effects if we are to correct for them. If we are driven not by information, but by identity; if our identity is determined not primarily by what we think, but by what we love; if we love not the things we think we love, but love belonging and acceptance from others who have the identity we want to have, then the starting point for combatting political extremism and online trolling is the same starting point for talking with someone who is being consumed by the desire to belong to an inner ring, who is compromising their beliefs and behaviors to fit in with their dream social circle, who is throwing away his family for the sake of a title or career milestone, who is making every choice around making sure those she looks up smile in approval, who desperately wants to be considered a true believer or patriot by the patriots and true believers, and any other way our quest for the inner ring meets the social media prism. The starting point for all of this is acknowledging that we do not love what we think we love, and that what we actually love may be the death of us, and that we need to recognize these false loves so we can reorient those loves to something else, and on the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we will look at Bail’s ideas for fixing the social media prism - and how the Gospel offers an even better solution.

[1] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 56). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 59). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 58). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 63). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 62). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[6] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 65). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[7] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 65-66). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 66-67). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 76-77). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[10] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 82-83). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[11] Cameron, Andrew B.J. & Rosner, Brian S. The Trials of Theology (p. 76). Christian Focus Publications.

[12] Lewis, C.S. “The Inner Ring” in Essay Collection, ed. Lesley Walmsley (p.319). London, HarperCollins, 2000.

[13] Lewis, C.S. “The Inner Ring” in Essay Collection, ed. Lesley Walmsley (p.318). London, HarperCollins, 2000.

[14] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 66-67). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[15] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 62). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[16] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 65-66). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

(The following is the unedited manuscript for Part 2 of my commentary on Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”, which released on December 6th, 2021. Breaking the Digital Spell is available wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube (embedded below) or you can listen online here.)

1.1: When we last left off on Chris Bail’s Breaking the Social Media Prism, we discussed how focusing on information in trying to understand political extremism, tribalism, and misinformation is the wrong place to begin focusing on. Information is certainly important and a part of the puzzle, but it’s not the driving force behind these behaviors and the present state of our polarization in our society. Instead, Bail argues that there is something deeper driving political extremism and tribalism on social media: our identity. We ended the episode with Bail’s thesis for the book and it’s worth re-stating here again to set the tone for this episode: I will argue that our focus upon Silicon Valley obscures a much more unsettling truth: the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves. We think of platforms like Facebook and Twitter as places where we can seek information or entertain ourselves for a few minutes. But in an era of growing social isolation, social media platforms have become one of the most important tools we use to understand ourselves—and each other. We are addicted to social media not because it provides us with flashy eye candy or endless distractions, but because it helps us do something we humans are hardwired to do: present different versions of ourselves, observe what other people think of them, and revise our identities accordingly. But instead of a giant mirror that we can use to see our entire society, social media is more like a prism that refracts our identities—leaving us with a distorted understanding of each other, and ourselves.[1] Bail is concerned with approaching social media and political polarization from the perspective of the everyday people who use it, and not from the narrative of ex-Silicon Valley technologists and entrepreneurs who helped design the very technology and platforms that are now supposedly the sources of the problem. Based on Bail’s complex and in-depth studies with individuals in several studies, Bail is convinced that the driving force behind social media polarization is a question of identity, not information, and I am convinced that the theological angle here - one that Bail likely doesn’t share or endorse - is that we are not primarily “thinking things” or “brains on a stick”, as James KA Smith says, but instead we are driven by what we love, and not only do we not love what we think we love, we will do whatever it takes to get whatever it is that truly drives our habits and our behavior. God did not create us with our minds being the “mission control” of our entire being, but as embodied beings with hearts, minds, and bodies that are complexly united together to form an identity greater than the sum of these individual parts. What we love is driven by our identity, and our identity is more than just what we think or believe - it’s what we want at the deepest parts of ourselves.

1.2: To recap the experiment that set this all off, Bail and his team of researchers from Duke University conducted a study seeking to understand what drives the adoption of politically polarized beliefs and behaviors on social media, and to understand what role “echo chambers” play in that process. Common cultural wisdom suggests that people who get more polarized or radicalized in their political beliefs are caught in self-reinforcing echo chambers of uniform perspectives and opinions with little diversity or pushback, and that if people were to just step outside their echo chambers to get “the other side”, that it would hopefully result in people adopting more moderate views and behaviors. However, the exact opposite happened - when the participants in Bail’s study were exposed to “the other side”, it reinforced their pre-existing political beliefs, and the more involved they were on social media, the greater the hardening effect that it had. This effect was observed for both Republican and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, men and women, and held true across racial, geographical, and many other lines of data as well. “Stepping outside the echo chamber” did not result in people becoming more moderate in their views - it drove them to adopt stronger versions of their pre-existing political leanings.

2.1: Bail contends that social media’s worst effects are not in the presence of abundant misinformation and disinformation (though there is plenty of that to be found and that is a problem worth addressing). Instead, Bail believes the biggest source of social media’s worst effects are found in how it distorts our understanding of ourselves, and our understanding of each other. But in the quote you heard a few minutes ago, I actually ended the thesis statement early - there’s more to what Bail has to say: The social media prism fuels status-seeking extremists, mutes moderates who think there is little to be gained by discussing politics on social media, and leaves most of us with profound misgivings about those on the other side, and even the scope of polarization itself.[2] The distorting effects of social media does not simply just distort our view of one another - it distorts our understanding of just how much distortion is going on at all! The consequences of these distortions are far from minor, either - these threaten not just the peace and purity of the church, but threaten the civic stability of American society as well.

2.2: Initially I had planned to cover chapters 4-6 of Breaking the Social Media Prism for this episode, but I am going to split that section of the book into two episodes because I think it’s worth discussing how social media distorts our image and the effects of that distortion separately. A couple months ago, I gave a presentation on Bail’s book to the staff of the church I work at, doing a very condensed version of the material I wrote in my review of the book for FaithTech. One of the questions that popped up was whether or not Bail’s research - specifically, the distorting effects of the social media prism - applied to anything else besides politics. Do the distorting effects of social media apply to “motherhood Instagram”, or “Reformed Twitter”, or “plastic model kit Reddit”, or any of the countless other subgroups among Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube or any other social media platform? While I want to caveat that not all Internet subgroups are created equal and that each platform may distort different things in different ways, Bail’s research does generally apply to social media usage wholesale, and not just to politics. Put another way: it’s not possible to not use social media and not have your identity and the identities of others distorted in some way, because the source of these distortions are not based on the content of social media, but the mediums themselves.

2.3.1: In the first season of this podcast, I looked at how changes in technology in media lead us to change what we value because mediums are not value neutral. To reiterate Neil Postman, “A technology is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” How a medium asks us to use it and engage with it reveals what that medium values, and we come to value what those mediums value the more we use it. As a society uses a shared medium, society comes to value what that particular medium values, and to have expectations and desires based on the expectations and desires of a dominant shared medium. Television, for example, values what Postman described as “discourse via images”, and a society “discipled” (so-to-speak) by television also came to value “discourse via images”. While this is an episode for another time, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that the long arc of social media bends towards video and that Tik Tok is rapidly ascending to the point Facebook (I refuse to call the company “Meta”) is desperately trying to pivot that direction as well. Tiktok and YouTube are extensions of television; everything that television values, Tiktok and YouTube value as well. Truth, an accurate or comprehensive portrayal of reality, is not something a medium has to value. Television values entertainment and production value; if something is true, that’s simply a bonus, not a prerequisite. All mediums, even the printed word and books, are guilty of this to a degree, but some are certainly more guilty of this than others. All social mediums value content and engagement above all else; whether or not that content or engagement is true or not is a bonus, not a prerequisite. In short, distorting reality is a feature of social media, not a bug.

2.3.2: But much of conversation surrounding what exactly is “distorted” on social media and how to fix that distortion has been centered around the content of social media, specifically misinformation and disinformation. Like I talked about in the last episode, while misinformation and disinformation are things that absolutely need to be addressed in their own right, to focus specifically on information or “content” assumes that the human person is fundamentally a “thinking thing”, or a “brain-on-a-stick”, or that the “mission control” of the mind has received the wrong information and has now veered off course as a result. Lost in this discussion is the question of whether or not these mediums, by their very design, are driven towards distortion regardless of the truthfulness of it’s content. Also lost in the discussion - and hopefully will get some traction with Bail’s work in his book - is the question of whether or not our minds and our intellect are the most serious things being distorted here. As Bail argues, the most severe impact of social media’s distorting effects are not upon our intellects, but upon our identities - how we view ourselves and how we view others. As Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith has argued, we are not driven by what we think - we are driven by what we love, and what we love comes to shape our identity. If our identity is being distorted by social media, our loves are being distorted as well.

2.4: My point in bringing this up at all is to say that I agree with Bail that focusing on misinformation as the primary cause of polarization and tribalism is not enough; we are driven by our identities, which is much deeper and more comprehensive than simply what we think or believe. But, while Bail focuses on political identity in his book, I actually think that his insight into social media as a “prism” that distorts and bends our identity extends to much more than just our political identity or affiliation - it can apply to essentially anything. So for the rest of this episode, I want to focus on the two main ways that social media functions as a “prism” and how this applies to American politics, but also to American evangelicalism as well: after all, this is a podcast about how technology and media change the way we think about God and the way we love our neighbor.

3.1: There are two primary distorting effects to talk about: distorting our identities, and bending our identities. Now, that may sound like two different ways of saying the same thing, but I’ll make that distinction between the two clear here shortly. Let’s start with “distorting” our identities. Bail contends that much of the root cause of polarization and tribalism stems from two factors: isolation, and our tendency to misread our social environments. The first one is relatively easy to grasp: when we live in isolation from one another, a relational distance between us naturally grows, and from that distance can often come misunderstanding, confusion, or other responses as we seek to “fill in” the gulf of relational information that we are missing. In the beginning of chapter 4 of the book, Bail tells the story of a social psychologist named Muzafer Sherif [MU-za-fer SHER-eiyf] and two experiments he conduced in the 70s involving some young boys at a summer camp. Sherif took a group of campers, who had never met each other, and assigned each of them an arbitrary “team” that they would belong to, thinking that by merely giving them a collective group identity, and “us” versus “them” mindset would arise and the two groups would begin to act with hostility towards each other. The first time he tried this experiment, it failed. But the second time he tried the experiment, it was a rousing success - as Bail describes it, the resulting carnage was eerily reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. What was the difference between the two experiments? In the first experiment, the boys were grouped into two different identities, but the two groups shared the same physical space. In the second experiment, the boys were grouped into two different identities, but kept the two groups physically isolated from one another. The only times the two groups saw each other where when it was mealtime and when the camp organizers brought them together to play team games - and it didn’t take long for the group dynamic during team games to show up in the dining hall either.

3.2: In the vacuum of relational isolation, something had to fill that space, and in the case of these groups of boys, Bail notes that in isolation, their manufactured identity took on a life of it’s own as it filled that relational void. In the second experiment, one group of boys was named the “Eagles” and the other was named the “Rattlers” - entirely arbitrary, entirely meaningless, entirely interchangeable identities. And yet, in isolation, both groups of boys came to see these completely vapid identities as something that gave them a very deep meaning and significance, not only for how they saw themselves, but for how they understood the “other” group. The ensuing in-group/out-group dynamic didn’t need to be based on a philosophically robust or ethically rigorous system in order for it to become valuable and important enough for the two groups to see the other group as a threat to their existence and well being - even though, as the first experiment demonstrated, the boys were prone to harmonious cooperation when they weren’t separated from one another. The implications should be apparent here: if this antagonism and hostility could emerge among a group of boys at a summer camp with a silly arbitrary group identity, how much more antagonism and hostility could arise between two political parties who are becoming further and further isolated and walled off from engaging with one another? As political scientist Liliana Mason remarks (as quoted by Bail): perhaps we should not be so surprised that political parties—armed with sophisticated campaigns, media professionals, and long periods of time to coordinate their activities—can create such deep-seated animosity between Republicans and Democrats if similar animosity can be created so easily with completely arbitrary identities such as Eagles and Rattlers. And if these same political parties are so effective at inflaming our passions, perhaps we should not be surprised that their power seems to increase when we find ourselves trapped within echo chambers—not unlike summer campers on opposite sides of a lake in rural Oklahoma.[4] Now, just to be clear, I am not saying that American politics are as shallow as being called an “Eagle” or a “Rattler” at a summer camp. Obviously, there is more to being a Republican or Democrat than there is being named after an arbitrary animal in a sociology experiment. But, if a collective identity and isolation was enough for two groups of boys to grow unreasonably hostile to each other without being based on any ideology or conviction whatsoever, what will collective identity and isolation result for two groups who are based on political ideologies and convictions? Unlike the “Eagles” and the “Rattlers”, there are actually things at stake at the issues Republicans and Democrats differ on - how big will the fire burn when the gasoline of isolation and group identity is poured on top of it?

3.3: There are entire episodes that could be done on the reality of isolation and how it is deeply connected to many of the problems we see in society today. Even before the pandemic occurred, American culture was becoming increasingly “buffered” through the presence of screens and mediating technology getting in the way of our ability to interact in person with one another, especially with those who are different for us. One of the most critical things our society is going to need to do - if it’s going to have any chance of reversing the trajectory we are on - is to to learn how to have face-to-face dialogue with people that we disagree with. But, at the same time, we shouldn’t believe that reclaiming conversation and our ability to converse in person with people who are different than us will fix every problem or issue that we have, because we are prone to misreading what people think of us even in interpersonal contexts. According to Charles Horton Cooley, we develop our concept of self by watching how other people react to the different versions of ourselves that we present in social settings. This idea recasts identity not as a jersey we wear, but as the outcome of a complex process of social experimentation. We constantly present different versions of ourselves, observe which ones elicit positive reactions from others, and proceed accordingly.[5] The problem, though, is that we are not always very good at evaluating what people actually thing about us, and if we aren’t careful, we can get locked into behaviors and mindsets that become self-fulfilling prophecies based on what we think other people think about us - even if we have absolutely nothing to go on to justify those perceptions. And I’m just describing how this problem plays out in interpersonal communication - naturally, when something as disembodied as social media enters the picture, the problem compounds even more. Not only do we have even less information to go on - we lack body language, tone, and other interpersonal communication markers, for example - we have the ability to construct a self-representation of ourself that is carefully manicured and precise (on a good day). This quote is lengthy but I think it’s necessary to quote in full: “In addition to giving us more control over our presentation of self, social media also allow us to monitor large parts of our social environment with unprecedented efficiency. Our news feeds—which provide frequent updates from everyone we follow—are not simply a convenient way of getting information about issues that we care about. They also enable us to make social comparisons with unprecedented scale and speed. A team of psychologists led by Erin Vogel studied how frequently people make social comparisons on and off social media. The researchers found that people who use Facebook engage in far more frequent social comparisons than those who do not. In related research, the psychologist Claire Midgley conducted a series of studies in which she observed people using Facebook. Midgley also tracked the frequency of social comparisons people make, as well as who they compare themselves to and what effect this has on their self-esteem. She found that social media users tend to compare themselves to people who are more socially distant from themselves and also those who have higher status. After people make such upward comparisons, Midgley discovered, most people experience decreased self-esteem.”[6] But what if decreased self-esteem wasn’t the only thing people experienced? What if those comparisons were based around political identity, and instead of decreased self esteem, the result was an increase in misunderstanding about the people who are different than us, and different in ways that are bad or even dangerous?

3.4: I had mentioned earlier that the scope of this discussion would include more than just politics, and I think this is a good point to apply these insights to the current state of American Christianity, specifically American Protestantism. Simply put, if group identity and isolation are two ingredients necessary to having a distorted understanding of yourself and those around you, then it’s not hard to see how much of the fragmentation and in-fighting of American Protestantism is fueled by secondary or tertiary group identities that are relatively walled off from active dialogue and relationships with one another. Just to put all the cards on the table: I consider myself both politically right-of-center (if all my various stances were to be aggregated and averaged into one general location) and theologically Reformed, specifically of the Calvinist tradition of the 16th century. I will be the first to admit that few corners of American Protestantism are more unhealthy than current Reformed culture, especially as conveyed through social media - just over the past several years, I’ve had to distance myself from individuals that I used to align with theologically or looked up to as a role model because their character and conduct has descended into polarized tribalistic madness. But in that, I need to give a pretty heavy caveat - my understanding of that unhealthy culture is a distorted understanding of that culture. I am only judging what I see because of the comparisons I make of others through social media; in fact, in my smaller and more personal offline Reformed contexts, my evaluation is quite a bit different (and significantly more positive). This isn’t to say that my evaluation that some teachers, influencers, or institutions are dangerous isn’t correct - it’s to say that my understanding of myself as someone who confesses Reformed theology in the classic Calvinist sense is likely going to be skewered heavily in a context of hundreds of other people who claim to confess Reformed theology, but my perception of what they actually believe and how they behave offline is heavily incomplete. Now, if I can’t reliably perceive my own status and identity among the theological tradition I identify in, how much more so can I not reliably perceive my own status and identity among the myriad of other theological traditions of American Protestantism? How “liberal” am I compared to branches of Protestantism that are defined largely by committed to conservative political convictions, even if I disagree with many of the features of current conservative Protestantism without identifying as being a liberal myself? How “conservative” (or worse) am I compared to liberal and progressive branches of Protestantism? How “complementarian” or “egalitarian” am I actually when neither side accurately conveys my theological position and I draw from insights found on both sides? How “woke” am I actually simply because I believe that systemic institutional racism exists and that racial division remains a significant problem in American Protestantism? If all I have to go by are the comparisons I make of myself to others on social media, I am going to conclude that hardly anyone else is like me, and that I am relatively alone and isolated in what I believe compared to what I perceive others around me actually believe. My inability to understand myself and my inability to understand myself relative to others creates a vicious feedback loop of increasing perceived alienation and separation from those that I think are radically different than I am - but who in reality may not be as different from me as social media leads me to think they are. Could it be that much of the infighting among American Protestants today are based on an artificially generated misunderstanding of what we actually believe beyond the labels that provide convenient shorthand for us to avoid having to do the work to get to know people that may see things different than we do?

4.1: This is where the second distorting effect of social media enters in: social media does not simply distort our identities, it bends our behaviors towards the distortions of those identities. At the core of our identities is a desire for significance and status - we want to build our understanding of ourselves around things that matter to us. If we highly value marriage, we will desire not just simply to be married, but to have the best marriages possible. If we highly value our jobs or professions, we will gladly work ourselves to the bone to be able to say that we are the best at what we do. If we highly value the success of our children - whether in academics, sports, or some other metric of success - we will orient our entire lives around making sure one particular aspect of our child’s life is as successful as possible. But even deeper than that - if we desire to belong to a group of people that embody something that we value and prize, and if we desire the approval and acceptance of that group of people, we will adopt whatever behavior is necessary for that group of people to consider us “one of them”, even if that is based on a distorted understanding of what that particular group actually believes or desires of it’s adherents. In short, if we want those we respect and revere to consider us “one of them” , we will often do whatever it takes to get their approval, even if it requires beliefs or behaviors that we would never otherwise hold on our own.

4.2: Bail’s description of social media as a “prism”, where our identities are distorted and bent, is more than simply a funhouse mirror at a carnival. Take, for example, a funhouse mirror that gives you giant, outsized legs - you walk up to it and behold, suddenly you have the swolest and thickest legs of any human on planet Earth. It’s amusing for a bit, but you walk away exactly the same way that you came in, knowing that your legs aren’t any larger than they were when you walked into a room. But, as Bail said in the thesis statement for this book, social media is not a giant prism that we can use to see society as a whole. Instead, social media does something more to us beyond giving us a potentially amusing distortion of ourselves - it actually changes the way we behave towards one another. Social media is more than just simply a funhouse mirror; with a funhouse mirror, you observe that you have massive legs, but walk away with the normal sense of how to walk that you’ve had for your whole life. With social media, you observe that you have massive legs, and then you walk away from the mirror convicted that you actually have massive legs and need to walk as though these are how your legs actually look and need to operate - with giant, sweeping steps that are foreign and unnatural to how you’ve perceived yourself up until then. Saying that social media “distorts” and “bends” our identities could be seen as two ways of saying the same thing, but Bail suggests (and I agree) that the distortion of social media changes our perception of ourselves and others, and then bends our identities to conform or respond to those distortions that we perceive. It’s not simply a question of knowledge or belief - social media fundamentally changes our behavior, and it changes our behavior to correspond to the identity that we desire to have based on the identities we perceive of others - identities that are likely very distorted and incomplete.

4.3: If I perceive that those that are the opposite of me politically not just believe different things that I do, but are actively working against my safety and wellbeing (and the safety and wellbeing of my loved ones), that is not simply going to change how I perceive the “other” group, but how I respond to them as well. To be clear: this isn’t to say that there isn’t a kernel of truth in some of these reactions. In the ordinary course of American politics (and politics in general), there will be winners and losers who gain and lose advantage and privilege, especially in a democratic republic like America. Sometimes those wins and loses are insignificant and made to be a bigger deal than they are; sometimes those wins and loses are legitimate and severe. I am not trying to flatten out every single political issue into being of one equal measure or value, because I certainly do not believe that is true. My general point is that if my default operating position is to assume that the other side relative to where I am at has the worst possible intentions and motivations against me, I should assume the worst possible intentions and motivations against them and, assuming they’ll stop at nothing to achieve their goal of harming me and those I care about, I need to respond with a similar degree of intensity as well. Furthermore, if I believe that my side is “righteous” - that God, or science, or the people whose opinion I value most approves of my belief and my conduct - then it’s not simply a matter of survival, but one of moral duty, to do whatever I can to make sure that the Rattlers or the Eagles, or the Republicans or Democrats, or the complementarians or the egalitarians, or the woke or the anti-CRT, never gain an inch of territory anywhere, ever.

4.4: But compounding this problem even further is the fact that not only does social media bend us towards the direction of the distortion, but that the distortion doesn’t amplify the presence and the voice of the ordinary and everyday people of a particular group, but the loudest individuals of that particular group and the most extreme views within that particular group. The bend in our behavior is towards the direction of more extreme views and more extreme behavior, which is exactly what Bail and his research team concluded in their studies and what we focused on in the previous episode. Exposing people to “the other side” of a viewpoint did not result in more moderate beliefs and behaviors, but more extreme beliefs and behaviors. And when the leaders of a group of people move in those extreme directions, it takes people with them who lead that group or model that identity that gives them status they value. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this has happened to both the Republican and Democratic party over the past six years, with the Republican party moving in whatever direction Donald Trump goes and the Democratic party doubling down on it’s progressive wing on the party, even as it continues to cost them in elections. If being a Republican or a Democrat is the “biblical” thing to do, or the morally right thing to do, you will move in whatever direction the party goes, even if it takes you to places you may not want to go.

5.1: I had mentioned at the onset that I was going to take what was going to be one episode and split it into two parts, because I want to give an entire episode to the consequences of how social media distorts our politics and the implications it has for us, because the consequences are not minor or insignificant. I am going to end this episode on an incomplete point, but not without offering some encouragement for what I’ve covered in this episode. If social media distorts our identities and bends our behavior, is it possible to correct those distortions and our behavior? Yes, there is. Social media may not be a giant mirror that we can use to see ourselves relative to society, but there does exist a mirror that is able to show us who we truly are and give a correct understanding of ourselves relative to the world: the word of God. As James 1:22-25 reads, But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. In the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we receive an identity that is greater than any identity we could have in this life. We receive the identity of being adopted into the family of God, chosen, loved, justified, sanctified, and one day glorified. In this identity, our goal is not to become the perfect conservative or liberal, father or mother, husband or wife, or to make any other subset of who I am the sum total of my being: in this new identity, the goal is to become like Christ, and in becoming like Christ, I will desire what Christ desires and behave as Christ behaves. Through the word of God, the Spirit corrects our identities and our understanding of ourselves and supernaturally empowers us to live in accordance with this new identity we have in being conformed to Jesus Christ. Even though the church, and Christians today, are rampantly plagued by these distorting and bending effects of social media, the fact remains that the church is uniquely positioned and empowered to offer something that is divinely powerful and able to help those caught in the whirlwind of the social media prism - even people in it’s own pews. The church does not simply have to “take it” when it comes to social media’s distortions on ourselves and society; we have something that is able to directly confront this situation in a meaningful way. But what exactly are we facing here? On the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we will examine the consequences of the social media prism on society, and how we can respond to the two most significant side effects of these distortions.

[1] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 10-11). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 10). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 44). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 49-50). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 51). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

(The following is the unedited manuscript for Part 1 of my commentary on Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”, which released on November 1st, 2021. Breaking the Digital Spell is available wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube, or you can listen online here.)

1.1: On October 3rd, writer and author David French published “A Whiff of Civil War in the Air” on his weekly column, The Dispatch. French is an outstanding writer and, as usual, this piece was no different; in my opinion, he is perhaps the single best conservative thinker out there right now. What made this piece different from his usual pieces is that this piece was much darker than normal; as the title suggests, French expresses genuine concern about the possibility of increasing political violence in America, potentially even civil war. What caught my attention was the reason why French is so concerned: as the subtitle of his piece makes clear, misinformation and malice are driving the nation apart. Listen to the first few paragraphs of his piece: On Thursday the University of Virginia released polling results that should shock exactly no one who closely follows American politics and culture. A majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agree that it’s “time to split the country.” Why would they even contemplate taking such a drastic step? Well, the poll provides the answers, and they’re not surprising. Competing partisans loathe each other and view the opposition as an existential threat. This also isn’t new. It’s been tracked in poll after poll for year after year. This one found that a “strong majority” of Trump supporters falsely believe there is no real difference between Democrats and socialists. A majority of Biden voters falsely see no real difference between Republicans and fascists. What this poll tracked better than many others is that the mutual loathing is based more on emotion than policy. In fact, the poll found that majorities of Trump voters expressed support for most elements of the Biden infrastructure and reconciliation plan. Even the least popular plank (supporting unions by banning state “right to work” laws) garnered 42 percent support from those who voted for Trump. Yet broad consensus on the most important legislation now pending in Washington didn’t stop 80 percent of Biden voters and 84 percent of Trump voters from viewing the opposing party as a “clear and present threat to American democracy[1].”

1.2: Although he never mentions the name of the book in his piece, French’s comment (and the polling results) perfectly reinforces the premise of Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing”. Bail published this book in April of this year and having read it upon it’s release and studied it for these past several months, I am convinced that this book represents a paradigm shift in the way we understand social media and respond to social media’s polarizing effects on society, and for the next several episodes of this podcast I am going to be working through this book and interacting with Bail’s claims, ideas, and research. I am convinced that not only is this book a paradigm shift in how we view social media in general, I also believe the paradigm shift articulated here is one that the church is uniquely positioned to respond to in productive and beneficial ways. In this episode we are going to cover chapters 1-3 of the book. As we go through these three episodes, if any of this interests you, my hope is that you’ll go out and buy this book and read it yourself. I do not want my commentary here to be a replacement for you supporting Bail through purchasing his book and through comprehending his arguments and research for yourself.

1.3: Now, I need to get one thing out of the way up front: Bail, to my knowledge, is not a Christian, nor is this book a “Christian” book. In these next three episodes I am going to try to delineate, to the best of my ability, where Bail’s thoughts end and my translation of them to Christian contexts begins, but I want to acknowledge up front that he may not agree or endorse my conclusions or commentary here in these three episodes. That being said, despite the fact that this isn’t a “Christian” book, I am convinced that this is one of the most important books Christians could read right now, not just this year but over the next several years. The reason I esteem this book so highly is because, bluntly put, I think what Bail writes about in this book is true. I think his research has yielded insight into the nature of social media and social media’s impact on society that Christians should take seriously because, if it is true, it ultimately has it’s origin in God, the author of truth. I find John Calvin’s position on Christians benefitting from non-Christian ideas and thinkers quite liberating: Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself. What then? Shall we deny that the truth shone upon the ancient jurists who established civic order and discipline with such great equity? Shall we say that the philosophers were blind in their fine observation and artful description of nature? Shall we say that those men were devoid of understanding who conceived the art of disputation and taught us to speak reasonably? Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit? What shall we say of all the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen? No, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without great admiration. We marvel at them because we are compelled to recognize how pre-eminent they are. But shall we count anything praiseworthy or noble without recognizing at the same time that it comes from God? Let us be ashamed of such ingratitude, into which not even the pagan poets fell, for they confessed that the gods had invented philosophy, laws, and all useful arts. Those men whom Scripture calls “natural men” were, indeed, sharp and penetrating in their investigation of inferior things. Let us, accordingly, learn by their example how many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good.[2] While I am glad to see that Christians are writing more on this topic and the general awareness of this topic has gone up, I have started to get a little concerned that Christian publishing on this topic has started to run stale and begun repeating itself. Most of the breakthroughs in thinking and writing have come from secular sources, often who have the skillsets and expertise necessary to make those breakthroughs possible. Even if we can’t contribute substantially to this topic, Christians ought to gladly welcome, adopt, and promote new research and new insight into this question and translate it into our own contexts; which is exactly what I hope to do here.

2.1: Which, at this point, let’s dive in to the book itself. Bail opens up his book with the story of a man named Dave, one of the many individuals he interviewed for his work and one of the many stories Bail will tell in the book. Dave’s political beliefs are all over the political spectrum, but being generally conservative and living in a liberal part of the country, Dave dislikes talking about politics offline because he knows it likely won’t persuade his liberal friends and family members. On social media, however, Dave looks entirely different - instead of being reluctant to talk to people opposite of him politically, getting into arguments with liberals and Democrats is all he does, sometimes spending entire evenings doing so. Dave regularly calls out liberals for only having “one side of the story”, but Dave’s information intake consists almost exclusively of conservative sources, and more right-leaning conservative sources as that. Based on this, cultural sense would suggest that Dave is stuck in an “echo chamber” At this point I think the vast majority of people are aware of this idea: essentially, an echo chamber is a closed circle where the only opinions and perspectives you hear are ones that confirm, reinforce, or validate your existing beliefs. A person who is stuck in an echo chamber is not interested in other viewpoints, and the only time they’ll tolerate them is if they’re straw men you can knock down. Because everything you hear already validates or reinforces what you already believe, there is little incentive to think critically about what you believe because from your point of view, everyone whose opinion truly matters already agrees with you. As Bail writes, “the problem, the story goes, is that our ability to choose what we want to see traps us inside echo chambers that create a kind of myopia. The more we are exposed to information from our side, the more we think our system of beliefs is just, rational, and truthful. As we get pulled deeper into networks that include only like-minded people, we begin to lose perspective. We fail to recognize that there are two sides to every story, or we begin listening to different stories altogether. Echo chambers have their most pernicious effect, common wisdom suggests, when people like Dave are unaware of them: when people think that they are doing research about an issue, but they are actually just listening to what they want to hear. When we encounter people from the other side, their views can therefore seem irrational, self-serving, or—perhaps most troubling—untrue. If we could only step outside our echo chambers, many people argue, political polarization would plummet.”[3]

2.2: It’s hard to overstate how much sway the “echo chamber” idea has in our culture. As Bail details, this idea existed long before social media came into existence, but rapidly gained acceptance and urgency in the late 00s-early 10s with the ascendancy of the social media and the Internet’s advancement through developments in smartphones. We all have likely heard at some point that if we don’t do something about the “echo chamber” problem that it will lead to the fragmentation of our society into clustered information silos, and that it’s up to social media companies to change their platforms and their algorithms to mitigate this threat. But Bail contends that, while the echo chamber story seems to make a lot of sense, that there’s actually something else going on here, and that while focusing on “breaking our echo chambers” seems like the right thing to do, it may actually come back to bite us.

2.3: This is the point where Breaking the Social Media Prism begins to diverge from the vast majority of books about technology and social media. Bail, who is a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, is concerned with the kind of increasing political polarization in our country and how social media is related to this polarization, but from a sociological angle, not a tech angle. Bail, together with colleagues from Duke University from a wide range of disciplines, founded The Polarization Lab, which is doing some exciting experimental work on social media and with social media companies to better understand how people are influenced by misinformation on social media. In fact, on the Polarization Lab website, you can actually use some of these tools yourself, at least if you have a Twitter account - there is a link to the website in the show notes and I really encourage you to check it out and play around with it when you can. Bail writes that “This work has led me to question the conventional wisdom about social media echo chambers, but it has also inspired me to ask much deeper questions. Why does everyone seem so extreme on social media? Why do people like Dave Kelly spend hours arguing with strangers, even when they don’t think it will change anyone’s mind? Is using social media a temporary addiction that we can shake—like smoking—or is it fundamentally reshaping who we are and what we think of each other? No amount of data science wizardry can answer these questions. Instead, I wanted to see social media through the eyes of the people who use it each day. This is why our lab spent hundreds of hours interviewing people like Dave Kelly and carefully reconstructing their daily lives on- and off-line. And it’s why I’m going to tell you the story of a recently bereaved extremist who lives in a motel where he wakes up and falls asleep watching Fox News—and a moderate Democrat who is terrified about school shootings but worries that posting his views on social media might cost him his job.”[4] I hope you can begin to get a glimpse of why I speak so highly of this book - this is a perspective on social media that has not been substantially studied up until this point. This is also a book that is driven by stories of everyday people, stories that may resonate with you because you may know and relate to the people Bail interviews in your own life. In my review of the book for the FaithTech Institute, I wrote that “for a book with a significant amount of research and work behind it, Breaking the Social Media Prism is far more down to earth than one would expect it to be”,[5] and that’s because a lot of the heavy lifting here comes through the stories of ordinary people. This is a book that anyone can pick up and very quickly relate to, which is usually not the case for books like this.

2.4: With this perspective in mind, what happens when people are encouraged to break their echo chambers and to consider “the other side”? If the echo chamber idea is correct, what you would expect to happen is that someone who is caught in an echo chamber will move away from being entrenched in their views and become perhaps more introspective, think more critically, and become more moderate both in belief and attitude. To test this theory, Bail and his team set up a pretty neat experiment involving an unlikely tool: Twitter bots. I am not going to get into the nitty gritty details of the experiment or how exactly it worked (though it’s definitely fascinating), but the short version is that each member of the study was asked to follow a set of Twitter bots that retweeted political content opposite their political leaning; If they were conservative or Republican, they saw content from liberals and Democrats, and vice versa. The content these bots retweeted were from a wide spectrum of political thought, including moderate/left-or-right-of-center voices, extremist voices, and voices in between. After a month, Bail and his team re-assessed the political leanings of those in the study using the same questionnaire they gave out at the beginning of the study. Now, if the echo-chamber framework is correct, what you would expect to happen (and what Bail and his team expected to happen) is that after stepping outside of their political echo chamber for a month to get “the other side”, people would become more moderate or thoughtful about their beliefs and become less solidified in their political views than before the study began. But that’s not what happened: in fact, the exact opposite happened. As Bail and his team concludes, “Exposing people to views of the other side did not make participants more moderate. If anything, it reinforced their preexisting views.[6]”

2.5: There is a chart in the book that summarizes and displays the impact of the study on the political view of it’s participants, and obviously this being an audio podcast I can’t show visibly display that chart here, but I can at least try to describe what it shows. Essentially, for both Republican and Democrats, there is a correlation between the amount of time they saw/interacted with the bots of Bail’s experiments and the impact it had on their political beliefs. While Bail notes that the overall effects were more pronounced on conservatives than on liberals, he says that this could’ve been an issue with the study itself and the number of people involved. However, for both conservatives and liberals, there is a very clear effect that showed that the more they paid attention to the bots retweeting content opposite their political views, the more they became entrenched in their existing political views. For those that were simply asked to follow the bots, or followed the bots but didn’t pay too close attention to them, this effect was still present, but to a significantly smaller degree. The deeper they were involved in the study, the more their views changed. And this held across different subgroups of the study as well, and soon other institutions replicated the results as well. As Bail says: “Our findings were also very consistent across different subgroups in the study. It did not seem to matter whether people were very devoted members of their political party or moderates who were mostly indifferent to politics. People reacted similarly to following our bots regardless of whether they were in strong or weak echo chambers before joining the experiment. The results were the same for people from different racial groups too. It did not matter if people were male or female, were old or young, lived in a city or a rural area—or any of the more than one hundred other variables we analyzed. We also carefully scrutinized the bots to determine if they had retweeted too many extreme messages. They hadn’t. We also weren’t the only ones to discover that exposing people to opposing views on social media could make them double down in their preexisting views. Two years after our study, an independent group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale replicated our study on a different population and found the same puzzling effect.[7]”

2.6 Bail and his team eventually decide to run the experiment again, but with some critical changes. Instead of increasing the number of participants in the study, they decreased it, and instead of a questionnaire, they conducted in-depth interviews with the individuals before, during, and after the study was complete. The timing of this new study couldn’t have been better either - the study ran during the several major news events of 2018, including the nomination of Brett Kavenaugh to the Supreme Court, Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump, the California Camp Fire, and more. As this study continued, some of these interviews went on for two and a half hours long - Bail and his team got to really know the people they worked with, and they were able to eventually able to learn not just about their political beliefs, but about how they came to those beliefs, and the correlation between their off-line lives and their on-live lives. Eventually, what Bail concluded is that focusing on information in trying to understand political polarization is the wrong thing to focus on. We need to focus on something else - but before I get to that what thing is, I need to take a brief digression and address an invisible elephant in the room that has quietly shaped this entire conversation so far.

3.1: Early on in the book, Bail sets himself and his work apart from some of the more prevailing narratives about social media and political polarization in our day. If you’ve seen documentaries like “The Great Hack” or “The Social Dilemma”, you may be familiar with it: essentially, these massive tech and media companies have figured out how to hack into human psychology to make ourselves addicted to their platforms or services, and because we are addicted to them, we are susceptible to influence from them by bad or foreign actors. While I personally think rather highly of Tristan Harris and Aza Reskin and the work of the Center for Humane Technology (their podcast, “Your Undivided Attention”, is really good), there is no denying that a lot of the discourse surrounding social media’s impact on society right now is coming from people, like Tristan Harris or former Facebook employee Sean Parker, who helped design the very technology that now addicts us and are now warning us about the Frankenstein’s monster they and other released on the world. And here’s the thing - there is plenty of truth in this. This framework of social media, known as the “addictive design” framework, does have a lot of merit and truth to it - the reality that Facebook and Google and Apple have employed design choices intentionally designed to tap into our biological responses to pleasure are very well documented. The problem, as Bail rightly contends, is that even though there is merit to this view, it ends up explaining too much. As Bail says, “Studying social media from the perspective of the people who use it is also important because they are conspicuously absent from public debates debates about social media and political tribalism. Instead, our current conversation is dominated by a handful of tech entrepreneurs and software engineers who helped build our platforms. These Silicon Valley apostates now claim the technology they created wields unprecedented influence over human psychology—technology that not only traps us within echo chambers, but also influences what we buy, think, or even feel. . . This narrative is very seductive for anyone searching for a scapegoat for our current situation, but is it really true? Though social media companies are by no means blameless for our current situation, the evidence that people are simple dupes of political microtargeting, foreign influence campaigns, or content recommendation algorithms is surprisingly thin.[8]”

3.2: Bail and I both agree that the addictive design framework cannot explain everything that is going on here, despite the fact the addictive design framework has a reached a rare pop-culture status akin to “smoking is bad for you and those around you”. But where I think he and I may part ways is on what this framework gets wrong. Bail contends that this view of social media is deficient from a sociological perspective (and I don’t think he’s wrong on that); I contend that this view is deficient on a theological perspective. All of this talk about information and content reinforces a view of humanity that reduces us to being what Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith calls “a brain on a stick.” Essentially, the center of our being is our mind and our thoughts, which govern the choices we make and is the most important center for understanding ourselves and each other. Whenever we talk about content consumption or information being the driving force behind social media, we are saying that what drives us to use social media at all is because we are primarily driven by what we think. But is this actually true? Is this actually how God created us? What if we aren’t driven by information, or content, or about what we think - but about what we love?

3.3: In his outstanding book “You Are What You Love”, James K.A. Smith proposes the idea that we are not creatures driven primarily by our thoughts. Instead, as God has created us as embodied beings with a body, mind, and heart that are complexly intertwined together, we are driven by what we were created to do with this body, mind, and heart: we were created to love, and we are driven by the things that we love. And the shocking twist here is that sometimes we don’t truly and actually love the things that we think we love - if we want to look at what we truly love, we look at our habits and our disciplines, and the direction these habits and disciplines take us. As he says early on in the book, “While paging through an issue of a noted Christian magazine, I was struck by a full color advertisement for a Bible verse memory program. At the center of the ad was a man’s face, and emblazoned across his forehead was a startling claim: ‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK.’ That’s a very explicit way to state what many of us implicitly assume. In ways that are more ‘modern’ than biblical, we have been taught to assume that human beings are fundamentally thinking things… we view our bodies as (at best!) extraneous, temporary vehicles for trucking around our souls or “minds”, which is where all the real action takes place. In other words, we imagine human beings as giant bobblehead dolls: with humungous heads and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies. It’s the mind that we picture as “mission control” of the human person; it’s thinking that defines who we are.[9]

3.4: The vast majority of the discourse surrounding political misinformation, polarization, and extremism fundamentally operates with this view of the human person. Because the “mission control” of the mind has received the wrong information, people are sucked into conspiracy theories or become radicalized into holding extreme or unreasonable political positions, which translates both into choices in the polling booth and also in everyday life and interaction with one another. Our media ecology further reinforces the view that our minds are the most important things - from our phones and the Internet as a whole to the design of apps, services, and platforms, we have been empowered to believe and act as though our minds are of outsized importance in relevance to our bodies. With the amount of information, data, and content that is thrown to us in our ordinary use of our phones alone, is it no wonder that we would focus so much on information given how much information our minds are now able to process with the tools in our hands?

3.5: But, the view that our minds are what drives our decision making is wrong. It is not how God created us. God has created us with the ability to think, but we are not primarily things that think. Instead, our thoughts, our bodies, and our emotions are intimately interconnected to each other in ways that we cannot untangle, and the combined output of what we think, how we move, and what we feel translates into what we love - and what we love, we want, and we will do anything it takes to get it. That’s not just James K.A. Smith’s opinion - that seems to be Christ’s opinion as well: “Jesus doesn’t encounter Matthew and John - or you and me - and ask, “What do you know?” He doesn’t even ask, “What do you believe?” He asks, “What do you want? This is the most incisive, piercing question Jesus can ask of us precisely because we are what we want. Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Our wants reverberate from our heart, the epicenter of the human person. Thus Scripture counsels, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:32).[10]

3.6: When it comes to dealing with tribalism, polarization, or extremism - of not just politics, but even of theology as well - asking “what do you know?” or “what do you believe?” is the wrong question to start on. Something much deeper is driving us, and often times what drives our behavior is not what we think it is. But if the driving force of tribalism, polarization, or extremism isn’t information, or theory, or content, or arguments, or statistics, or data, or research, then what drives these things? Bail answers this question in the thesis of his book: I will argue that our focus upon Silicon Valley obscures a much more unsettling truth: the root source of political tribalism on social media lies deep inside ourselves. We think of platforms like Facebook and Twitter as places where we can seek information or entertain ourselves for a few minutes. But in an era of growing social isolation, social media platforms have become one of the most important tools we use to understand ourselves—and each other. We are addicted to social media not because it provides us with flashy eye candy or endless distractions, but because it helps us do something we humans are hardwired to do: present different versions of ourselves, observe what other people think of them, and revise our identities accordingly. But instead of a giant mirror that we can use to see our entire society, social media is more like a prism that refracts our identities—leaving us with a distorted understanding of each other, and ourselves.[11] Focusing on information is the wrong place to start. We need to focus on identity - the sum total of what we think, feel, do, and most importantly, what we love.

3.7: I hope you can connect some dots on why I speak so highly of this book and why I have spent so much time with the book this year, not only in writing a full length review of the book for a Christian organization but also why I am doing a run of episodes on this book. If Bail’s research is correct, and his conclusions about his research are correct, then not only is Breaking the Social Media Prism a paradigm shift in the way we understand social media, it’s a paradigm shift for the church in how it responds to social media. In other frameworks for understanding social media - whether it be the addictive design framework of the “echo chamber” framework that Bail compellingly argues against - the church has little in the way of pushing against those tides. For every theologically and biblically faithful blog post, podcast, or YouTube video published in a week, there are thousands published every day full of lies and distortions about Scripture, our history, and our faith. The scale of the Internet simple does not allow for pastors, church leaders, or writers to possibly respond to every piece of media or individual that contests against the Christian faith. For every addictive app or device that is deleted or curtailed, three more are waiting to take it’s place, and the ease in which it takes to set up boundaries or limitations (either through a device or outside of device) makes it just as easy to break those boundaries and limitations and be thrown back into the throes of addiction. Self discipline and sound teaching are important, but at best these aspects of the church can only construct a wall to avoid drowning amid a culture that is downing in addiction and misinformation. But if the driving force behind social media is identity and our desire to understand our identity against the identity of others, then suddenly the church goes from being able to be defensive at best to having the best reason to be as proactive as possible, because the remedy to this situation is found in the thing only the church can uniquely provide to the world - a new identity, a supernatural identity, the identity of being made into a new creation in Jesus Christ through the Gospel.

[1] French, David. “A Whiff of Civil War in the Air”. https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/a-whiff-of-civil-war-in-the-air

[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion & 2, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 1, The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 273–275.

[3] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (pp. 3-4). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 9). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] https://medium.com/faithtech/forget-the-echo-chamber-social-media-is-a-prism-82bee912f2f8

[6] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 20). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[7] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 21). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[8] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 10). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Smith, James K.A. You Are What You Love (p. 3). Brazos Press.

[10] Smith, James K.A. You Are What You Love (p. 1-2). Brazos Press.

[11] Bail, Christopher. Breaking the Social Media Prism (p. 10-11). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

(This is the episode manuscript for the standalone episode “On Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon”. Breaking the Digital Spell is available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen down below or online here!)

0: If you saw the length of this episode and freaked out, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This is far and away the longest and most exhausting episode I’ve ever done and, realistically, will likely ever do - this has not been the norm nor will it be the norm going forward! To help you out with this episode, I have divided this episode into parts, and depending on where or how you’re listening to this you may be able to see those divisions, but if not, I’ve listed them in the show notes as well. While I haven’t done this for the prior two standalone episodes released so far, I will also make this manuscript available on my website, which you can find the link for in the show notes as well. Whether you listen to this episode all at once, or in chunks, I hope you enjoy “Esther, Daniel, and Exile in Digital Babylon"

Part One: The Top of the Rabbit Hole

1.1: When Covid-19 exploded in the middle of March, society quickly began moving or relocating as much to the Internet space as they could. Within a month, the then-relatively unknown video conference company Zoom would become our lifeline for meetings, family visits, Bible studies, and more, propping the company to become a multi-generational household name. Restaurants and other businesses that didn’t have an online order infrastructure of some type scrambled to adopt one to keep their workers away from the public as much as possible. Perhaps the biggest transition was the sudden and rapid shift of the entire US education system to online formats, from elementary school all the way to graduate school and anything else in between. For the vast majority of people, especially for those in grade school, this shift was painful and confusing, and we are just now beginning to assess the damage and the loss brought by this necessary and critical, but thoroughly inadequate, educational shift. If you were in college, chances were your adoption of online education went a little more smoothly, especially if you were already an online student in part. If your education was fully online - like mine was - this transition was likely not even a bump in the road, and while others were struggling to adapt to this new learning methodology and context, online students were already prepared and able to keep moving forward.

1.2: For the past two years I have been a full-time student at Reformed Theological Seminary’s Global campus, pursuing a Masters of Arts in Biblical Studies. Before that, I was at West Texas A&M University pursuing the back half of my undergrad, and with the exception of one class, I was entirely online then as well. My thoughts on online education are mixed at best, and once I graduate from seminary I plan on doing an episode or two about online education, but thankfully, when Covid hit, it didn’t disrupt my studies at all, and I was able to keep moving forward without missing a beat. My time at RTS has been absolutely wonderful; they’ve been doing online seminary for quite a while now and their infrastructure and processes are excellent. I’ve yet to have a “bad” class or a class that I haven’t enjoyed or found beneficial in some way, but like every degree plan, there are some classes that impact you more than others and whose lessons will stay with you longer than others. I recently just completed one of those classes, and it was a class I wasn’t expecting to be one of my favorite seminary classes to date: Joshua-Esther, taught by Dr. Mark Futato. I cannot describe how much I loved this class, and how much I was surprised by how much I loved this class. Studying Old Testament history was one of the most exciting and riveting areas of study I’ve had in some time and, unlike most other classes I’ve taken so far, I was sad when it was over. But one of the biggest reasons why I loved that class so much because of a single lecture - a lecture that flipped my world upside down and created a paradigm shift for me in multiple ways, a lecture I even showed to a bunch of my friends because I thought they needed to see it too! This lecture was on the Hebrew Old Testament Canon, and what follows in this episode is how one particular facet of the Hebrew canon led me to connect some dots about a major event in Old Testament history and how that can be a helpful framework for thinking about Christian engagement in the digital world - and if that sounds like a massive and radical leap, I understand. It’s going to take a bit before I can get there, but once I lay the groundwork, I hope the connection will seem more plausible and helpful than not.

1.3: For the majority of this section of the podcast, I need to give credit to Dr. Futato for teaching me this material and for supplying the material that you’re about to hear. I need to give him credit up front because if I didn’t, I would be referencing him nearly every other sentence, and that would be annoying. I also need to make clear that this section is purely a Cliffnotes version of this topic and that there is quite a bit that I am intentionally leaving out - if you’re interested in this subject, I’ll recommend a couple of books in the show notes for you to check out. But let’s start with the idea of “canon” - what does that mean? Simply put, the “canon” is “the books of the Bible recognized by the church as inspired and authoritative for faith and life"(1). All three major branches of Christianity - Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox - share the same NT canon - that is, they contain the same list of books. For the Old Testament, the Catholic and Orthodox church recognize more books in the OT than Protestants do, and in the Protestant Reformation the Protestant canon reverted back to the list of books found in the original Jewish canon of the Old Testament. 

1.4: The Jewish Old Testament, or properly known as the Tanak, contains the same books that we would find in our Old Testaments today. But, if you picked up a Tanak, you’d notice that they books aren’t listed in the same order as our modern English Bibles are - at least, not all the way. The Tanak starts off with the Pentateuch just as our Bibles do, so you start with Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The next major division of the Tanak is the Prophets, and within the Prophets are two sub-divisions known as the “former Prophets” and the “latter Prophets”. The Former Prophets include Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings (1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings are treated as one text for the most part), and the Latter Prophets includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then the “Book of the Twelve” minor prophets. Anyone who has ever tried to memorize the Old Testament knows that trying to memorize the Minor Prophets is far and away the biggest memorization headache, and while the Jewish canon treats each book as it’s own text, it collectively refers to them as “the Book of the Twelve” - imagine how much easier your Bible Drill memorization routine would’ve been if you could’ve just said “the Book of the Twelve” and be done with it. Finally, the last major division of the Tanak are the Writings, and this is the division most unlike our English Bibles. The Writings includes Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah (treated as one text), and Chronicles. This is where our sense get thrown off because we tend to think of books like Ruth, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles as being historical books, and Daniel is often considered a prophet, so why is he not with the rest of the Prophets?

1.5: This is where a comparison to our English Bibles will hopefully help us to begin making sense of the differences. Our English Old Testaments are not divided according to Law/Prophets/Writings, but according to Law/History/Poetry/Prophets - there are four divisions instead of three. I’m not going to go through the list of the books of the Old Testament a second time around but if you’ll notice that the English divisions of Law/History/Poetry/Prophets are based on a particular kind of division; a division of genre. All of the books relative to the establishment of the Mosaic Covenant and the Law remain grouped together in the Pentateuch, just as it is in the Tanak, but the similarities end there: in the English Old Testament, all the History books are grouped together, all the Poetry books are grouped together, and all the Prophetic texts are grouped together. From there, you can subdivide those divisions by chronology and authorship, but the primary rationale for the division is based on genre. The history behind how the English canon changed to what it is today is pretty fascinating, but not really relevant here: the main thing you need to know is that the English canon puts a different emphasis on the books than the emphasis they originally had. So if the emphasis of the English divisions of the OT was to emphasize genre, what is the emphasis of the divisions and ordering of the Tanak? This is where things get awesome, and I genuinely mean that. Simply put, the emphasis of the divisions of the Tanak is based not on genre or literary features, but on the purpose of each set of books relative to the story of the entire Old Testament. In the Pentateuch, of course, you have the Law. In the Prophets, you have the account of Israel’s descent into apostasy and exile in the former prophets, and you have the theological explanation for why Israel went into exile in the latter prophets. In the Writings, you have all of the books pertaining to how to live as the people of God wherever you are at, whether before the exile, during the exile, and how to hope in the promised Messiah after the exile. The emphasis on the divisions of the Tanak is to highlight the “forest” of the story and flow of the Old Testament. Dr. Futato, in his lecture, gives this outstanding hypothetical scenario where you get on an elevator ride with someone and they ask you “what is the point of the Old Testament?” If you opened up to the table of contents of your English Bible and tried to explain the point of the Old Testament based on how the books are divided and arranged, you’d have a pretty difficult time! But, with the Jewish order in the Tanak, you would be able to point to the Law, Prophets, and Writings and show the big picture and flow of the Old Testament story. As Jewish scholar Marvin Sweeney describes it, the Law show the ideal established, the Prophets show the ideal unrealized as the people of God are sent into exile, and the Writings show the ideal restored as the people of God return from exile and wait for the coming Messiah. Thus, within the divisions of the Tanak, the books are grouped together not according to authorship or genre, but according to purpose, because the divisions of the Tanak are according to a particular purpose in telling the story of the Old Testament.

1.6: Let’s use the book of Chronicles as an example. Who among us actually enjoys reading 1-2 Chronicles? When it comes to reading through the Old Testament, the books of Leviticus and the first half or so of 1 Chronicles are often the two hardest books to get through. In our English Bibles, 1-2 Chronicles comes after 1-2 Kings, and based on that placement, 1-2 Chronicles feels like a redundant re-telling of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings that we don’t necessarily need. Yet in the Tanak, Chronicles is the very last book of the Old Testament - why in the world is it placed there? Well, if the primary emphasis of the Tanak is on the overarching story of the Old Testament, then the order of the books themselves must be more concerned with prioritizing it’s role within the canon more than its genre or other literary features. For Chronicles, the role is twofold: the book of Chronicles presents an idealized re-telling of the history of the kingdom of Israel as a nation experiencing the grace of God in being restored from exile, and it sets the stage for the coming Messiah who will build the true house of the Lord and bring about the restoration of all things(2). Chronicles essentially closes out the Old Testament by speaking a eulogy, or “good word”, over everything that has happened - just like a eulogy at a funeral, the audience doesn’t need to be reminded of all the terrible things someone may have done or experienced in their life, and that information is in their minds even as the preacher or loved one explains all the good things about the deceased. The original audience of Chronicles didn’t need to be reminded of all the bad things that led up to their exile and return - they knew full well the history of the sins of their people, and yet as the people of God, Chronicles speaks a eulogy of grace, forgiveness, and confirmation that God has not abandoned his people, and that God will fulfill all his promises to his people to bring a Messiah through the lineage of David to build a house and kingdom that will never be destroyed. I don’t know about you, but that is not what I think about when I think about the book of Chronicles - or at least, that’s not how I thought about before hearing this! The placement of Chronicles shapes the interpretation of Chronicles, because the primary emphasis of where Chronicles is placed is because of the purpose Chronicles is supposed to serve in telling the story of the Old Testament.

1.7: This principle also extends to groups of books as well, especially in the Writings. Greg Goswell, in a JETS article covering the Hebrew canon and it’s purposes and themes, notes that "where a biblical book is placed relative to other books influences a reader’s view of the book and so influences interpretation. The reader naturally assumes that the placement of books in close physical proximity implies that they are in some way related in meaning (3).” For the English canon, that relation is that books grouped together share the same genre, but what about books that are grouped together for a similar purpose? Let’s use Proverbs and Ruth as an example - in the English canon, both books belong to fundamentally different genres, but in the Tanak, Ruth immediately follows Proverbs. What is the purpose of putting these two books together? To start, let’s look at the book of Proverbs - what is in the last chapter of the book of Proverbs? The Proverbs 31 woman, or the “woman of noble character”. What if I told you that the only other place in the Old Testament where the phrase “woman of noble character” or “excellent wife” or however your Bible translate it is found in the book of Ruth - and what if I told you that the reason why Ruth appears immediately after Proverbs is to provide a real flesh-and-blood example of what the Proverbs 31 woman looked like? Of course, there is more to the book of Ruth itself than it’s connection to Proverbs 31, but it’s placement in the Jewish canon is primarily based on the surrounding material - the chapter immediately preceding the book of Ruth details what a “woman of noble character” looks like, and then Ruth enters the scene to demonstrate what the Triune God and Author of the Sacred and Holy Scriptures considers a “woman of noble character” to be. In our English Bibles, Ruth appears in between Judges and Samuel as a chronological bridge between “the time of the judges” at the beginning of Ruth and the birth of David, Ruth’s eventual descendant; essentially, Ruth is the prequel or backstory to the coming of David. In the Jewish canon, Ruth is the woman of noble virtue, an example for how the people of God are to live.

1.8: Proverbs and Ruth aren’t the only example of this - at last, we finally arrive at Esther and Daniel. To refresh your memory, after Proverbs and Ruth comes Song of Song, Ecclesiastes, Lamentation, Esther, and Daniel, then the OT closes out with Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles. Dr. Futato hypothesizes there are two divisions within the Writings with Psalms serving as an introduction to both of them: Job through Ecclesiastes are about life in the land pre-exile, and Lamentation through Chronicles is about life in the land after the exile. Within the post-exilic half of the division, you have three books - Lamentation, Esther, and Daniel - covering life during the exile, and then the latter two books - Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles - covering life immediately after the exile, with Ezra-Nehemiah detailing the history of rebuilding the city of Jerusalem and the temple and Chronicles written, as previously mentioned, as a “eulogy” of sorts over the entire Old Testament as the people wait for God to fulfill his promise for a Messiah. The laments comprising Lamentations take place from the point of view of someone who was not taken off into captivity after Jerusalem was destroyed - these are the divinely inspired laments of the people who either stayed behind (or more accurately, were left behind) in a condition of ruin, devastation, and destruction so unimaginable that lament is the only appropriate response to the horrors one would’ve witnessed. But for those who were taken off into exile - by the Babylonians and later ruled by the Persians - what would be the appropriate response to living in exile? The examples of Esther and Daniel in their respective books. Just as Ruth is placed next to Proverbs as being (among other things) an example of the Proverbs 31 woman, Esther and Daniel are placed after Lamentations and before Ezra-Nehemiah as examples of what faithful obedience to God in exile looks like, with Daniel as a reference for men and Esther as a reference for women. Esther and Daniel both were courageous individuals who found themselves forcibly uprooted and planted in a context they did not choose to be in and rather than running away and hunkering down in their exilic communities, they worked with wisdom, graciousness, and humility within pagan and wicked systems to glorify God, and God worked through their faithfulness to secure provision and blessing for his people, especially in Esther’s context, where her courageous obedience and boldness saved the Jewish people from certain annihilation. Esther and Daniel’s purpose in the Jewish canon of the Old Testament is to highlight what obedience to God in exile looked like, and provide examples of how the people of God today might live in exile wherever they’re scattered in the world today. When you think about Esther and Daniel in the context of your English Bibles, is that what you think about? Or do you think about Daniel in terms of his status as a prophet, or Esther as being simply the story of a princess who saves her people? What if they’re more than that?

1.9: Now, at this point, I think I need to make a couple things clear before we move on further here, because I have thrown out quite a bit here so far. First and most importantly, more theologically astute listeners will likely be frustrated (and understandably so) that I took a very long and awkward detour towards arriving at an idea that Scriptures make pretty clearly, namely the idea that the exile is a prominent framework in both the OT and the NT for understanding how Christians should engage with the world. This is far from a new or novel idea, and there is no shortage of work at the academic and popular level detailing how the exile plays a significant part in shaping Christian ethics, and often those works include plenty of references to Esther and Daniel as being examples and references for Christians today. In fact, I debated delaying this episode a month in order to completely re-write everything you just heard and give a more straightforward introduction to the topic of the exile and how it might relate to us today. Ultimately, I decided against that for several reasons, and the biggest reason being that I want to highlight the value that biblical studies can bring to understanding the world we live in today, especially Old Testament biblical studies. Theological studies are critical and vital to understanding our world and understanding how Christians are called to live in it, but theological studies tend to dominate the landscape in Christian publishing and even more so in current Christian publishing regarding social media engagement. While I don’t think this is intentional at all, the impression one may get is that biblical studies may get too deep into the weeds of the text of Scripture itself to be of any use to us today, and I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I think biblical studies excels at taking lofty or abstract ideas contained in Scripture and grounding them in the lives and experiences of the individuals we read about in Scripture, and can help localize a “big picture” idea like exilic Christian ethics in the lives of actual people who lived in exile and their experiences - in this case, Esther and Daniel. There are limitations to this, of course, but I don’t think those limitations make this an unfruitful or dangerous line of thought and may connect to people in ways that talking about the big-picture idea may not. We may live in the New-Testament church, but as Paul tells us in Romans 15, “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” The Old Testament has plenty to say to us today, and in some surprising ways.

1.10: Now, having said that, I need to make clear that while I think biblical studies is helpful here, not every topic under the biblical studies umbrella is as clear or necessary for the Christian life. Specifically, the topic of the placement of certain books in the Jewish Tanak is an incredibly niche topic and one that is not required to be believed in order to understand the Bible correctly.  I do think the contrast between the two canon orderings, with the English canon ordering’s emphasis on genre and literary features and the Jewish canon ordering’s emphasis on canonical purpose, does lend itself to being able to see this idea more clearly than if I had tried to argue for it just from the text itself. But make no mistake - this is not something that is required to be believed or taught to be a mature Christian who rightly handles the word. I find this subject absolutely fascinating, and in my term paper for that class I argued that teaching the Jewish order of the Old Testament may be a potentially fruitful strategy for helping Christians understand the point and purpose of the Old Testament. At the same time, though, I do want to take Greg Goswell’s warning regarding this topic seriously: In some quarters there is a lack of recognition that the (differing) order of the biblical books is a para-textual phenomenon that cannot be put on the same level as the text itself. Whatever order is adopted as a starting point, it is a reading strategy and must be viewed as such. A prescribed order of reading the biblical books is in effect an interpretation of the text. Sometimes this is lost sight of in the enthusiasm for erecting a theology of the OT based on the Hebrew Scriptures structured as Tanak, with the threefold canonical structure made determinative for OT theology (4). If you’ve ever gone through seminary or have a friend or loved one who has been through seminary and at some point in their studies they get fixated on this obscure idea or teaching or individual and become convinced that this is the lost and missing key to fixing all the problems in the church, you might be hearing the same level of enthusiasm here, and I am fully aware that this topic is, for me, a “seminary lightbulb”, and I need to keep my enthusiasm for this topic in context to my circumstances. The doctrine of the clarity of Scripture is also a helpful guide here as well: the most important truths of Scripture necessary for saving faith in Jesus and obedience to God are the clearest things taught in Scripture, and while secondary and peripheral topics in Scripture are important by virtue of being the inspired words of God, the lack of clarity and increased obscurity or difficulty in understanding those topics should help guard our desire to make these things the primary or principle focus of Scripture, since Scripture clearly doesn’t treat them that way. This topic is, without at doubt, a peripheral topic, and one that countless faithful saints have never heard or thought about and still lived lives of faithful and holy obedience to Christ as elect exiles journeying towards the heavenly city.

Part Two: Introducing Digital Babylon

2.1: Which, at this point, it’s time to start connecting some dots and get into the point of this episode. I think the Old Testament exile and all that goes with it - including Esther and Daniel in the context of the Babylonian and Persian exiles and the writings of the prophet Jeremiah,  can give us a helpful framework or model for thinking about Christian engagement in digital spaces, specifically social media spaces. If Esther and Daniel are given as examples for how to live godly and obedience lives in exile in Babylon and Persia, does their example have anything helpful for those of us who are currently called to exile in Digital Babylon - that is, for those of us forced, to some degree or another, to participate in the oppressive and destructive media ecosystems of social media empires? We are at the point in this social media experiment where most of us have likely attempted to “escape” social media at some point, only to be required by God’s providential circumstance to return to participating in it in some way. “Going off the grid” or living a life of pure “digital minimalism” is a luxury very few people are able to enjoy. Just as Judah could not go back to a time before Babylon showed up on their doorstep and destroyed the city walls and the temple and ended the Israelite theocratic monarchy for all time, we cannot go back to a time before Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, SnapChat, TikTok, and all of these other platforms came into our lives and destroyed the relational and social walls of our society. There may come a point someday in the future where those walls are able to be rebuilt, but in the meantime, what do we do once we are finished weeping by the shores of digital Babylon at the destruction wrecked by social media in our world?

2.2: Obviously, when we are talking about the exile of the people of God in the Old Testament, we are talking about two fundamentally different groups of people: those that were carried off to Babylon, and those that remained in the land after the destruction of Jerusalem. I am waiting until the next section to define and flesh out what I mean by “social media ecosystems” in the next section, but for now, if participation in social media ecosystems is the equivalent of being carted off to Babylon, remaining “off the grid” or living a meaningful life of digital minimalism is the equivalent of remaining in the land - except those two parallels could not be any more different from each other. For context, the fall of Jerusalem did not happen overnight - the first deportation to Babylon came from the siege of Jerusalem in 605 after Egypt was defeated by Babylon in the Battle of Carcimesh, the second deportation was eight years later in 597, and the final one came roughly a decade later in 587 after another Babylonian siege of the city. By the time the third deportation occurred, a good number of the “important” or prominent people of Judah had already been taken into exile - for example, when we read at the beginning of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar came against Jerusalem and besieged it and the Lord gave King Jehoiakim into his hand, we are reading about the first Babylonian deportation, not the final one. In the second deportation, it’s generally believed that Ezekiel and Jehoiakim’s son, King Jehoiachim (not the same person), were taken into exile in that time as well. By the time you get to the final deportation in the destruction of the city, Judah’s population is a fraction of what it once was, and those that are left to remain in the land are the elderly, the poor, the sick - people that the Babylonian empire doesn’t want to take care of, or who wouldn’t survive the journey. What follows for those who remain in the land is powerfully and graphically captured in the book of Lamentations, and it is among the most horrifying and disturbing words breathed out by God in the divine inspiration of his sacred Word. By contrast, those who “remain in the land” with respect to Digital Babylon are often considered blessed and joyful that they are able to enjoy life in the “real world” to a high degree. Those that are able to live “off the grid” are usually able to do so because of strong family and community commitments to stay off the grid, or have the privilege that allows them to outsource certain professional responsibilities and obligations to others that enable them to live to a high degree of digital minimalism, which allows them to make the most of hobbies, traveling, silence and solitude, in-person networking and professional development opportunities, and more. Those of us who are in exile in Digital Babylon often wish we weren’t, and that we were able to enjoy life in the land to its fullest extent. However, this healthy and blissful conception of “life in the land” is the polar opposite of what “life in the land” was like for those not carried off in the Babylonian exile, and I need to make that disconnect clear up front because that is a significant and critical point where this framework or analogy breaks down.

2.3: But even though the “life in the land” imagery does not match the Biblical description of “life in the land” post-exile, I think the description of social media ecosystems as “digital Babylon” actually holds up quite strongly. The historic Assyrian empire had long been a major terror to Israel and considered Israel’s biggest threat, but Assyria would be nothing compared to Babylon. The historic Babylonian empire had a rapid and meteoric rise to power and quickly overshadowed the nation of Assyria and destroyed it; if Assyria was terrifying to the imagination of the average Israelite, how much more so the nation that comes out of nowhere and demolishes Assyria? As an evangelical youth ministry kid in the mid 20s I remember my two wonderful youth ministers trying to navigate the perilous waters of MySpace with us students and how it was such an annoying thorn in their side, but MySpace would be nothing to the Facebook and their rapid and meteoric rise to power that quickly overshadowed MySpace and destroyed it. After a prolonged period of rule and power over, the historic Babylonian empire would eventually be conquered by the Persian empire, just as Facebook enjoyed a prolonged period of rule and power and, while it remains the largest social media ecosystem today (especially if you include Instagram and WhatsApp), the TikTok empire now threatens to conquer everything - or at least, force every one of it’s competitors to play on its own terms. When I talk about social media ecosystems, I am primarily referring to three things: the social media platforms themselves, the companies responsible for designing and controlling those platforms, and the effects those platforms have on our environment. If we were to stretch the analogy to their historical counterparts, the platforms themselves are the land and territory of these empires, the companies are obviously the government and ruling elite of the empires, and the effects of the platforms are the same as the effects of these empires on the environment. In speaking of social media ecosystems, you can speak of a particular individual ecosystem, such as Facebook the platform, Facebook the company, and Facebook’s effects on society, or you could tap into another dimension of Babylon’s portrayal in Scripture and speak of social media ecosystems collectively as one unified force. In the Old Testament, references to Babylon are references either to the nation state of Babylon or its prototype in the tower of Babel. In the New Testament, the nation state of Babylon no longer exists, but the New Testament church uses the historic nation-state of Babylon and its historic oppression, subjugation, and wickedness as a “pattern” or “example” for the global world and it’s oppression and wickedness that will be destroyed in the coming of New Jerusalem. This technical term for this is “typology”, and I really appreciate Michael Lawrence’s description of typology in his book “Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church”: “God not only speaks, he is also the Lord of history. This means that God providentially orders events and individual lives so that they serve to prefigure what is to come. The Scriptures therefore record the lives of real people and events that serve as historical analogies that correspond to future fulfillment.’ [5]. One of the best examples of this is found in the closing address of 1 Peter, where Peter writes in 5:13a that “She who is in Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings…” Peter is using Babylon is a stand-in for the nation of Rome, whose wickedness and oppression of the church in the New Testament is comparable to Babylon’s wickedness and oppression of the people of God in the Old Testament. Later on in Revelation, Babylon will be used to represent not just a single nation, but the entire collective force of the kingdoms of the world under the rule of Satan, the total culmination of the offspring of the serpent whose collective wickedness and oppression of the offspring of the promise will be destroyed once and for all as the total culmination of the offspring of the promise is freed from Babylon’s grip once and for all as they enter New Jerusalem and participate in the resurrection of the dead and the life in the world to come. “Digital Babylon” can refer to both realities and uses of Babylon in Scripture; it can refer to individual social media ecosystems of Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok as the parallel to the individual nation state of Babylon, Assyria, or Egypt, or it can refer to Babylon as the composite and total social media ecosystem whose wickedness and oppression of the world - and yet destined and doomed to destruction. And if this comparison seems absurd or ludicrous, listen to how Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang report Facebook’s own description of themselves in July’s recently published “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination”: “As a private global company, Facebook did not want to engage in geopolitical skirmishes, and it certainly didn’t want to be in the middle of contentious national elections. Facebook was, above all, a business. It was a line of thinking that came directly from Zuckerberg. In Facebook’s earliest days, when their office was still a glorified loft space, “Company over country” was a mantra the CEO repeated to his employees. His earliest speechwriter, Kate Losse, wrote that Zuckerberg felt that his company had more potential to change history than any country - with 1.7 billion users, it was now in reality already larger than any single nation. [6] If Zuckerberg, from the earliest days of Facebook, saw his company as being comparable to a nation - not just in terms of population but in terms of the scale of impact Facebook could have on world history and the kind of geopolitical and national skirmishes they could potentially be dragged into - is it too much of a stretch to identify Babylon as the nation Facebook and it’s rivals embody?

Part Three: Application One - The Reality of Exile

3.1: So, having said all this, let’s get practical. For the rest of this episode, I want to outline three potential applications that I think arise from this framework of seeing social media ecosystems - both individually and collectively - as embodying Digital Babylon, and how the Old Testament exile, including the lives of Esther and Daniel, can give us helpful examples of how Christians can live and navigate their lives within their exile in Digital Babylon. The first application seems a little obvious, but is perhaps the most personal out of all the applications here: just as the Babylonian exile was unavoidable (past a certain point), being sent to exile in Digital Babylon is also unavoidable, which means you shouldn’t blame yourself if you can’t escape it. The seeds of the Babylonian exile can be seen all the way back in the covenant stipulations of Deuteronomy, and after the Lord sends numerous prophets to Israel and Judah and warns them of what might happen to them if they don’t repent, eventually the Lord says that exile to Babylon is no longer avoidable. In fact, in Jeremiah especially, the Lord tells the people of Judah that if you surrender to Babylon and don’t resist them, you’ll actually live and escape with your lives. There came a point in time in the nation’s history where resistance was futile, and it was better to submit to the plans and purposes of the Lord than it was to try to fight back against his appointed destroyer. The parallels for us today are in that we are really past the point where the threat of Digital Babylon is a threat we could potentially avoid if we got our collective act together, not only in society in general but especially in the church as a whole. As I mentioned earlier, we can’t go back to the world that existed prior to this world shaped by the social media ecosystems of Digital Babylon, and in the world that exists now, it is very difficult to leave Digital Babylon completely. Unless you are blessed with the kind of tight knit family or social communities that collectively commit to resist participating in Digital Babylon together, or you’re privileged enough that you have status, connections, influence, or support systems in place to where you personally do not have to participate in Digital Babylon, chances are that you’re likely participating in some corner of the empire. Now, to be clear, not all forms of participation are created “equal”, and there is a very wide spectrum where some types of participation are more justified than others. However, the one thing that’s common on every point of that spectrum - whether you simply maintain a LinkedIn or Facebook account for professional networking or you’re uncontrollably spending hours a day on TikTok or YouTube - is that you can’t fully leave even if you really want to. Whether by necessity or compulsion, you’re stuck in these ecosystems - you’ve been sent to exile in Digital Babylon. And yes, it is true that you do have agency and choice in what you do while your in Digital Babylon, and in many senses, these applications are meant to help you figure out what you do while in Digital Babylon, but unless your circumstances change, participation in Digital Babylon is where the Lord has placed you in his providence - if you’ve tried to leave Digital Babylon completely and get off social media completely but ultimately returned to it after a while, there’s a reason why. Or, if you’re like me and the Lord has blessed you with the wisdom, understanding, and skill necessary to navigate Digital Babylon well and utilize it’s resources for the benefit of the church, leaving Digital Babylon would be direct disobedience to the Lord in fulfilling the calling he has given you. This particular application is the most personal to me because, despite how much I talk negatively about social media and genuinely believe it is a wicked and cancerous blight on our world, I have been a social media manager for a church for five years now - and that’s not a path I chose for myself. As a ministry intern, I was given responsibility over our social media and happened to fall down a rabbit hole where it quickly became apparent that I was good at this, and the majority of my work over these past five years have been in the realm of social media management, and this was a source of confusion and pain for me for a long time. Prior to my internship, I had several years as the head audio engineer at a Christian camp and had a degree in radio and TV production - if I wanted to get into the media industry, I didn’t need to be a ministry intern! I didn’t quite realize this at the time and can only see it now with the benefit of hindsight, but one of the major motivations for season one of this podcast was a desire to escape and run away from exile in Digital Babylon - I had recognized that God had prepared me and equipped me uniquely for this, and I did not want to go there, and I wrote 100,000+ words trying to argue my way out of it. I long for the day when I no longer have to participate in these awful environments, and don’t have to witness firsthand the disgusting debauchery and degrading decadence of Digital Babylon on my world and especially on the church. I long for life in the land, where I don’t feel the addictive pull towards refreshing a feed or have the clarity of mind that comes from a lack of Twitter Brain (not my term) or the grief that comes from watching people I know and love in real life conduct themselves with godless shame online, or the horror of watching people I know who used to be smart, kind, and compassionate be swallowed up in the principalities and powers of misinformation and disinformation. I long to see the destruction of Facebook, whose wickedness we recently learned reaches even more awful and unimaginable heights than previously thought, as the Wall Street Journal recently revealed in their “Facebook Files” expose series. I long for a life where I am able to fully enjoy my Father’s world and all the blessings and wonder it contains with my wife, family, and friends, free from Digital Babylon’s corrosive influence. That day has not yet come, and I suspect that for many people, there is a longing to see that day come in their own lives as well, and yet no matter how much they try to hasten that day, they find themselves being brought back into captivity.

Part Four: Application Two - Engagement in Exile

4.1: The second application builds off the first, and is easily the most comprehensive and multifaceted: biblical engagement in Digital Babylon is not a call to make Babylon into Jerusalem. if exile to Digital Babylon is unavoidable, what do we do? How do we live? For those who were carried off into biblical exile, they only had three options: on one extreme, they could be physically present in Babylon, but isolated and clustered around their own communities and only step outside those communities when absolutely necessary, and on the other extreme, they could seek to assimilate completely into Babylonian culture and society and discard their Jewish identity altogether. Neither of those options - total cultural isolationism or total cultural assimilation - were what the Lord commanded for the exiles. Instead, the Lord commanded a third option: ordinary engagement. Listen to what Jeremiah wrote in his letter to the Babylonian exiles: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” [7]. Notice what God does not call the exiles to do here: God does not call the exiles to do anything spectacular or extraordinary in an attempt to transform the city of Babylon into Jerusalem. Everything the Lord commands here - building houses, planting gardens, getting married and starting families, and prayer - are all ordinary, common, and regular actions and experiences. The Lord calls them not to reform or transform the city, but only to seek its genuine welfare and wellbeing through obedience in ordinary, everyday obedience to God, and God promises to provide for the welfare of his people in their obedience in seeking the city’s welfare. Notice the difference here: the kind of engagement the Lord commands the exiles here is not the same thing as seeking to “transform” the city into something completely different. The bar is significantly lower; every member of the exilic community could participate; there is no pressure that if they don’t try hard enough or work hard enough that they will fail in what God has called them to do. God has not called them to transform Babylon into Jerusalem; he has simply called them to engage in it with their ordinary obedience to him, and for those of us in exile in Digital Babylon, this is our calling as well. 

4.2: I think it’s worth spending some time talking about the idea of “engagement” vs “transformation” because so much of American evangelicalism is steeped in the language and idea of “transformation” and, despite the best of intentions, this idea is ultimately not the best reflection of what God has actually called us to do in Scripture. Yes, it should be said up front that we do see the language of “transformation” in Scripture, such as in Romans 12:2, where we are called to be “transformed by the renewal of your mind.” I am not saying that the idea of “transformation” is not found in Scripture, because it certainly is, but it’s important to see where that the language of “transformation” is and is not applied to: specifically, God has not called Christians to transform their cultures and their societies and make the city of man into the city of God. Now, I know that as soon as I say that, you may be tempted to hear what I am not saying: I am absolutely not saying that Christians shouldn’t try to make their world a better place. In the passage we just read a few minutes ago, Jeremiah told the exiles explicitly to seek the welfare of the city, and it goes without saying that “seeking the welfare of the city” includes confronting injustice, or oppression, or corruption, or any other sinful system that erodes or compromises the holistic and total health of the city, and in both Esther and Daniel we see them both do this. Ordinary, faithful, everyday Christians should be doing those things in the ordinary course of walking in obedience to Christ, who has commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves and consider the interest and well-being of others before our own. The difference between the idea of “engagement” and the idea of “transformation” is that one of those ideas sets the bar for “success” at the level of faithfulness, and the other sets the bar for “success” at the level of outcomes. For engagement, obedience looks like ordinary, everyday faithfulness to steward the gifts and callings God has given you in living holy lives of obedience to Christ. For transformation, obedience looks like everything included in “engagement”, plus successfully completing the task of actually making society a Christian society, with the laws of the land reflecting the laws of Scripture in some way, and where the worship of the Lord and the governance of society are one and the same task. 

4.3: Now you may hear this and think “that sounds awesome, why are you against that?” And truthfully, I’m not. A society that collectively worships the Lord and a government that rules with faithfulness and righteousness sounds wonderful! But here’s the problem: that society has never existed, and it never will exist, no matter how hard we may try to bring it about ourselves. If it were to have successfully existed at any point in history, it would’ve been under the theocratic Israel of the Old Testament, where the Lord, through Moses, built a nation from the ground up with his law as the supreme law of the land, where the worship of the Lord and the governance of society were quite literally one and the same task - and I don’t think I need to go into too much detail of whether or not that actually resulted in a transformed society or not. I think we all know how that actually played out, and it didn’t play out all that well. It doesn’t take much study of church history to see that even on the handful of moments where the church came pretty dang close to transforming a society or culture that those successes did not last very long and often resulted in a corruption much worse than the way things were before it. But while looking at the Old Testament or church history is helpful, probably the definitive place to look would be at Jesus, and his life and his ministry - after all, if our sanctification as Christians means conforming to the image and likeliness of Christ, it would make sense that Jesus would demonstrate the obedience he desires of his disciples. When we examine Christ in the Gospels, which framework best explains both his actions and his impact: in his incarnation and first coming, did Jesus engage the world in his obedience to the Father, or did he transform the world by remaking society? This may sound controversial and provocative, but Jesus Christ did not transform the world in his incarnation and his first coming - because that is what he has promised to do the second time he comes. Jesus Christ, in his ministry, did not seek to make Rome into Israel; in fact, the people repeatedly try to crown him as king to directly spite their Roman oppressors, and Jesus explicitly refuses this! Instead, Jesus fulfilled the ministry given to him by his Father in the context and space he was placed in, and it is his perfect, ordinary obedience to the Father that is the source of our righteousness in the Gospel that now goes out into all creation.  The transformation of society by the church, no matter how sincere or well intentioned it usually is, is not something that Jesus has commanded us to do, because not only is it something that he didn’t do, it’s something that he is going to do better than we could possibly imagine. Our best attempts at transforming society into a Christian society will be fragile, brief, and incomplete at best; when Jesus Christ returns, he isn’t going to just make a marginally better world, he is going to make an entirely new one. As the church has confessed for centuries in the Nicene Creed, we look forward not to the world that we could potentially bring about ourselves if the church worked hard enough, but we look forward to when Jesus Christ comes again with glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom in the life in the world to come will never end.

4.4: When it comes to engaging with Digital Babylon, we need to set some reasonable expectations here, and those expectations are given to us in Scripture. The Babylonian exiles were not called to transform Babylon into the city of God, but to engage their pagan neighbors in a pagan empire through their ordinary lives of obedience to the Lord as his people. With transformation, the emphasis is on the desired outcome you’re working towards; with engagement, the emphasis is on faithfulness, leaving any desired outcome in the hands of God who rewards faithful obedience. And if that sounds like I’m saying that God just wants Christians to live comfortable lives without any risk or challenge, I think you underestimate how difficult faithful and ordinary obedience actually is. Faithful obedience is rarely flashy or exciting. It involves moment to moment decisions to love the Lord and keep his commandments in your everyday rhythms and routines of your life. You won’t be remembered for it, or get credit for, and nobody will write a book about it - but the Lord sees it and is glorified by it. In Michael Horton’s outstanding book “Ordinary”, he tells the story of author and writer Tish Harrison Warren (who would later go on to write a book on this topic as well called “Liturgy of the Ordinary”) and her experiences with her desire to transform the world and how ordinary faithfulness ended up being the harder calling. It’s a lengthy story but I think it’s worth quoting in full: I was nearly 22 years old and had just returned to my college town from a part of Africa that had missed the last three centuries. As I walked to church in my weathered, worn-in Chaco’s, I bumped into our new associate pastor and introduced myself. He smiled warmly and said, “Oh, you. I’ve heard about you. You’re the radical who wants to give your life away for Jesus.” It was meant as a compliment and I took it as one, but it also felt like a lot of pressure because, in a new way, I was torturously uncertain about what being a radical and living for Jesus was supposed to mean for me. Here I was, back in America, needing a job and health insurance, toying with dating this law student intellectual (who wasn’t all that radical), and unsure about how to be faithful to Jesus in an ordinary life. I’m not sure I even knew if that was possible. . . . Now, I’m a thirty-something with two kids living a more or less ordinary life. And what I’m slowly realizing is that, for me, being in the house all day with a baby and a two-year-old is a lot more scary and a lot harder than being in a war-torn African village. What I need courage for is the ordinary, the daily every-dayness of life. Caring for a homeless kid is a lot more thrilling to me than listening well to the people in my home. Giving away clothes and seeking out edgy Christian communities requires less of me than being kind to my husband on an average Wednesday morning or calling my mother back when I don’t feel like it (8)”. Biblical engagement, as opposed to transformation, may seem like settling or taking it easy, but it’s much closer to what Jesus had in mind in the Gospel of Luke when he tells us that whoever would follow him must deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow Jesus wherever he leads.

4.5: The reason why I went on this digression, apart from clearing up some potential misunderstandings at the onset, is because the nitty-gritty details of what it means to engage in Digital Babylon is going to require wisdom and perspective that can very easily be lost in the mire of social media culture. Simply put, engagement in Digital Babylon is not going to be uniform, and it’s going to look different for different people based on their gifts, callings, stations of life, or more. Given the nature of this medium, it can be very easy to pursue higher callings or levels of influence or exposure and baptize that desire in the name of Jesus, when in actuality it’s our narcissistic or vain desire for the approval and spotlight of man that drives this desire. Engaging in Digital Babylon is not shorthand for trying to make a career as an influencer on social media; instead, engaging in Digital Babylon means engaging in social media relative to where God has placed you and what God has allowed you to do. While we can look to Esther and Daniel as God-given examples for how to navigate life in Digital Babylon, we need to acknowledge that Esther and Daniel’s station in the context of exile was unique and not like the vast majority of people who were taken into captivity. While Esther and Daniel both arrived at their positions in power and influence in different ways, both of them would accomplish their most significant and effective work in some of the highest positions they could occupy, Esther as queen of Persia and Daniel as the governor of the providence of Babylon and then later the third most powerful man in the nation. For them, ordinary and faithful obedience and engagement looked differently than it may have looked for the average exile, and for us today, ordinary and faithful obedience and engagement for individuals with large social media followings or who work in the field is going to be different for those whom the Lord has not given either of those things. Not that I think that any of them will be listening to this, but I think it is important for us who don’t work at Facebook or these social media companies to recognize that, just as the exilic community had Daniel and Esther in the highest places of the government, we have brothers and sisters in Christ who work at these companies, because that is where the Lord has placed them. When we criticize these companies, we need to take care to not assign the total weight of the company’s faults to single individuals, especially if they are lower on the totem pole. You can do that to the Board of Directors of the C-Suite, because that’s their job and they’re the ones most responsible for these decisions, but we cannot and should not blame an individual engineer or developer for the whole company’s faults.

4.6: But my goal here is not to speak to how the influencers or industry workers conduct themselves, because I think we can glean instruction and insight from Esther and Daniel that is applicable for everyone in every corner of Digital Babylon. First and foremost, engagement in Digital Babylon requires understanding what Digital Babylon is and how it impacts our lives. In order to engage in social media ecosystems, we first need to understand those ecosystems; we need to be able to interpret them; we need to be able to describe their influence and impact; we need to be able to respond to their effects. This is essentially what media literacy education does, and like I talked about in the previous episode of this podcast and intend to talk much more on in the future, media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship. Teaching media literacy in the church is functionally teaching our people how to live faithfully in Digital Babylon and is a mandatory extension of exilic Christian ethics; media literacy helps us navigate social media ecosystems without getting swallowed up in them and their effects. Understanding Digital Babylon will help us know how and where we can subvert it and where we can participate freely in it - the exilic community was called to engage Babylon and seek the welfare of the city, but obviously this did not include doing everything Babylon ordered them to. There was a time and a place to subvert Babylon, and there was a time to freely participate in Babylon according to the laws of the land. Media literacy shows us where those boundaries are. Second, engagement in Digital Babylon requires criticizing Digital Babylon itself. If you think that I am suggesting that we stop talking about how wicked and awful and evil Facebook and other social media companies are just because we may be called to engage and work in them, you couldn’t be more wrong! As I mentioned earlier, recently the Wall Street Journal published a series of absolutely brutal and damning articles against Facebook based on a recent cache of previously-unavailable internal documents, and when stories like that break, we ought to amplify these stories and educate ourselves and others about how wicked and evil these companies are (and again, we need to keep our criticisms focused on the company and their key leaders and not lay the blame for a company’s faults on any lower level individual). In the Bible, we couldn’t ask for a better example of this than the prophet Daniel himself, who spoke against both Babylon and Persia and foretold their fall and destruction while being one of the most powerful men in the land. And granted, there is a difference between Daniel speaking Spirit-given prophecies and us speaking prophetically today, but we need to dispense with this notion that we cannot criticize the spaces and cultures that we participate in - if anything, our world needs more of that, not less. Participating in social media ecosystems should absolutely include criticizing and condemning what should be criticized and condemned even as we work and engage in these ecosystems. Third, engagement in Digital Babylon requires testifying in Digital Babylon that though we are in Digital Babylon, we are not of Digital Babylon. I am not calling for participation in toxic and destructive social media culture wars; I am calling for testifying to the goodness of God in the Gospel and our love for Christ and his Word in our ordinary use of social media. There may be a time and a place for public debate or discussion; I think that does come with the territory at times. However, there is a difference between debating the Gospel and declaring the Gospel with our words and displaying the Gospel with our lives, and we should strive to declare and display the Gospel first and foremost and debate the Gospel when necessary. It also goes without saying that we should conduct ourselves with holiness out of fear and reverence for the Lord; Christians on social media should be known for their gracious reasonableness and pure conduct towards one another, and the fact that Christians are not known for that is an indictment of Digital Babylon’s influence among Christians today. That’s going to have to be a podcast for another time. Fourth, engaging in Digital Babylon requires circumventing Digital Babylon and engaging Digital Babylon through intentionally and strategically withdrawing from it. The exilic community was not called to withdraw from society and live life in a bunker, but that didn’t mean they didn’t function as a community within a larger society that resisted that larger society in certain ways. Engagement in Digital Babylon requires understanding, criticizing, and testifying in Digital Babylon as a means of understanding how to circumvent it when necessary. Churches and ministries should intentionally build communication structures and systems that do not require a Facebook account, for example, and small groups or Bible studies should intentionally discourage, as much as possible, using phones or screens during meetings or study sessions. Christians should build one another up by expecting and encouraging one another to be present and in-the-moment with one another as much as possible, and to take “digital Sabbaths” or other intentional breaks as much as they are able. Just as the exilic community tried to retain the rhythms and practices of “life in the land” as much as they could while in exile, those in exile in Digital Babylon should try to retain or engage in the rhythms and practices of “life in the land” as much as they are able to as well. Lastly, engaging in Digital Babylon requires praying for our brothers and sisters who are involved in Digital Babylon in some way, whether as high-level users or employees for these companies. One thing that the previously mentioned “Facebook Files” from the Wall Street Journal and Kang and Frenkel’s “An Ugly Truth” do a really good job of highlighting is how often the understanding and awareness of the problems within these social media companies often originate from within the companies themselves, often from rank-and-file engineers or researchers who raise the alarms internally only to have the Zuckerbergs and Sandbergs of the company choose to bury the problem in the name of profitability. Many of these engineers, programmers, and researchers care deeply about the consequences about the work they do and are likely just as dismayed or discouraged as we are when they see their companies implement features or ignore problems based on their work. For those of us not in the tech world, we should pray that our brothers and sisters in Christ who work in these spaces are able to effectively work change within the companies they are at, just as Esther instructed the exilic community to pray for her while she waited for the right opportunity to intervene on their behalf. 

Part Five: Application Three - Providence in Exile

5.1: The third application is true of life as a whole, but often doesn’t get applied to discussions about engaging on social media. That application is simply this: God’s providential care for his people follows wherever he sends them, and promises to bless them in ordinary ways through their ordinary obedience. Now, I know that the word “providence” is a word that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I know that not only are there some really bad definitions of “the providence of God” out there, I also know that there are many people who have been wounded or hurt through the doctrine of providence being taught or applied in callous or insensitive ways. I am not going to give a full and complete outline and defense of the Reformed doctrine of providence here, but if I could just ask as a favor: please do not hear me say things that I am not saying, whatever that may be. If you think that by advocating for the doctrine of providence that I am advocating for belief X or application Y, I ask you give me the benefit of the doubt if I don’t address that particular belief or application here - there is a good chance I may not agree with it! But not only do I believe and take great comfort in the providence of God, I actually think the best place to look for understanding God’s providence is not in the New Testament, but the Old Testament. Yes, some of the strongest doctrinal statements of God’s providence are found in the New Testament, but in the Old Testament we get to see the providence of God in action in its fullest sense - we can talk about the doctrine in abstract, or we can look at the life of Joseph in Genesis and his declaration to the brothers that sold him into slavery that “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Joseph is only able to save the nation of Egypt - and his family - because the Lord, in his providential ordering and through the sinful agency of his brothers, put Joseph in Egypt, which led to Joseph being put in a prison where a king’s official would later tell Pharaoh of Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams, which would put Joseph in charge of preparing Egypt for a famine that would devastate the whole world. We could look at the life of David, and how the Lord raised him up to be king not through supernatural acts, but through guiding five smooth stones to slay a giant, and keeping David and his companions safe from Saul as he hunted them. We can look at Ruth, and how her initial misfortune is reversed and turned to fortune and blessing through circumstance and the providential placement of Boaz. We can look at the life of Esther - “God” is not mentioned once in the entire book of Esther, and yet it is impossible to read the book without seeing the hand of God involved in arranging and orchestrating details that ultimately lead to the protection and deliverance of his people. The amount of “coincidences” and “it just so happened that” instances cannot be chalked up to chance or luck - it just so happens that Esther is chosen to be queen, that Mordecai happens to overhear a plot to assassinate the king, that Esther is in the perfect position to aid the Jews once Haman commanded their destruction, that the King recognizes he never honored Mordecai for saving his life and honors Mordecai over Haman, that Haman builds gallows that he will later be hung with, that the King walks in on Haman appearing to assault Esther in his palace, and that the Jews, through ordinary warfare, totally defeat their enemies. There is no better book in Scripture than Esther that show that how God providentially accomplishes his purposes through the ordinary agency of creation. The relationship to divine sovereignty and human responsibility is a mystery, but as Scripture teaches both, we are to confess both as well even if we do not always understand it fully.

5.2: The Westminster Confession of Faith’s description of the providence of God remains, I think, the best and most helpful description of God’s providence out there. Chapter 5, article 3 reads that “God, in his ordinary providence, makes use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at his pleasure.” God accomplishes his purposes through everyday, ordinary cause and effect, circumstance, or situations, but is powerful enough to work without needing to use ordinary means, work above circumstances or situations, or even accomplish his purposes in direct opposition to the effects of ordinary means. And it’s this little nugget that has captivated my thinking the most recently, because while there is no shortage of understanding of how the providence of God relates to the ordinary life of the believer, there is little (that I am aware of) that asks the question about how the doctrine of providence practically plays out in the context of social media ecosystems. Most of the material available right now is unrestrained technological optimism baptized in the name of evangelism or missions, often equating social media data with the worth and impact of real world evangelistic or missional encounters. That is not at all what I am talking about here - what I am talking about here is something that bypasses the need for “best practices” or being “data driven” in order for it to be worthwhile. If the Lord has providentially placed many of us in Digital Babylon to some degree or another, and the Lord has called us not to transform the world, but to engage the world in ordinary obedience, and if God, through his providence, uses that ordinary engagement to accomplish his purposes, then I think we should not be afraid to engage in Digital Babylon and trust that the Lord will use our obedience as a means to accomplish his purposes in the lives of others. This doesn’t require us to become social media influencers, or engage in sinful, tribalistic, and scorched earth culture wars, but through our ordinary lives understand Digital Babylon and criticize Digital Babylon while testifying to the goodness and grace of God in the midst of Digital Babylon, trusting that the Lord is omniscient over the complex and mysterious systems of Digital Babylon and uses them with perfect knowledge for his purposes.

5.3: With that comes plenty of risk. To get this out of the way up front: the vast majority of Christians who engage in Digital Babylon do so in ways that are sinful, counterproductive, and reap consequences entirely unrelated to the offense of the Gospel and entirely to the offense of their character and conduct. Most Christians who suffer on social media do not suffer, as 1 Peter describes, according to righteousness’ sake, but suffer as a fruit of their sinful and ignorant engagement in Digital Babylon. That being said, not all suffering or opposition is a result of sin or disobedience; it is possible, in fact it is likely, to faithfully engage in Digital Babylon in ways that are wise and yet still bring criticism and condemnation. Sometimes this will come through the ordinary preaching and teaching of the word of the Lord. Sometimes this will come through applying the word of the Lord to cultural or social situations. Sometimes this will come through the prophetic dimension of the ministry of the Word, where the Lord burdens us to speak towards a topic or issue even though we know in advance that people will not listen and our speech, like the speech of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, becomes a means by which God hardens people’s hearts - not because of our sin, but because of their sin. In an age that measures value or worth by pragmatic outcomes or results, faithful and ordinary engagement in Digital Babylon may seem like a waste of time at best or actively counterproductive at worst. But, if God has placed us here in the day and age of Digital Babylon, and commanded this ordinary and faithful engagement while in exile in Digital Babylon, and providentially works through this ordinary engagement in Digital Babylon, our confidence should not be in our tangible or visible results or outcomes, but that God will use our obedience for his glory - even if we can’t always see how or what he is doing.

5.4: Part of this entails engaging with people we know or may not know in conversations, and often uncivil or unpleasant conversations as tends to be the norm for these mediums. Yet one strategy that we should consider is using those opportunities not to try to reason with people who have no interest in being persuaded, but reasoning with the people who may be listening in the background and could potentially be persuaded. Ask yourself: is there anyone who has influenced your beliefs or opinions about a topic or issue on social media just through reading their interactions with others? I can say that, over the years, some of the most influential people who have contributed to my thinking have been through reading interactions with others, not through engaging in active conversation. Not every instance of that was an instance where someone was using their conversation with someone to speak to the room, but there have been plenty of instances where I have seen people engage with others in a way where their primary goal wasn’t to persuade the other person, but the other people who were watching. And here’s the thing - that data can’t be tracked. There are no metrics to evaluate that effectiveness. But what if God, in his providence, uses the features of social mediums as a means to accomplish his purposes? What if, one day, a saint tells you that the Lord used your engagement in Digital Babylon as a means to plant or water a seed for the Gospel, or as a means of conviction of sin or sanctification, or as a means of influencing and changing someone’s mind about a controversial situation or topic? Is that possibility worth it even if you never or rarely saw that fruit in this life?

5.5: Part of this entails creating content for people to consume. Nobody is more aware than I am at how repulsive that idea and that language sounds, but we cannot fully ignore it either. It is not possible to push back hard enough against the present trend of viewing humans as being brains-on-a-stick, whose bodies are merely optional or disposable containers for their minds and who are governed primarily through their minds and not through their hearts and their loves. There is no sector of society which is not plagued with this malformed anthropology, including within the church, which has often reduced discipleship to being little more than the transfer of content or information. And yet - the correct response to this malformed anthropology is not to overcorrect in the opposite direction and anathamatize the idea of people consuming content. That idea should not be discarded; it should be re-contextualized and put in it’s proper place. We were not created for the sole purpose of intellectual consumption, but intellectual consumption is an aspect of our creation, and intellectual consumption does influence and shape other aspects of our embodied existence just as our embodied existence ought to influence and shape our intellectual consumption. For Christians with the talent and means of creating quality content for social media (including YouTube and TikTok), all of the previously discussed applications apply here as well. And, just like speaking to listeners in the room, we may not know or be able to see how the Lord uses our content in his providence and for his purposes, but we may not see or know that in this life - but is the possibility of what God can do worth it?

5.6: I am leaving a lot of these questions and suggestions vague because, to be honest, I have not exhaustively thought through these things myself. To my knowledge, the exilic framework of engagement has yet to be applied to the topic of social media in a comprehensive sense, and while I hope that I am wrong and that others have already tread this ground and I am just unaware of it, I think this could potentially be the most biblically-informed framework for Christians can navigate this present reality. I want to make clear that am open to pushback and criticism here. There are likely questions I haven’t thought through or other perspectives I’ve not considered that may challenge what I am doing here. But, I am convinced that I am on to something here, and so this is an idea I am committed to studying and developing over time. And again, just to reiterate and make this abundantly clear, this is not a one-sized-fits-all model here. There are Christians who will be able to “live life in the land” without being involved in Digital Babylon. There are Christians who will try to “live life in the land” as much as possible without being able to totally escape Digital Babylon. There are Christians who will be ordinary exiles in Digital Babylon. There are Christians who will be extraordinary exiles in Digital Babylon. There are Christians who will sin and compromise themselves or their faith while living in Digital Babylon. There are Christians who will become Christians through the obedient and faithful testimony of Christians in Digital Babylon. I cannot tell you which category you personally fall in, nor what category your family or church should be in. What I hope to accomplish here is to give you a framework for understanding your relationship to Digital Babylon and these massive and pervasive social media ecosystems. Where has God placed you? What has God gifted you with? What does it look like to use those gifts where you are at? That is not a question that I can answer, but I can at least maybe give you a starting point for thinking through this topic. I intend to explore this topic and idea further because I am convinced that whether God calls us to participate in Digital Babylon or not, media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship. For pastors and ministry leaders, we continue to ignore this issue to our own peril. If our people are held in exile by Digital Babylon, we must teach them what Scripture teaches about the time when the people of God were in exile in physical Babylon - and we must also teach them about the power of God to save his people, and glorify his name, and advance his kingdom, and proclaim his gospel, through the ordinary engagement of the elect exiles wherever the Lord has sent them.

1: Reformed Theological Seminary lecture outline for 0OT5250 Joshua-Esther.

2: Dempster, Stephen G. Dominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003.

3: Goswell, Greg. “The Order of the Books in the Greek Old Testament.” JETS 52, no. 3 (2009): 449–66.

4: Goswell, Greg. “The Order of the Books in the Hebrew Bible.” JETS 51, no. 4 (2008): 673–88.

5: Lawrence, Michael. “Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church.” Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010. 75.

6: Frenkel, S. and Kang, C. “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.” New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2021. 123-124

7: Jeremiah 29:4-7 (ESV)

8: Tish Harrison Warren, “Courage in the Ordinary,” written Wednesday, April 3, 2013, at http://thewell.intervarsity.org/blog/courage-ordinary (accessed February 26, 2014). Cited from Horton, Michael. “Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World” (p. 15). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

(This is the manuscript for the standalone episode “The Asterisk Year”, which premiered on August 9th, 2021. Available wherever you get your podcasts, or you can listen online here.)

Intro: The podcast you are about to hear is the first episode in what was going to be a six-episode second season of Breaking the Digital Spell called “Notes from the Pandemic”, and I say “was” because, although I was able to make significant progress on several of these episodes, I was not going to be able to finish writing and recording them during the window of time I had to get these out. This past spring and summer, as I am sure is the case for many of you, ended up being far busier and crazier than I could’ve predicted. Of those six episodes, this episode was the one that felt the most complete and, after showing it to some people and getting some feedback, I felt that this one was worth releasing as a standalone episode. However, in this recording I’ve included all the references to this now-cancelled second season because I think it provides some additional and helpful context for some of my thoughts and some of the points I’m trying to make, so as you listen to it just remember that the second season I reference here is, unfortunately, not going to be coming. However, if you’ll stick around till the end of the podcast, I do have some exciting news about to podcast to share with you and I think you’ll be excited to hear. With all that being said, I hope you enjoy “The Asterisk Year”.

This podcast, at least in its first season, owes an incredible debt to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. I think it is one of the finest uses of the medium of podcasting and perfectly blends Dan Carlin’s abilities as a storyteller and communicator while being deeply informative and educational, and I aspire to be even just a cheap knockoff of that. I’ve listened through his entire series on World War I, “Blueprint for Armageddon”, several times through and I learned more about World War I in the 25+ hours of that series than I had learned in my entire life up to that point. But perhaps unknowingly I’m more indebted to Dan Carlin and his work because, if you know anything about Hardcore History, you know that he can take a very long time to release new episodes, sometimes going entire years with only releasing one episode. And granted, those episodes are three to four hours long and are insanely well done, but the drought can be real, and as I release this episode nearly three years removed from the release of the previous episode, I can only chuckle as I realize the Hardcore History influence maybe goes deeper than I thought.

One of the themes from that Hardcore History series on World War I is the theme of the collision between the old world up to that point and the new world that was emerging and, by the end of the war, would full emerge. At the start of the war you would have entire armies operating on strategies and tactics resembling the warfare of the past centuries and very quickly releasing that those strategies and tactics no longer work, and that unless you want to insist on burning through hundreds of thousands of troops in failed attempts to defend your pride and prove the “old ways” worked, you had better get with the times and start digging trenches. And while I don’t think comparing World War I to the Covid-19 pandemic is a fair or accurate comparison, I do think we have seen (and will continue to see) a collision between the “old world” and the “new world” that continues to emerge, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic as we see the world try to return to “normal”, but one that looks slightly different from the previous “normal”. For many of us who have done work on this subject in some form or fashion (and I mean actual, serious work, not hobbyist podcasters), we are having to dig new trenches that many of us never thought we’d have to dig. And of course, this is not true just for people who write and think about these things, but for every sector of society as a whole.

The idea for this episode (and really, this whole season) came while I was reading Dr. Jean Twenge’s absolutely excellent book “iGen”. The premise of the book is made clear up front it’s absurdly long subtitle: “Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - And Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (And What That Means For The Rest of Us)”, and to the book’s credit, that is exactly what you get when you read it. iGen released in 2017 and included a significant amount of statistical data and research on iGen, or those who were born in or after 1995, when the Internet became commercially available. This was actually one of the first books I ordered as I began my research for the first season of this podcast, but as my research took some different directions than I expected, this book had to be set aside at the time. Reading it now, nearly three and a half years after its release, the book is still remarkably relevant; as someone who works with iGen students on a weekly basis, Dr. Twenge’s findings were illuminating, comforting, confusing, and disturbing - sometimes all at once.

But as I kept reading it, there was this strange mental tick that occurred whenever I’d come across a key piece of information or a long-term projection of the behavior of iGen teens and adults, and I called it “the Covid asterisk”. This mental tick didn’t call into question the way things had been up to 2020 or not even really how things may continue to be even after 2020, but it did call into question the ways 2020 disrupted the smooth, linear projections and predictions about the trends of the iGen generation and how we should think about those projections going forward. Which trends will be exacerbated? Which trends will be corrected or blunted? What trends will emerge that are too early to detect? And - like the subtitle of the book asks - what does this mean for the rest of us?

Covid-19 disrupted the “narrative” of everyone’s life. It also disrupted the narratives of entire industries, research fields, and the history of this nation and the world as a whole. As the pandemic is hopefully winding down, we can hopefully begin to detail and trace some of the changes that have already occurred in the midst of the pandemic, but at only a year and half removed since the pandemic began, it’s also way too early to detail which changes to society are temporary and which changes will be permanent. It’s also way early to tell how many of our smooth and linear predictions and projections about our pre-Covid world will end up resuming their charted course and which ones will take wildly different course corrections, and until the crop of post-Covid literature begins to be published, the vast majority of the material available to us must be read and discussed with the Covid asterisk because none of this literature and research factored in the possibility of a pandemic - much less able to predict that pandemic’s effects. 

But Covid-19, more than disrupting our predictions and narratives, also called into question the way we approach “predictions” and “narratives” in our own lives and in the way we understood the world. Each of us probably remembers vividly where they were when they realized that Covid-19 wasn’t going away, and was about to become a big deal. For me, that process took the span of several days: on Monday I read news reports beginning to suggest that shutdowns and cancellations in several major US cities were coming; on Tuesday, those reports continued to increase and gain traction, and while taking our puppy on an evening walk, I told my wife (who is not on social media nor a news junkie like myself) that this was probably going to become a big deal here within the next week or two. On Wednesday, I remember going out to dinner with the youth leaders of our church after normal Wednesday night services and seeing, on the multiple giant TVs on the walls, the NBA’s announcement of the cancellation of the rest of the basketball season due to Covid-19, opening the floodgates for endless waves of cancellations or delays or other responses to the coming pandemic. By the time I went back to work at my previous job on Monday, the world had changed, and it was only the beginning. 

Looking back on that week a year later, I think my biggest source of shock wasn’t necessarily the fact that all of our plans were changing and we were going to have to radically change our lives to keep us save from this virus, but my biggest source of shock came from having to undo the confidence and certainty in the way I understood the world and my own life. The shock also came from having to slowly realize that, unless a miracle occurs and this pandemic doesn’t end up lasting very long, that this likely signals the end of the “old world” as we knew it and all of the “old ways” are not going to work anymore and that as we dig new trenches with the way we do our jobs, socialize, shop, rest, and play, that a “new world” with “new ways” will emerge from this - and as it unfolds, we will be completely incapable of predicting what this new world will be. And again, I don’t believe comparing Covid-19 to WWI is necessarily a “good” comparison, there are far more difference than there are similarities between the two, but I do think one of the biggest similarities between the two is that the “normal” that the world returned to in both WWI and from this pandemic will be significantly different from the “normal” as we previously understood it. The only difference is that we have the benefit of a century of hindsight for one of them, and the other is still unfolding before our eyes.

But what was “normal” before Covid? I’m not asking as though we’ve forgotten what life was like pre-Covid, but how (and in what ways) would we describe the “normal” lives we had prior to the pandemic? Likely, many of us would go on to describing our normal lives in terms of the rhythms and routines that we lost - our predictable drive to our 9-5 jobs, weeknight sports with the kids, weekend dinner parties with friends, or church on Sunday mornings, and generally speaking, yes, these kinds rhythms and routines were “normal” for the vast majority of society in some way, shape, or form. But is that all it takes for us to describe our lives as “normal” - our rhythms and routines? What about the circumstances within those rhythms, or the locations of those routines, or the situations and trials that have come and gone and that we have either forgotten or wish we could forget? How “normal” was our pre-pandemic “normal”? 

Embedded into the world “normal” is usually an assumption of consistency, stability, or predictability that is used as the standard to determine things that are unusual or abnormal. Things that are “normal” are things that are done or experienced repeatedly or habitually; some things are so “normal” to us that they occur almost on autopilot, without us consciously being aware of what is going on. And it is very true that Covid disrupted many significant things in our lives that we considered “normal” because of their consistency, predictability, or repetition. But I think, if we were to think back over the past several years of our lives, that the only truly “normal” thing about our lives was that our “normal” was always in flux and changing to some degree or another. No, our sense of normal was not always being turned upside down overnight on a consistent basis, but our sense of “normal” was likely not as stable as we remember it to be compared to the radical shift of our lives caused by Covid; the biggest difference is likely that Covid impacted multiple “normal” things all at once, and created a contrast of significant flux and change relative to the smaller and more subtle ebbs-and-flows of our lives prior to Covid.

If our “normal” was not as stable as we remember it, then what were our lives like before the pandemic? As strange as it is to say, our lives are both forever changed by this virus, and our lives are continuing as normal despite the virus. Despite the fact that 2020 felt like the slowest year many of us will ever experience, the year came and went and continued on it’s course with each rising and setting of the sun. Even when everything was changing, there was a consistency in that our lives are always changing, sometimes in larger ways than others. Listen to the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3:

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

            2       a time to be born, and a time to die;

                  a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

            3       a time to kill, and a time to heal;

                  a time to break down, and a time to build up;

            4       a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

                  a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

            5       a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

                  a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

            6       a time to seek, and a time to lose;

                  a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

            7       a time to tear, and a time to sew;

                  a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

            8       a time to love, and a time to hate;

                  a time for war, and a time for peace.

Notice how generalized these seasons are - there is a time for each of them, but nothing saying how long those times are. Notice too that there is nothing preventing these seasons from running concurrently with each other - when the pandemic began, we collectively entered a season of breaking down our lives and weeping and mourning as we refrained from embracing. Notice that there is no equalizing scope to these seasons - each of these can be applied to contexts as small as an individual or as large as a nation and any size in between. Notice also that none of these seasons continue on without end - just as the poetic motif provides for only one hard pause at the very end, the only hard pause any of us will experience to these changing seasons will be our eventual deaths. Outside of that, there will be times that are always coming and going, and times that are always changing, and stability and consistency will, for the most part, elude us.

On the one hand, this ought to be comforting to us. If there is a season for everything and no season in our lives is truly permanent, then it means our trials and tribulations have an expiration date. We may not know when that date is, and those dates are not uniform for everyone, but whether your trials last a day, a month, a year, or many years, they will eventually end. The inverse is also true - we should not expect that “the good times” are going to go on forever in this life. We are never going to reach a point where, like Thanos at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, we breathe a sigh of relief as we sit down knowing our jobs are done and that we can rest in the stability of what we have attained (and it should be said that Thanos didn’t enjoy this station of life for very long himself). Aside from the perishability of life and it’s goods, it is impossible to hold in your hands your “perfect” life, which can be taken from you in an instant, and no matter how much we may strive, will never be able to truly recover and return to. While some seasons of our lives will go on longer than others - seasons of lifelong marriages, or successfully careers, or living in the same town or city - no season goes on indefinitely. 

Complicating factors is the reality that, for the most part, we are not very good at predicting what the next season of our lives will be. We may have general senses of changes that are on the horizon as stages or circumstances of our lives end, but there is little guarantee that our idealized visions (or nightmares) of our future seasons will materialize as we hoped. Even though we live in an age where predicting the future through statistical research or machine learning or other technological advances, there is still a very firm and strong ceiling on our ability to anticipate what life has in store for us - like a pandemic. We also are not very good at predicting multiple future events that follow us; mentally, we can only really focus on the “next big thing” right in front of us and not the “next big thing” following the most immediate “next big thing”. Granted, part of that is it the subsequent “next big thing” is largely predicated by the “next big thing” that comes before it, but part of it also is that if we can’t predict the next season of our lives very well, we will almost certainly not be able to predict the subsequent season, and so why bother thinking about it? All we have are the seasons and situations we find ourselves in today,  our hopes, dreams, and fears for what the next season brings (with little way of confirming those hopes, dreams, and fears ahead of time), and the whiplash of living in a world of constant and often unpredictable change.

This insight is part of the reason why this series is titled “Notes from the Pandemic”. I had actually written a significant portion of this episode during the spring of 2020, where I had planned to do a brief run of episodes detailing how Covid was causing changes to the way we think about and use technology under normal circumstances. Ultimately, though, I decided to hold off on writing anything because it was too hard to tell what the trajectory of the pandemic was - in the Spring it was inconceivable to me that my Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions would be upended because the pandemic was still going. But I realized, as I was reading Dr. Twenge’s book on the iGen generation, that if our world is constantly in flux, and our understanding of that world is not as certain or sure as we’d like it to be, then there is never really a true “opportune” time to plan to write about the world. If we wait for the perfect “snapshot” or freeze-frame to write about trends in society or culture, we will never be able to write anything at all, because rarely, if ever, does a single moment capture or solidify a moment in time that remains true for very long. And really, our writing and research itself isn’t at fault here; our confidence in the certainty of our conclusions, and our ability to predict and control the feature, is the issue here. If, as Solomon wrote, our lives are truly seasonal and governed by constant change, then to think in terms of the “old world” or the “new world”, the pre-Covid world vs the post-Covid world, is a somewhat reductionistic way to think about our lives. It’s not to say that there can’t be any truth or insights gleaned from examining the changes this pandemic brought, but sooner or later the changes brought by the pandemic will be upended by changes that come to our world after the pandemic has long ended. While it feels as though this season of our lives may never end, like every other pandemic in the history of the world and every other season in our lives, it will eventually come to an end, as will whatever seasons that follows in its wake.

Maybe, instead of thinking of 2020 as the asterisk year, the exception to the linear progress of predictable development, maybe we ought to be more generous about our asterisks. Maybe, instead of placing our confidence in our ability to understand the trends of the world and predict the future, we distrust our sense of assurance and recognize that, despite all of the promises of living in a technologically advanced age, that we cannot truly know what events are in store for us. Maybe, instead of resting in our ability to plan our years and map our lives, we take the posture of James in the letter he writes to the Christians whose sense of “normal” has been upended by persecution and dispersion: 

“Come now, you who say, ’Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ - yet you do not know what tomorrow brings. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that."

The language of being “under a spell” suggests that the person under the spell is seeing the world differently than it actually is.

Whether the spell is self-inflicted due to feelings of love or at the hands of a malicious witch or wizard of ancient folklore, the state of being “under a spell” is ultimately undesirable because you are under the control of something else, and that your ability to see and think clearly has been hijacked. Even if that spell you’re under is one that you’d like to be under (think of all the cheesy romance stories you want to here), it is still a dangerous state to be in because you are acting according to a warped perception of the world and your surroundings. “Breaking the spell”, then, is to break the control something or someone has over you and that is causing you to see or do things at their disposal or command and to return to your normal state.

For this season of Breaking The Digital Spell, we have been operating under the assumption that we live in a world where the technology and media in our lives have cast a spell on us, and as a result we no longer see the world as it is. Under this spell, our thoughts, habits, and beliefs are held under the sway of our machines and the mediums these machines create, and we begin to understand and make sense of our world according to the terms set forth by how we use this technology and consume this media. Television insisted we begin understanding the world through images instead of understanding the world through the spoken and written word, and now we have reached a point where visual communication via GIFs, memes, and emojis is an understandable language in and of itself. The Internet insisted that we come to it for all of our needs, even if those needs are basic human connection and relationships, and now we have reached a point where the Internet itself is considered a need instead of a useful tool. Our smartphones insist that we always be on, always be connected, always be available, and now we have reached a point where the idea of “disconnecting” for a day or two is now seen as a daunting task. Under this spell, we cannot conceive of a world without television, without the Internet, without social media, without smartphones, or without the technology and media that we take for granted in our daily lives, and we cannot conceive of a world without these things because technology and media have become our world. We are held under a spell that leads us to see the world differently than it actually is, and the world that we see is a world where our technology and media has convinced us that there can be no other world other than the one our technology and media have created for us. And like Neil Postman predicted in Amusing Ourselves to Death, it wasn’t the Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism that we shouldn’t have been so afraid of, but it was Huxley’s vision of us ruining ourselves by what we love – and our love for the technology and media in our lives has left us held under a spell that leads us to believe a vision of the world where there is nothing worth seeing or experiencing beyond the screen in front of our face.

Postman believed that no medium (and the machine behind that medium) was excessively dangerous if it’s users understood what those dangers are, and that to ask questions about these dangers was sufficient to break the spell. I can’t necessarily speak for Postman here, but I think an implied premise in that directive is that if people were to ask questions and come to realize the dangers posed by television’s creeping influence into all corners of life and public discourse that people would do an about face and choose to live in such a way as to keep television in its proper place. As Postman states,

The point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium. How is such media consciousness to be achieved? There are only two answers that come to mind, one of which is nonsense and can be dismissed almost at once; the other is desperate but it is all we have.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

Postman goes on to describe these two options, and both of them are tied to education about media and it’s effects. The latter is at the schooling level (which is beyond the scope of this podcast) and the “nonsense” option is to use these mediums to raise awareness about the dangers of these mediums. Of the “nonsense” option Postman writes,

The nonsensical answer is to create television programs whose intent would be, not to get people to stop watching television, but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news, political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies along the lines of Saturday Night Live or Monty Python, the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television’s control of public discourse. But, naturally, television would have the last laugh. In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus, the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

I recognize that using a podcast as a medium for communicating how technology and media changes the way we think about God and love our neighbor falls into the same trappings that Postman warns about. This podcast contributes to the waterfall of content that one can consume. This podcast is geared towards being something you can listen on your phone. In trying to get people thinking about technology and media, I am relying on the very same technology and media that I am critiquing in order to make my critiques available (and don’t even get me started about using social media to promote episodes that criticize social media)! While I certainly believe there are numerous differences between podcasting and television, and I believe Postman would agree were he alive, I think his general point still stands: we cannot rely on the technology and media that creates the digital spell as a means of breaking that spell. We cannot rely on educating people about the dangers of technology and media through the very technology and media we are warning them about and believe that the effects of co-opting the mediums we criticize will be minimal. Much of our education about the negative effects of technology and media must come from outside of the technology and media in question, but given that technology and media have become deeply integrated into our education and learning, this will be a difficult task, and Postman recognizes this fact, which is why the book does not end on an optimistic note.

Given the two options he listed, he believes that Huxley’s vision of the future will come to pass without hindrance, and I don’t believe his prediction was wrong at all. Not only should we not rely on the technology and media that creates the digital spell as a means of breaking that spell, we also need to accept the fact that not everyone will want the digital spell to be broken in their lives. Like we talked about in the episode on extended reality technology, we suppress the truth about God in our unrighteousness, and now we have the tools at hand to not only suppress the reality we actually live in but to also construct convincing replacement realities to live in as a means of worshiping creature and creation rather than the Creator. Where Postman might have hoped that people would change their attitudes towards television if they could understand how television affected them and where this direction was headed, there is the obvious fact that people would still choose the screen-dominated dystopia even if they achieved the deep unfailing awareness of information and media that Postman desires, and if this was true in the 80s, it’s even more true today. Postman assumes that education is the solution to this problem and while education is certainly part of the solution (and this is certainly one of the goals of this podcast), education in and of itself will not be enough. People will still text and drive despite knowing the dangers of texting and driving. People will still smoke cigarettes despite health warnings being plainly obvious on cartons and advertising. People will still eat excessively and get drunk even if they know – even if they are educated – about the dangers of doing so if for no other reason than they want to do so, and so education alone cannot be our sole hope here in breaking the digital spell in our lives and the lives of others. People will still spend hours upon hours on their phones knowing that doing so will make them anxious, agitated, and depressed. People will still spend hours binging Netflix knowing that there are psychological consequences for doing so. People will still dive headfirst into alternative realities of their own making knowing full well – perhaps intentionally so – that they’re leaving the real world behind. We must find another way. And this is where I think Postman missed a possible option here. If our technology and media have put us under a spell that convinces us that there is not a life worth living beyond the lives given to us by our screens and the content they give us, then one way to break the spell is to live and display to others the full and satisfying life that exists beyond the screen.

If I could make one criticism of Postman’s book, it would be that he offers very little description of what life could look like if we were not amusing ourselves to death. Postman’s book is bleak, dark, and depressing (and rightly so), but he does little to convince you that there is a better, more full, more satisfying life that can exist outside the television screen. And, to be fair, he is addressing a meta-level problem, and believes that few meta-level solutions exist, and I don’t disagree with that. But, at the same time, Postman does not offer a more compelling vision of the world to move towards to as a means of escaping the Huxleyian apocalypse, and this is where the transcendent Gospel we talked about in the last episode comes in. The Gospel compels us to see the world the way God sees it, which is full of beauty, and awe, and majesty, and all of which points back to Him and His glory, even though we have marred and tainted the world by our sin. Because Jesus Christ has saved us from our sins through his life, death, and resurrection, we await his return where he will make all things new, heaven and earth included, and already we see him making all things new in the fact that, as a result of our salvation in Christ, our ability to see God’s creation (including you and me and everyone else made in his image) and delight in His creation and give praise to him for it as the Creator has been restored. We no longer look at the beautiful night sky and say it is just an accident. We no longer look at the vast, ever expanding cosmos and say it has no purpose. We no longer look at the sparrow and assume it has been forgotten or abandoned by God. In warning people about the dangers of living in a world dominated by screens, we do so because we have a better world, a better life, a better existence to invite people to live in to, and this existence, life, and world offered to us in the Gospel that points to the transcendent Creator promises us that the joy we can experience in this life is only just the beginning.

Now at this point you might be thinking that I’m about to outline a bunch of rules and guidelines about limiting and controlling your screen time, or taking certain apps off your phone, or not having a television in your bedroom, or all these other suggestions aimed at helping you get better control and mastery over your technology. And here’s the thing: breaking the digital spell in your life will result in different technology and media habits in some way, and one does not attain to new, beneficial habits without practicing them. But, I want to suggest that we often put too much of an emphasis on fixing the problem (and the myriad of steps one can take to fix the problem) that we fail to craft a full and compelling vision offered by the solution. This is especially a risk with all of the talk about measuring and tracking “screen time”, or how much you spend in front of a phone, television, or computer screen, and while tracking how much time you spend with these devices is certainly a necessary step towards gaining control of those devices, tracking screen time just for the sake of tracking screen time somewhat misses the point. Yes, spending 30 minutes on social media each day is more preferable than spending 3 hours on social media, and the effects of spending 3 hours on social media will be far more serious than spending 30 minutes on social media, but if you’re spending those 30 minutes of social media constantly comparing and evaluating yourself to others or berating yourself for coming up short compared to someone else or using social media to mock, belittle, or bully others, that’s still 30 minutes of using social media in unhealthy ways – and the same is true for another other technology. The focus needs to be not just on the amount of time spend with the technology but on the reasons for that use of technology with the hope of point people away from unhealthy uses of technology and media towards healthy uses of technology and media and the benefits that come from that, and those benefits are found in the world that exists beyond the screen. But again, education is not simply enough – we must offer a compelling solution that is not just learned, but lived, and our aim must be to convince people not only of just the dangers of unhealthy technology and media habits but that living a life beyond the screen is a life worth living. Telling people that spending less time on their phone will allow them to be more focused on their work or loved ones is only an effective solution insofar as the person is convinced of the beauty, value, and joy of spending time with their loved ones or helping them enjoy their job better. Telling people that spending less time in front of the television or computer will allow them to read a book is only an effective solution insofar as people are convinced of the healthiness of reading books and of the benefits that come from it. And, to put this solely in Christian terms, telling people that their technology and media usage habits are depriving them of the joy of knowing and being known by God is only an effective solution insofar as people are convinced of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as their Lord – and only insofar as the people telling other people are actually convinced of the surpassing value of knowing Christ themselves.

Part of the reason why I spent so much time in the previous episode explaining why Christians need to be the first to repent of their unhealthy technology and media habits is because we cannot point people towards a better way of life that we are not living ourselves. We cannot convinced people of the surpassing value of knowing the transcended, risen Christ if we are not deeply convinced of this in the deepest parts of our soul as well. If our Christianity is merely a lifestyle preference or a part of our customized, individual identity – if our approach towards Christianity is on secularism’s terms – then point people away from their screens towards anything else is ultimately pointing them towards more of the same, and a conception of “the good life” driven entirely by technology and media is no better or worse than a conception of “the good life” where technology and media are used when appropriate. But, if our Christianity is built around the fact that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again, and that this has implications for how we live our lives each and every day, then repenting of our unhealthy technology and media habits not only brings us more into the life the Gospel has saved us to, but also helps us bring people alongside us to join us. It is far easier to tell someone that life is better when you’re not glued to your phone all the time when your life is characterized by a fullness and joy that comes from enjoying the world beyond the screen, and from enjoying it in such a way where you can invite the person to put down the phone and enjoy life with you. It is far more powerful to tell someone that online life and online communities can’t compare to real, embodied community with real people than when you’re able to invite that person to join you into your community (and your community gladly receives and welcomes them) despite the differences in personality, hobbies, or beliefs. It is far more welcoming to invite someone at your dinner table when your dinner table is characterized by thankfulness, warmth, and compassion instead of inviting someone to table where screens separate you from your neighbor. If we can conceive of and live out lives that are vibrant and fulfilling beyond the screen, then we can convince others that such a life is possible as well, and such a life is only possible because of Jesus Christ.

Like I’ve said at many points this season – I am not advocating that anyone throw their computers out the window, smash their TVs and run over their phones in the street. Technology and media are good things we have received from the Lord, and we should receive them with thanksgiving. But, like every other thing we have received from the Lord, it has a proper place in our lives. Our lives are not to be dominated by food, drink, sex, entertainment, recreation, or any other good thing we have received from the Lord that has exceeded the boundaries that ought to be set for it. Television was not meant to be an alternative for a religious experience. The Internet was not meant to be a conduit for escaping your life and living a fantasy life. Your smartphone was not meant to dominate your attention and focus for hours of the day. Technology and media have a place in our lives, they are not meant to be our lives. Our lives are meant to be much more than what they’ve come to be living in a distracted, digital age. Breaking the digital spell means living our lives to the fullest, which cannot be done through a screen, an app, or a website. Breaking the digital spell means living our lives together with others, which cannot be done when our phones or computer screens constantly serve as a buffer from having to talk to others. Breaking the digital spell means enjoying the world we live in, which cannot be done without acknowledging the Creator of this world and the one from whom all good things come – and to ask questions about how technology and media change the way we think about God and love our neighbor and how to see and live in the world that God created and intended for us to live in – that is to break the spell.

This season of Breaking the Digital Spell could go on indefinitely. There is so much to talk about in terms of how technology and media change the way we think about God and the way we love our neighbor, and we barely scratched the surface when it comes to the new technology and media that’s on the horizon. But, I think we are at a point where we can draw several conclusions about how technology and media in the Internet age change the way we think about God and the way we love our neighbor, and we are going to do that in this episode.

Before we begin, this is the second part of a two-part episode, the first of which is entitled “Conclusions, Part One”. You don’t need to listen to that episode in order to be able to understand this one, but you’ll get more milage out of the this episode if you do. Second, this episode will refer back to the batch of episodes released following “Conclusions, Part One” and again, you don’t need to listen to those in order to listen to this one, but you’ll get more out of this episode if you go back to those if you’ve not listened to them yet. Third, this is not the season finale of Breaking the Digital Spell. We have one more episode to do after this, because this episode might be kinda depressing, and I don’t want to end this season on a depressing note. But, with that being said, lets start outlining some conclusions.

The first conclusion is that, if television and the early Internet opened the door for secularism to gain a stronger foothold in the church (the third conclusion we laid out in Part One), the modern Internet with the technology and media it brings have cemented that foothold.

Let’s briefly recap what I mean by secularism: first, by “secularism”, I mean a state of mind where all belief systems are possible, equally valid options for living a happy, meaningful life, and second, where the idea of “transcendence” becomes less believable, less plausible, and less meaningful. In secularism, belief systems – whether yours is Christianity, or Islam, or atheism, or agnosticism, or any of the other belief systems one could pick from – are not evaluated based on their truthfulness, but on whether or not your expression of your belief system helps you live a full life. Because the emphasis is placed on knowing truth as it exists outside of us to living up to our own idealized visions of “the good life”, the idea of “transcendence” – the idea that there are things that go above and beyond the world we physically inhabit – doesn’t automatically become false, but just unnecessary. There is no need to posit the existence of a transcendent God who has created you for certain ends when you have within yourself the power to create and define what you consider a meaningful life, and so long as your conception of “the good life” does not consist of harming anyone else, you can and should pursue your vision of “the good life” and attain to whatever vision of yourself you desire. In the last three episodes about social media, smartphones, and VR, I have been trying to demonstrate how these technological and media forces reinforce a secular way of thinking because they make achieving your conception of “the good life” more achievable than ever before, right down to visually creating and defining your conception of this life all the way to giving you a fully simulated world in your VR headset, which inherently numbs you to the transcendent reality of the God who created you to know him and worship him. Television and the Internet, as technological forces, were limited in their ability to empower people to fully act on their individualism and, in turn, inculcate a thoroughly secular view of the world, but if smartphones and social media and extended reality technology were built off of, and evolutions of, television and the Internet, then the widespread cultural adoption of these technological forces was the moment when the other shoe dropped, and the game was changed for good. Television invented the possibility of experiencing Christianity on your own terms, detached from the people of God – smartphones, social media, VR technology, and other technological forces give you limitless tools for further customizing your version of Christianity and for experiencing it on whatever terms you so desire. The Internet redefined “community” by giving us the possibility of forming communities detached from any geographical constraints; smartphones and social media make maintaining these new communities even easier, and have helped move the idea of an “online church” from being a niche use of the Internet to being a cost efficient and practical avenue for churches of any and all sizes to explore in expanding their outreach efforts. These new understandings of Christianity, which could not have existed at any other point in time in history, are only made possible because of the technology and media that make these kind of practices possible, and because of American Evangelicalism’s unchecked technological optimism towards these new technological forces, American Evangelicalism has taken on the form and function of the technology it has uncritically embraced and adopted, rather than the other way around. And now that secularism has a foothold in the church due to the technology we use, we can see the consequences of secularism play out in our theology and in the way we conceive of and experience church as a whole.

Let’s start with the changes to our theology. A few weeks ago Ligonier, the teaching ministry of the late theologian R.C. Sproul, released their most recent State Of Theology report for 2018. The State of Theology report is a a poll of 3,000 Americans, from a wide range of backgrounds/demographics, on a set of theological statements where respondents answered “strongly agree”, agree”, “disagree”, “strongly disagree”, or “not sure”, and the results are fascinating to say the least. I’m not going to read off the entire report (I’d highly encourage you to read the whole report at thestateoftheology.com), but I want to highlight a few of the results to show how technology and media are making an impact on our theology, and not in a good way:

• In response to the statement “God accepts the worship of all religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam”, 65% of respondents agreed, and 23% disagreed.

• In response to the statement “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature”, 67% of respondents agreed, and 26% disagreed.

• In response to the statement “Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation”, 23% of respondents agreed and 69% disagreed.

• In response to the statement “the Bible, like all sacred writings, contains helpful accounts of ancient myths but is not literally true”, 47% agreed and 43% disagreed. 10% were not sure.

• In response to the statement “the Bible is 100% accurate in all it teaches”, 41% agreed and 41% disagreed.

• In response to the statement “Modern science disproves the Bible”, 36% agreed, 48% disagreed, and 16% were not sure.

• In response to the statement “Worshipping alone or with one’s family is a valid replacement for regularly attending church”, 58% agreed with this statement, and 30% disagreed.

• In response to the statement “the Bible has the authority to tell us what we must do”, 53% agreed, and 38% disagreed.

• In response to the statement “Religious belief is a matter of personal opinion; it is not about objective truth”, 60% agreed, and 30% disagreed. 10% were not sure.

• In response to the statement “the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe”, 61% agreed, and 39% agreed. 0% were not sure.

• In response to the statement “Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin”, 62% agreed and 38% disagreed. 0% were unsure.

Now, one very important caveat: those results I just read off include the entire survey population, which includes not only evangelicals but also African American Protestants, Mainline denomination Christians, Roman Catholics, and other individuals who don’t fit in one of those categories. When you compare the results from evangelicals against the results of the entire survey population you do get some noticeable (and even encouraging) differences. My point in reading these results, especially in reading the results of the entire survey and not just the results among evangelical respondents, is to illustrate that American Christians – not limited to, but including evangelicals – are displaying sharp theological disagreement not on secondary or tertiary theological topics but on theological topics that touch at the core of Christian orthodoxy. There is a fundamental confusion amongst Christians about what it means to be a Christian, and I don’t have survey data on hand to prove this, but I’m more than willing to bet that if you went back 50, 30, 20, even just 10 years ago, you wouldn’t get results indicating this severe and deep level of confusion and misunderstanding about basic Christian doctrine and beliefs – and this fundamental confusion and disagreement is a byproduct of secularism’s cemented foothold on the church. This isn’t me being an alarmist: there’s data to back this up. When 65% of respondents believe God accepts the worship of all religions, 67% believe most people are good by nature, 60% believe that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion, 58% believe worshipping alone or with your family is a valid substitute for church attendance, and only 62% agree that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that can atone for one’s sin, those are the kind of results you could expect to see in the aftermath of a deep, thorough theological upheaval – and while modern technology and media are not solely to blame for this, I don’t think its a stretch to say they play a large part in producing these kind of results. These results are consistent with the first part of the definition of secularism we presented earlier: where all belief systems (and beliefs within those belief systems) are possible, equally valid options for living “the good life”, and if your conception of “the good life” is a Christianity that gives you the luxury of worshipping on your own terms and believing that people are mostly good and that religious belief is a matter of personal opinion, then you should pursue it, and modern technology and media give you the tools to do just that.

We can see this in several ways, but let’s start with one practice we are probably all familiar with: church shopping. For one, this idea of “church shopping” is nothing new, but as advertising and promoting your church’s physical or online services easier to do and more competitive thanks to social media, the awareness of the number of churches to attend has increased and created more choices than ever before. Now this isn’t inherently a bad thing, but when you combine the new and improved abundance of choices in churches and Christianity with a culture that is geared towards choosing an experience of Christianity that bests matches up with their conception of “the good life”, then we have an problem. If your conception of “the good life” is showing up on to a church on Sunday to hear an inspirational reminder about being nice to people and gets you out in time for the Sunday game, you are now aware of numerous churches that offer what you need to realize your ideal Sunday experience. If your conception of “the good life” is laying in bed watching a sermon live streamed to your phone, you can find plenty of churches that stream their services and allow you to participate without ever leaving your house. If your conception of “the good life” is being active in working in the community towards the improvement of the world around you, can find churches that will give you plenty of chances to let your light shine before others – even if it’s your light that is shining and not the Lord’s. If your conception of “the good life” is belonging to a church that spurns modernity in favor of ancient and traditional practices (be it Reformed, Catholic, Anglican, or Episcopalian), you can find plenty of churches that will allow you to experience the ancient faith as a countercultural practice to your modern life; but, in a secular age, this option is not inherently better than any of the other options available for you to choose. What matter is that you choose the experience of Christianity and the church that best matches your conception of “the good life”, and it has never been easier to choose a church experience on your own terms, and then to choose a different church experience should your tastes change, and all of this is made possible my the technology and media we process these choices through. Again, church shopping has always been a reality in the modern age: if anything, we can blame Henry Ford and the Model T for making traveling greater distances an easier and more regular occurrence. The abundance of choice was always there, but what is new and modern is the degree to which the emphasis is placed on the individual for making the choice that best corresponds to their desires. Brett McCracken, writing in “Our Secular Age: Ten Years Of Reading And Applying Charles Taylor”, writes that:

“When churchgoing becomes mostly about finding a church that best supports one’s own subjective “spiritual path”, Taylor seems to suggest, it will eventually become an impossible task, more frustrating and draining that it is worth. As he notes [quote] If the focus is going now to be on my spiritual path, thus on what insights come to me in the subtler languages that I find meaningful, then maintaining this or any other framework becomes increasingly difficult [end quote]. Why? Because no church is ever going to be perfectly tailored to my preferences and the subtler languages I find meaningful. Something will always make me bristle, something will leave me feeling unseen, unheard, uncomfortable. Just as we eventually grow tired of a trendy restaurant or favorite clothing brand because our tastes inevitable change, so we will eventually tire of a church that initially connects with our unique “spiritual path” but then fails to sufficiently track with our evolving beliefs. So we keep shopping for that perfect church, or (more likely) we give up the futile search entirely….By accepting the consumerist terms of the Age of Authenticity and seeing themselves as another product to be branded and marketed and consumed, churches merely amplify the instability. They encourage the fickle, commitment-phobic habits of consumers who attend only insofar as it fits the nuances of their personally curated spirituality.”

Brett McCracken in Our Secular Age: Ten Years Of Reading And Applying Charles Taylor

And while we are on the subject of church shopping, we need to acknowledge that the church shopping we experience today isn’t limited to just physically attending a new church every week. Online churches have become viable to the point where they are considered legitimate church options in the church shopping process, and there is no better example of this than what happened last week with a tweet from megachurch pastor and superstar Judah Smith. In announcing the launch of a new smartphone app for his church, he wrote in his tweet that “People have asked, when are you starting a church in Nashville? When will you come to Texas or Boston? Well…we just did. I am so excited to announce our newest location: Churchome Global. The location? The phone in the palm of your hand.” Now the list of things wrong with this tweet (and the video that accompanies it) is so long that it ought to merit an entire episode in and of itself (and, thankfully, the tweet was met with an insane amount of backlash), but I want to point out the language he uses in this tweet. Notice how he began it: he started off by raising the issue of starting new churches in other cities, speaking to the idea that “hey, Judah, we want to be able to physically attend one of your churches where we live”. He then claims that this desire has been met as he announces an smartphone app that serves as the launch of a global, digital campus, and presents this solution as though downloading an app was equivalent to physically attending a church. It cannot be overstated the number of ways that the language of this tweet reinforces a secular view of Christianity, regardless of whether or not that is Judah’s intent. This language reinforces the idea that there is no difference between physical churches and digital churches, which is a byproduct of secularism’s idea that one can and should experience Christianity on their own terms, which are made possible by the technology and media that make attending a “digital” church possible. This language reinforces the idea that attending church in community and attending the church in isolation are perfectly legitimate options, which is not only explicitly spoken against in the New Testament but also a byproduct of secularism’s idea that, again, one can and should experience Christianity on their own terms, and if your conception of “the good life” is a fully private religion, then pursue it. Lastly, this language reinforces, as Brett McCracken stated earlier, the “fickle, commitment-phobic habits of consumers who attend only insofar as it fits the nuances of their personally curates spiritually”. A smartphone app, regardless of whatever the app contains, does not require commitment. A smartphone app does not keep you accountable. A smartphone app will not make you uncomfortable. A smartphone app can be customized to serve you exactly on your terms – and all of these are thoroughly antithetical to a biblical understanding of what it means to belong to a church. Churches require commitments. Churches keep you accountable. Churches will make you uncomfortable – but churches, unlike an app, will be there for you when you are sick. Churches, unlike an app, will help you watch your kids (and give you chances to watch other’s kids). Churches, unlike an app, will draw you out of yourself into a shared experience with other believers centered around the proclamation of the Word of God and the administration of the sacraments, which is exactly how God ordered his church to operate. These alternatives only exist because of the technology and media that allowed their existence to be conceivable, but just because they exist as alternatives does not mean they are acceptable alternatives.

Now, to be perfectly fair to Judah Smith – he is neither the first person, nor the last, to propose or suggest any of the things I’ve criticized about. There are plenty of other online churches that exist and have done other things like this – Judah is just the most recent example a trend that has been going on for some time and shows no sign of slowing down. Second, we need to treat seriously the claims of Christians who say that the physical church has hurt them, or abandoned them. If people are leaving our physical churches for digital churches, we need to thoroughly examine whether or not we are contributing anything to their departure. Are our churches hospitable? Are our churches welcoming? Are our churches safe? Even though and can should rightly push back against these unbiblical alternatives to church and these secular expressions of an individually-driven Christianity, we should not be so quick to absolve ourselves of fault in contributing to this situation. Churches can be damaging. Churches can be unwelcoming and unloving, and if we want to draw people who have left the physical church back into it, our churches must be biblical both in what we teach and also how we live. It is not simply enough to teach sound doctrine but have a church culture of callous coldness. Nor is it simply enough to live joyful, sacrificial lives of obedience while believing things contrary to what the Bible teaches. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy – right belief and right living – must be simultaneously pursued as we criticize these consumer-driven church alternatives like the ones Judah Smith and others offer. But, what we cannot do is say that because imperfect churches exist that unbiblical models or expressions of the church are therefore permissible options for Christians. In living in a digital, secular age, at no point can we agree that just because technology and media have made these other types of churches possible that these alternatives are okay. The challenge, then, is how do we live as the biblical church, and biblical Christians belonging to the biblical church, in a distracted, digital age that reinforces a secular approach towards choosing Christianity on an individual’s terms? How do we proclaim the Gospel and fulfill the mission and ministry of the church in this kind of context? This is where the second conclusion of this episode comes in.

The second conclusion is that Christians must acknowledge the reality of living in a distracted, digital age, and we must consider how the technology and media used in our lives challenges or reinforces a distracted, secular way of thinking and repent of any unhealthy use of technology and media in our lives.

Before we concern ourselves of doing the work of the church in a distracted, digital age, we must begin with ourselves. Before we consider how technology and media are affecting our neighbor, we must honestly and thoroughly examine how technology and media have changed the way you and I think about God, and the way you and I love our neighbor, and we need to repent of using technology and media in unhealthy ways.

One of the consequences of living in a distracted, digital age – where smartphones and social media are always available and ready to give us something to preoccupy ourselves – is that the art of meditation, self reflection, and self criticism has become compromised. Fruitful meditation and study requires long periods of unbroken attention and intense concentration, but we live in a culture where our attentions spans are hijacked by devices that constantly try to get us to pay attention to them, and by media that trains us to process disjointed bits and pieces of information by the second. Self reflection and self criticism require the ability to accurately assess yourself and to be able and willing to point out your shortcomings and weaknesses and see if any correction or improvement can be made, but we live in a culture that offers us both endless distraction from having to evaluate and reflect on our lives or offers us extremely distorted views of ourselves. Social media enables us to see ourselves as more righteous and holy than that other group of people (which can be political or theological rivals or people who do things you don’t like) or leads us to believe that we are lazy, boring, stupid, ugly, unwanted, or unloved because we are constantly comparing ourselves to others online. We cannot meditate if we are distracted, and we cannot accurately evaluate ourselves and our actions if we are either too distracted to do that and if, when we evaluate ourselves, we evaluate ourselves to the wrong standards we’ve come to accept as a result of our online activities. And as a result of the fact that these practices are more difficult to do because of the technology and media in our lives, it makes repentance – turning away from our sin and returning to the Lord – a more difficult challenge, because we can avoid having to face our sin, make light of our sin, or even make our sin so serious to the point we believe we are beyond redemption. And to be fair, this has always been a problem for fallen and sinful humans, regardless of what era they’ve lived in. The difference, however, is that our sinfulness is armed with incredibly powerful tools to aid us in our desire to stay hidden in our sin and distracted from the urgency of repentance, and before we begin pointing out how others use technology and media in sinful ways, we need to examine our own lives to see where we are committing this sin.

So, how do go about doing this? Simple: we start asking questions about how the technology and media we use change the ways we think about God and change the way we love our neighbor. In order to break the distracted, digital spell, we must begin asking questions, and we must begin with ourselves. Tony Reinke has a great list of questions in “12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You” that I think are applicable to technology and media beyond the smartphone, and while some of these may not be specifically relevant or applicable to you, I think they are good examples of the kind of questions we need to be asking. Listen to this list and if any of these questions strike a nerve, pursue that, and ask yourself why that’s the case

1. Do my smartphone habits expose an underlying addiction to untimely amusements?

2. Do my smartphone habits reveal a compulsive desire to be seen and affirmed?

3. Do my smartphone habits distract me from genuine communion with God?

4. Do my smartphone habits provide an easy escape from sobered thinking about my death, the return of Christ, and eternal realities?

5. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with the pursuit of world success?

6. Do my smartphone habits mute the sporadic leading of God’s Spirit in my life?

7. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with dating and romance?

8. Do my smartphone habits build up Christians and my local church?

9. Do my smartphone habits center on what is necessary to me and beneficial to others?

10. Do my smartphone habits disengage me from the needs of the neighbors God has placed right in front of me?

Now again, all of those questions were in the context of using smartphones, but don’t let that limit you from applying those questions to any technology and media in your life. Nor are all these all of the questions one could consider and ask, but I think this is a good place to start. The reason why I think these questions are good questions to ask (and a good example of the kind of questions we need to be asking) is because these questions expose how sin has disordered our desires and how we disorder our desires through misusing technology and media according to those disordered desires. If we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, then our loves – our desires – must be rightly ordered towards the Lord and towards our neighbor. But, because we are fallen, sinful creatures, we do not love the Lord and we do not love our neighbor, but ourselves, and we will gladly avail ourselves of anything we can get our hands on that help us do what we want out of our self-love, and we make habits out of those behaviors we express in our self-love. If our habits are towards distracting us from everyday life, or if our habits lead us towards an unhealthy obsession with politics, fitness, romance, or success, or if our habits lead us towards an idealized vision of “the good life” that includes no place for the Lord of your life, and if all of these disordered loves towards our sinful desires and away from God and away from our neighbor are being mediated through the technology and media we use in our lives, then repenting of our disordered desires and loves must include repenting of the habits surrounding our technology and media usage that fuel and empower those disordered desires. As James K.A. Smith writes in his excellent book “You Are What You Love”,

If you are what you love, and if your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals [not limited to, but including, our practices and cultural rituals centered around technology and media], then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices [again, including how we use technology and media] is a competition for your heart – the center of the human person designed for God, as Augustine reminded us. More precisely, at stake in the formation of your loves is your religious and spiritual identity, which is manifested not only in what you think or what you believe but in what you do – and what those practices do to you.

James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power Of Habit

Ask yourself: what do your smartphone, social media, computer, television, and Internet habits say about who you are? What do your habits say about what you love? Do these loves lead you to the Lord, or away from him? Do these loves lead you to love your neighbor, or hate your neighbor?

I cannot answer these questions for you. Nor are these the only questions you must ask of yourselves. But again, before we can be concerned with how technology and media are affecting other people, we must understand how technology and media affect us, and there is no greater effect that technology and media can have in our lives that reinforcing a secular way of thinking where the idea of “disordered loves” and “disordered desires” away from God and away towards self do not exist. A secular way of thinking does not place a difference on your loves being directed towards the Lord and your loves being directed towards yourself – so long as your loves allow you to live whatever conception of “the good life” that you desire, love what you will, and our technology and media empower us to choose to love what we will and distract us from the God who exists and who has created us to know Him and love Him with all our being. This is where the third conclusion comes in.

The third conclusion is that in order to overcome a distracted, secular way of thinking, we must proclaim a transcendent Gospel, one that draws the hearer out of their buffered self and into communion with the external God and his people.

Ultimately, if we are to proclaim the Gospel in a distracted, digital age that empowers and reinforces our disordered loves and leads us into a secular way of thinking where it is up to the individual to determine what “the good life” is, we must proclaim a Gospel that calls people out of their distraction, made possible by the technology and media and our habits surrounding them, and to re-order their loves back to the Lord who exists outside and over our lives.

In Part One, we spent a lot of time talking about how unchecked technological optimism is the direct offspring of utilitarianism, which undergirded (and still undergirds) not only our view of technology and media, but also undergirds most of our theology as well. To recap, utilitarianism is a philosophical view that ties something’s value or worth is tied solely to that thing’s output, usefulness, or productivity. In utilitarianism, the ends justify the means, because the ends are where something (or someone’s) value and worth is grounded. The idea of inherent value or worth, such as the idea that a human’s value in worth is grounded in being made in the image of God, is nonexistent in utilitarianism – it is contingent on variables that must be measured and tracked in some way. This is why the late Reverend Billy Graham could say that he preached more the Gospel to more people in a single telecast than Christ did in his entire life – the number of people reached by television trumped any consideration of what it was that was reaching them through television. This is how American Evangelicalism still approaches technology and media – reaching people, regardless of what it is that ends of up reaching them, is the only important factor to consider. This is also how American Evangelicalism approaches theology as well – reaching people, regardless of whatever it is we are actually saying, is what is most important. Utilitarianism is at the heart of the kind of alternative Church models presented by guys like Judah Smith and anyone else who wants to pioneer a digital church of some kind – the potential to reach people is limitless because everyone has access to the Internet, but what reaches these people is a form of Christianity that plays perfectly into reinforcing a secular way of thinking. And because the goal is to reach as many people as we possibly can, the message that we proclaim in reaching people – the Gospel – becomes refashioned into being a tool useful to utilitarianism, and in re-tailoring the Gospel to being a message that is as generically appealing to as many people as possible, we have reduced it the point of being a message that cannot save.

Looking back on Part One I regret that I didn’t spend more time fleshing out what I meant by secularism being just as much an option for Christians as it is for non-Christians, because too often when Christians here the word “secularism” they immediately equate it with something that doesn’t involve belief in God, and that is not the case at all. Christians are just as susceptible towards a secular view of life and the world as any nonbeliever is, and a lot of that influence comes from within the church itself! If secularism is concerned with the individual determining their conception of “the good life”, than any preaching, teaching, or practice that portrays Christianity as living “your best life now”, “the best decision you’ll ever make”, or anything that co-opts the Gospel towards being an addition or modifier to a person’s life (such as a smartphone app) to make it better in some way is ultimately reinforcing a secular way of approaching Christianity. The focus of such teaching and preaching is not on calling and leading Christians to look away from themselves and to turn their eyes to the exalted and risen Christ in heaven, but a sales pitch on how Christianity can help you best achieve your desired conception of “the good life”, which must then compete with any other possible conception of “the good life” that people can choose from – and even if people choose Christianity, there is no guarantee that they are not choosing Christianity for anything more than the fact that it fits their desired image of who they want to be and the life the want to live. We do not want people to be Christians because it helps them achieve “the good life”. We want people to be Christians because their eternity is at stake. And because people’s eternity is at stake, we must proclaim a Gospel that conveys a sense of urgency as to their eternity, which cannot be done without preaching a Gospel that communicates, at least propositionally, the existence of the transcendent realm.

Secularism removes the need for transcendence to be considered because anything that we look to transcendence for – value, meaning, significance, beauty – can now be found in the “immanent frame” we live in. Christianity cannot exist where transcendence is denied, because we believe there is an all powerful, all righteous Father in Heaven that exists outside of us, and this Father, this God, has created us to know Him and worship Him by keeping His commandments – which, because we have failed to do, we deserve eternal death and separation from Him as a punishment. We also believe that, because we have broken God’s commandments, that we cannot make this situation right, and that we needed a Savior from heaven, that exists outside of us, to save us from our sins, and that this Savior – Jesus Christ – now rules and reigns in this transcendent space we call “heaven”, and that one day this Savior will break into our imminent, closed off conceptions of the world to judge the living and the dead by whether or not they have repented and believed in His Gospel. Foundational to the Gospel message is the fact that the transcendent realm exists and that this has significant implications on our lives – but, living in a distracted, digital age, we are numb to this, and because we are numb to this, a secular way of thinking about our lives and our world becomes plausible and possible. This is a lengthy example from Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness, but its an outstanding example of how our everyday experiences, even as Christians, can numb us to the transcendent world, and why our proclamation of the Gospel must take this into account:

To get a sense of what this look like, consider for a moment what it is like to attend church on Sunday. You are awakened by an alarm on your cell phone, an amazing piece of technology and testament to the power of human mastery over the natural world. You eat eggs for breakfast. They come, almost miraculously, clean, large, and white in a carton that has been inspected by some government agency to ensure it is safe. The carton lists the nutritional composition of the eggs along with a few words about their health benefits. Everything has been considered. You get dressed in clothes that you bought ready-made. You drive to church in a glistening, energy-efficient sedan with advance safety features, and glance occasionally at the cars next to you, in which people are completely preoccupied and content with the technology around them. As you drive through the city, everything you see appears as a work of human achievement: stoplights, fire trucks, businesses, freeway overpasses, and skyscrapers. By chance you see a bluebird, and immediately reflect back on a recent episode of an animal show you watched that featured the bluebird. ‘Bluebirds are part of the thrush family’, you say to no one in particular. At church, you sing songs praising God’s provision, his mercies, his creation, and his grace. But everything you experienced on the way to church, from the food you ate to the beauty you witnessed, testified to humanity’s ingenuity and mastery of the world. Your experience of the world was a testament to humanity, not God, because everything in your experience conditioned you to look at this world and its physical laws. It all makes sense as a self-sufficient immanent world, even though you know that Jesus is our Creator and Sustainer…While its possible for us to believe in a transcendent God and still live within the imminent frame, it isn’t easy. In fact, its becoming increasingly difficult.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth In A Distracted Age

It is the fact that believing in a transcendent God and living in this imminent frame is difficult that ought to compel us to preach a Gospel that calls us to consider the world beyond the world we immediately live in. We must preach a Gospel that calls the hearer to die to themselves and their inwardly-chosen conception of “the good life” that technology and media has allowed them to conceive of, to take up their crosses, and to follow the risen, ascended, transcended Christ in submission and obedience to his sovereign lordship and will over their lives, knowing that whoever loses their life in this life will find it in the next. But even as we emphasize the fact that there is a world beyond the world we know and a life beyond the life we live now, we do not do so seeking to persuade people that the technology and media in our lives that distracts us from contemplating and meditating on our eternal future is a bad thing, but rather that everything good that we have in our lives – including the technology and media that we use to make our lives more productive and bring us joy – ultimately comes from a transcendent God. Wherever we see human ingenuity and mastery, we must point back to the God who made such ingenuity and mastery possible. Wherever we see human creativity and beauty on display, we must point back to the God from whom we understand beauty and from whom we have received our creativity. Whenever we enjoy good food, good drink, good times with friends and families, we must point back to the God from whom our enjoyment of those things ultimately comes from. A transcendent Gospel does not call us to forsake the world that we live and delight in – a transcendent Gospel calls us to taste and see that the Lord is good and, in his goodness, he has given us this beautiful world and creation to live in and delight in, and technology and media have a place in that beautiful world and creation and can be means by which we know and delight in the Lord, but can also be powerful tools in depriving ourselves from sensing and knowing the transcending realm by distracting us from true life and joy in this one.

The Gospel we proclaim cannot be a Gospel that ignores the sin in our lives, because a Gospel that does not confront the reality of our sin is a Gospel that cannot proclaim the good news of salvation from our sin. Nor can the Gospel we proclaim be a Gospel that ignores the ebb and flow of the culture we live in, and if we are to sow the seeds of the Gospel and see a fruitful harvest, we must understand the fields we are trying to sow in. We must understand the culture and world that we live in so that we can preach the Gospel in such a way that breaks into the barriers and distractions of the culture, and in our case, our distractions and barriers are fueled by the technology and media we use to reinforce our disordered desires away from God. But not only must we proclaim a transcendent Gospel that calls the hearer out of their individually-driven distraction and towards Christ on his throne, we must model a life that reflects the results of believing such a Gospel – and on the final episode of this season of Breaking The Digital Spell, we are going to look at what life looks like once the digital spell has been broken.

“Media ecologist Marshall McLuhan reminded his generation that technology is always an extension of the self. A fork is simply an extension of my hand. My car is an extension of my arms and feet, and no less so than Fred Flintstone’s foot mobile. Likewise, my smartphone extends my cognitive functions. The active neurons in my brain are a crackling tangle of skill lightning, and my thought life resembles a thunderstorm over Kansas. This tiny electrical storm in the microscopic space of my nervous system quite naturally extends out to my thumbs to create tiny digital sparks  of electricity inside my phone that beam out to the world by radio waves. This all means that my phone makes a place in time and space – outside of me – where I can project my relationships, my longings, and the full scope of my conscious existence.” - Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

Tony Reinke opens up his book “12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You” by bringing Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic remarks to life in ways McLuhan himself could’ve never conceived of. McLuhan, who lived from 1911-1980, wouldn’t live to see the dawn of the Internet age, much less the smartphone and social media age, but he would’ve seen the dawn of the television age and how, through television entertainment, our television sets would project for us the life and culture that we would desire to live – and we could pick the programming that best corresponded to the version of ourselves that we idealized. Of course, television is no longer the best medium for accomplishing that goal – our smartphones, powered by social media, allows us to achieve an extension of ourself reflects our longings, relationships, and the full scope of our conscious existence more powerfully than ever before. If we are unsatisfied with the world we live in, we can retreat into a digital world of our creation through our smartphones, a world that reflects who we desire to be and that focuses solely on the things we desire to focus on, and we can be perpetually distracted from the world we actually and truly live in. But even smartphones and social media have their limits, and if, as we looked at last week, the future of technology and media is to contribute more and more to a distracted digital age, what exactly does that look like?

If technology is an extension of the self, then these extensions communicate something about ourselves and the world that we live in. Our smartphones are incredibly powerful tools for communication, but like we’ve talked about at multiple points in this season, mediums are not value neutral. They ask us to do certain things in order to engage with them, and how we engage with them reveals what those mediums value. This applies just as much to the machines as the social and intellectual environments – the mediums – that the machines, like smartphones, create. And if these machines and mediums value certain forms of communication, we must understand what these machines intend to be communicated. Tony Reinke quotes Christian ethicist Oliver O’Donovan, who succinctly captures this idea:

The tools set the agenda. A tool of communication is a tool for communicating something.

Tony Reinke, citing Oliver O’Donovan, in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

Reinke then immediately references a quote from theologian David Wells:

Media don’t just just lie around passively, waiting for us to come along and find them useful for some project we have in mind. They tell us what to do and, more significantly, what to want to do. There is a current in the stream, and if we don’t know how to swim, we shall be carried by it. I see someone doing something and I want to do it, too. Then I forget whatever it was that I thought I wanted to do.

Tony Reinke, citing David Well, in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

These ideas are central to the premise of Breaking the Digital Spell: asking questions about the technology and media that we take for granted to see how they shape the way we think about God and how we love our neighbor, and these tools of communication influence the way we communicate God in a distracted digital age to our distracted digital neighbors. Again, if the trajectory of technology is towards more and more distraction, these tools are communicating something for us, and they’re telling us what we should want to do. We cannot be ignorant as to what these desires and demands are.

There is no possible way we can cover all the new technology and media that is on the horizon – there is simply way too much to talk about, and with each passing month it seems as though there are newer possibilities on the horizon to consider. In this episode we are going to look at one particular form of technology that’s already here and gaining acceptance, but you can apply what O’Donovan and Wells discuss to the technology and media in your life. Communication tools are tools for communicating something – ask yourself, what do the tools you use in your life want you to communicate? Technology and media tell us what to do and, more significantly, what to want to do. What does the technology and media in your life want you to do, and what is it willing to do to make doing that easy and convenient? This can even apply to technology beyond the confines we’ve listed here. When we read about the increasing possibility of workplace automation via machines, or driverless cars promising safer roads with more free time for the former driver, or the disturbing possibility of brothels opening with robots for customers to sleep with, what is being communicated in these advances? What do they tell us to do and, more significantly, what to want to do? Armed with this perspective you have a starting point for being able to make sense of this rapidly changing digital world, and you’ll be able to break the digital spell with the questions you ask.

Let’s put that into practice with the main focus of this episode: extended reality technology.

Extended reality, according to a Medium.com article from tech networking firm North of 41, defines extended reality as “all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables.” Extended Reality, or XR, is an umbrella term for any kind of technology that blends the real world and the digital world to some degree through an interface. This term encompasses the other popular “reality” technology, including Augmented Reality (also known as AR), Virtual Reality (also known as VR), and Mixed Reality (also known as MR). Augmented Reality, or AR, takes live or direct interaction with the real world and adds digital elements on top of it, usually through the camera of a smartphone or tablet. If you played Pokemon GO or have seen people playing it, they’re using Augmented Reality – the camera footage from the real world is augmented with Pokemon that appear on the street corner or in someone’s front yard that you have to try and catch, but the foundation for that augmentation comes from whatever the phone camera captures in the real world. By contrast, Virtual Reality, or VR, totally removes direct interaction with the real world and completely replaces it with a digital world. VR technology, whether its a phone inside of a headset or a VR gaming rig like the Oculus Rift, requires you to completely block out the real world so your eyes can focus on a digital screen that moves as your head and body does. If you saw the recent film Ready Player One, you saw very powerful VR technology at work, and that level of immersion isn’t totally here yet but we are closer to it than you might think. Mixed Reality, or MR, is somewhere between AR and VR, and sometimes referred to as “hybrid reality”. The main thing that distinguishes MR is that content in the real world and content in the digital world are able to interact with each other – where virtual reality is a fully immersive digital reality and augmented reality adds supplemental digital content on top of some real-world content, like Pokemon in Pokemon GO, mixed reality technology blends the two and allows you to interact with the digital content given to you by your display in a real-world context. There are a few demonstration videos on Microsoft’s website for their HoloLens headset that show hologram and digital interfaces that can be controlled via hand gestures, such as “tapping” through a holographic menu by “tapping” it with your hand. All three of these forms of technology – AR, VR, and MR – extend the concept of “reality” from the real world into the digital space to some degree of immersion, with VR being total immersion in the digital world at the expense of the real world and AR and MR being a mixture of the two worlds to some degree.

Now, to be clear – extended reality technology is really, really cool. I personally do not have any desire to play VR games, but if Microsoft were to release a full and proper Halo VR game, I would play that in a heartbeat. The possibilities of VR and other extended reality technologies for creativity, storytelling, and entertainment are absolutely amazing. Likewise, the possibilities of MR technology in the workplace is truly incredible. One of the HoloLens demonstration videos showed an electrical technician making a Skype call to a factory engineer and together they troubleshoot an electrical problem in real time with the engineer having full access to what the technician could see through the HoloLens interface. That is awesome. Extended reality technology has just as much practical, real world potential as it does for creating highly immersive entertainment, and we can and should be thankful for what these tools could allow us to do. At this point I want to set aside talk of AR and MR to focus more on VR, because I think VR has unique implications for us to consider due to the fact that, unlike AR and MR, VR is a fully immersive digital experience. In order to use VR, you must block out the real world in order to interact with the digital world given to you in your headset, and this raises some questions that, as Christians, we need to consider, and we can use the perspective we outlined earlier in the episode as our starting point.

First of all, what does VR tell the user to do? This is another way of asking what VR values as a medium, and what that mediums values will be revealed in what that medium asks us to do in order to use it. VR tells the user that, as a baseline requirement for us, the real world must be completely tuned out, and VR technology is very powerful at tricking your brain into thinking that the digital world you’re now immersed in is the world you’re actually in. This sets us up for the next question: what does VR want us to want to do? What kind of desires does VR want us to have, and what is it willing to do to engender those desires in us? This is where VR’s strength becomes dangerous – there is nothing wrong with being fully immerse in a digital world for entertainment or recreation, but what happens when you’re immersing yourself in a digital world as a means of escaping the real world? VR wants us to desire a digital world that captivates our hearts and attentions more than the real world does, and is willing to offer the very experience necessary to make that possible. We can get sucked into distorted realities through prolonged exposure to a television screen after a Netflix binge or through starting at your smartphone for hours on end, but the real world is always in the peripheral vision as you stare into the screen. No matter how much you try, you can’t fully escape the fact that the house is falling apart or that you’re sitting on the couch alone when you watch television – no matter how much we might use television or the Internet to escape the real world, the screen size and location always leaves a little bit of the real world in the peripheral vision. VR takes that peripheral away and replaces it will a full digital world that could offer us what our real life can’t. The digital world could offer us a live of excitement or adventure. It can offer us the illusion of companionship and satisfaction, as the growing availability of VR pornography demonstrates. It can offer us beauty, fascination, and wonder when we can’t find it outside our front door. It can also allow us to satisfy our deepest, darkest desires, and Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University succinctly captures why this should concern us:

“Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interaction, function as society?”

Jeremy Bailenson, Three really real questions about the future of virtual reality

One possible result is a society very much like Ready Player One’s – a world where the real world has absolutely and completely collapsed because the digital world offered through the movie’s VR technology is more satisfying to us than the world we actually live in. The Oasis – Ready Player One’s digital world – is where the vast majority of human socialization now takes place, and given how hideous and broken the world is outside the screen – trailer houses stacked endlessly on top of each other, the smoggy air rendering the sky a neutral grey, where everyone is desperately chasing solutions in the digital world for problems they face in the real one, [its no surprise that people continue to turn to the digital world to escape the physical one]. I am not trying to suggest that VR technology will lead to a guaranteed dystopia like the one Ready Player One describes, but I also think it could very easily become that if we do not come to terms with our desire for distraction and escape and how VR technology will offer us a pinnacle of distraction of escape unlike anything else that has come before.

Again, to be clear – VR technology is pretty cool. I am not trying to say its not. However, just like all the other technology and media we’ve looked at this season, it’s not possible to adopt VR just for the cool and beneficial features. You either adopt all the consequences of VR, the good, bad, and dystopian, or you adopt none of it. But, unlike television, the Internet, social media, and smartphones, I think the bad and ugly of VR poses a more pernicious threat than the dangers of prior technology and media because VR, more than anything else that comes before it, has the ability to numb us to the world we live in – a world created by an omniscient and omnipotent Creator, who has created a universe that is beautiful, majestic, and awesome, but a universe that is marred by our sin against a perfectly holy and righteous King who has pronounced death to the enemies who broke his law. Outside of Christ, we are those enemies under that death sentence, and as sinful enemies of this King we despise his creation, his laws, his rule and authority and desire the means to enact our own authority, our own rule, our own laws, within our own creation. VR technology doesn’t allow us distraction on the same tier as our smartphones and social media – VR technology allows us to fully suppress the truth in our unrighteousness, and gives us some of the most powerful tools to do just that. I’m not trying to suggest that those who continue to pioneer and improve on this technology are secretly trying to accomplish this while hoodwinking us with the possible benefits of VR or other extended reality possibilities – again, extended reality technology holds some incredible possibilities for legitimately good uses, and VR is included in that. What I am saying is that VR technology is not value neutral, and what it values as a medium – giving us a fully immersive digital world we want to be based off our desires – is something that simultaneously strikes at the very core of what it means to be a human made in the image of God living in his creation. We used this quote from Alan Noble’s book Disruptive Witness several episodes ago, and ask yourself if you can conceive of a more powerful kind of technology that reinforces this notion of the “buffered self”:

Our pervasive culture of technological distraction dramatically exacerbates the effects of the buffered self, which in turn feeds the demand for technology of distraction. It is not a coincidence that these two forces have arisen at this point in history. The rise of secularism has inspired a view of technology and fullness rooted thoroughly in this life and established and chosen inwardly, which I believe has helped to justify the creation and adoption of technologies that are not directed toward human flourishing but instead help us project our identity and remain distracted. Outside of a culture of virtue grounded in an external source, science, technology, and the market have been driven to produce a society that prioritizes the sovereign individual. The modern person experiences a buffer between themselves and the world out there – including transcendent ideas and truths. The constant distraction of our culture shields us from the kind of deep, honest reflection needed to ask why we exist and what is true.

Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth In A Distracted Age

If modern technology and media exists to put a buffer between us and the world we truly live in, then we as Christians cannot afford to be silent on how technology and media, when incorrectly used, can be a severe obstacle to the Gospel. On next week’s episode of Breaking The Digital Spell: Conclusions, Part Two.

I got my first cell phone for my 16th birthday: it was a Nokia flip phone with no Internet access and restricted call/texting functionality past 10PM. This was in September of 2007, just a couple months after the original iPhone hit store shelves. As a newly-minted 16 year old, I was just happy to have a cell phone to text my friends. The iPhone was really cool – the worship intern for my church’s youth ministry got an iPhone on day one – but I didn’t think it’s features were necessary. I was more than content with smashing a number multiple times to get a certain letter and doing this over and over and over again – the touchscreen keyboard of an iPhone was just bling.

I didn’t hold that opinion for long though. Fast forward three years to 2010 and the original iPhone was now obsolete compared to the new iPhone 4. Gone was the curvey plastic design of old – the rectangular metallic body was in and it looked amazing. My middle brother Travis received an iPhone 3GS for his birthday – which is just a few weeks before mine – and as the older brother I could not stand the injustice of my little brother having an iPhone before I did. Once the iPhone 4 was released I went to the AT&T store and dropped $800 on the phone – $300 of it was the cost of the actual phone and $500 of it was the security deposit I needed to pay because, in order to buy this phone, I needed to leave my parent’s phone plan and start my own plan, and since I didn’t have a credit score at the time, AT&T required a security deposit nearly twice the cost of the phone I was buying! I got that deposit back at the end of my first year, but in hindsight, my love for the iPhone and my unyielding desire to have one made me do something irrational and stupid.

We opened this season of Breaking the Digital Spell up with a comparison of two dystopias, one from George Orwell and one from Aldous Huxley. Orwell believed that what we feared – the iron fist of totalitarianism and government control – would ruin us, while Huxley believed that what we loved – our comfort, our leisure, our entertainment and distraction – will ruin us. My love for the iPhone when I bought it didn’t ruin me in the moment (although it certainly ruined my savings). Seven years later, however, I think Huxley was on to something about what we love ruining us – and I think smartphones, while making our lives better, are simultaneously ruining them in the process.

According to Statista.com, it is expected that there will be 2.53 billion smartphone users in 2018, and that by 2019 that number is expected to climb to 2.71 billion – an increase of 180 million in the span of a single year. Those numbers are estimates, but they show that the meteoric rise of smartphones shows no sign of slowing down. Of that 2.71 billion projected for next year, 230 million of those users live in America, which comprises 68.4% of the entire American population – nearly 7 of out 10 Americans own a smartphone. And the habits of those 7 out of 10 Americans are not good: again, according to Statista.com,we check our phones 47 times a day on average, and 85 of us use it while talking to friends and family. 80% of us check our phone within an hour of getting up and going to bed, and within that hour, 35% of us can’t even make it five minutes without checking our phone To make things more depressing, 47% of us, at one point in time or another, have tried to reduce their smartphone usage and cut back on the screen time, and the icing on the cake is that of those 47% that tried to cut back, only 30% were able to do so successfully. Smartphone addiction is real, and smartphone manufacturers realize that while they make an awesome product capable of doing many good and helpful things, they’ve also made a product that has a reliable track record of producing compulsive, addictive behaviors in its user base. Its why, with this most recent iOS update, Apple has included internal phone tracking capabilities to give you data about your phone usage (and, I might say, with more reliability and precision than similar apps that came before it), and Google has done the same thing for Android. The jury’s still out on whether or not these measures will work on not, but just as we are starting to reach a point in society where we are really beginning to question social media’s effects on us, we are really beginning to question our smartphones as well. To quote Tony Reinke from his outstanding book “12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You”:

“We are embodied creatures, and that means that the way we use digital technology changes all of us – mentally, physically, and spiritually. Solomon warned us to not divorce our minds from our whole bodies, the very temptation of the touch-screen age. Study after study has shown that too much time on our phones has profound effects on our physical health, including (but not limited to) inactivity and obesity, stress and anxiety, sleeplessness and restlessness, bad posture and sore necks, eye strain and headaches, and hypertension and stress-induced shallow breathing patterns. The physical consequences of our unwise smartphone habits often go unnoticed, because in the matrix of the digital world, we simply lose a sense of our bodies, our posture, our breathing, and our heart rates. Our overwhelming focus on projected images causes negligence with regard to our bodies.” - Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

I’m not going belabor the point that smartphone addiction is a real and serious issue. Chances are you’ve felt its effects in your own life and need no reminder that you struggle to get away from your phone, and I’m not here to try and convince anyone to toss their phones out the window. This is a podcast about asking questions about the technology and media we take for granted, and honestly assessing the full range of impact they have on our lives and how those impacts shape the way we think about God and love our neighbor. And it should go without stating: smartphones, when properly used, are wonderful tools for the Christian. The smartphone combines the access of the internet and the malleability of digital text into something you can quite literally hold in your hand, which makes reading the Bible, listening to sermons, counseling a friend and praying for them long distance, and more all the more easier and doable. Phones can track our health and help us manage our time and our finances, and we can store valuable information about our jobs and families and carry it with us on the go. Many of us couldn’t do the jobs we do without our phones – my iPhone 7+ is the most important tool I have in managing the social media accounts I’m in charge of, and combined with my MacBook my workflow is seamless and efficient because of it. We all know that our phones are used for legitimately good and praiseworthy things. The problem is that – just like television, just like the Internet, and just like social media – you cannot adopt just the good things about smartphones. You either adopt all of the things smartphones bring, good and bad, or you adopt none of those things. And the bad things that smartphones bring have not only physical consequences on us, but spiritual ones as well.

In the previous episode we did on social media, we ended the episode with the unanswered question of “why is it so hard to break away from social media?”. In many ways it’s almost impossible to talk about smartphones without talking about social media, because social media’s meteoric growth is parallel to smartphone’s meteoric growth as well. Part of the reason why we can’t break away from social media is because our smartphones are now tailored towards making social media as accessible as possible that wherever our smartphones go, social media goes with us. It used to be that checking MySpace and Facebook required you to be at a computer, which was anchored to a desk and not something you could check at any moment of the day. Smartphones empowered social media with the mobility it needed to fully saturate our lives and society, and where social media tries to convince you through timelines and algorithms that you can handle an endless waterfall of content, smartphones convince you that you can and should have access to that waterfall of content 24/7 a day. Social media combined with smartphones can be a good thing, but it can also neutralize us under the allure of the waterfall of content our screens put forth. This quote from Tony Reinke is lengthy but listen his commentary on C.S. Lewis and in the Screwtape Letters and ask yourself if you’ve experienced what he describes as the “Nothing” strategy:

What I am coming to understand is that this impulse to pull the lever of a random slot machine of viral content is the age-old tactic of Satan. C.S. Lewis called it the “Nothing strategy” in his Screwtape Letters. It is the strategy that eventually leaves a man at the end of his life looking back in lament, “I now see that I spent most of my life doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” This “Nothing strategy” is “very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off” … Lewis’ warning about the “dreary flickering” in front of our eyes is a loud prophetic alarm to the digital age. We are always busy, but always distracted – diabolically lured away from what is truly essential and truly gratifying. Led by our unchecked digital appetites, we manage to transgress both commands that promise to bring focus to our lives. We fail to enjoy God. We fail to love our neighbor. - Tony Reinke, citing C.S. Lewis, in 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

And to be clear – this “nothing” strategy Reinke and Lewis talk about is not just caused by social media. Push notifications have increased in pervasiveness from all sorts of apps, all with the aim of distracting you away from the real world to the screen. I know in moments of boredom I’m just as prone to check the stock market as I am to check social media, and my phone buzzes the same for a text message and a stupid push notification from Amazon enticing me to spend money on something I don’t need. My point is that smartphones (and dumb phones, to be sure) are tools of immense usefulness and tools of immense distraction, and we cannot use for good without exposing ourselves to crippling distraction. And this crippling distraction profoundly affects how we think about God and the way we love our neighbor.

In our “Conclusions, Part One” episode, we ended the episode with the idea that television and the internet paved the way for secularism to gain a greater influence in the church, not to mention among society as a whole. With the combination and global acceptance of smartphones and social media, we are now on the other side of that influence running its course in our culture, and we live in a distracted age made possible by powerful computers in our hands that feed us a limitless amount of distraction. And make no mistake: this distracted, content-saturated age shortchanges our ability to think about God in addition to influencing what we believe about him. As Alan Noble, author of the insanely good “Disruptive Witness” explains:

Modern media technology focuses largely on two goals: capturing our attention and gathering our data. While the latter has troubling implications for our privacy, the former has a direct effect on our ability to encounter and contemplate the holy. Innumerable gadgets, websites, channels, streaming services, songs, films, and biometric wristbands vie for our attention. Without our attention, their existence is unjustified. So, each piece of technology we own does what it can to make us pay attention to it, like an overly eager child tugging on our sleeve, begging, “Look what I can do, Dad!” It is not that every spare moment is fought for; our technology covets every glance. Flashing lights, vibrations, bells ringing, little red dots, email alerts, notifications, pop-up windows, commercials, news tickers, browser tabs – everything is designed to capture our attention. And there is good reason to believe that technology will only continue to progress in this direction. . . . Barring a catastrophic event or a drastic shift in the structure and goals of modern technology, we can expect that for the foreseeable future our society will be in part defined by technology designed to continually distract us. - Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth In A Distracted Age

Alan continues on to summarize the work of American cognitive scientist Daniel J. Levitin and the implications of multitasking on our minds and how all the distractions we live with – chiefly, but not exclusively caused by our phones – give us mental fatigue. Alan again:

We are addicted to novelty, ,and as with most addictions, it takes a toll on our bodies: we become mentally fatigued, “scrambled”, as Levitin describes it. In this way, the modern mind is often not prepared to engage in dialogue about personally challenging ideas, particularly ones with deep implications. The fatigued mind would rather categorize a conversation about God as another superficial distraction, requiring little cognitive attention, than a serious conversation that ought to cost us, at least cognitively. - Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth In A Distracted Age

If you’ll recall from Episode 5, we discussed how God, in revealing himself through the spoken Word to the authors of Scripture who then codified it in the written Word, bounded his revelation to a medium that values high levels of cognitive interaction. I’m not going to repeat the “how do you read a book?” exercise again because I’ve done it in several episodes now, but reading a book requires abstract thinking, contemplation, focused meditation, and other cognitively intense activities, and that if the God of Christianity was to be understood through the medium of the Word, then this God must value abstract thinking, contemplation, and focused meditation as well, and desires that to be reflected in how we worship him. Smartphones short circuit that, because smartphones are the means through which a million distractions are presented to us that keep us from abstract thinking, contemplation, and focused meditation. This is another longer quote, but listen to Alan one more time:

Multitasking forces us to make millions of tiny decisions (What song should I listen to? Should I share this article? Should I check that text message? How should I reply to this email?), and this wears us out cognitively. The result is that when it comes time for us to make important decisions, we are too exhausted and are more likely to make mistakes. Alternatively, we may avoid making a decision all together. When there are an almost infinite number of options, its hard to choose just one. Decision overload is as much a problem as it is for digital multitasking. A good friend of mine once explained that although he believed there is a God, he didn’t know which religious account of God is true because there are so many different religions. When I asked him why he didn’t try to discover the truth, he replied that it was just too overwhelming. A distracted and secular age does this to us: we are cognitively overwhelmed by the expanding horizon of possible beliefs. Our frantic and flattened culture is not conducive to wrestling with thick ideas, ideas with depth, complexity, and personal implications. It is a culture of immediacy, simple emotions, snap judgments, optics, and identity formation. In such a world, is it any wonder that Christians so often speak past their listeners?” - Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth In A Distracted Age

I cannot stress enough how valuable Alan Noble’s book Disruptive Witness is because it’s one of the first books of its kind to connect the consequences of living in a world with distractions, especially with the endless and convenient amount of distractions caused by our smartphones. The result is that the Gospel message doesn’t fall on deaf ears, but distracted ears. The Gospel becomes just one more source of distraction and noise amid a backdrop of endless distraction and noise, and our smartphones contribute a significant amount of the noise and distraction we experience in our lives. And it’s not always pointless distraction either – maybe that email we need to read is legitimately important, maybe there’s a situation that we are monitoring and need to communicate with others about, or maybe you’re checking your bank accounts after seeing some strange transactions show up. Again, our smartphones are useful tools, but they’re also tools of immense distraction, and this immense distractions distracts us from thinking about God and influences the way we think about God. God is no longer a subject we ought to give the fullest amount of our attention to; instead, he is one possible option of belief amid a myriad of other beliefs we encounter in the waterfall of content put forth by our phones. And if you do believe in God, what do you believe about him? Do you believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God or solely the writings of its authors passed off as having a divine source? Do you believe God created Adam and Eve or that their account is fictional, allegorical, or metaphorical? Do you believe the flood of Noah was literal or figurative? Do you believe the signs and wonders in Exodus actually happened or that they’re exaggerated accounts of Moses’s clash with Pharaoh? Do you believe Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time, or just a man – maybe a man who never actually existed? Do you believe Jesus was actually crucified as the fulfillment of God’s plan to redeem his people from the curse of sin, or was Jesus crucified for being a political troublemaker? Do you believe that Jesus Christ is coming back one day to judge the living and the dead, or is our charge as Christians to simply create “heaven on earth” for our fellow man? Like Alan said just a bit ago, “a distracted and secular age does this to us: we are cognitively overwhelmed by the expanding horizon of possible beliefs.” And make no mistake – if we are to live as faithful Christians in this culture, we must take this into account as we proclaim the Gospel. We must, as the title of Alan’s book suggests, be disruptive witnesses.

Smartphones and social media aren’t going anywhere, but they’re not the only players contributing to the distracted age we now live in as Christians. On the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we set our eyes towards the horizon of new technology and media, some of which already exists and is growing in acceptance and usage – and some of which, quite literally, covers our eyes so that all we can see is whatever digital world we want to live in.

When I originally set out to do this podcast back in May of this year, my initial vision of it was to focus specifically on social media. I wanted to do a podcast on how social media and theology intersect, and so I invested in some research material to help me get this podcast started. By the time I finished the first book in that stack – Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death” – I realized that focusing solely on social media, while not a bad idea in and of itself, wouldn’t be enough. Social media did not arise in a vacuum – it is the culmination of several difference strands of technology and media that collide into one of the most powerful – and most destructive – mediums ever created. Neil Postman passed away in October of 2003; two months before that, a collective of former employees from a digital marketing firm would take a risk on the creation of a brand new website called MySpace. Nobody, not even Postman himself, could conceive of how the humble beginnings of MySpace would soon give way to the most significant revolution of media since the Internet itself, and how drastically the world would change 15 years later because of it.

Before we keep going, I want to say that the rest of this season will not be like the first half of the season when it comes to keeping things in chronological perspective. We started with words, then went to television, then went to the early Internet, and now he we are at the modern Internet. The point was to show the effects of change on society over time, and with regard to everything up to this point, the changes were slow moving and easier to process in hindsight. We cannot reasonably do this with social media. The Facebook we know and use today is not the same Facebook we knew when we signed up and began using it. In fact, the Facebook we know and use today is not even the same Facebook that we knew and were using not even a full year ago! Where television and the pre-social media Internet stayed relatively stable in how they worked and what their effects as mediums, social media is defined by its instability. The things we discuss in this episode about how social media changes the way we think about God and our neighbor have a somewhat limited shelf life – by this time next year, the social media field will have changed and there will be new issues to consider. However, I think there are some aspects of social media that will always be true regardless of what future changes might bring, and that’s what we are going to focus on in this episode. In thinking about how social media has changed the way we think about God and the way we love our neighbor, these will always be consistent issues to deal with. Also, for the record, I will be mainly focusing on four social media networks in this episode: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the greatest social media platform of all time, Twitter. Other platforms will get mentioned when relevant, but otherwise I’ll keep the scope to those four platforms.

What even is social media? Its a term that everyone knows and is familiar with, but what does it actually mean? That’s a good question, because depending on who you ask, you will get totally different answers, and if you ask the same person one day, you might get a different answer a few years later. Merriam Webster defines “social media” as “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).” Wikipedia’s definition has changed several times over the years, but their current one is “social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.” One of the best definitions I’ve heard comes from Marta Kagan, creator of the the business presentation program Ace the Pitch, and her definition is “social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.” It’s this definition of social media that I want to work with, because it captures everything that we might think of when we think of social media. Social media is technology and social interaction and lengthy Facebook text bombs and dank memes and family photos and videos from talented content creators and videos of violence and terror and collective celebration or mourning after a football game and debates about religion, politics, and fan theories and so much more. Part of the reason why defining social media is so hard is because it’s so massive and always evolving, and thinking about “social media” as an umbrella term is a very useful and pragmatic approach to such a vague and nebulous concept.

But even though “social media” itself is a hard term to define, we can make better sense of it if we break it down into its various parts. Social media combines all of the major themes we’ve looked at so far in this season in one single medium, and I think its safe to say that, in a sense, the path of technological development in human history has all led to this point. If the printing press revolutionized the written word and further technological developments made printing even more powerful, social media has created the possibility of a Tweet from an ordinary person going viral and being seen by hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of minutes. This can’t be said of any book, magazine, tract, pamphlet, even really of any online blog or news article – anyone has the possibility of writing something that could potentially explode beyond their wildest dreams. If television upended a world that makes sense of itself through the spoken and written world and turns it into a world where our discourse is now based in images, social media capitalizes on this by empowering anybody to upload videos ranging from smartphone recordings to studio produced shows – to mention the untold number of cat, baby, and food photos. Not only do we have the behemoth known as YouTube, and the millions of channels within it, we also have Facebook Watch and, as of a few weeks ago, Instagram TV, and all of these are designed to be the successor of the television Neil Postman knew and understood when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. If the Internet upended our sense of “community” by giving individuals the possibility of having a community free from any geographic or physical constraint, social media fills in the gaps by giving us profile pictures, full names, job titles, family photos, and other information designed to make us feel like we truly “know” the person we are talking to online. Even though social media is technically a byproduct of the internet – once might even call it a sub-medium of the Internet, or a “medium within a medium” – it incorporates all of the technology and media we use and consume in one place. We used this quote from Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” in the previous episode, but I think this quote is still true even if change the wording to focus specifically on social media and not just “The internet” in general:

“Traditional media, even electronic ones, are being refashioned and re-positioned as they go through the shift to online distribution. When [social media] absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form: it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.” - Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

At the risk of sounding overdramatic, social media is a black hole. When MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter first appeared, they weren’t any more than these fun, trendy websites that people used but didn’t take all that seriously. Now, its impossible to not take social media seriously, and there is no place you can go where you do not see or feel its effects. Even if you close down your personal social media accounts, you’ll still hear about that stupid and idiotic thing some celebrity tweeted out, or someone will show you this hilarious meme that you found on Facebook. You’ll be regularly asked “why aren’t you on social media”, and while people will think that its noble and admirable that you’re willing to buck the trend and not be on social media, they’ll have zero desire to join you. Social media occupies the same cultural significance that television did when Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, with everyone implicitly assuming that you’re participating in social media in some way, just as everyone implicitly assumed you watched something on television. The idea of not watching television at all or not using social media at all is very culturally unpopular, and if you’ve ever contemplated the idea of staying off social media, you know there are a million reasons that come up in your mind as to why you can’t leave.

But why can’t we leave? We do we all seem to struggle to mitigate or control social media’s influence on our lives? Earlier in the season we asked “how do you read a book?” and “how do you watch television?” to reflect on what these mediums demand of us. Remember: mediums are not value neutral, and they ask us to do certain things in order to use them, and we can discern what those things are when we look at what it means to actually “use” social media. So – how do you use social media? Even asking this question poses some difficulty because, unlike reading a book and television, there’s not one truly uniform way to interact with social media. Some people use social media as their writing and creative outlet. Some people post status updates about anything and everything, and some people simply like and share what other people post as their main contribution. Some people use it as a networking tool. Some of us are just here for the dank memes, and some of us use social media because it’s our job to manage social media accounts professionally. Whatever your specific use of social media looks like, there’s one thing we all share in common: we all use timelines. So let’s narrow it down: how do you use a timeline on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? First, you have to create an account (obvious, I know), and then you need to “friend” or “follow” people, brands, companies, or subjects in order to populate your timeline with content – photos, videos, text updates, articles, GIFs, polls, livestreams, and more. The content that is shown to you in your timeline is selected based on a variety of factors, which are mysteriously (and often annoyingly) mediated through a background process known as the “algorithm” of whatever platform you’re using. Once your timeline is served to you, you have two options. You can start going down on the timeline, and the content will become less and less “relevant” to you the further down you go, or you can refresh your timeline, and the algorithm will serve up a brand new batch of content for you, and after a while you’ll start seeing the same content you’ve already seen. At any point, you can post content of your own in the form of text, image, and videos, and you can like, comment, share, and retweet the content of others, and all of this not only impacts your timeline but the timelines of others. The more a post or content gets interacted with – the technical term for it is the “engagement rate” – the more the algorithm will promote that content in the timelines of people, even people who aren’t your friends. The less interaction the content gets, or if the content is not content the algorithm wants to promote (for example, a post with a million hyperlinks to various websites), then the algorithm will suppress that content and refuse to serve it to as many people as it would for “good” content. At the time of this recording, “good” content is video, and specifically short video or live-streaming video through Facebook Live, Periscope, and Instagram’s live streaming. Text still performs just fine on Twitter, but is getting more difficult on Facebook, and while Instagram is just now beginning to promote the ability to include outbound links via their paid Story promotions, Facebook still largely frowns upon posts that contain outbound URLs. And even though video is “in” right now, horizontal video’s time in the sun might be running out as – and consider this a free professional social media tip on the house – Facebook and Instagram are doing everything in their power to make vertical video the next big thing, and given the unbelievable, brutal destruction of Snapchat at the hands of Facebook and Instagram stories, their ability to make vertical video stick seems more likely than not. But what’s “good” content right now wasn’t necessarily “good” content a year ago, and by this time next year “good” content might be something totally new and different.

And speaking of content and timelines- how much content are we talking about here? Every minute, 510 thousand comments are posted to Facebook, and 293 thousand statuses are updated and 136 thousand photos are uploaded by 1.47 billion daily active users – for comparison’s sake, there are 7.7 billion people that live on the entire planet. There’s an average of 6,000 new tweets every second, which results in 5 hundred million tweets per day. 80% of Instagram’s 1 billion users are outside of the U.S., and of those 1 billion total Instagram users, 500 million people use Instagram every day and like 4.2 billion posts per day – and post 95 million posts and 400 million stories a day. YouTube has 1.9 billion total users, and while their active daily user base is comparatively smaller at 30 million people, those 30 million people watch 5 billion videos a day, 500 million of those coming from mobile views. Every minute, 300 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube, which translates 432 thousand hours of new YouTube footage per day. We haven’t even touched LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Pintrest, WhatsApp, and some of the other social media platforms that still boast insane figures of their own, even if they aren’t a part of the Big 4 of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

If all this talk of “content” seems overwhelming, that’s because it is overwhelming. Simply put, if mediums are not value neutral, and how we use a medium reveals what that medium values, then social media values content, and has made it possible to value content to the point it can house and feed you obscenely high amounts of new content every second and get that content to you through your social media timelines. And your interaction with this content is not framed in plainly obvious terms like “consuming content”, but on “conversations”, “engagement”, “building community”, “interacting with your audience”, “updating your friends and family on what’s new”, and a whole slew of other language to re-frame this content production and consumption on good and desirable terms. And to be clear – it is perfectly legitimate to use social media to have conversations with people, and to build community, and to interact and engage with others. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to use social media to just do that. You can use social media for those things, but you will be asked to stand underneath a waterfall and drink the downpour of content our social media feeds serve to us and to our neighbor in our timelines.

So, to go back to the question of timelines, how do we consume what is in those timelines. Recall from several episodes ago the contrast between reading a book and watching a 60 minute evening newscast on television. Reading a book requires you to give a considerable amount of attention and focus for a prolonged period of time, and you need to be able to parse the vocabulary and grammar of the text in each sentence, and then you need to be able to understand each sentence in relation to each sentence, each paragraph in relation to each paragraph, and each chapter to each chapter, as well as link ideas, concepts arguments, and illustrations together if you want to understand what the author is saying. By contrast, to watch your standard 60 minute evening news broadcast, you still need to give some degree of attention to it in order to understand it, but the attention required is only relevant to the length and subject matter of each story, so only a few minutes at most. With each new story, you mentally hit “reset” and begin paying attention to something completely new to what you were paying attention to seconds ago, and after a few cycles of this, you’ll get interrupted with a commercial break that you can pay attention to or totally ignore. By the time the news is over, you’ve been processing information for 60 minutes, but that information has been compartmentalized, disjointed, and detached because of the format you consumed it in, and even though you might have covered a diverse range of subjects, you’ve only done so in a way that barely skims the surface. This holds true for even other types of programming as well – even if the internal subject matter is consistent, such as an episode of a TV show, you’re still only asked to give a few minutes of your attention to the show at a time (Netflix is obviously exempt from this). Social media builds upon the precedent built by television and serves us content that is more compartmentalized, more disjointed, more disorganized, more diverse, and it only requires seconds to consumer instead of minutes, and because it usually only requires seconds to consume instead of minutes. Even if we are watching a video or reading a lengthy Facebook text wall, we can disengage at any second and resume going back to a habit of consuming content by the second. Because the algorithm does the heavy lifting for us in filtering the type, quality, and source of the content it serves us, we are able to consume more of it – we are able to drink the waterfall of content.

Or, at least, we falsely believe we are able to drink it. One of the promises of social media is that, through algorithms and timelines, we can juggle and process all of these conversations and topics and show an interest in as many subjects as we can tailor our profiles to tune in to. What social media doesn’t tell you is that, as an individual, that you have a finite attention span. God did not create us as omniscient beings, omnipotent in our ability to continually process and take in new information. We cannot possible equally care about, or give equal attention to, all of the topics and conversations social media throws at us. At the best, all we can give is a like, share, or retweet, which only requires slightly more effort than just scrolling on by that post or tweet. We cannot give our attention fully to the physical world and the digital world at the same time – at best, we can give 50% of our time, attention, and focus to both, but to be on social media on a regular basis is to divide your attention to the world that you actually live in and the world your social media timeline creates for you. You cannot be engaged with loving your neighbor if you’re busy refreshing your timeline to get new information about people and businesses that might not be anywhere nearby. You think about God if your mind is being reshaped to think like a social media timeline, with attention spans that function in spans of seconds and there are no parameters governing the amount and type of subject matter your mind is juggling in any given moment. In short – you cannot drink from the waterfall without consequence, but we live in a world that has been convinced that it can and will continue to drink from the waterfall despite the growing amount of evidence that the consequences to your mind, to your body, to your community, to your friends, and to your family are not insignificant.

And yet, I don’t think anyone would deny that there are plenty of legitimately good uses of social media. Yes, social media allows you to drown in a waterfall of content, but sometimes that content can be good. It can make you laugh. It can make you think. It can make you aware of something you can or should do. It can, in many legitimate ways, make your life better. Yes, social media allows you to waste countless hours refreshing a timeline and distract yourself from your work or other people, but it also allows you to connect with friends, family, coworkers, and professionals within your industry. You can more easily connect with people who share your interests and hobbies, and sometimes that leads to people actually going out and doing things together in the real world. Yes, social media does lead to anxiety, and envy, and depression, and jealousy, and outrage, but it also allows you the chance to express yourself, to be creative, to encourage and uplift others. In order to say that social media is solely a “good” thing or a “bad” thing requires you to downplay all the legitimate and illegitimate uses social media offers, and to ignore all the positive and negative impacts it can bring. This is where the responses of technological optimism, technological pessimism, and technological ambiguity come into play – do the good things about social media outweigh the bad? Does the bad outweigh the good? Does the use of social media determines whether or not it’s good or bad? In asking questions about how technology and media affect us, we must consider the whole scope of effects of technology and media, both good and bad. Social media is here to stay, and its pervasiveness will only get more and more significant, and there will be no shortage of content for us to consume. How we consume that content is just as important as what we consume. How we produce content is just as important as what we produce. And in order to know how and what we should consume and produce – how we should use social media – we must understand the positives and negatives, the upsides and the downsides, the good, the bad, and the ugly – and go from there.

We are going to pump the breaks on this point because, at this point in time, it’s impossible to cleanly separate social media from the machines that make it so pervasive. Earlier we asked the question: why is it so hard to break away from social media? Why can’t we leave it? In next week’s episode, we take a look at the technology that fueled the social media revolution and ensures the saturation that social media has in our lives – which, ironically, is most likely the same technology that’s playing this podcast episode for you right now.

When we first started talking about mediums several episodes ago, we used this quote from Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death as our starting point:

“We might say that a “technology” is to a “medium” as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

For the past several episodes, we’ve been focusing on those “social and intellectual environments” created by televisions and the early Internet, and how those mediums have played a part in shaping our thoughts about God by promoting a secular way of thinking towards Christianity and religion as a whole. But what about the machines themselves? What role do they play in all this?

We’ve not focused too much on the technology of television sets and the Internet up until this point because, to be quite honest, it would be pretty boring. I personally find it fascinating, but if the goal in understanding the past is to help us understand the present digital world we live in, focusing on older forms of technology wouldn’t serve that end well. Whether your television is an old cathode ray tube television, a plasma display, or an LCD or OLED display, the medium created by the television set is going to be relatively similar to an older/newer television set, even if the picture and sound quality is different. The same is true with the Internet – whether you’re using Google Fiber and getting ridiculously fast speed, or you’re in a small town and are lucky to get 50 MBs in download speed, the medium created by the Internet is still relatively the same even if one loads a webpage in milliseconds and the other in (what feels like) an eternity. As this season starts moving more into current technology, we will start looking at the machines themselves as much as the mediums created by the machines, but I think it’s worth examining some of the technological changes brought with the Internet and look at some of questions raised with that, and we will start with a topic I’ve mentioned briefly in the past but haven’t spent too much time on yet: is there a difference between the printed word and the digital word?

I mentioned early on in this season that “a technologically optimistic view of technology sees the good that can come for Christianity when technology makes the transmission of text, words, documents, and books more doable and more available”, and obviously that’s one of the best things about the Internet. While I think that the Internet has brought negative consequences for Christianity, namely by empowering individuals to experience Christianity at the expense of the physical, embodied people of God, I also fully believe that the Internet has been one of the best things for Christianity insofar as it has allowed for text pertaining to Christianity to be more easily accessible. There’s a reason why Christian leaders were so quick to adopt blogging as a communications medium in the early 2000s – Christianity is a religion centered around the written word, and blogging was (at the time) the most cost efficient ways to publish written material and get into the hands (or, more accurately, on the screens) of people without the financial obstacles of publishing and buying physical books. And, speaking of books, the eBook industry exploded because, in general, you could buy books for significantly cheaper because the physical overhead of making and distributing physical books wasn’t a factor. My Kindle library is massive, and my physical library and Kindle library combined are barely a fraction of the library I have in Logos Bible Software – a library that I forked over $1,300 for and still haven’t exhausted looking at the digital books it came with. Digital word processors – be it Microsoft Word, Apple’s Pages, or Evernote, the note taking software I’ve been using religiously for nearly a decade – have made writing significantly easier and more convenient, with tools that allow you to do things you couldn’t do if you were writing by hand.

Its hard to imagine a better evolution of the printed text than what we have in the creation and expansion of digital text. But is reading digital text on a screen the same as reading physical text on a page? Recall what Neil Postman said of televised Christianity a few episodes ago: “If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same.” And while that might have been true of television and the Internet, does this hold up with a comparison of digital text to printed text? After all, if you look at a page of a book in a Kindle, and if you look at that same page of the same book in physical form, aren’t both pages saying the exact same thing, word for word?

In a sense, yes, and in a sense, no.

Let’s start with the affirmative: yes, propositionally speaking, both the digital page and the physical page of our hypothetical book are saying the exact same thing, word for word. The same ideas are being conveyed, the same argumentation is being used, and the terms of engagement for reading a physical book are still required in order to read the digital book as well. But isn’t that all that really matters? Not necessarily. For one, consider the extra things you can do with digital text that you can’t do with physical text. Usually, with digital text, you can customize it: you can change the font, the size, and the spacing relatively easy. You can also usually expand on the text within the text itself – in a Kindle you can highlight a single word and immediately pull up definitions, pronunciations, highlight it, or type out a note on it – and theoretically, that note could be several pages long by itself! If a text is hyperlinked, you can pull up that link and read whatever comes up. You can’t do any of these things with printed text in a book. You can physically highlight the text, and you can physically write in the book, but the shape and size of the printed text is what you’re stuck with. If you come across a word or phrase you don’t recognize, there’s no internal dictionary to help you out, and of course, you can’t put hyperlinks in physical print. And, to be clear: none of these things are inherently bad things. Part of the reason why I invested in a Logos library is because I wanted to be able to interact deeper with the texting using the indexing and cross-reference features Logos is known for. It has made sermon prep – on the handful of occasions during the year when I get to preach – significantly easier because I don’t have to thumb through volumes of books and physically keep them open to mine their content. Logos does that for me. But are these simple additions to physical text – like highlighting text with a highlighter or writing a note in the margins of the page – or are these features the result of a fundamentally new kind of text altogether? If Nicholas Carr, author of the groundbreaking book “The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains”, is correct, these features of digital text testify to digital text not simply being an evolution upon printed text, but something entirely new altogether:

“Traditional media, even electronic ones, are being refashioned and re-positioned as they go through the shift to online distribution. When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium’s physical form: it injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.” -Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

Several episodes ago, when we talked about how we actually go about reading the book, we looked at how you read a book if your goal is reading for comprehension. Reading for comprehension requires you to be able to concentrate on the text of the page and tune out distractions for a considerable period of time, to be able to understand the language the text is written in, and you need to be able to parse the vocabulary and grammar of the text and understand what’s being said in each sentence. But not only do you need to be able to understand each sentence that you’re reading, you need to be able to understand each sentence in relation to each sentence, each paragraph in relation to each paragraph, each chapter to each chapter. You need to be able to link ideas, concepts, arguments, and illustrations together if you want to understand what the author is saying. However, you don’t always need everything with the goal of reading it comprehensively. The ability to skim text – to interact with it as quickly and efficiently as possible – is equally as important as the ability to read comprehensively. In urgent or desperate situations, being able to quickly and effectively skim text could have life-or-death consequences. But we need to ask ourselves – if digital text, changed in the ways Carr described earlier, changes the way we understand the content, which direction does that understanding take us? Does it take us in the direction of reading comprehensively, or reading to skim information? I’ll let Carr, with help from Anne Mangen, answer this one:

“A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may see similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or clicking though a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. It’s tactile as well as visual. ‘All reading’, writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is ‘multi-sensory.’ There’s a ‘crucial link’ between ‘the sensory-motor experience of the materiality’ of a written work and ‘the cognitive processing of the text content.’ The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.” - Nicholas Carr, including a citation from Anne Mangen, in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

Digital texts is geared towards skimming text because the way you interact with digital text is fundamentally different than reading a book. When you look at a page of a physical book, you are looking at a physical page of a book, and in order to turn the page you must physically do so. When you look at a page of digital text, you are looking at a screen, and in order to turn the digital page of the book, you must click, scroll, or press a key – and none of those are the same as physically turning a page. So if the way we physically interact with the text is different between the two, and the sensory stimuli is different between the two, what effect does this have on the way we think? How does this impact our brain?

I don’t want to spend too much time here because the concept of neuroplasticity – the idea that our brain can be physically altered by our actions and experiences – is such a massive concept and we will visit it again in later episodes, but I think we can and should briefly look at how the technology – the machines – we use have physiological effects on us; they literally change us. And we know this to be true in other ways – your eyes get bloodshot if you stare at a screen for too long, or your ears hurt if you sit close to loud speakers, for example. The idea of technology having a physical impact on us is not a new idea, but what if it’s having a physical impact on us in ways we can’t necessarily feel or discern? This quote from Carr is pretty technical but notice how the brain itself changes itself in response to actions and sensations:

Every time we perform a task or experience a sensation, whether physical or mental, a set of neurons in our brains is activated. If they’re in proximity, these neurons join together through the exchange of synaptic neurotransmitters like the amino acid glutamate. As the same experience is repeated, the synaptic links between the neurons grow stronger and more plentiful through both physiological changes, such as the release of higher concentrations of neurotransmitters, and anatomical ones, such as the generation of new neurons or the growth of new synaptic terminals on existing axons and dendrites. Synaptic links can also weaken in response to experiences, again as a result of physiological and anatomical alterations. What we learn as we live is embedded in the ever-changing cellular connections inside our heads. The chains of linked neuron’s form our mind’s true ‘vital paths’. Today, scientists sum up the essential dynamic of neuroplasticity with a saying known as Hebb’s rule: ‘cells that fire together wire together.’ - Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

So every time we click a mouse, or type on a keyboard, or stare at a screen to quickly digest some digital text, that has a physical consequence on us. The more we do it, the more its easier to do it. The easier it is to do it, the more we want to do it. The more we want to do it, the less we care about any of the potential side effects. Because this podcast is about the ways technology and media shape our thoughts about God, I think it must be stated that technology and media not only have philosophical effects on us, but psychological affects on us as well. It’s important for us to understand that technology and media influence both what we think about, and how we even think at all. This is not an accident – God our designed our brains to be plastic and malleable, and God does not design things poorly. But, living in a fallen and sinful world, that plasticity can (and often does) lead to results that only perpetuate the brokenness of this world – addiction, mental disorder, forgetfulness, distractedness, and more. Could it be that some of the issues we experience in society today have arisen because of the collective re-shaping of our brains as a result of the new technology and media we live with? I don’t think that’s a controversial conclusion to come to. And if this technology has the power to reshape our brains as a result of our use of it, what happens when the brains of a collective society are changed as a result of the technology we collectively use? When everyone is coming culturally – and mentally – accustomed to skimming digital text instead of reading for comprehension, what are the results? Maryann Wolf, writing in The Guardian, believes that:

The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended “collateral damage” of our digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.” - Maryann Wolf, “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound”

Digital technology has opened the floodgates of information for us, and has packaged that information to where we must skim it if we are to be able to handle it all. Is it good for society if we get so used to skimming information all the time that it impacts our ability to read comprehensively and thoroughly? If the amount of digital text we consume – if the amount of digital text we skim – is so massively overwhelming that we can’t control its influence on us and its influence on others, what kind of impact does that have on our minds? What kind of impact does that have on our worship as Christians? Even if we disagree as to how specifically it impacts us, I think we can agree that it does have a tangible impact on us. And if digital text has a impact on us, what kind of impact do mediums that are built around digital text have on us? On the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we finally arrive at the most powerful set of mediums that have ever existed. We arrive at the space where skimming digital text and a highly repetitive, mind-altering activity involving people you actually know merge together – in a space called Myspace.

Even though the title of this episode is “Conclusions, Pt. 1”, this season of Breaking the Digital Spell is far from over. We will do a similar episode like this at the end of the season, when we draw some more conclusions based off the upcoming episodes dealing with the consequences of the Internet. I think we are at a point where we can start drawing some big conclusions based off what we’ve already covered, so if you’re a new listener to the podcast and haven’t listened to the previous episodes, there’s nothing stopping you from listening to this one without the others, but you’ll get more out of this episode if you listen to those other episodes beforehand.

We are going to look at three significant conclusions in this episode, all of which I think are true conclusions that can be made well before the social media and smartphone era, and all of which I think get even more apparent as we move into episodes dealing with those eras. But before we dive into these three conclusions, I want to make a few things clear up front. First of all, I am going to tailor my conclusions specifically to conversation American evangelicalism because its the camp I grew up in and, for better or worse, is the camp I still remain in. Much of what I say here can apply to other corners of American Christianity, but because I have little to no experience in those corners I will limit myself to the world I know – which happens to be one of, if not the, largest block of American Christians. Second, I am going to offer some counterarguments to what I’m saying at the end of the episode, because while I think these conclusions I’m about to outline are true, I also think that my biases are worth examining as well, and I’ll do my best to try and do that at the end.

Now, with all that being said, lets dive in.

Conclusion 1: American Evangelicalism’s default response to modern technology and media has been one of unchecked technological optimism.

In episode 2 we looked at the three common response to new technology and media: technological optimism, technological pessimism, and technological ambiguity. To briefly recap, technological optimism puts a greater emphasis on the positive changes technology brings, technological pessimism does the opposite, and technological ambiguity puts the emphasis of the context that technology is used in to determine whether or not that technology is good or bad. In covering the advents of television and the Internet, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the default response to modern technology and media by American Evangelicalism has been one of unchecked technological optimism.

I use that word “unchecked” deliberately. It’s not as though American Evangelicalism wrestled with new technology and media and, time and time again, came to hold an optimistic response – I think its safe to say that American Evangelicalism didn’t wrestle with new technology and media at all. The reason they didn’t was because of a philosophical view that undergirded – and, in many ways, guarantees in advance – their optimistic response to new technology and media, and that view is known as utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism, for our purposes here, will be defined that “something’s value and/or worth is solely tied to that thing’s output.” In other words, utilitarianism grounds value and worth on conditional variables, and those variables are tied to production, output, effectiveness – any criteria that can be measured and tracked. If worker A makes 5 sales a week, and worker B makes 50 sales a week, a utilitarian view would say that worker B is inherently more valuable than worker A is, regardless of whether or not worker B made those 50 sales honestly, ethically, or professionally. Worker A might have been ethically and professionally upstanding and fully honest in his dealings that earned him those 5 sales, and worker B might have been shady, manipulative, or dishonest in how he achieved those 50 sales – but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that worker B made significantly more sales than his counterpart. In utilitarianism, the ends justify the means. The son of the late theologian Francis Schaeffer, known as Frank Schaeffer, wrote an extremely underrated book in the early 80s called “Addicted to Mediocrity”, and its thesis was that a utilitarian view of the arts and creative had thoroughly ravaged the Christian understanding of creativity and beauty, and while I doubt he would vouch for the contents of that book today, its still a phenomenally relevant text even 30 years later. This is a lengthy quote but listen to the way he describes utilitarianism, and how it has manifested itself in the church, and ask yourself if anything he says here rings a bell:

So the tree which one had had value, not least of which was its beauty, its shimmering leaves, the dappled shades it cast upon the mossy ground beneath, now only had value because of how many cubic feet of paper could be produced from it. So even man was measured by what he could achieve, produce, earn, contribute, and so on. Not only that, all man’s attributes, talents and endeavors had to be justified in some utilitarian way. No longer was it good enough to say that some human attribute was a God-given gift which should be freely enjoyed and given. Now those gifts had to translate themselves into utilitarian usefulness. Either they had to contribute monetarily or in some other way to society. They had to become propaganda tools, advertising tools, or monetary earning tools, to be considered useful and therefore tolerated by the church. . . . Unfortunately, the church itself was infiltrated by this view. The view was translated into religious terms. Now everything anyone did had to measure up somehow in utilitarian terms in the church. It had to be useful to the onward march of the church. It had to help in its efforts, in its programs, its church growth emphasis week or whatever. This would be bad enough by itself. To make it worse, whatever thing had to measure up to as being useful toward was this false view of spirituality, this shriveled, truncated, narrow view which selected a few things arbitrarily and called them the Christian life, the walk with the Lord, my Christian growth, witnessing, or whatever. That this was all that remained of the full Christian life we were redeemed to and that these sad standards were used to measure all Christian endeavor for its utilitarian usefulness to the church left many things in very deep water. - Frank Schaeffer, Addicted to Mediocrity

To translate this back to technology and media: the reason why I say that American Evangelicalism’s default response to new technology and media was one of unchecked optimism was because of the utilitarian implications these new technology and media brought with them. If you’ll recall in the fifth episode of this season, the late Rev Billy Graham believed that, in a single television cast, he preached to more people than Christ did in his entire lifetime. Any concerns about the possible effects television might have on the message conveyed in the medium – like the ones Neil Postman raises in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death – were irrelevant because, in Rev. Graham’s words, “television is the most powerful tool of communication ever devised by man.” It’s potential to reach millions, by default, overrode any consideration as to what it was that reaching these millions. The ends justified the means. This would be true of American Evangelicalism’s general attitude towards the Internet, and nearly everything that has come from it, as well. These new mediums opened the door to “reach” people with the message of the Gospel, and while these mediums did overcome some legitimate obstacles to evangelism or ministry, they would also introduce new obstacles that we are dealing with today, chief among them being the consumerism among American Evangelicals when it comes to their relationship with church as a whole.

One of the reasons I mention this conclusion first is because I think that, so long as this conclusion remains true, everything other conclusion we could make – both in this episode and later on – ultimately stems from this one. Given some of the conversations that Ive seen take place about the place of VR in the church (spoiler alert: I don’t think it has a place), I think I can say that this unchecked technological optimism is perhaps now more a reality than it was 20 years ago, simply due to the fact that the Internet now pervades every aspect of our lives. And yes, there is some pushback coming from some corners of evangelicalism, but they’re in the minority. The default response hasn’t changed, nor has the idea that whatever we can use in the name of proclaiming the gospel is automatically fair game. As a social media manager, part of my job is to keep my ear to the ground on what is going on in the social media world for anything relevant to ministry use, and there are quite a few Christian thought leaders in that sphere who I believe passionate love Christ and the church, but who are quick to immediately embrace anything and everything new that comes out in the social media industry. The common response is that if something is going on in the social media world the Church must get in on it, even if its something as ridiculous as spending a 40 hour workweek to flood Vine 2 with Christian vines when it comes out or that half a youth pastor’s week should be making YouTube content (yes, those are actual suggestions I’ve heard). Being optimistic about new tech or media is not a bad thing, but when the mediums themselves get embraced and adopted uncritically, all that leaves you with is a charge to create content for those mediums. Which leads us to the next big conclusion.

Conclusion 2: American Evangelicalism has wrongly defined “counter-cultural” in terms in content, not medium usage.

So because American Evangelicalism has held this unchecked technologically optimistic response to modern technology and media, its worth examining how that response plays out, and I think it’s easy to say that American Evangelicalism’s focus was on creating alternative, counter-cultural content within the mediums that were adopted rather than creating counter-cultural medium engagement practices.

I am a 90s kid. I lived during the golden era of Saturday morning cartoons. KidsWB and eventually FoxKids and the (awful) 4Kids TV were the centerpieces of my Saturday morning ritual and routine. Whether it was Pokemon or Teen Titans or One Piece or any one of the other dozens of cartoons available, my childhood was defined by television entertainment. But, being in a Christian home, we also had other things we could watch if we wanted to – and if your upbringing was similar to mine, you know what those other shows were. You could watch Batman: The Animated Series…or you could watch Bibleman. And, if you watched these shows like I did, it wasn’t because they were good, but it was because watching these shows made you different. It was counter-cultural. It made you stand out from your non-Christian friends, even though you watched just as much television as they did, even though you used the Internet as much as they did, even though – content not withstanding – there wasn’t anything different at all as to how you used these mediums.

I don’t want to digress too deeply into the entertainment American Evangelicalism put out through television and the Internet (believe me, I could ramble on for hours on that), I only want to point out that, because American Evangelicalism uncritically embraced television and the Internet without hesitation, the emphasis has always put on creating counter-cultural content rather than creating counter-cultural media consumption practices. Its the embodiment of this us-versus-them approach to cultural engagement where we have our content – our movies, our music, our books, our TV shows, trinkets, and T-shirts – and they have their content. In later years this would manifest itself in things like GodTube, the Christian version of YouTube, or FaithFreaks, the very short lived Christian MySpace, or even The Overflow, a Christian version of – I kid you not – Spotify and Apple Music. It’s never been a question of how we use the Internet; it’s always been a question of what is consumed on the Internet. It’s never been a question as to how we watch television or even how much television we watch; it has always been a question as to what is watched on television. Only very recently has the question shifted from what is on our phones to how we use them, and with that question, how we use social media as well. And what we consumed, what we watched, and what we listened, if not tied explicitly to evangelistic ends, was at the very least meant to be a signal indicating to those around us that we are Not Of This World – even if the ultimate source and inspiration came from “this world”, especially in the music realm. So long as we consumed content that expressed or displayed our faith, it did not matter if the way we used these mediums were uncritically identical to the rest of the world.

I am not trying to suggest that creating content that reflects the Christian worldview is a bad thing – obviously, as a podcaster, I don’t believe that at all. Nor am I trying to suggest that the content we consume doesn’t effect us and that Christians ought to be discerning as to what we watch or listen to – of course we should. The point that I’m trying to make is that whenever new technology and media arise, the response of unchecked technological optimism nullified the need to consider how we use and consume new technology and media and instead became a matter of filling that medium with Christian content that mirrors or rivals non-Christian content, and this Christian content has an end towards evangelism or signaling your commitment to your faith. Consuming Christian content became just as plausible an option as consuming non-Christian content, rather than using television or the Internet in ways that reflected Christian convictions about what these mediums do to us.

Conclusion 3: Because of this unchecked technological optimism, and this misplaced emphasis on counter-cultural content, changes in technology and media – namely, television and the Internet – empowered secularism to gain a greater influence in the church than it ever had before.

First, let’s start with secularism. I can’t vouch for the other definitions of “secularism” you might be familiar with, but for this podcast, when I say “secularism” I mean two things. First, by “secularism”, I mean a state of mind where all belief systems are possible, equally valid options for living a happy, meaningful life, and second, where the idea of “transcendence” becomes less believable, less possible, less meaningful. In secularism, belief systems – whether yours is Christianity, or Islam, or atheism, or Pastafarianism – are not evaluated based on their truthfulness, but on whether or not your expression of your belief system helps you live a full life. As a result of this, the idea of “transcendence” – the idea that there are things that go above and beyond the world we physically inhabit – becomes not necessarily false, just unnecessary. There is no need to know your Creator – who exists outside of you and apart from the physical world you know – if the life you’ve chosen to live brings you joy and happiness, and so long as your neighbor is choosing to live their lives around beliefs that bring them satisfaction and isn’t causing trouble for others who are pursuing the good life in other ways, good for them. And, after all, how do we know that what we believe is really correct? Who’s to say that our beliefs are any better than theirs? Secularism takes any kind of truth claim that would stand over all of us – such as the claim that “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” – and flattens out it’s claim to exclusivity in order to bring it into a realm where it could be wrong – or it could be just as important or significant as any other belief, including ones to the contrary.

Secularism existed long before television and the Internet, and I’m not trying to suggest that the church was impervious to this way of thinking before television sets began appearing in believer’s homes. What I am trying to say here is that these changes in technology and media – specifically, with the advents of television and the Internet – have empowered secularism’s influence in the church by giving it tools that reinforce a secular way of thinking. Secularism is ultimately rooted in individualism, and individualism is strengthen by technology that makes practicing individualism easier to do. Recall the end of episode 5 when we landed on televised religion – and specifically, televised Christianity – changing the way we conceive of Christianity because we now have the option to participate in the Christian life, including our Sunday morning worship, apart from having to physically be present with the embodied people of God. A secular way of thinking doesn’t see a difference between watching a sermon at home or physically going to church to be with other believers – but this kind of thinking wasn’t really possible before television, because before television, the idea of staying at home to watch a sermon broadcast didn’t exist yet. As Neil Postman explains:

The television screen itself has a strong bias toward a psychology of secularism. The screen is so saturated with our memories of profane events, so deeply associated with the commercial and entertainment worlds that it is difficult for it to be recreated as a frame for sacred events. Among other things, the viewer is at all times aware that a flick of the switch will produce a different a secular event on the screen – a hockey game, a commercial, a cartoon. Not only that, but both prior to and immediately following most religious programs, there are commercials, promos for popular shows, and a variety of other secular images and discourses, so that the main message of the screen itself is a continual promise of entertainment. Both the history and the ever-present possibilities of the television screen work against the idea that introspection or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence. The television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure. - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death.

Likewise, as we talked about the Internet in the previous episode, the Internet took this individually-experienced Christianity and gave it something that televised Christianity lacked – the ability to form communities apart from any geographical constraint, and all without having to leave your house. A secular way of thinking doesn’t see a difference between a physically gathered Church and a digitally gathered group of believers, because before the Internet, the idea of being able to forge relationships with people all over the world with relatively minimal commitment wasn’t possible. With both the television and the Internet, the individual was empowered, for the first time in history, to choose a Christianity that fit their lifestyle, their preference, their convenience as to how they wanted to experience it – and so long as this gave you meaning and happiness, who was to say that you were wrong to do so?

In talking about how technology and media have shaped the way we think about God, it is impossible to avoid talking about how modern changes in technology and media have reinforced the idea that thinking about God is not inherently better than not thinking about him. It has also reinforced the notion of a closed-off physical world, where every phenomenon we experience (including religious experiences) have physical, natural explanations, and the need to appeal to God as an explanation for anything becomes unnecessary because there is a more proximate explanation that we can make sense of. This is known by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor as the “buffered self”, an individual who has insulated themselves in their individualism from anything that exists outside themselves – including the transcendent realm. Television and the Internet began to give individuals the ability to further insulate themselves from any external influence by empowering them with technology that not only gives them the ability to act on their individualism, but also distracts them from needing to consider the possibility that maybe there is a God that exists outside themselves – and maybe this God doesn’t see the world the way you do. Alan Noble, in his very recent and very good book “Disruptive Witness”, explains that:

Our pervasive culture of technological distraction dramatically exacerbates the effects of the buffered self, which in turn feeds the demand for technology of distraction. It is not a coincidence that these two forces have arisen at this point in history. The rise of secularism has inspired a view of technology and fullness rooted thoroughly in this life and established and chosen inwardly, which I believe has helped to justify the creation and adoption of technologies that are not directed toward human flourishing but instead help us project our identity and remain distracted. Outside of a culture of virtue grounded in an external source, science, technology, and the market have been driven to produce a society that prioritizes the sovereign individual. The modern person experiences a buffer between themselves and the world out there – including transcendent ideas and truths. The constant distraction of our culture shields us from the kind of deep, honest reflection needed to ask why we exist and what is true. -Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age.

To link all this back to our first two conclusions earlier in the episode – when American Evangelicalism responded to these new technological forces with unchecked optimism, they allowed themselves to be open to the influence of secularism, even if their initial motives for adopting these new mediums were entirely attached to religious reasons. The problem with adopting television as a medium for preaching the Gospel is that you can’t just isolate your adoption of television for that singular reason – you either adopt everything that television brings as a medium, including it’s “psychology of secularism”, or you don’t adopt television at all. The same is true for the Internet – it is impossible to adopt the Internet for the use of spreading the Gospel and making Christian materials more readily available without adopting the option of experiencing Christian community without committing to a physical church. Its a package deal. And, to link this to the second conclusion, if this secular way of thinking is empowered by modern technology and media, and if Christianity is flattened out to being one possible belief amid a myriad of others, then focusing solely on Christian content only reinforces that message – and reduces your message to being an expression of your preference for Christianity. Your collection of Christian T-shirts, music, books, and movies becomes signals by which you express your faith – and those expressions of faith are not proclamations of a Gospel that calls all men and women everywhere to repent and believe in Jesus Christ for salvation, but simply expressions of how important your faith is to you, and no different than expressions of belief from anyone else. You might not mean it that way, but thats how your neighbor takes it to be. What sets us apart is not the content we consume as Christians, but how we even approach these mediums at all. If the habits surrounding our television, smartphone, internet, and social media usage are identical to our non-Christian neighbors, does anything actually set us apart and show that we are different? Consuming different content is not sufficient. Approaching the mediums themselves differently is.

Now, I do want to give some credit here to actual technological optimism – the creeping secularism into American Evangelicalism was long occurring before television and the Internet, and it would have continued onward without them, even if it was at a slower pace. And, even if American Evangelicals had decided to not adopt television and the Internet in the ways that it did, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that their neighbors and coworkers would’ve have, and evangelicals would still have to deal with the obstacles of secularism in living as Christians in their communities. The writing was on the wall for this trajectory – American Evangelicals were just willing to pick up the chalk and write with everyone else. But if this is the way the culture was already going to go and there was no way to stop the tide from turning, why not try to take advantage of that in any way you could? If secularism was already on its way to reducing Christianity to being one possible belief option amid a mass of other equally viable beliefs because of this new technology, why not jump into the mediums that reinforced that thinking and try to influence it from the inside? While I think that the reasoning behind the wholesale adoption of television and the internet was on very misguided philosophical and theological grounding, I am sympathetic towards the idea that, if these cultural changes were going to happen regardless, that you might as well make the most of it. To use a military analogy – if you know the army marching towards you can wipe you out regardless of whether or not you put up a fight, why not go and try to surrender or negotiate a peace agreement – even if you came out as captives, at least you were still alive. Where technological optimism conceded too much in adopting television and the internet, if technological pessimism were the majority response, American Evangelicals might have overlooked legitimate opportunities in these mediums, especially in the Internet. Its a complex situation, and despite my criticisms of technological optimism in this episode, I don’t believe that technological pessimism might have been the best response either. If we believe what the Bible teaches about the sovereignty of God being over all things, including the technology and media of our present day, then why not dive in head first knowing that God is going to use these flawed and imperfect mediums to build his kingdom? Why should we take a cautionary approach based on what we can perceive and get involved in the mess of the world knowing that Jesus Christ descended from heaven into our mess in order to bring about the salvation of mankind? These are questions I regularly ask myself in wrestling with the technology and media I use and consume every day. And this is ultimately what this podcast is about – asking these kind of questions and thinking through them and wrestling with their implications. I think American Evangelicalism is starting to ask more and more questions about the technology and media in our lives, and praise God for that. There is a deep cultural unrest about the impact our phones and social media have on our lives, and in thinking through these we are going back to look at the two big mediums that paved the way for our present situation. Personally, my concern is not whether or not you come to the same conclusions that I do after wrestling with these questions, but whether you wrestle with these questions at all. If I can convince you of what Neil Postman believed at the end of Amusing Ourselves To Death – that “to ask is to break the spell” – I will have done my job.

Secularism is going to play a more prominent theme in coming episodes as we start discussing smartphones, social media, and the future of technology and media, but on the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we are going to briefly pause all of our talk about new mediums and take a look at the technology that makes these new mediums possible.

I remember a life before the Internet.

I was born in ’91, so I don’t know what a life without television was like, but I do remember a time before the Internet. I would go outside to play often, and that entailed going to my next-door neighbors asking if David, Lindsay, Wesley, or Robert could come out and play. If I wasn’t outside, I was playing video games with my brothers. But I do remember when we got our first family computer – I remember the unbelievable amount of excitement I had when I realized that soon I’d be able to play the same Star Trek and Star Wars games my dad would play on his work computer. It would be a while before I was given permission to double-click the blue Internet Explorer icon on my own, but I didn’t care. The Internet was boring at the time – I just wanted to be a Jedi with a double hilted yellow lightsaber, dangit.

By the time I was a teenager, though, my relationship with the Internet had changed. In 2005, upon turning 13 years old, the Internet was the most incredible thing in my life. It was my gateway away from a life I didn’t want to live at a time. It was my portal to endless amounts of entertainment, as evidenced by the thousands of hours I logged playing Halo: Combat Evolved’s online multiplayer. It was, quite literally, my life, and it completely replaced the life that I had before – and, I don’t think its a stretch to say that, in many ways, it defines my life to this present day.

I am going to make a sharp and hard distinction on what exactly we are going to cover in this episode, because “The internet”, at least as we understand it today, is such a massive behemoth that its almost impossible to talk about it without reducing it to a conversation about social media, or Youtube/streaming culture, just to make the conversation easier in terms of reducing the scope of the subject matter. As much as we can, I want us to go back to when the Internet – which, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as “an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world” – was starting to become more readily available to the average American consumer, which wasn’t really a reality until the mid-90s or so. The reason for this is because we are going to devote entire episodes to consequences of the Internet – smartphones, social media, streaming, etc – and because some of the critiques of the Internet that we see today aren’t new at all, but were beginning to manifest relatively early on in the Internet’s popular life. Specifically, we are going to look at two significant changes brought by the Internet, one of which will seem like a “well, duh” observation but is necessary for the significance of the second change. First, we are going to look at how the Internet was revolutionary as a medium because it allowed for truly bi-directional communication, and second, how this bi-directional communication began to shape the concept of “community”.

What makes the Internet such a significant phenomenon was that this was the first mass medium to incorporate bi-directional communication as one of it’s key features. In the previous episodes, as we’ve been talking about books, television, and the differences between the two, we’ve not mentioned that books and television share one significant common feature – they are only one-way streets in communicating ideas. The author of the book knows that there will be no way for a reader to respond directly to the author’s message through the medium that brought that message to him – the disgruntled reader can write a letter to the author, or perhaps stop him or her in the street or at a book signing to voice their grievances, but otherwise, the book does not let a two-way conversation take place. The same is true of television – as much as you’d like to think that yelling at the ref after he makes a bad call will change anything, you know that he can’t hear you. Neither can the newscaster or political figure that you dislike hear you as you express your disagreement or disgust at what they’re saying. The Internet, though, opened the door for the possibility for that to change. If mediums are not value neutral, and if they promote and encourage certain forms of engagement over others, then I think it’s safe to say that the Internet values two-way communication because it makes it possible in a way no medium before it could, and paves itself in such a way so that it can become a two-wide street wide enough for anyone to talk to someone else about anything with as many number of people that want to join in.

In 2018, pointing out the fact that the internet is a bi-directional medium of communication is tantamount as saying that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west – there’s nothing profound about it. But at the time, this was a big deal. Yes, there was one other significant bi-directional medium of communication before the Internet – made possible by culturally irrelevant technology we refer to as “landline phones” – but you didn’t use phones in the way that you use the Internet. First of all, you had to have someone’s number if you wanted to be able to reach them (which was a challenge if there was a cute girl or guy you wanted to possibly date), and unless you were using the phone for business purposes, you generally knew who would be on the other line when you dialed a number. If you dialed the wrong number or the wrong person picked up, you would re-dial or leave a message, but you typically wouldn’t spend time talking with someone on the other end that was a stranger. There’s a reason why the “stranger-making-a-scary-phone-call” motif is one of the oldest tropes of horror and suspense films – its a form of intentional communication that shouldn’t be there. With the Internet though, that intentionality isn’t necessarily removed, by the parameters governing that intentionality are significantly expanded. Generally, on early Internet forums, it was expected that you not know the person you were talking to, but so long as they weren’t being creepy or abusive, talking to them was okay. The same was true of email and, to perhaps a lesser extent, messenger programs. Instead of that intentionality being governed by wanting to talk to someone you know or for an intentional business purpose, like it was with landline phones, intentionality on the early Internet was governed by the subject matter that you wanted to talk about. You were willing to talk to people you didn’t know because they shared the same interests you did.

And this was the second significant change that the Internet brought. Because it was a bi-directional medium, it made bypassing your physical communities possible. You could now talk to people who shared a common interest regardless of any geographical constraint.

What is a “community” – or, perhaps more helpfully, “how do communities form”? That’s a massive question and I’m not going to be able to give it the attention it really deserves, but in the most general of terms, communities form when 1) multiple people are able to talk to each other 2) over a shared common interest. Your physical community is dictated by the people that you talk to over the common interest that you share – it could be the coworkers in your workplace, fellow parents that attend the same school that your kids do, other people in your church, or your next door neighbors living on the same street as you did. Before the Internet, your physical community was all you had. If you lived in a city or town where you didn’t know anyone shared your passions, interests, hobbies, causes, or political views, you were kinda stuck with that. If there was a topic that you wanted to talk about but you didn’t know anybody else who did, that was your situation you had to deal with. In larger cities, this may not have been as big of an issue, but if you came from a small town – one like Claude, TX, where my parents currently live with a population of 1,300 people – you had no relief from that. The idea of belonging to a community beyond what you were physically wasn’t possible – until the Internet. Again, in 2018, this is not a significant revelation, but in in the 90s and early 2000s, this was a very big deal. It allowed you the ability to bypass the limitations set by your immediate, physical community and to choose to belong to communities of people that cared about the same things that you did. Now you had a choice – if you wanted to, you could invest in your physical community and the real, flesh-and-blood relationships you have with your neighbors, or you could invest in a digital community and the people who you know next to nothing about, other than the fact that they care about the things you do. But where you might’ve been stuck with your physical community and have to deal with things or issues that you disliked, with the Internet, you could enter and exit communities based on your discretion. You could consume content and engage with others at your convenience. You could focus only on the things you wanted to focus on – and totally ignore the rest. The Internet allowed for anyone to have things their way – right down to choosing the place where they felt they belonged.

In the previous episodes about television, we introduced the idea that the context you hear a message in shapes the message itself, and that contrary to what the late Rev. Graham and other leaders thought in the early days of television, the medium does not result in a 1:1 transmission of a message. We also talked about how when you hear a sermon in a church that you participate in a shared experience in a congregation, and that being a part of the gathered people of God will shape the way you listen to a sermon compared to watching the same sermon at home in your pajamas on your television. Television introduced the possibility of participating in a religious experience in isolation from a physical gathering, and its no secret that Americans were tolerant of the idea of getting a sermon in a church and getting a sermon in one’s home and that the two were legitimate options. But the Internet takes this situation and adds the possibility of connecting to others in a context where connecting to others people wasn’t possible. In a pre-Internet world, you could stay at home and watch a religious broadcast, and the only other personal connections you had in that moment were those shared by others in the room. With the advent of the Internet, staying at home didn’t automatically mean you weren’t connected to a community of some kind. The Internet allowed you to connect to others regardless of the distance or space in between, and in doing so, reshaped the idea of community and allowed for a concept of community unhinged from the physical concept of space to exist.

It should go without saying that this impact on the concept of “community” has significant implications for a religion with a community-centered orientation as one of it’s main driving identities. In 1 Peter 1, the apostle tells us that “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” and that “once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” All of those terms refer to a group of people, and before the Internet, that group of people was a physical community known as “Christians” or the “Church”. The Internet introduced a new type of community, and as Heidi A. Cambell and Stephen Garner explain:

Online communities exist as loose social networks where members have varying levels of affiliation and commitment. This is in contrast to traditional communities, which often exist as more tightly bounded social structures overseen by family and institutional ties. Online religious communities often function quite differently than conventional religious groups and institutions, where membership is established through a set of rituals such as confirmation, baptism, or an act of public confession. Online religious communities are often formed through people’s commitment to a shared interest, and membership is based on active participation in group conversation and online activities rather than affiliation or membership rituals. - Heidi Campbell and Stephen Garner, “Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture.”

In assessing the Internet, I don’t think it’s possible to respond purely in a technology optimistic or technologically pessimistic manner. When it came to television, I think it was obvious that I hold a pessimistic view of television, and I think it brought more harm then good. With the Internet, however, I’ve already spoken positively of it as being a medium that amplifies the power of the spoken and written word – the medium that Christianity is ultimately rooted in, and early on, that was the main way the Internet was used. While there were examples of online congregations popping up in the 90s, most notably The First Church of Cyberspace (how’s that for a dated term?), most of the uses of the Internet by early Christians revolved around the dissemination of information about Christianity – for example, the “United Methodist Information” email newsletter, which Campbell and Garner note is the first recorded Christian email newsletter to exist. I do think that there is an inherent difference between reading text in a physical book and reading text on a screen, but at the same time, the Internet was making material on Christianity more readily accessible and available – and for that, I am beyond grateful. But when it comes to the Internet’s impact on the idea of “community”, I tend to take a more pessimistic response, and the reason I take that response is because mediums shape the way we interact with each other as a result of the terms of engagement set forth by the medium in question. Campbell and Garner again:

Studies of Christian community online have found that theological orientation and religious identity often draws members together. Researchers noted that new patterns of social sharing and interaction online may lead to shifts in expectations regarding the nature of community. The ability to interact and exchange ideas with people from different parts of the world from a shared faith perspective can transform members’ expectations of how contemporary religious groups could or should function. These expectations create desires for online Christian community members to experiment with and even model in their offline churches new styles of small-group interaction, accountability networks, or forms of dialogue experienced online. - Heidi Campbell and Stephen Garner, “Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture.”

In other words, the Internet began to shape our interactions with each because we began to expect our offline interactions to mirror, in some way, our online interactions, and when those offline interactions don’t live up to our expectations, we have something better that we can go back to. I know this to be true because this is what happened to me. I mentioned earlier that, when I was a teenager, the Internet was a portal to endless amounts of entertainment, but it was also a portal to a community and friendships that I didn’t physically have at the time. In 2005, my family moved in with my grandparents to be their live-in caretakers. My grandpa had Parkinson’s disease, and he couldn’t drive himself and grandma around anymore, so we moved in to provide transportation and take care of the house. My grandparents lived an hour away from where we lived – moving required uprooting from the home, church, and neighborhood I grew up in and move into a gated community comprised mostly of retirees. I did not transition well. I was homeschooled at the time, and so the only time I saw anyone my own age was during Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights at church – and I didn’t fit in at all, and wouldn’t feel like I belonged for a couple of years. But that didn’t matter – I had my networks of Christian Halo clans to keep me company. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but I was able to spend time with these other believers I had met online and chat and play with them and forge relationships with them that I didn’t have in the real world at the time. We would pray together. We would discuss the Bible together. We would encourage and support each other, sometimes even financially. It was, quite literally, my life, because it was the place where I felt like I belonged. My offline communities were painful, and so I wanted nothing to do with them. My online community brought me joy, and so I wanted to spend as much time as I could with them. In a season or space where offline Christianity was painful, I had the choice to be in a space where online Christianity was life-giving and centered around the things I cared about, and this created a feedback loop where the more time I spent with my online friends, the more my offline life began to look like my online life, which only put me at greater odds with my physical community of Christians because they weren’t fulfilling my expectations or desires of how I wanted my offline relationships in the church to work. Eventually, though, I would start making healthy offline relationships, and over time my relationships with my online friends would fade away, but in a season where I was in a space where I didn’t want to be, I had the means to be in a space where I wanted to be – something only made possible by the Internet.

I think we’ve reached a point where we can start drawing some big conclusions based on everything we’ve covered in these past several episodes, and on the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we are going to do just that. We still have quite a bit of ground to cover, but before we get to smartphones and social media, I think we have enough on our plate to show how changes in technology and media have changed the way we think about God.

There are going to be a couple of ideas that we repeatedly touch on in this season, because not only are they going to pop up over and over again, they’re crucial to understanding what has changed and what those changes have done to the way we think about God.

First, like we looked at in the previous episode, mediums are not value neutral. They ask us to do certain things, and ask us to not do certain things. They actively encourage certain forms of engagement or consumption and actively discourage others, and in doing so, our communities become reshaped around the terms of engagement set forth by these mediums. In a culture where books and words are the dominant medium of communication, not only are you expected to know how to read and interact with this medium but you expect everyone else to be able to do this as well, and the same is true with television. But, as we started contrasting in the last episode, word-based mediums have radically different terms of engagements than the ones television set forth when it became widely adopted, and those terms of engagement have implications for how we engage with Christianity.

Second, and this is something we are not going to emphasize as often but it’s still very crucial to understand, Christianity has always revolved around the medium of the spoken and written word. We fleshed this concept out some in Episode 3, and before we keep going forward, we need to revisit it again, because I deliberately left out something very important. I failed to mention the 2nd Commandment.

Exodus 20:4-6, also known as the 2nd Commandment, states that:

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. - Exodus 20:4-6 (ESV)

Now, why do I bring this up? Well, part of the reason I bring it up now is because television is a visual medium, and Christianity, in being a a religion revolving around the medium of the spoken and written word, is a religion that explicitly did not revolve around visual mediums, and we know this because of the 2nd commandment. Lets take a look at where this commandment is even located. The first commandment is straightforward enough: you shall have no other gods before me. Right off the bat God is making clear that His people will be different from the surrounding religions in that He alone is to be worshipped, and not to be included in the pantheon of gods of ancient near eastern culture. You would think that what comes next would be a commandment about giving God respect and honor, but that’s not what happens. Before we get to the third commandment – the commandment prohibiting taking God’s name in vain – we are told that we are prohibited from making images of God. God saw this commandment as being so important that he gives it immediately after the first commandment, and before the one concerned with insulting him by misusing his name, before honoring the Sabbath, even before “honor thy father and mother”. What is God saying in the placement of this commandment? He is saying that not only will his people be different in how they will only worship one God, his people will also be different in that their god will not be represented via an image – like every other surrounding pagan god was. Throughout the Bible, we see that the presence of images among the people of God is always a bad sign, regardless of whether or not they were worshipping them or not. I don’t think its a coincidence that, immediately after the Lord gives Moses the 10 Commandments, that Moses goes down to the mountain to find the Israelites worshipping a Golden Calf – they had just come from a land where the Egyptian deities were depicted everywhere and worshipped by their Egyptian neighbors, and so they were accustomed to having visual representations of deities as a focal point of worship. Likewise, in Daniel 3, Nebuchadnezzar threw Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the fiery furnace because they refused to worship an image recognizing Nebuchadnezzar as a deity. Later in the New Testament, one of the most significant moments in the book of Acts is when the apostle Paul comes into conflict with a man named Demetrius, who instigated a riot in the city of Ephesus because his business of making images of Artemis was threatened by the Gospel. There are a range of opinions about whether or not the 2nd Commandment applies to the post-incarnate Jesus or not, but regardless of whether or not you believe images of the incarnate Christ are exempted or not, we can agree that this commandment absolutely applies to the Father and the Spirit and, like the rest of the 10 Commandments, this commandment is still binding and in effect among believers today.

But why, though? Why did God give this commandment at all? I think part of the reason why God is because God knows our nature, and knows how our nature became corrupted by the fall. As the other 10 commandments emphasize, God knows that, in our sinful state, that we are prone to idolatry, to violence, to lust, to greed, to ungratefulness. In God forbidding visual representations of himself, he does so knowing that mediums value certain things, and that the things that visual mediums value are not the things that God values – but they’re things that we value in our sinful state. Specifically, as Postman outlines early on in his book, the written and spoken word values abstract thinking and contemplation, which are things we do not value in our sinful, fallen state. Television, like we talked about in the previous episode, doesn’t ask us to engage in this higher level of thinking and meditation – you can if you want to, but you get by watching television just fine with relatively minimal focus and attention. I don’t think it’s inherently controversial to say that watching a show on television is easier than reading a book. I also don’t think it’s inherently controversial to say that reading a book requires abstract thinking and contemplation, and that if the God of Christianity was to be understood through the medium of the Word, then this God must value abstract thinking and contemplation as well, and desires that to be reflected in how we worship him. It’s hard to worship the Lord with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength if the locus of your worship is a medium that does not ask of you all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength – something we all know we must give if we are going to walk by faith and not by sight. And again, the problem here isn’t that television doesn’t ask us to engage in higher, critical thought – there’s nothing wrong with watching a sitcom, crime drama, or other television entertainment and veg out in doing so. That’s just not okay in Christian worship.

Now, all of that being said, its time to introduce a third idea that we are going to repeatedly come back to in later episodes, but we need to do some setup first.

If the printing press is what made the Protestant Revolution possible, then I think it’s safe to say that television is what made the health, wealth, and prosperity Gospel possible. Both were theological revolutions, but these theological revolutions are only made possible because of the media revolutions that undergirded the way these evolutions spread. I don’t think I need to spend much time detailing the prosperity Gospel and who its main proponents – whether you agree or like that designation or not, you know who I’m referring to, and what they teach. But, regardless of your opinion of the prosperity Gospel, I think we can agree that – the theological content notwithstanding – the television broadcasts of these guys make for pretty good television. The production quality is usually pretty slick and solid. The talking heads, whether its the pastors or guests, have good communication and speaking skills. It’s not necessarily the exciting stuff to watch, but it is watchable. Even if it’s a sermon recording and you can see a massive crowd in attendance, the pastor usually knows where the cameras are located and is able to look directly into them and, as he preaches to the crowd, preaches to the individual at home as well. I know that Joel Osteen is usually treated as the poster boy for the prosperity gospel – and regularly whipped for it as a result – but to give him some credit here, being able to communicate to a crowd while simultaneously knowing when and where to turn his head and look so that he’s simultaneously looking into a camera is a pretty difficult thing to do. The result the people in attendance feel as though he’s speaking to him, and so does the individual at home – which, as we’ve talked about, the people watching a home are watching this message in a radically different context than those watching it live and in person. But, if you’re a technological optimist, that’s a huge opportunity! Television allows you to reach the people who might not ever step foot in the church and reach them in their homes without having to send anyone out and without having to cross the threshold of anyone’s front door. The late Reverend Billy Graham, one of the pioneers of translating Christianity to television and harassing the medium’s power, wasn’t technically wrong when he said that:

Television is the most powerful tool of communication ever devised by man. Each of my prime-time “specials” is now carried by nearly 300 stations across the U.S. and Canada, so that in a single telecast I preach to millions more than Christ did in his lifetime. - Billy Graham, as quoted by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death.

But – as Neil Postman argues, and as we will constantly re-state throughout the rest of the season:

If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same. And if the context in which the message is experienced is altogether different from what it was in Jesus’ time, we may assume that its social and psychological meaning is different as well. - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Simply put: there’s a difference between watching a sermon preached in a church and watching a sermon through a television. That might seem obvious, but I want to explore this a bit. How do you go to church to hear someone preach? You (hopefully) take a shower and get on some decent clothes, get in the car with enough time to arrive at the start of the service, walk in, find a seat, and participate in a shared experience, and this shared experience takes place in a space, or context, of some kind. You may not know anyone else in the room, but you are sitting in the same seats as they are. You’re expected to sing when it’s time to sing; you’re expected to be quiet and listen when someone is speaking. You feel the laughter in the room at a joke or a gaffe, or the dead silence after a stunning rebuke or controversial declaration, but regardless of whether or not you’re enjoying the sermon or not, you cannot leave without physically getting up and walking out – a social fear many introverts like myself know all too well. You make eye contact with people. Maybe you’ll shake some hands and say hello. And, once everything is said and done, you go back home, change into your lazy clothes, and go about your day. Now, if you were to tune in to hear that same sermon preached, very little of what I just said would not apply to you. You don’t need to bathe; you don’t even need clothes! There’s no need to weave through the crowd for a seat, nor will you be asked to leave if you shouting out to someone in a different room of the house. There is no eye contact. There are no handshakes. There are no awkward side hugs. Whatever there is of a shared experience, it comes at the expense of an experience tied to a context, because the space you’re in is not the same. The context is no longer the church, but the living room; no longer the gathered body of Christ, but an individual Christian in the space you’ve created to reflect who you are and what you love – and as prosperity gospel pastors would soon discover, television is a powerful medium to speak to people in such a way that reinforces the love of comfort, security, wealth, entertainment, and success as communicated through the television that our living rooms are designed around.

I re-wrote this episode at this point several times because detailing the social and psychological changes that come through the context of television are so sweeping and wide ranging that we could spend an entire separate season explaining it all, and I know I am leaving out quite a bit more that ought to be said. But, one change I want to highlight and end this episode on is a change relevant to the changes in technology and media we’ve yet to talk about, and one of the social and psychological changes brought by Christianity delivered through television is the increased emphasis on the individual at the expense of the group. [Neil Postman, at the end his chapter on religious television, is not obscure at all about the impact television has on Christianity and how it re-centers our focus on individuals instead of Christ and the church:]

“I think it is both fair and obvious to say that on television, God is a vague and subordinate character. Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concreteness and persistence of the image of the preacher carries the clear message that it is he, not He [meaning God], who must be worshipped. I do not mean to imply that the preacher wishes it to be so; only that the power of a close-up televised face, in color, makes idolatry a continual hazard. Television is, after all, a form of graven imagery far more alluring than a golden calf.” - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 122.

The thing about our idols, whether its the literal Golden Calf of the Israelites or the ones we create from our favorite actors, shows, and preachers on television, is that we cannot converse with them. But on the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we are going to look at what happens when another technology revolution takes place that allows us to talk to our idols – and they can talk back to us.

Before I begin this episode, two quick disclaimers:

One: in the previous episode, I know that my description of the history of communication left a lot out and is super simplistic. I also know that it ran the risk of sounding as though pictures or images were completely alien to the world prior to the advent of television. Those were deliberate choices on my part. I wanted to isolate one particular form of communication and trace it through history so that we would have a contrast for this episode as we look at television and the changes it brought to society as it became the dominant medium of the day. Obviously, there were beautiful things to look at during the age of books – there is an entire history of art that runs parallel to the history of printed communication – just as there were plenty of books to read in the age of television, and there’s still plenty of television to watch in the age of the internet. If you want more in-depth analysis and explanations of these subjects, you’ll definitely want to look elsewhere.

Second: just like the episode before it, this episode and the next couple of episodes are geared towards explaining the past so that we can better understand the present. The practical implications may not be quite as obvious at this point in the season, but I promise they’ll become more prominent once we’ve laid the groundwork for our present circumstances. I hope you’ll find all this information interesting and intriguing, but I totally understand if you feel unsure as to what the point is. I promise, in later episodes, we will be asking more questions about what all of these changes have done to our theology, and what we can do in response to those changes, but we have a lot of changes to cover before we can get to that part.

Now, with all that being said, lets go back to the 50s

If you were a kid born in the 50s, your relationship with television was probably just beginning to form. Chances are, if you lived in or close to a city, you owned a television set, or knew someone who did. If you lived out in the country, you were going to be out of luck for a while – only the major cities had television stations, and only television stations were broadcasting television signals, so if you didn’t live near a station, you didn’t have anything to watch. In 1951, President Trueman spoke to 13 million television sets in the first coast-to-coast telecast, but that wasn’t going to be the norm for a while. In addition, if you had a television set, all you had was a grainy black-and-white image to stare at – still pretty cool at the time, but people weren’t going to be content with grayscale forever. In 1954, RCA would introduce the first colored television set, and ten years later, a million of them would be sold in a single year. The history of television is fascinating, but it took a while for the technology to become widely adopted in American society. But when it did (and that date is debatable), it signaled a fundamental shift in American society – and theres no better example to demonstrate this than the debate between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential Election.

Its hard to believe that presidential debates are a relatively new thing in the history of American politics, but on September 26th, 1960, Nixon and Kennedy would appear on television and radio all over the country in the first of four debates Presidential Election debates. The fact that this had never been done before, combined with the fact that they would be televised, meant that this was going to a huge event, and it was: as the Museum of Broadcast Communication claims, over 70,000,000 people tuned in to watch the debate. But even though the debate was broadcast on television, it was still being carried over radio, and, because of this, something curious happened. As it is with any debate, someone wins, and someone loses, but people were in disagreement as to who won and who lost the first debate, and that disagreement was tied to whether or not the person watched the debate or listened to the debate. Although this has been disputed, its been claimed (and I believe there is some merit to it) that those who listened to the debate on the radio believed that Nixon won the first debate. Conversely, those who watched the debate on television believed that Kennedy won, or at best the debate was tied with neither candidate winning outright. Its hard not believe that the presentation didn’t play a factor here – if you watch some of the footage on YouTube, Nixon doesn’t look all that good. He sounds great – for all of his flaws, Nixon had a great speaking voice – but he looks sick, and the contrast on the black-and-white image makes his face look really pale. Kennedy, on the other hand, looks really sharp and slick. Its obvious he has stage makeup on, and he looks like he is rested, relaxed, and ready to go. But, if you’re listening to the debate on the radio, you don’t know that. All you have are Kennedy and Nixon’s voices, and the substance of their arguments. If you’re watching on the television, you still have their voices and their arguments, but now you have Kennedy’s pleasing appearance to take in as well, and being able to see changes your perception about what you hear. In a sense, people believed Kennedy won…because they could see him.

If you think I’m overstating the significance or the magnitude of this moment, you’re probably right. I don’t believe this was the moment where the script was flipped and suddenly television was calling all the shots. I do think, though, that this was an indication of what was to slowly come over the next several decades, and I think that it illustrates something even more significant than that: the technology of the future was not based on the written and spoken word alone anymore. The technology of the future was found in moving images, and moving images would soon displace the written word as the dominant medium by which we receive our information. As Neil Postman put it:

On television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us conversations in images, not words. - Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”

Now, I think we need to pause for a second to talk about what a “medium” even is. After all, the title of this very podcast is based off a quote from Postman where he states that “no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are”, but what is even a medium, aside from being the singular form of the word “media”? I’ll just let Postman answer that real quick:

“We might say that a “technology” is to a “medium” as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.” - Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”

In terms of television: the TV set is the technology, and “television” is the medium that arises because of the TV set and because of it being widely available in the homes of most Americans. A technology becomes a medium once it starts employing a particular symbolic code – which, television’s case, is moving images on a screen accompanied by sounds that the viewers can understand. A technology becomes a medium once it finds its place in a particular social setting, which television did rapidly as it became the centerpiece of the living rooms of American households – something we still see to this day. A technology becomes a medium once it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts, which you could argue happened on the night Nixon and Kennedy set a new tradition in American politics in front of 70,000,000 television viewers, and even with the advent of the Internet television still has a significant place in the American economic and political spheres. We could run through this example with books, with radio, with the internet, or with any other mass medium. The technological capabilities alone don’t create the medium, but once the technology is put into use to transmit communications that you, your neighbor, your schoolmates, your congregation, your town, your city, other cities, other towns, other congregations, and other neighbors can receive and respond to in some way, you have a mass medium. And, like Postman stated a bit ago, this medium deals not in words, but in images.

But why is that a problem? What’s wrong with that? To answer this question, it might be easier to rephrase it some: how do you interact with the medium? We will use books as an example. How do you read a book? Well, to read a book (and I’m specifically talking about physical books, not digital books per se), you need to be able to concentrate on the text of the page and tune out distractions for a considerable period of time, you need to be able to understand the language the text is written in (it’s hard to read a book in a language you don’t know!), and you need to be able to parse the vocabulary and grammar of the text and understand what’s being said in each sentence. But that’s just the start. Not only do you need to be able to understand each sentence that you’re reading, you need to be able to understand each sentence in relation to each sentence, each paragraph in relation to each paragraph, each chapter to each chapter. You need to be able to link ideas, concepts, arguments, and illustrations together if you want to understand what the author is saying. This is true of the written word and the spoken word as well. When we listen to speeches, sermons, lectures, or other lengthy oral presentation (or a podcast like this), we process the information in the same way, only through hearing instead of reading. And then, once you’ve done all of that, you trust that everyone else who read the book, or heard the speech, did the same thing – if they didn’t, having an intelligent conversation will be a frustrating endeavor.

So, how do you watch television? Lets take your standard 60 minute evening news broadcast from one of your local FOX or CBS affiliates. In order to watch this broadcast, you still need to give some degree of attention to what you’re watching, but given that the news anchor’s commentary is accompanied with news footage, interviews, and graphs/charts, you only need to be able to understand what the anchor is saying insofar as it relates to the visuals that accompany it, and often times, the visuals do the heavy lifting in communicating the details of the story. There’s no need to describe where last night’s robbery took place, what kind of place it was, and how the owners are responding to the crime – you can see the actual spot where the robber broke in, and get a brief snapshot of the range of emotions the owners feel in an interview clip. And even though you’re being asked to pay attention to this story in order to take it in, you only need to pay attention to this story for this story’s sake – after a minute or two, the broadcast will shift to a different story, totally unrelated to what just came before, and you need to be able to reset your mind to pay attention to this new story. After two or three rounds of this, there will be a commercial break, where you can either pay attention to even small stories told via advertising or take a mental break, and then the news will resume and the cycle of two-or-three minute commitments to attention continues. By the time the evening news is over, you’ve been processing information for an hour, but that information is compartmentalized, disjointed, detached from each other, and while you might have covered a pretty wide range of subject matter, you’ve only done so in a way that skims the surface. This holds true even if you’re watching a crime drama or thriller instead of a newscast – you’re tasked with giving the show your attention for several minutes, and then you know that in a moment of tension or suspense there will be a commercial break, often with a completely different tone from what you’ve just been watching, that you can either pay attention to or take a mental break from watching before the show resumes.

The thing about mediums is that they are not value neutral. They inherently ask us to do certain things in order to interact with them, and they ask us not to do certain things in the same token. They promote certain forms of interaction, and actively discourage others. As Postman states,

My argument is limited to saying that a new major medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content – in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth telling. - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

In other words, new mediums set their own terms for transmitting truth, ideas, concepts, stories, and information – new mediums create a demand for a new kind of content, and the content of television was unlike anything that had ever existed in the world before. But television, like every other medium, not only creates the content but also creates the terms of engagement with that content, and in order to engage with television, we only need to give a fraction of our mental powers in order to process what we are seeing. Postman again,

“When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, “Let me think about that” or “I don’t know” or “What do you mean when you say…?” or “From what sources does your information come?” This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it.” - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death.

What makes television such a significant development is that the demands of television were completely different than the demands of the written or spoken word, and those demands had power behind them. Yes, books were still printed and read and discussed, but they were displaced as being the dominant medium for communicating ideas and information in lieu of television, and the way you go about reading books and discussing them with others is fundamentally different from the way you watch and discuss the morning news with others. Our communities were no longer based around the written and spoken word, shaped and formed to interact with each other against a backdrop set by books and the culture of discourse they create. Instead, our communities began to be shifted to television, and the way we interact with each was being reshaped by this new medium we now share.

So what does any of this have to do with theology? Well, it has quite a bit to do with theology – so much so that, in the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we are going to examine the impact of television on the church, and how this new medium gave rise to a new form of Christianity – a form we still see to this very day.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Gospel of John opens up with a beautiful description of the lordship and majesty of Jesus Christ by echoing the very first words of Scripture: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” Jesus Christ, the Son of God sent by the Father, was not a being created by God but was present with the Father and the Spirit in the very act of creation, and as the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Colossians, “For by him all things were created, in a heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him.” In Genesis, we see God’s creation unfold by His spoken word – eight times in Genesis 1 we see the words “And God said”, and whatever is spoken of, happens.

But even though John was writing of the glory of the Son of God, he is unintentionally correct in another area as well. In the history of technology, language, and communication, in the beginning…were words.

A crash course in the history of human communication is way beyond the scope of this podcast, so please forgive me in advance if my generalizations are too simplistic, but in general terms, words have been the dominant mode of communication through the majority of human history, and advances in technology have all revolved around making words more powerful and permanent. With the development of Cuneiform script by the Sumerians around the 4th millennium BC, words went from being communicated from our mouths and heard by our ears to now something that could be written with our hands and read by our eyes. There were ways to communicate with images well before writing – the drawings in the rocks of caves, the rise of Egyptian hieroglyphics being two easy examples of this – but at the end of the day, the world began to revolve around the technology of the spoken and written word. Of course, those who could read and write would start off as a very small and select group of elites, often tied to religious and political roles, but even those who couldn’t read or write in a written language understood that language when those words were read aloud to them. It’s a scene we see several times in the Old Testament, where the people of God are gathered together to hear the Law read before them by someone who could read aloud in the language the people spoke – one such instance occurs at the end of the book of Nehemiah:

“And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law.” - Nehemiah 8:1-3 (ESV)

Its a common misconception that the God of the Bible is a God who is opposed to human ingenuity and progress – that advances in science, technology, and communication are of no importance to God, because He is just going to do his own thing. And yet, this scene in the book of Nehemiah – a scene also seen in the books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, the Kings, the Chronicles, and Ezra – we see the exact opposite happening. Far from being opposed to technology, God has chosen a particular form of technology – writings contained in books – as the means by which He reveals himself to his people. In fact, God loves this form of technology so much that His revelation would be written and recorded completely in a set of historical records, poems, letters, and other documents compiled together and called the Bible, and he has seen fit that his kingdom would be spread forth not through images, but through the proclamation of the Gospel, a message of victory and deliverance from sin by Jesus Christ. As Heidi A. Campbell and Stephen Garner explain,

“The adoption of the papyrus codex, a precursor of the book, marked the acceptance of a particular expression of media technology that became a significant part of Christian identity and the Christian church. Moreover, the physical form of the codex, seen as containing the sacred writings and accounts of the faith, became so significant that its protection and veneration were causes of martyrdom….In addition to the Hebrew Scriptures, Christian accounts of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers and helpful letters to churches were collected together and declared the sacred Word of God. Thus, a form of technology found in the codex and the book made its way into the Christian church and shaped the faith itself.” -Heidi Campbell and Stephen Garner, “Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture”

Once the establishment of the canon was complete, the focus shifted not from writing and recording more revelations from God, but on creating written documents called “creeds” that would summarize key teachings of the Bible into an accessible and concise expression that churches far and wide could agree on. The Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and several other documents would be produced that outline essential summaries for faith in Jesus Christ. Not only were these documents created to help maintain the unity and agreement of the Church on the most important matters of Christianity, they were also meant to help pastors teach their congregations about the key teachings of Scriptures – keep in mind, owning a Bible, much less being able to read one, wasn’t an everyday reality for most Christians. Chances were that, unless you were a pastor, academic, or politician, your reading and writing skills probably weren’t all that great, which poses a pretty big problem when you believe in a Savior who you personally haven’t seen with your eyes, but who’s life, death, and resurrection are testified to in a document that you personally can’t read. Combined with the fact that the Bible is a pretty big book – my personal Bible spans nearly 1,600 pages of printed text – and not laid out in a topical order or edited for topical clarity, and you have two significant obstacles rooted in the technology of the book. The creeds and confessions overcame both of these obstacles by being documents short enough to memorize by the everyday believer, and being summaries of the most important truths of the Scriptures that makes discipleship a consistent process. For example, consider how brief the Nicene Creed is, but how many topics are covered:

“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.” - The Nicene Creed

Even if you didn’t have access to the Scriptures (or be able to read it if you had them), you learned the truth of the Scriptures by reciting a creed, and in reciting that creed with other believers, you formed a community around the spoken word formed from the written word. You formed the church. We all know how powerful it is to recite something in unison with others – think the Pledge of Allegiance – and the creeds of the early church were a means of cementing that collective identity of believers together, regardless of their ability to read. As we will discuss in later episodes, mediums create communities, and the medium of the spoken words of the creed gave the church a theological identity.

Fast forward a few centuries, and advances in printing technology would be the means by which one of the most significant moments in the history of the Church – the Protestant Reformation – would take place. By the time Martin Luther nailed his copy of the 95 Theses on the castle door of the church of Wittenberg in 1517, the Gutenberg printing press, created by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, had been widely adopted and was giving birth to the earliest expression of “the press”. The ability to now print books at significantly cheaper cost and at relatively quicker speeds opened the door for an explosion in literacy, as more people now had the chances to own books – and, of course, had a greater incentive to know how to read those books. It also opened the door, for the first time in the history of Christianity, for the Bible to become a book that both minister and layperson could read and understand, and long before Luther began printing his German translation of the Bible for his countrymen to read, William Tyndall would labor long and hard to do the same in English. Where the ability to publish written material had been well within the control of the church and state, the printing press made that privilege more widespread and readily available outside the upper class – something the Reformers would take advantage of as they published their religious literature and distributed it to the masses, knowing that persecution would happen, but that the Catholic Church couldn’t completely shut down their operations. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Protestant Reformation, in addition to being a theological movement, was also a media revolution, and would not have happened without the advent of the printing press.

Christianity is a religion based on the spoken and written word. We believe that God spoke creation into existence. We believe that God spoke to the patriarchs of Genesis, to Moses in a burning bush, to the Israelites through the a written document we call the Law, through the Psalms, through the Prophets, through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, through the letters of Paul, Peter, and John, and that all of these documents are inspired by the same Spirit despite being written by dozens of authors and over the span of several centuries. We believe God still speaks to his people today through the Bible, which is part of the reason why we call it the Word of God. Whatever visual descriptions we get from the Bible, we get not from drawings or illustrations, but from detailed explanations of their design or appearance. Christianity has never been a religion where the substance of our faith is based around visual media of some kind – aside from those who lived and walked with Jesus, those who came before him believed in the coming of the Messiah by faith, and those who have come after him believe in his return by the same faith, a faith made known to us through the Word of God. Yes, at one point there was a majestic and beautiful temple that the people of God would have seen and beheld every day (and quite a bit of ink is spent to describe what this would’ve looked like), but as the author of Hebrews makes clear, “Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.” The temples, with its sacrifices, pointed to the true and greater sacrifice and priestly service of Jesus Christ, and now that Christ has come and atoned for the sins of the world, we receive this blessing not by sight, but by faith – a faith shaped and formed by a book, and the words in that book.

At this point, it should go without saying that any time there are improvements in technology that allow for the transmission and communication of words, Christianity stands to benefit from those improvements. Radio, one of the most enduring forms of mass communication of modern times, remains an incredibly powerful tool for communicating Christianity in difficult places, and don’t even get me started on the wonderful phenomenon of podcasting (which, obviously, I’m a huge fan). We are so far down the road from the printing press of the Reformation that we can pay for tiny, miniature household printers for our own personal use, if we don’t want to use the incredibly powerful duplex units up at the office that can spit out dozens of pages a minute. Mass-printed Bibles, while still having value and use today, are no longer the most cost efficient way to make the Scriptures available to people – a single PDF document can be shared to significantly more people for significantly cheaper costs, and Bibles can be distributed to believers in nations hostile to Christianity through something as small as a flash drive or SD card. Although there is something to be said about the differences between digital text and printed text, its no secret that the Internet has made available a wealth of treasures on the history of Christianity and insight on how to live as a believer in today’s world. Of course, its also made available a wide swath of nonsense, fabrications, misinformation, and even outright lies, and those are very legitimate and serious critiques to consider, but, thinking back to the previous episode, a technologically optimistic view of technology sees the good that can come for Christianity when technology makes the transmission of text, words, documents, and books more doable and more available. If we believe, as the Westminster Confession states, that God makes use of means to accomplish his ends, then means by which the Bible becomes more readily available, sound doctrine more readily accessible, and the history of the Church more readily available, are means by which we ought to be thankful for as we take advantage of them – and encourage others to take advantage of them.

But what happens when there are improvements in technology that promote images over words? And what happens when society begins to heavily adopt these technologies that begin to shape our culture not through words, but through images? On the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we are going to look at what happens when a world shaped by worlds slowly becomes shaped by images – images that come to them live, in color, and in the comfort of their own home.

Is the glass half full, or half empty?

There is probably no question more amusing – or annoying – than this idiom. Its an easy way to quickly gauge who is the Leslie Knope and who is the Ron Swanson in the room. Its a quick shield and dismissal from criticism about whether or not you’re hopelessly positive or critical all the time – “I just see the glass half empty, its who I am!” Its the Intro to Philosophy question about whether or not absolute truth exists and what role subjectivity plays in the pursuit of truth. In high school my nickname was Eeyore, from Winney the Pooh, because I carried the same gloomy, woe-is-me, super pessimistic disposition as the stuffed donkey. In my world at the time, the glass was definitely half empty – and even that was being generous.

And yet, despite the triviality of the question, it’s nonetheless a useful diagnostic question to get a conversation started about how we approach subjects in general terms. It illustrates that, when tackling large, big picture questions, that starting with something that reduces a complicated topic or situation into something approachable like a glass of water. Obviously the question is not meant to be a nuanced, comprehensive answer, but its an easy question to ask that makes it easier to ask further, more specific questions that can lead to more fruitful conversations. I say all this because I recognize that the first episode of this podcast asked a lot of questions, and believe me, there are plenty more questions that will be asked along the way. It can be overwhelming to even know where to begin. Part of the problem is the scope of the subject matter – we are asking questions about things we spend hours with each and every day, whether its our phones, the Internet, or our entertainment. We aren’t also just concerned with asking questions about how these things are affecting us individually (though that is perhaps the best place to start), but how these things are affecting society and culture as a whole. The range alone is significant, and we haven’t even factored in the implications of the questions we ask. What will we find in the answers? What conclusions will we come to, and what will we do in response to them? You answers might be different than the ones I’ve come to, and will come to, and the course of action might be more or less drastic. I am a social media manager; my job is to know how Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram work, both as a consumer and as a producer. Leaving social media is not an option for me; but it may be for you. Conversely, you may not have a problem with being on your computer all the time, but I definitely do, and I’ve been trying to take steps to change that.

Perhaps it would be easy to start with some ways that people, including Christians, have thought about technology through the ages. We are not the first to wrestle with these questions, and we have much to learn from other thinkers who have gone before us just as much as we have to learn from present day writers. I really appreciate the work Heidi A. Campbell and Stephen Garner did in their work “Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith In Digital Culture”, and how they summarize the work of science and religious scholar Ian Barbour. Barbour proposed three categories that represents the three common response to technology: technological optimism, technological pessimism, and technology ambiguity. These categories are not all encompassing, and I imagine that none of us fall fully into one of these categories, but I think they give us a helpful starting point for making sense of the technology and media around us.

Technological optimism is probably the easiest response for us to understand; I think its the default response of culture and society as a whole. Its the view that technology is what will usher us into a better, more peaceful world; as advances in science, medicine, engineering, and education are made, the world will become a better place. Ignorance and physical limitation will be overcome by an abundance of information and the tools to accomplish what was previously difficult or perhaps even impossible. We can think of Tesla, the car manufacturer and their leader, Elon Musk, and the possibilities of a future of electric vehicles. We can think of services like 23&Me and Ancestry.com, which help us gain understanding and control over who we are and where we’ve come from. We can think of Uber and AirBNB, which bypass the traditional transportation and lodging industries to make transportation and travel more convenient and more adventurous – not to mention cheaper. We can think of Apple, Amazon, Google, and dozens of other powerful companies who make truly life changing products or offer services that make life more convenient and stress-free than ever before. There’s even a unique Christian spin on technological optimism, one that baptizes this optimism in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit and sees technology as a means of fulfilling the Great Commission. Social media makes it easier to connect to members in our congregation and stay in touch with them throughout the week. Live streaming platforms make it possible live stream conferences, workshops, and seminars for those who would like to travel and attend, but lack the funds or means to do so. Creatives, like those who are a part of the Austin Stone Story Team, are able to use their talents in filmmaking, graphic design, storytelling, and other artistic talents to creative beautiful works that convey the Gospel in novel and powerful ways. Technological optimism knows that there are downsides and limitations to technology and media, but believes the benefits of current technology – and the promises of future technology – outweigh the downsides.

Technological pessimism, on the other hand, is the opposite response. Technological pessimists don’t believe there aren’t any upsides to these new technological forces; they just believe, in general, that the negatives outweigh the positives. The root of this belief is not unreasonable; we all understand that, in some ways, technology has come to take a life of its own, and has grown beyond being a tool for the benefit of humanity to being something that exerts control over us and makes demands of us that we would rather it not make. In addition, it creates a new “in” group – you either adopt to the technology and the times, or risk being left behind and on the margins of culture, society, and the workforce. Perhaps the best example of this is automation, and the possibility that someday major industries, such as the trucking and supply industry, could leave thousands of drivers without a job as machines quite literally take over the driver’s seat. Another example is how the quest for efficiency and performance – things we expect our machines to produce – trickles down to the way we treat ourselves and our humans. Rather than seeing our employees as being made in the image of God, they are now cogs in the productivity machine. Amazon is well known for having a culture that rewards workaholism and flattens out the needs of individuals in the name of capitalistic competition – a New York Times expose of the company in 2015 painted a very dark and depressing behind-the-scenes picture of the company who guarantees free two-day shipping for their Prime customers. Technological pessimists who hold to a Christian worldview rightly recognize that advances in technology and media can have a direct impact on those made in the Image of God, either by making their jobs more difficult (in response to advances in other fields) or by depriving them of work outright, or can cause them to drown in comforts and distractions that numb them to the urgency and need of the world that desperately needs the Gospel. They recognize that technology does bring upsides and improvements, but doesn’t necessarily buy into the hype that those benefits make up for what’s lost in the process.

Technological ambiguity is in the middle, between pessimism and optimism. Unlike the optimism or pessimism views, this position sees technology in the social context that gave birth to it or makes use of it, and examines how this technology came about and what it’s being used for. Campbell and Garner offer the example of a hammer; in the hands of someone building a house, a hammer is a good thing. In the hands of a murderous madman, a hammer is a bad thing. What matter is the intentions of those who use the technology, and the consequences of their use. Technology is neither inherently good, or inherently bad; it can be both, depending on the circumstances. Computers, for example, can tools used for productive work, study, creativity, and fun one moment – and used as a gateway for pornography the next. In one moment, we can comment how much we love and miss our friends and family on social media, and in the next moment, we can tear down and destroy a stranger and a neighbor. This response to technology recognizes the nuance and complexities that come with technology and media, and strives to hold these diverse uses together into a complete picture – the problem, however, is that ambiguity is still ambiguity, and sometimes taking an ambiguous stance is an easy way out of making firm statements where firm statements are required.

These three views, as I said, are not all encompassing, nor are they without their shortcomings. Technological optimists rightly get excited about advances in technology, but can sometimes get too caught up in the hype and fail to do their due diligence in the process. There’s no better example of this than the biotech company Theranos, who spent more than a decade hyping up their proprietary blood testing machines that could run a battery of tests, with just a few drops of blood, in one’s home or nearby Walgreens. Turns out, it was all a complete, utter lie, and as John Carreyrou documents in his remarkable book, “Bad Blood”, this lie was only made possible by dozens of board members, doctors, the media, and several other parties getting so caught up in the hype of what Theranos was doing that they were willing – or, in some cases, forced – to ignore the literally dozens of red flags that came their way. By contrast, technological pessimists rightly get concerned about the impact of new technology and who loses out on these new advances, but can sometimes lose sight of the fact that every benefit will have a cost of some kind, and sometimes that cost is a negative impact to an industry, a product, or a livelihood. There will always be winners, and there will always be losers, and while we should know who the losers are and what they’ve lost and even see if that can be mitigated, we should not pretend that technology can advance in such a way that it doesn’t leave anyone on the outside looking in. And, of course, those who fall into the technological ambiguity camp can use that ambiguity as a shield for making appropriate moral judgments about technology or media and the impacts they have, and can be content to wrestle with the implications of technology simply as a mental exercise.

There are two things that all three responses have in common: the first, is that both camps agree that there is some degree of good that comes with technology, and even though this podcast is aimed at getting us to ask questions about technology, this is always something to keep in mind. As Tony Reinke outlines in the introduction of his book “12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You”, technology modifies creation, pushes back the results of the fall, edifies souls, upholds and empowers our bodies, and all of it happens under the direct supervision of God. The question is not whether or not good things have come from technology, but to what degree that the good ought to be held in tension with the bad. As Reinke notes, the copper and iron that was incorporated into ancient farming practices to make cultivating the land easier also made its way into the swords, spears, and shields of warriors who used them to defend their land – or pursue bloodshed and violence. Like every other gift from God, there are twisted perversions that arise when they’re used without acknowledging the Creator they came from. Sex, a beautiful and wonderful gift meant for marriage, becomes twisted into lust, exploitation, and enslavement as an entire industry exists to reduce women into sexual objects to be consumed by as many men as possible. Food, which we not only need to live but are given to delight and use in feasts and celebrations, becomes twisted into being a means of escape, an expression of a lack of self control, or a means of idolatry and pride. Houses and homes, given to us to be places of safety, shelter, and security, easily become prisons of harm, abuse, or laziness. Technology is no different, and these three response that we’ve looked at in this episode all revolve around the idea that technology is good, but is not only good. The glass has water in it, but how much is up for debate.

The other thing that all three responses have to technology is that we live in a technology-driven world, and that will not change. Going back to a pre-technological world, or living in a world completely divorced from technology and its influences, is not possible. To quote Campbell and Garner:

“Whether it be the vast vistas of possibility envisioned by the optimists; the bleak, oppressive world of technological determinism posited by the pessimists; or the ambiguity of those wrestling with technology, all agree that technology cannot be removed from human existence. Technology and media have become ingrained in our environment.” - Heidi Campbell and Stephen Garner, “Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture”

Which raises another big question: how did we even get to this point? What were things life before technology and media became ingrained in our environment? Most of us can remember a time before the pervasiveness of the Internet, but what about before television? Before phones? Before radio? Before books? In order to make sense of the present, we need to understand the past, and in the next episode of Breaking the Digital Spell, we are going to go back to the beginning, and in the beginning…was the Word.

1984 was a big year for Western democracy.

Just hearing the date can bring an unpleasant feeling, even if you weren’t even alive then, because of a certain book revolving around the now-infamous year: George Orwell’s 1984. I don’t think I need to spend much time describing the book; even if you haven’t read it, you know what it’s about. We get the idea of “Big Brother”, “thoughtcrime”, and “doublespeak” from the book; we all are familiar with the Ministry of Truth, and the lies they spew; the Ministry of Peace, and the wars they wage; the Ministry of Love, and the tortures they bring; the Ministry of Plenty, and the starvation they feed. The book was published in 1949, a few years into the beginning of the Cold War, and by the time the actual year 1984 was on the horizon, the Orwellian dystopia of the book 1984 wasn’t just fiction, but the literary reference point of everything America and other democracies were desperately fighting to ward off. When the year 1984 came and went, and Western democracy was still standing, there was a collective sigh of relief that Orwell’s prophecy wasn’t accurate the point of nailing the date of totalitarianism’s takeover of the free world. The year came and went, and the Cold War raged on.

A year later, in 1985, author and professor Neil Postman published a little book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, and he opens the book with a bold claim: it wasn’t George Orwell’s vision of the future we should have been fearing. Instead, there was someone else’s vision for the future that we should be afraid of, a vision buried and forgotten in Owell’s dark shadow. The author was Aldous Huxley, the book was called “Brave New World”, and the vision was equally as dark – but not on the surface. There is an oppressive totalitarianism in Huxley’s vision of tomorrow, but it’s not externally opposed on us by the state, which is undoubtedly part of the reason why America, still years away from the end of the Cold War, found Orwell so horrifying. Instead, the oppressive totalitarianism is caused by…us. I’ll let Neil Postman, as read by my wife, explain:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy-porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. . . .In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. -Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, emphasis mine

Neil Postman’s book was subtitled “Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business”, and his thesis was that television was doing more than giving us cheap entertainment, but that it was shaping the way we think about politics, religion, and education, and that – whether we intended it or not – we were putting color on the canvas of Huxley’s brave new world. His book soon became a hit, and would go on to sell 200,000 copies and be translated into several languages. Neil didn’t hate television – on the contrary, he praised what he called “junk television”, which included the likes of “The A-Team” and “Cheers” – but he was deeply concerned that they way politics, education, science, journalism, and religion, were being reshaped by the demands opposed by the medium television. As his son Andrew recalls in the introduction of the 20th anniversary edition of the book, one time Neil appeared on television to discuss the thesis of his book and noted that, as they were having a serious conversation about the health of society and culture, a mandatory television break was arriving within the next 30 seconds so that colorful, banal advertisements for toothpaste or cars could be aired, putting a forced end to a necessary discussion.

The news anchor corrected him; the commercials weren’t coming in 30 seconds, but in 10 seconds.

Neil would pass away from lung cancer in October, 2003. But two months before his passing, several employees from a marketing firm called eUniverse would band together and launch a little known website called MySpace – and just as the world was changed through the advent of television and (eventually) the internet, the world was about to be changed again through the advent of social media. We are now 15 years removed from the humble beginnings of MySpace, and with MySpace came not only the advent of social media, but helped fuel the explosive beginning of the Smartphone Era and the trend of adding “smart” in front of every new fancy gadget, be it our Smart TVs or Smart Thermostats, or Smart Cars. And even when the word “smart” doesn’t necessarily fit in the front of something, the word “reality” might be used instead, as in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. While I enjoy watching shows on my gorgeous 55” 4K TV, I look forward to the day when I can upgrade to 8K, and then to whatever comes beyond that. Needless to say, we are living in a time where technology is growing, changing, expanding, evolving – and its awesome! We all know this; we all can go on and on about how technology makes our lives easier, better, more comfortable, and more fun.

And yet, the last year and a half has been a slow-moving wake up call for society as we begin to grapple with some of the unintended consequences of the technology and media we (thought) would bring us so much joy and happiness. When we signed up for our various social media accounts, we had no idea of how it would change our political landscape and come to play such a significant role in our elections. When we picked up our smartphones from our providers, we had no idea that “smartphone addiction” would become a buzzword of growing concern. When we signed up for Netflix to binge watch The Office, we had no idea that we would someday be discussing the merits of a show centered around a teenager’s suicide – and how it would lead to a documented increase in teenager suicide across the nation. We were so enthralled at the possibilities of this new technology and the hype behind this new media that we didn’t consider asking if there would be any downsides mixed in with the upsides, and we are realizing that perhaps the downsides are resulting in minimal profits to society – perhaps, in some cases, even a loss. It’s why Apple and Google are rolling out features into iPhones and Androids designed at curtailing smartphone usage. It’s why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress about the role Facebook played in the 2016 Presidential election. Its why health authorities are beginning to sound the alarm on the dangers of Netflix binging on consumer’s mental health, even on how binge watching impacts our sleep at night. I haven’t even gone into the epidemic of pornography, the law’s current inability to handle cyberbullying among teenagers, the threat of automation leaving skilled workers without jobs, or a whole host of distressing issues. Our technology has changed the world – but maybe not in ways we wanted it to.

While all of the questions about how social media has changed politics, or smartphones have given rise to addiction, are perfectly good and valid, I think there is an even more pressing question for Christians to ask: how have all these changes in technology and media changed our theology? How has it changed the way we think of the bride of Christ? How has it changed the way we love our neighbor?

I know that, with those questions, we can point to many ways where technology and media have changed these things for the better, and I know that’s certainly true for me. Social media allows us to connect with other believers from all over the world, and to encourage and support each other from incredible distances. Smartphones allow for powerful apps that can help us stay in the Word during the day. Digital ebook services have made reading books cheaper and more convenient, whether its the newest works of bright new authors or cheap public domain copies of old dead theologians. A whole economy has opened up for people with skills and training in these new fields that provide new avenues of creativity, expression, and management; I personally experience all three of these as a social media manager and content creator for a church. But what about the ways where technology and media have changed things for the worse? Even though I can point to dozens of examples where technology and media have positively benefited my theology and blessed my relationship with my neighbor, I can also think of dozens of ways where the opposite has happened. The same social media that allows me to connect to other believers all over the world also shows me a world of unbelievable brokenness and despair, despair that creeps into my mind and leads me to question the goodness of God given how many voices cry out in pain online. The same smartphone that allows me to spend time in the Word at any time also gives me the greatest get-out-of-boredom device that allows me to tune out any unpleasant situations – or snub annoying individuals that I’d like to avoid. And what about the Internet? Has being immersed in a world where the Internet is available anywhere and everywhere changed the way I absorb and process information? What have I gained – and what have I lost – by not having to internalize facts and knowledge, but by simply knowing where I can go to find the information that I need? How does the Internet, as a medium, change the way I think – about God, about the church, about the Bible, about ministry, about theology, about friends, about family, about politics, about society, about life?

And thats what this podcast is about. Its not about convincing you to throw your MacBooks out the window, pack your things, and move to the middle of nowhere, free from any technological influence whatsoever. Nor is it about instilling a fear of the device you’re currently listening this into, as though there were some big, grand conspiracy to turn you into some mindless lemming. Instead, Breaking the Digital Spell is a podcast about asking questions about the technology and media we take for granted, and honestly assessing the full range of impact they have on our lives and theology. Specifically, for this first season, we are going to look at the various evolutions of technology throughout history – from writing, to the printing press, to televisions, the Internet, and the future – and examine how, whenever these technological breakthroughs occurred, our theology changed with the times – and ask ourselves, what changes are on the horizon? What does this mean for the future of the church, for the future of evangelism, for the future of living as faithful, ordinary Christians? Because buried underneath these questions is an even more important question: why does it even matter?

I would submit to you that these questions matter because, if we believe that we are called to fulfill the Great Commission, we cannot effectively do that without understanding the world we are being sent out to. We cannot effectively share the Gospel with our neighbor if we don’t understand how our neighbor, and we cannot understand our neighbor unless we understand ourselves. We cannot love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength if we do not understand how our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies are being captured and captivated by the technology and media we consume and interact with. We cannot break into a world ruled by distractions – from text messages, from Twitch streams, from email, from eSports, to social media, from schedules, from noise, from nonsense – if we do not first understand how our lives are affected by these distractions. In a world dominated by digital mediums, we must understand what these mediums do to us if we are to faithfully proclaim the Gospel in, through, and around these mediums, and the first step in doing that is to do what Neil Postman outlined in the conclusion of his little book:

These questions, and dozens more like them, are the means through which it might be possible for Americans to begin talking back to their television sets…For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are….This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell. - Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, emphasis mine