Christians Need to Take Internet Culture Seriously

My newest article - and previewing the return of Passing Through Digital Babylon.

Taken from the Endeavor article

You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!

This is not the official re-launch of PTDB. That will happen in the subsequent post. The good news is that I’m about to return for the long haul. The better news is that I have some wild updates from the last year and a half on life, the book, the Substack, and more. It’s gonna be big.

What I wanted to do here is share my newest standalone article, When Internet Culture Becomes the Culture, published over at Endeavor. With this piece, I want to highlight a problem, an opportunity, and a framework for how Christian writers could begin capitalizing on that opportunity.

The problem is this:

In Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, he sternly warns those who think they can shield themselves from television’s impact on culture by not watching television: “Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world where the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.”

Internet culture is, for most people, the most attractive thing to do at any time of the day or night. When the majority of Americans are addicted to smartphones and social media, they are not turning them off. Even if you personally participate little in internet culture, your neighbors are likely being reshaped on internet culture’s terms without even realizing it. Sooner or later, you will encounter the formative effects of internet culture in your life. Are you prepared to share the Gospel, defend the Christian faith, and make mature disciples of Christ against a backdrop of the fraternity, fandom, and fantasy that internet culture provides?

The opportunity is this:

The secular world recognizes that internet culture exists, and a new generation of writers and content creators have found immense success by trying to answer the question, “What do we do about it?” In contextualizing events and artifacts of “internet culture” for the masses, writers like Charlie Warzel, Casey Newton, Taylor Lorenz, and Ryan Broderick have created enormous audiences for themselves by taking the weird, niche, and/or dangerous aspects of internet life seriously. Dozens of highly successful YouTubers have followed suit, such as Tiffany Ferguson, Jenny Nicholson, Kurtis Conner, Wendigoon, and Supereyepatchwolf—just to name a few.

Christian thinkers and writers recognize the power of the internet and have been at the forefront of writing about the dangers of smartphone addiction, excessive social media use, and internet pornography. But where secular internet culture writers often approach their topics from a live-from-the-scene-of-the-crime perspective, Christian writers are frequently on the outside looking in. Both perspectives are important, but if we want to seek and save the lost where they are found, we cannot approach internet culture solely from the safety of the sidelines. Someone needs to call an ambulance, like a lifeguard team rescuing a drowning swimmer. Someone needs to be prepared to do CPR, but none of that matters if someone isn’t willing to dive into the water to bring the victim to the surface first.

The framework is this:

One way scholars study “religion” is to look for common categories that religions share despite their differences. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are all mutually exclusive religions with beliefs that are incompatible with each other. Still, each has a category for “holy texts,” “sacred spaces,” and even a “goal” to work towards. These categories can stand independently and overlap with other religious categories. 

We can take a similar approach to “internet culture”, and the nearly limitless internet sub-cultures. Though far from exhaustive, we can better understand “internet culture(s)” by examining three categories: fraternity, fandom, and fantasy.

Read the piece for yourself and subscribe to Endeavor if you’re not already. Patrick Miller and Ian Harber are doing cutting-edge work on the intersection between the Internet and biblical Christian ministry. It was an honor to be able to write for them on such an urgent topic.

Thanks for reading. Next time on Passing Through Digital Babylon: the most out-of-left-field plot twist my life never saw coming.

Austin