Reading the News to Love My Neighbor (But Who Is My Neighbor?)
Vol. 1 of notes from "Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News" by Jeff Bilbro, plus additional things to read.
(Post-publishing note: I wrote this piece on Monday, and scheduled it to publish Thursday morning, before I woke up and heard the news of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I will likely follow up with a separate piece tomorrow or Monday with some additional remarks in light of this development.)
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!
Today, I am beginning a recurring side-series of sharing insights and reflections from the books I am reading, starting with Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News by Jeff Bilbro. This was a book given to me as a participant of the American Values Coalition’s pastoral workshop on misinformation and disinformation, and was a truly life changing event that I cannot possibly recommend enough. These installments will focus on a single reflection from the book, whether it spans a couple paragraphs, multiple chapters, or some amount of text in between. Additionally, each of these installments will have links to other articles or pieces that I’ve read recently and may be things you’ll enjoy reading as well!
News Consumption as a Hobby
I have long considered myself a “news junkie”; I have fond memories from my childhood of eating ice cream and watching Fox News together with my grandparents. That trend would continue on high school, where I would watch Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly with a religious intensity that, in hindsight, sends chills down my spine. In college, I considered an education in journalism, opting instead for an associates degree in radio and television production. Twitter is my primary social media platform of choice because it is the platform of breaking news, and the place where “the news” can be discovered and consumed to limitless degree. When it comes to my job as a social media manager, I take great pride in being up-to-date and in-the-know on “the news” regarding Facebook, the social media industry, and other related areas; when it comes to how I view myself, I take great pride in considering myself “informed”.
By considering myself “informed”, I mean little more than "being in a state of actively consuming the news”. As it is with consumerism in general, news consumption is a means to it’s own it; we consume in order to consume, and the goal of “consuming” is to have consumed. As it is with my other hobbies, I find value in news consumption just for the sake of the thing itself, free from any other pragmatic purpose other than to enjoy reading (or watching) the news for it’s own sake. And then I pick up Jeff Bilbro’s Reading the Times and I am confronted with the title of the introduction, a title that packs a punch so powerful that it has left me reeling for a couple weeks now:
Reading the News in Order to Love Our Neighbor
All my life, I have viewed “the news” as a self-sufficient “good”, something that you did not need to justify your consumption of. If there was a particular purpose for being “informed”, it was tied to circumstantial factors such as your job or field of industry (a purpose I have openly claimed for myself)1. Occassionally, you would get discussions of Christians being “informed” as a means of being watchful and wise about the times, which has quickly become the go-to defense for habits that lead to conspiratorial belief and practice. But to my shame, it had not once crossed my “informed” mind that the Two Greatest Commandments have something to say here: one, that only God is truly self-sufficiently “good” and whose worship I do not need to justify, and two, that loving my neighbor ought to set the parameters - and become the purpose - for the news I consume.
And Who Is My Neighbor?
The Internet age has brought compelling challenges to the concept of “neighbor”. If I can talk with people all over the world, are they now my neighbor? And if I should read the news to love my neighbor, should I read the news relative to my neighbor on the other side of the world?
In particular, social media presses us with the belief that, because Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok now connects us to others all over the world, I have an obligation to care for others all over the world because they are my neighbor. And while that impulse to love and care for others is certainly correct and good, I would suggest that “neighbor” is the wrong term and category for why we ought to treat others online well. Simply put, I do not think we need to claim that everyone we are connected to online is our “neighbor” in order to treat them with love and respect; rather, we need to treat those we are connected to online with love and respect because they are made “in the image of God”. Everyone is created “in the image of God”, and thus God commands us to love them with the dignity and respect of being a fellow image-bearer; not everyone can meaningfully be considered “our neighbor”, and thus I should prioritize reading the news of those who are truly considered “my neighbor”.
Let’s take the unfolding crisis in Ukraine as our example. Are Ukrainians and Russians my neighbor? Having never been to either nation (and, to be honest, I doubt I could pin Ukraine on a map), it seems a stretch to meaningfully call them “my neighbors”. But, I do not need for them to be my neighbors in order to respond with compassion and concern for the plight of Ukrainians, because they (and their Russian aggressors) are both made in the image of God and, as fellow image bearers, are worthy of the same compassion and concern I’d want shown to me. Additionally, I do not need for Ukrainian Christians to be my neighbors to respond with prayer for their peace and safety, because we are “brothers and sisters in Christ” together. Christianity has other concepts and vocabulary that ground the duties we owe to those around us, even if they cannot be meaningfully considered “my neighbor”.
So who, exactly, is my neighbor? A helpful starting point to determine who your “neighbor” is is to begin with your embodied context and begin working outward. Your “neighbor” is determined by the space and time you physically inhabit, the people that you share a street with, or stand in the checkout line together with, or see when dropping your children off at school, or sing together with in the pews, or cheer and root for at the minor league baseball game2. What is the news that affects them? What do you need to be “informed” about in order to serve them? What are the things they are weeping about? What good does it do to be up-to-date on the political machinations of Washington, or the newest example of cultural debauchery in Hollywood, or the newest developments within Silicon Valley, if none of these empower you to be the hands and feet of Christ to those Christ has placed around you? Chances are, the news you need to know, or the things you need to be informed on, are the very same things that most directly impact you and your immediate world as well.
When we consume the news without direction or purpose, we fail to love our neighbor because we fail to arm ourselves with the knowledge that serves those around us and opt for arming ourselves with information that is useless to us beyond our own pride and self-gratification. And, as Bilbro notes, our posture towards media consumption tells on us in ways we would rather not admit:
Further, our posture towards these media often reveals underlying moral and social failures: our failure to attend to what and whom we ought, our failure to recognize what actions are appropriate to our moment, and our failure to belong well to one another. A topic as seemingly discrete as “the news” ends up having far-reaching implications.3
I have long argued that media literacy is the biggest gaping hole in our discipleship; if Christian discipleship forms us to love our neighbors well, it ought to include how we read the news in order to love our neighbors well. For news junkies like me, this is a sobering wake-up call not to stop reading the news, but to read the news better and more effectively, and to prioritize what news I consume with the limited amount of time I have.
Prioritizing Our Neighborhoods
Of course, reading the news in order to serve our neighbors does not mean we can only read the news relevant to our immediate surroundings. In fact, in rural contexts, the availability and quality of local journalism can be a serious problem.4 However, regardless of whether our local institutions are a small mom-n-pop press or The New York Times, we ought to prioritize the news that most immediately impacts our neighborhoods, and if we have time left over, we can move on to the news beyond our context.
We can also search out for news in other places that helps us understand the things we see in our own neighborhoods. This book was given to me by the American Values Coalition, whose mission is “growing a community of Americans empowered to lead with truth, reject misinformation and extremism, and defend democracy.” What I love about the AVC is that they desire to equip pastors and church leaders on how to respond to misinformation and extremism in their own contexts, as this is something that churches are uniquely positioned to do very effectively. However, the biggest benefit of participating in AVC’s pastor workshops is being connected to others across the country who are experiencing in their own neighborhoods what I experience in my own. We can prioritize our neighborhoods by looking elsewhere for information that can help us love our neighbors - provided we know our neighbors and how we can best serve them.
Ultimately, we must recognize and reject the impulse to know everything else going on in the world simply because it is made available for us to know. We ought to prioritize the news and knowledge that is most immediately relevant and helpful to us in loving and serving our embodied neighbors and neighborhoods, because unlike the news of the rest of the world, we can actually make a difference with the news of the world immediately beyond our front door.
Other Things to Read
Attending to the World, by L.M. Sacasas (The Convivial Society): I often struggle with writing on these topics because I’d rather people just read the people I read, and this piece is no exception. Why are you still reading this when you could be reading another stellar essay from one of the best writers on tech/media culture right now? Your time will be much better attending to Sacasas and his masterful writing and thinking than with me.
Studying Great Evangelicals’ Lives Made Me Less Ambitious, by Joey Cochran (Christianity Today): Protestants often struggle with teaching church history along lines of hero worship, portraying the great men of our faith as only great men without any fault. Joey’s piece contrast what true “greatness” ought to be, and it often looks very different from the “greatness” we prize and esteem in our others, both in the past and the present.
I Found The Tech Angle On The Vibe Shift, by Charlie Warzel (Galaxy Brain / The Atlantic): Another instance of “why read me when you can read the people I read?”, Charlie Warzel has an incredible gift of describing things that are vapid and elusive, and this piece on NFTs and NTF culture vocalizes things that many of us feel but struggle to describe.
Virtual Reality is the Rich White Kid of Technology, by David Karpf (Wired.com): This is not a new piece, but it remains the single greatest and most comprehensive take-down of virtual reality technology and it’s inability to gain mass adoption despite years of efforts and billions of dollars from powerful tech companies. If Karpf’s argument(s) here hold, it spells a disastrous end for Facebook/Meta and it’s attempts to pivot to VR.
Thank you for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. For next week’s installment, I plan to write on the “typing and deleting replies” phenomenon of social media, and how James 3 warns us that our tongues can set fires in our souls even if we do not ultimately fire out the tweets or comments we want to respond with. As someone who types out replies and deletes them 90% of the time, this has become a conviction of my own and something I suspect many others will be able to relate to as well. If this was your first time reading the newsletter, please consider subscribing so you can get new pieces delivered straight to your inbox!
Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon.
Austin.
And, just to be clear, I do think being “informed” relative to your job or industry is a legitimate justification beyond the standard purposeless consumerism of news-consumption-as-hobby. In my former life as a pest control technician, being able to be an “expert” on my industry was paramount to my ability to serve my customers well and meet their needs. Likewise, I want my doctors to have the best information available when I go to see them.
Shoutout to the Sod Poodles, one of the most disastrous and brilliant marketing schemes I’ve ever been personally affected by.
Reading the Times, 5
This is a piece for another time, but it can be discouraging to read exhortations towards reading local journalism from those writing in cities or context with strong local journalism outlets, knowing that practically, my options living in rural Texas are far less robust and prone to other problems and issues.