Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

by Samuel James

Rather than being a neutral tool, the internet (particularly the social internet) is an epistemological environment8—a spiritual and intellectual habitat—that creates in its members particular ways of thinking, feeling, and believing. It’s true in one sense that the web is a tool that responds to its users’ desires. But the web is not a tool in the same way that a screwdriver or wrench is a tool. The web speaks to us. We talk to the web, and the web talks back, and this dialogue constitutes an ever-growing aspect of life in the digital age.

The digital liturgies of the web and social media train us to invest ultimate authority in our own stories and experiences as they separate us from the objective givenness of the embodied world.

because human beings are divine image bearers with a cosmic mandate to subdue the earth and represent God’s rule on it (Gen. 1:27–28), our technology is massively theologically significant. We not only shape technology; technology shapes us. And certain kinds of technologies shape us in certain profound ways.

The major argument of this book is that Christians can only understand and respond to these and other cultural shifts correctly if we understand them in the context of digital technology’s undermining of biblical wisdom. Because wisdom is a submission to God’s good and given reality, our immersion in computer and internet existence is a crisis of spiritual formation. Our digital environments dislocate us, training us to believe and feel and communicate in certain ways that our given, embodied, physical environments do not. The more immersive and ambient the technology, the more extreme this effect.

What we choose to see as our reality changes us in that “reality’s” image. The spiritual and intellectual haze we feel is the feeling of thinking, feeling, and believing more like our technologies. We are becoming what we worship.

In the digital epistemological habitat, certain ideas and associations are plausible not because they make rational sense or are even accurately communicated, but because of how easily and seamlessly they are accessed.

Human attention is finite. There are limits to how well and accurately we can think when our attention is besieged with multiple stressors. This point is demonstrated compellingly by several studies cited by Carr that show an inverse correlation between the amount of multimedia in front of us and our ability to accurately remember and restate the information that multimedia was communicating. The problem, Carr observes, is not the presence of pictures or sound, both of which can be used to enhance comprehension and learning. The problem is rather the internet’s unique, consciousness-bending format that trains our minds not to sit and reflect but to keep scrolling, keep skimming, and keep looking for a novel bit of information. Carr describes the internet as “an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention.”15

Social media’s algorithmic design to elicit our anger so as to command our attention is nothing less than a moral crisis.

Glory from others is a powerful reality distorter, and in the age of social media, it is one of the most profound threats to truthful Christian thinking. When the act of thinking is inseparable from the act of being noticed, approved, or shared, the threat of thinking for the sake of those things is omnipresent.

One of the core convictions of this book is that our digital tools speak to us, and evaluating all they say is a spiritual task. A careful consideration of Christian wisdom and the culture of the web reveals that pornography is a logical and predictable creature of the spiritual habitat of the internet.

The chaos itself seems to sink its claws into us, making us curious for things we don’t even really care about, vulnerable to distractions and temptations we’d never come near away from the screen.

The web’s nature as a novelty machine, however, is intrinsic to its nature as a pornographic medium. There is a vital connection between aimless immersion in “content” and the spiritual mood that primes a heart to seek out lust.

Emotionally numbed by endless scrolling, the human heart tends to become inclined toward that which simply offers a dash of color to an otherwise drab listlessness. In other words, the mindless search for more stuff pushes us toward the temporary thrill and pseudo-connection of online porn.

The web’s ethos of consumption is a fitting vehicle for the pornography industry. Pornography is, after all, fundamentally a consumptive act, a transformation of human persons into soulless objects of spectacle. Porn and the web go together so efficiently precisely because they are both instruments of commodification, a way to turn the most intimate or even most elementary stuff of human life into consumable content.

the digital liturgies of endless novelty, constant consumption, and limitless power make pornography more plausible to our hearts and our habits. Within the web’s spiritual habitat, looking at pornography makes sense and feels natural.

Living, working, studying, and loving in the sun of God’s embodied creation, feeling a sense of transcendent purpose and meaning to even our “ordinary” days, is what makes the mirage of online pornography feel small, even silly.

It’s not that my wandering attention span has nowhere else to go. It’s that digital environments beckon to me in a particularly powerful way. The restlessness we feel when we instinctively reach for our devices ports all too easily into how we think about our lives.

the web is a habitat of discontentment that makes our feelings of insecurity and unhappiness seem more plausible than they might otherwise appear.

web’s minutiae of dislocation. Distraction and discontentment are serious challenges to a life of Christian wisdom. But both are really symptoms, not causes. Behind the life of distraction and discontentment is the life of dislocation, by which I mean a life in which deep belonging and rootedness feel like a disadvantage, and scattered, shallow omnipresence feels like power.

We have become exceedingly good at replacing human beings with technology. But even as our performance at work and media intake have kept apace, our spirits have not. We need people. We need presence. We need place.

The digital liturgies that vie for our belief and our attention are simply man-made structures posing as real identity, real wisdom, real pleasure, and real justice. They entrance us because they know our hearts are restless for these things, and we cannot live for long without the hope of finding them.

The web is a curious, marvelous thing. But at the end of the day, I believe its power and its appeal are simple. The web is a promise that we can be more than we are, do more than we can, and feel more than is near us.

I think that every time we log on, we are looking for something. We are looking for heaven.