Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

by Samuel James

The scholar Robert Bellah defines expressive individualism this way: “Expressive individualism holds that each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.”

In other words, what most people in the modern, secular world believe is that the key to their happiness, fulfillment, and quest for meaning in life is to arrange things so that their inner desires and ambitions can be totally achieved.

If these desires and ambitions align with those of the community or the religion, great! But if not, then it’s the community or the religion that must be changed or done away with. Life’s center of gravi...

The “look in” approach to life means that your purpose is to look inside yourself in order to discover who you truly are—to find what makes you unique—and then to take hold of your authentic self and emerge with it intact and uncompromised. Who are you? Only you can figure out the answer, and the way you find out is by looking deep into your heart to discover your uniqueness, to come to terms with what you most want from life.

What’s crucial to realize is that alongside the philosophical revolution of expressive individualism, the digital technology revolution has exploded, and in the process it has provided the revolution of expressive individualism with its most important, most enchanting, and most effective vehicle.

In other words, in about twenty years the internet has gone from a hobby of the few to the routine of the majority.

Part of the reason for this is that the internet has not just stayed a recreational pastime, a way to watch funny videos, read sports statistics, or send the occasional email. Many industries are now centered around the internet. These jobs require constant access to email, videoconferencing, file hosting, social media, and more. In the twenty-first century, it is perfectly plausible that a typical employed person would spend most (if not all) of his workday online, spend most (if not all) of his break catching up on social media or listening to a podcast, and then go home to spend most (if not all) of his free time watching Netflix, playing online games, or just browsing the web.

While some of us can still feel occasional pangs of guilt for “bingeing” too much TV or losing track of time aimlessly scrolling through our social media feeds, the point is that this kind of rhythm does not stand out as strange in our modern world. We can tinker around the edges, but the life bordered on all sides by the internet is neither rare nor surprising in our era. From work to dating, from movies to music, from friendship to even church—the screen is mediatin...

The internet is a lot like pornography. No, that’s not a typo. I did not mean to say that the internet contains a lot of pornography. I mean to say that the internet itself—i.e., its very nature—is like pornography. There’s something about it that is pornographic in its essence. If this sounds confusing, you’re not alone. It sounds confusing because over the past few decades, the tendency among Christians has been to focus on what the internet provides instead of what it is.

Consequently, evangelicals have indeed talked a lot about the scourge of online pornography. But while much attention has been given to how the web can supply us with spiritually dangerous pictures and videos, much less attention has been given to how the very form of the web shapes us in the image of the spirit of the age.

Few Christians would dispute that there is much on the internet that harms us. But by divorcing what the internet presents from what the internet intrinsically is, we are fighting against the symptoms of a more fundamental disease that we are failing to treat. “Staying pure online” is a worthy ambition, but defining purity to mean only one thing—the avoidance of certain content—not only misses the richer biblical ideal of wise living, but it ironically makes us more vulnerable to the allure of godless ideas and rhythms of life. It is entirely possible—in fact, all variables eq...

This may sound incredibly strange. If we are avoiding sinful content online, how in the world can the internet “shape” us in a negative way? We try to avoid articles, podcasts, or videos that undermine Christian belief. Technology is a neutral tool; what matters is how we use it, right? The key (many might say) is to use the web only for good things: to keep up with friends, to consume wholesome content, to be more efficient at o...

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.

Rather than thinking of the web and social media as merely neutral tools that merely do whatever users ask of them, it is better to think of them as kinds of spaces that are continually shaping us to think, feel, communicate, and live in certain ways. In other words, the social internet is a liturgical environment. James K. A. Smith has written powerfully about the effect that certain habits and environments can have on our desires.9 As we will see later on, even our most allegedly “nonreligious” spaces are deeply spiritual. They tell us a story about the good life: what it is, and how we can get it. These spiritual habitats train our hearts and make certain ideas and behaviors more desirable, and others less so, by immersing us in a particular narrative.

The web tells a story too. The disembodied, fragmented nature of the internet is not merely a quirk but a fundamental part of the web’s nature and, thus, part of the story it tells. As we will see, the form of the internet has radically altered how we read, think, feel, and believe. 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. How is it that in a supposedly relativistic, you-do-you age, so many people have been shamed or “dragged” online, helplessly watc...

These are some of the “digital liturgies” that you and I encounter almost every day. They are not neutral. They are theological, philosophical, existential, and moral stories that leave constant...

One of the great things about being a Christian is that in a listless and frantic age, you don’t have to chase after every new idea or attitude. To be a Christian is to go to bed every night knowing that you have a completely trustworthy, completely solid, and completely good word from the Creator of the universe. The maker of the stars put the wisdom, truth, and hope we need in a book, the Bible. The Bible reveals to us the grand narrative, the master story, that gives meaning and direction to our lives: the gospel of Jesus.

We don’t have to construct meaning; we have to cling to the meaning we’ve been given already.

Amid the white noise of digital liturgies that preach to us every day, the gospel is wonderfully satisfying analog truth. We’ll say more about this later, but for now, by “analog truth” I mean that the story of the gospel is rooted deeply in physical reality.

To preserve the good news of Jesus, God put his gospel in a physical book, inspiring real humans by the Holy Spirit to write physical words that tell a unified story about a speaking God, who was incarnated as a real human being to save us from our sin, free us from the slavery of self-...

When we put the digital liturgies of our age up against the analog truth of the gospel, we see just how flimsy, how untrue, and how unsatisfy...

Throughout this book, however, these words will refer to one single idea: the disembodied electronic environment that we enter through connected devices for the purpose of accessing information, relationships, and media that are not available to us in a physical format.

Next, the first disclaimer: this book will not argue that Christians should stay off the internet. I’m not going to tell you to permanently unplug, find a cabin in the wilderness, and go “off the grid” so that you can be a better Christian. Not only would this be undoable for most of the people reading this; it would not accomplish what we might want it to. When Jesus prayed for his disciples a few hours before being crucified, he specifically prayed that instead of being taken out of the world, his followers would be preserved by the power of God’s truth

Our immersion in the world’s liturgies is not the deciding factor in our faithfulness to or love of Jesus. Rather, by identifying how the web shapes us, we can use these technologies more deliberately, more wisely, and more Christia...

But more deeply, it’s a story about worship.

As we think about the formative power of online technology in our lives, we must start where all truth starts—with God. One of the reasons so few people can articulate the effects of the online world is that so few people have a baseline standard of human flourishing for comparison. The world is a thoroughly “tech-maximalist” place. As we will see, this is not an accident. Part of the reason is that much of our digital technology was invented according to a logic that sought to help humans transcend their humanness and achieve something more.

Indeed, if there is truly nothing more to being human than endlessly optimizing ourselves, this makes perfect sense. Why not use every tool imaginable to escape the confines of our bodies?

Christianity, however, contradicts this narrative. As we open the Bible, God’s word to all humanity, we see a meaning and a purpose much different. We see that we are not self-made but created in another’s image. We see that we are not infinite or self-existent, but creatures who depend on the world around us and on each other. Most importantly, we see that the question of how we should live, rather than being an unknowable mystery or a self-chosen adventure, is a truth we must receive. There is an objectiveness to reality to which we as human creatures must conform if we are to live whole and well...

In his helpful book The Fear of the Lord Is Wisdom, theologian Tremper Longman III describes biblical wisdom as containing three essential levels: the skill of living (practical), becoming a good person (ethical), and fearing God (theological).

As theologian John Kleinig has observed, “society as a whole does not know what to make of the body.”11 Kleinig points out that many modern people express confusion about the body through one of two ways. First, they become “obsessed” with achieving a body they desire, so they go to great lengths to get slimmer, fitter, stronger, or prettier. Kleinig sums up the situation: “My ideal self, the person I would like to be, must match that ideal body. Yet that ideal is never fixed. It changes as fashions change.”12 The result for many people, however, is a profound and often debilitating shame over the way their body fails to look like the ideal body. This shame is expressed through an increasing alienation from our bodies, as we despair of having the image we desire and try harder and harder to separate our “inner self” from our disappointing physical self.

This dynamic that most of us experience—this connection we feel between our bodies and an ambient sense of shame or disappointment—is very near the center of the biblical story of the fall. After Adam and Eve sinned against God, their eyes were opened to the knowledge of good and evil. What did they see? They saw their naked bodies (Gen. 3:7). Their sin did not disrobe them; it did not free up their true selves, suppressed by fellowship with God. Instead, sin turned them against their true selves.

Sin’s power is visible not just in its capacity to alienate us from our bodies but to make this alienation the fundamental thing we are aware of when it comes to them. Because of this, we miss the good givenness of our bodies. By “good givenness” I mean the sheer reality that we exist in an embodied state and cannot do otherwise. Our bodies are given to us in our mother’s womb. We are passive recipients of God’s creative work. Even thousands of years before ultrasound technology, King David of Israel knew that the Lord had knit him together in his mother’s womb and that the result was a body “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139:14). What did David do to possess such a wonderfully made body? Absolutely nothing. His body was made for him without his input, without his effort, and without his agency, yet it is inarguably real and essential. The body has givenness.

Biblically speaking, it’s when we attempt to get around or beyond our identity as embodied creatures that we plunge headlong into despair and folly.

Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, our cultural moment in the modern West is profoundly hostile to the body. The internet, which dominates our lives as the primary medium through which we encounter most of the world, is an entirely disembodied habitat. Consequently, the internet trains our consciences to think of ourselves and the world in disembodied ways. We do not exist bodily online but through photos and videos that we carefully manipulate to construct a preferred identity.

This habitat itself tells us a story—a story that humans are not essentially people with flesh and blood, voices, and facial expression, but “users” whom we can sufficiently know from their words, profile pictures, and shares. This is not just a minor tweak in how we think of what it means to be a human person. It is an intellectual and spiritual revolution. And there is much reason to think that a worldview of disembodiment has currently seized the reins of cultural power.

How has the idea of a person being stuck in the “wrong body” become not just respected but orthodox in many circles? There are many legitimate answers, but this book offers an overlooked one: digital technology has recalibrated our worldviews and reshaped our consciences not to see the good givenness of our bodies.

This isn’t merely a problem of content; it’s a problem of form. In other words, it’s not simply that on social media and the web we read sentences that devalue the physical. Rather, the nature of online presence itself powerfully reinforces the sense that we are not our bodies, that we have total control over our identity and our story, and that any threat to this feeling can and ought to be “deleted” so that we don’t have to put up with it.

According to a vast amount of research, teens and young adults in contemporary American society feel significantly lonelier and more isolated than generations prior.16 For many, friendship is an elusive art that seems to be slipping further and further away with each successive generation. Even worse, the emerging generation of adults in many economically developed parts of the wo...

Meanwhile, technologically speaking, it has never been easier in human history to “connect” with another person: to meet, get to know, and develop a relationship with someone even over vast distances. The trends of loneliness and unwanted solitude have not only resisted technological conn...

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.

In the world of Inception, dream-sharing is not just a tool to invade someone else’s mind; it’s a way to construct one’s own subconscious reality. With training, sleepers can learn how to change the content of their dreams at will. However, this intoxicating ability erodes the sleeper’s sense of what’s real and what is a dream. As the dreamers port more and more of their desires and memories into the dream environment, they become increasingly immersed in the world of the dream. Not only does this immersion confuse their sense of reality (with tragic consequences in the case of one character); it recalibrates their desires entirely.

The chemist explains that these people come to his shop to take the sedative and spend hours every day dreaming together, as their subconscious selves construct an alternative life in their dreams. Stunned, the team asks, “They come here to fall asleep?” “No,” comes the reply. “They come here to wake up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?”

The power of technology to shape us is something that many evangelical Christians have not considered nearly enough. Particularly in the digital age, evangelicals have often focused exclusively on the content that our TVs, computers, and smartphones deliver to us rather than the form by which that content is delivered. If we were to borrow computing language to make this distinction, we might say that American evangelicals have had a lot to say about cultural software but very little about cultural hardware.

The idea that technology changes the kind of people we are is not itself an argument against them; it’s simply a true observation of the world we live in.

The medical doctor and philosopher Stanley Joel Reiser, for example, has made a provocative case that the stethoscope, along with other medical technology, made physicians less dependent on (and ultimately less interested in) the subjective experiences of patients. “As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis,” he writes, “he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists. . . . These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgment.”

At the same time, however, many evangelicals struggle to understand how the situation has been transformed so quickly. Ideas about gender identity that were strictly the domain of far-left bastions in higher education just a decade ago are now topics of conversation among pastors and parents in middle America. How in the world did we get here so soon? I believe an important answer is about technology. The epistemological and ethical effects of technology have gone underreported in evangelical spaces partially because we don’t know how these material devices are shaping us, which in turn is due to a lack of a viable theology of spiritual formation.

Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg believes the metaverse—an immersive virtual reality environment where digital renderings of people gather—is an essential step in the human journey toward total freedom to customize our bodies and our environment.

Elon Musk, as of this writing one of the wealthiest people in the world, has observed that as our personal computing tools become more important in our daily lives, the line between self and software is blurred. Musk welcomes an imminent chapter in human history where we will “see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.”

Once again, this doesn’t mean that these technologies are inherently evil in themselves or that the right response would be to disavow permanently any use of computers or the web. Instead, what we must do if we want to live wisely in the world God has made is identify these ideas and worldviews for what they are, and understand how they can shape and move us even when we are not conscious of any mental battle going on.

This glance at the intellectual heritage of much of our online and computer technology helps make sense of why these devices seem to powerfully separate us from the givenness of the world. In a very real sense, this is precisely what such technology was intended to do. Its function is downstream from a particular belief system, a story of humanity wherein salvation consists of overcoming givenness itself, curating a custom existence, and achieving freedom from boredom, limitation, ignorance, and even death.