Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

by Samuel James

Life’s center of gravity, according to expressive individualism, is the self.

is entirely possible—in fact, all variables equal, it is likely—to faithfully avoid vulgar or explicit content on the web while simultaneously being shaped by it in a profoundly sub-Christian way.

In other words, our choices matter in shaping us into a certain kind of person.

entirely determined by our childhood experiences. We change them through the way we live—and . . . through the tools we use.”4

In particular, Carr specifies that “intellectual technologies”—technologies that directly influence human language and thinking—communicate by their design and function certain ideas

In other words, our intellectual technologies are constantly preaching to us, and over time, their sermons transform how we think and act.

Devices and practices that alter our habits of speaking and reading consequently alter our habits of learning and thinking.

Neuroplasticity and the formative power of technology are profoundly theologically relevant because human beings, created in the image of God and belonging to God “body and soul,”7 are irrevocably physical.

What’s more, habits and practices, while carried out externally by physical means, are spiritually significant because they shape us into particular kinds of people.

While the blessed man’s relationship to God’s word is certainly more than a physical matter of hearing and meditating on it, it is not less.

We become more like Jesus as we give ourselves over to practices that push our hearts closer to him in love and trust.

the mall is an epistemological (and moral) habitat. It is an environment where buying more stuff becomes more plausible, where the idea that happiness is a purchase away seems easy to believe and easy to act on.

“Because language is, for human beings, the primary vessel of conscious thought, particularly higher forms of thought,” Carr writes, “the technologies that restructure language tend to exert the strongest influence over our intellectual lives.”

through the same medium at the same time.12 To read a book, newspaper, or personal letter is to encounter the meaning of words wholly as a recipient rather than a contributor.

The internet’s inherent volatility as a medium is extremely important in shaping it as an epistemological habitat.

words, the internet actually retrains us as readers. “When the Net absorbs a medium, it recreates that medium in its own image,” writes Carr.

“Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them.

They encourage us to dip in and out of a series of texts rather than devote sustained attention to any one of them.

Their value as navigational tools is inextricable from the distra...

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

We begin to think like the internet.

the web is quickly becoming more than just another epistemological or spiritual habitat that competes for our attention and presence. It is becoming the foundational medium, the superstructure of nearly every other experience.

because Christian teaching will not let us divide what happens to our minds and affections from what happens to our spirits, the web’s ability to reshape us as people becomes a spiritual ability.

moral language of our technologies is so easy to miss precisely because the technologies change the way we see them. We don’t realize when we’re being pushed toward rhythms, patterns, and attitudes that undermine Christian formation because we usually only look for that in explicit worldviews, not in our devices. But they are there.

part of faithfulness to God as embodied humans means living wisely, and this wisdom consists primarily of seeing the world the way God sees it and responding accordingly.

The question is not, Is this technology shaping me right now? The question is, How is this technology shaping me right now?

the tendency of evangelicals over the past few years has been to zero in on the content of digital media, to encourage one another to use discernment, filters, accountability, and time limits. These things can be valuable, but a focus on content to the exclusion of form creates an illusion of purity.

contemporary university students are being weakened by ideologies that purport to protect individuals from ideas that may be uncomfortable to them.

If we look hard at the epistemological habitat of the internet through the eyes of wisdom, we will see that the privileging of personal experience as ultimate truth is not just something we find online; it’s the very logic of the social internet itself.

When we say that the web has democratized information and experiences, we mean that it has made things that otherwise would be available to the few available to the many.

political commentator Tom Nichols described “the death of expertise,” a condition of the internet era in which the free availability of information and the ease with which individuals can express their viewpoint result in an intellectual free-for-all.

circle to a unique dilemma of the internet age. The radical democratization of everything has not only given billions of ordinary people a very real kind of power and voice; it has flattened the distinctions between one voice and another.

In other words, in the analog world, society is set up so that while everyone is owed equal justice under the law, not everyone’s insights or voices are considered equally valid or worthy of broadcasting.

And in the online world, your story is your truth.

the web is uniquely designed to cultivate expressive individualism in us.

When people criticize a historic biblical doctrine by relating a story of how they were treated poorly by someone who believed that doctrine, they are almost certain to be flooded with replies and messages offering support and encouragement for their rejecting that belief. Their post may go viral, being read or watched or shared by thousands of people.

Arguments belong to the world of expertise; stories belong to the world of democratization.

The internet, especially social media, has untethered scores of people from any solid, given sense of identity or purpose.

The digital revolution’s redistribution of information has led to much public knowledge, but much less public wisdom.

people are talking past each other because they have entirely different sources of information.

From this vantage point, the transgender revolution not only makes sense; it feels almost inevitable.

Yet Shrier believes that the astonishing surge in trans-identifying teen and even preteen girls is not a moment of liberation but one of indoctrination.

It’s that the idea of such an order rings intuitively false to a generation of people who have only known themselves via the profile page. It’s my story, my truth, because it’s my self(ie) and I must decide what it is in the world.

It turns out that the work of creating ourselves is not energizing but exhausting, even maddening.

The power of limitless freedom and options does not seem to unleash our creative self-expression as much as it seems to make us wish someone else would think about life on our behalf.

it simply repositions us to be submissive to the demands of others.

If we are our own and belong to ourselves, then we are always only who we are. No more. No less.

Though we may retreat into the safety of self-creation to get out from under some sense of being oppressed, the self-creation actually turns into a form of self-oppression. Without givenness, we have to create the self that we are, and it needs to be a good one if we are to feel validated. How do we know if it is a good one?

But the flipside of this is that because I am God’s creature, I matter. My story is not absurd or meaningless. There is a transcendent purpose over my life and even my body. Since I cannot create my own meaning, I do not have to. I’m

The great church theologian Saint Augustine described sin as a turning from God to self.