This article first appeared in the September 2021 edition of Franciscan magazine.
“In these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son.” So begins the Letter to the Hebrews. These days, we might joke that God should speak to us in a collection of social media memes or a Zoom call. After all, that’s the way everybody else communicates these days.
The joke is fair enough, but it also misses the point. The people of 1st Century Palestine may not have been able to log on to Zoom to take part in a heavenly videoconference, but they could and did expect God to communicate in all sorts of ways. Receiving enlightenment and instruction from divine visions is a repeated theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Peter and Paul are both recorded as receiving direct instruction through visions. But the Father didn’t send the divine Word to people in visions, although presumably he could have done – instead He sent the Word directly, in the person of Jesus Christ. Personal presence matters; the Word was made flesh because we are creatures of flesh and blood.
What might the digitisation of human relationships, accelerated by necessity due to the terrible pandemic we are enduring, mean for the Church? Let us first explore its wider societal impact to shed some light on that.
It is now a generation since communication started migrating into digital spaces, mediated by screens. I notice this shift most profoundly in pubs; people on their own are much less likely to strike up conversations with strangers or the barman than they were when I first discovered their amber-tinted pleasures in the mid-1990s. Instead, singles constantly flick through their phones to pass the time. A more specific example: gay bars have closed at an astonishing clip, rendered commercially unviable after losing the section of their custom primarily interested in casual sex to dating apps which leave many of their users experiencing incessant digital rejection. Gone with the bars is the broader sense of community they provided, including for those who had no interest in hooking up. A good pub, gay or otherwise, allowed people to meet in a way that transcended class, politics, race, and educational levels, at least to the extent their locality or workplace environs did.
On social media, in contrast, people often slip into clusters of the like-minded, forming small and cohesive online communities trapped in their own groupthink, increasingly incapable of assimilating any alternative viewpoint, and regarding their very expression of such as at best fake news and at worst an act of hostility.
Social media sites are designed to make the world appear as if each of us is the most important person in it, something fuelled by the wider culture of hyper-individualism. They also discourage us from switching off; once social media apps appeared on our smartphones, they started following us everywhere, in many cases even to bed, with the sense that we’re always on parade for a retinue of family and friends – a panopticon without cells or bars.
Young people emerging into adulthood report themselves as being in the grip of a mental health crisis. Certainly there are some very strange things happening with the Facebook generation, which presents almost a photographic negative of the wild abandon of their Baby Boomer grandparents. Drinking and drug-taking are at record lows, while an American academic study in 2019 found a third of thirty-year old men had never had sex. Among young women, the tidal wave of anorexia and cutting, the product of deep alienation from one’s own body, continues unabated.
So far, so depressing. If it’s all so bad, why do I bother spending so much time on social media? Its positives include the wonderful connections with friends I had previously lost touch with, and the people met online who’ve become treasured real-world friends. People have shared so many beautiful photographs, pieces of music, and book suggestions with me. Even Twitter can, if used intelligently, be a powerful source of little-covered news.
Previous communications revolutions, from the printing press to the radio, have disrupted the pre-existing social order, leading to polarisation and violence, before people learned how to assimilate them as a blessing. I’m fairly confident that will happen this time too. Making that happen involves us ensuring that technology remains our tool; we must never become tools of technology, for that is a foundation for a slavery not in keeping with our freedom in Christ.
How can the Church help us to use communications technology to enhance our humanity, rather than consuming it?
Firstly, it can help people recapture a healthy sense of physicality. We are not creatures of pure psyche and mind. Our bodies matter, they are part of the way in which we are made in the image and likeness of God. Whether we bless ourselves at the consecration or raise our right arms along with the praise band’s riffs, Christian prayer is as much a physical as an interior act. When we are once again able to safely worship together without restrictions, let’s do so with unrestrained joy in the presence of one another and our Lord. Our buildings matter too, albeit widely denigrated by those in the Church with an unhealthy tendency to idolise the quality of their own relationship with Christ; they ground us in the reality that the Church is united across fathomless centuries, not merely something that lives in the present moment, and are a channel of beauty in a sometimes ugly world.
Secondly, the Church can learn to be content to be peripheral, hopefully teaching others to do so too in a self-centred world. While there is much life in the Church, there is little sign on these islands or elsewhere in Western Europe that Christianity is going to assume the central social role it held for centuries. Since being ordained last September, I’ve been surprised by the number of people who ask me what I do for a living while I’m wearing my dog collar. We should not see this as a sign that God has abandoned us – far from it, for God chose to incarnate Himself in an unimportant little town as a member of a peripheral ethnic group in a backwoods province. Yet too much of our church life involves pompously lecturing the rest of society about what it should in the bedroom or the boardroom although few care what we think. Let us learn to share wisdom rather than bark orders.
Thirdly, the Church must work to retain the breadth of Anglicanism, something surely worth contending for in a fissiparous age. Church social media too often involves abusive discourse between members of different factions and too much groupthink within them. Let us seek to be a Church where we are not afraid to have allies disagree with us on important matters, and equally unafraid to embrace our enemies. We are not factional followers of Paul, Cephas, and Apollos respectively, one hopes, but each of us a disciple of Christ our saviour.
These are a few small steps that might help churchpeople retain our souls in the epoch of screens. Like others, I have experienced real benefits of the new technology but, to coin a phrase, “Caveat orator!”
Gerry Lynch is the Curate of St John with St Mary, Devizes. He was previously Director of Communications for the Diocese of Salisbury and Executive Director of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, in which roles he was an early adopter of social media in both church and political communications.
