When was the last time you were more than fifty feet from your smartphone? I’m just old enough to remember a time when people would have replied, “What’s a smartphone?” But, it’s time we reckon with the reality that we don’t live in that world any longer. In many ways it seems that we’re just beginning to glimpse the societal and cultural consequences of the digital age. This month we look at Digital Liturgies by Samuel James. He argues that the digital world functions liturgically—its form and function shape our understanding of reality as we interact with it.
Perhaps the word “liturgy” sounds foreign to our Anabaptist ears. Liturgies are religious ceremonies that express a truth not just in words, but in action and ritual. (Think of baptism, communion, or mass.) Our concerns about the internet tend to center around content. We see the danger of internet pornography, but as James argues, we often miss the fact that the internet itself is “pornographically shaped.” That is, the medium of the internet invites us to consume, to binge, to self-gratify.
James addresses five digital liturgies: authenticity, outrage, shame, consumption, and meaninglessness. Consider, for instance, the gender confusion that defines our age. Could transgenderism even be plausible without the internet? The digital world gives us the impression that we can be anyone we want to be regardless of bodily reality. Or think about the way social media discussions so often descend into angry tirades. Could it be that the internet itself—with its illusion of anonymity and tendency toward confirmation bias—discourages rational thinking? What is it that compels us to keep watching, scrolling, and refreshing long after we should have stopped? It is the internet itself, with its infinite sea of “content” in all directions that teaches us to consume and consume and consume.
The gospel is refreshingly analog. In contrast to the liturgies of the digital age, Scripture calls us to embodied truth. First, we need to cultivate practices—habits of prayer and reading Scripture—that intentionally help us resist the flow. Second, we need people. Real relationships with real people in a real church combat the isolation of being digitally connected to everyone and no one. Finally, we need to recognize the promises of God in order to reorient our priorities. Those nagging feelings of anxiety, boredom, restlessness, and distraction that come from scrolling too long point to something very real in the human heart. We are made to long for eternity, for a heavenly country, not for infinite scroll.