The universality of digital technology means—for good or for bad—it has become part of most everyone’s context around the world. This dawned on me years ago while teaching at a Bible school in Zambia, where all my students had phones and were online. Amid all the cultural diversity around the globe, we are increasingly bound together by our digital liturgies. Yet to escape becoming cultural captives as we rush forward to leverage this feature of our context for ministry, wisdom calls us first to understand the digital world we have been baptized into.
In A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, Antón Barba-Kay explains that today’s digital world is not just in the business of getting and keeping our attention. Its aim is to push our buttons: coaxing us to behave in certain ways while making us feel like “we are our own bosses every step of the way.” When we scroll on our phones or stream whatever we decide to watch next on our big screens, we feel free. We’re in the driver’s seat. So we think. But that is the racket of “choice architecture” that uses data analytics to measure "not just what I click on, but in what I order, how often and how long I spend on each page" to direct our actions. Sure, we're in the driver's seat, but we are driving "the routes that have been minutely and thoroughly planned for us to spend time and money on." In addition, we are often energized forward by forces filling us with resentment and anger, onto routes that take us through echo chambers of reductionistic thinking.
Digital technology also redefines our ideal for rationality due to its efficiency in collecting massive amounts of information. Most of us don’t understand algorithmic quantification and the statistical models that serve as their foundations; nonetheless, we increasingly yield to what the experts tell us the data “says.”
Certainly, analytics has its uses, especially for the narrow questions of life. Yet it is leading to a shallow form of rationality, even as it reduces our accountability and agency. Instead of growing in wisdom through experience, rightly ordering our loves and learning to walk in virtue, we cede our judgments to an allegedly “neutral way of representing collective preference. We alienate the site of judgment from ourselves, choosing to forget that the outcome is only as good as the people who have made it.” To modernize C. S. Lewis’ famous metaphor, we might ask: Who needs chests when we have our devices?
By trusting in this kind of reductive, algorithmic approach to answer the big questions of life, we submit ourselves to “be governed by our own creations.”
Barba-Kay argues, “At bottom, this outsourcing of human judgment to data is also a form of the primitive impulse to idolatry: a heightened reference for something that we desire to trick ourselves into forgetting we have made, a desire to obey ourselves writ large.” Barba-Kay’s account is a bleak and sobering diagnosis of our present situation, valuable in laying bare how we’re all being conformed to patterns of the digital world. But how might we respond as ministry leaders? I think Lewis might help us get started.
Lewis wasn’t optimistic about the modern world. Still, his apologetic was not characterized by resentment and scorn. Instead, the tenor of his approach was to offer the treasures of the Christian faith, speaking of joy and desire and appealing to reason and the imagination. He believed the modern world needed to be awakened “from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.” His apologetic response was to try “to weave a spell” to break this enchantment.
Lewis’ approach is suggestive for how the church might bear apologetic witness in a global digital age. In contrast to the idolatries in digital technology that Barba-Kay diagnoses in his work, in Christ we experience a counter formation: true freedom, a renewed mind and the true fulfillment of our desires. The Scriptures are the frame we must continue to look through. By the Spirit and with the collective wisdom of the church, we’re called to discern the faithful patterns of life in today’s digital world.
Last summer while teaching at an evangelical church in Switzerland, I met a man who told me he had recently become a Christian. He explained that he was a teacher and noticed the students from Christian families were different. As he put it, they weren’t addicted to their phones and were relationally aware. They had a “spark.” This made him curious, and he began to visit the church many of these students attended to see if it had anything to do with it. He never left. The leadership of this Swiss church is committed to apologetics, but they also know it is the faithful lives of the saints that form the living context of any truly Christian apologetic.
My sense is that the faithful way forward in our global digital age will require turning our attention to simple acts of repeated fidelity. Showing up in person week after week to church services that aren’t designed to entertain. Putting down our devices to attend to your lonely loved ones, neglected neighbors and cultural enemies. Gathering around the Scriptures in our churches and families to pray. Guarding times for personal communion with God. Embracing the vulnerability that comes with sharing the Gospel in person. Enchanted apologetics and embodied arguments grow in such soil.
In these modest acts of digital resistance, we are formed into the right kind of witnesses: echoing the humility of the saints who have gone before us, reflecting the patterns that God has used in surprising ways. In our digital age, these beatitudinal ways of life will increasingly appear quaint and feeble, so the temptation will only become stronger to accept the terms of our digital world in our desire for apologetic “wins”—for efficiency, control, optimization and “going viral” have become our age’s norming norms.
Yet when the game is rigged, the only way to “win” is to take a path that at first looks like a sure defeat (Mt 16:25), lest we forget the scandal of the cross. We are more than conquerors, but our victory comes through the “weakness” of the inefficient, the local, the embodied and the sacrificial—the body of Christ, testifying to the wisdom and strength of our Master (1 Cor 1:18-30; 2 Cor 12:9-10).