I’ve just finished Anton Chekhov’s excellent short story, “The Man in a Case” (1898).
It chronicles the life of a rigid and anxious man named Belikov, who teaches Greek in a provincial Russian town. As Chekhov describes him,
“the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate and protect him from external influences.”
For Chekhov, a “case” is a way to insulate ourselves from the world’s messiness, but also from its grandeur, pathos, and joy. Cases prevent discomfort, but they also wall us off from life and from transformative experience.
Through a series of unexpected twists, Belikov nearly gets married (driven partly by the townspeople who hope to rid themselves of him), but he pulls back at the last minute, refusing now to even leave his bed, until his final encasement: death.
Then comes Chekhov’s most memorable line:
“Now when he was lying in his coffin his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case which he would never leave again. Yes, he had attained his ideal!”
In our day, we might say that Belikov lives with a form of OCD. And that likely makes him a more sympathetic character.
Chekhov’s genius, however, is to show how there is a bit of Belikov in all of us. After the narrator (whose thoughts are not necessarily Chekhov’s) has smeared Belikov for the entirety of the story, another character experiences a moment of apparent revelation, staring up at a moonlit and melancholy sky. After reflecting on his safe but stuffy life, filled with frivolous pursuits, ” he remarks: “isn’t that all a sort of case for us, too?”
And the question hangs unanswered.
CASE STUDIES
Chekhov’s encasement sounds a bit like what Jonathan Haidt calls “safety-ism”— the worship of safety above all else, which leads to an attempt to “nerf” the world to prevent all possibility for distress, anxiety, or risk.
But safety-ism has ironic consequences: It serves as an “experience blocker,” which fuels anxiety, instead of quelling it. It also often leads to an enforced adherence from others. “You know, he crushed us all,” a townsperson remarks of Belikov, “and we gave way.”
Case-dwellers become case-enforcers.
And case-enforcers rob not only themselves, but also their loved ones of life.
MY CASE
I’ve thought about my own tendencies to be a bit like Belikov.
Like anyone, I have reasons: A few years back we almost lost our eldest son to a freakish rip current while on a family vacation in Florida. It happened on my watch, and ever since I’ve turned into much less of a “fun dad” at the beach (but also elsewhere)—causing my children to complain as I hover nearby telling them to “stay close!”
Is my safety-ism bad?
Not always. Sometimes it’s needed. But it can go too far so that I find myself saying “Be careful” when what I really mean is “I love you, and I’m scared you’ll die.” The thing is, both ends of that sentence are inalterable. So the only question is, what now?
A theme in Chekhov’s masterpiece is the need to examine how we insulate ourselves not merely from danger or discomfort—but from life. This happens not just in anxious attempts to avoid suffering or death, but more frequently through the malaise of distraction, productivity, and the tyranny of tiny tasks which confuses “getting things done” with actually living.
In other words, as Chekhov might say, don’t crawl into a casket because it’s “safe.”
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This passage on the death of Crazy Horse from Ian Frazier’s book on the Great Plains is just fantastic.
It describes how, after being bayonetted in the back , the great Lakota warrior refused the U.S. Army cot toward which he had been led to die.
Ian Frazier:
“What I return to most often when I think of Crazy Horse is the fact that in the adjutant’s office he refused to lie on the cot. Mortally wounded, frothing at the mouth, grinding his teeth in pain, he chose the floor instead. What a distance there is between that cot and the floor! On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, “ours”: an object of pity, an accident victim, “the noble red man, the last of his race, etc. etc.”
But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still. On the floor, he began to hurt as the morphine wore off. On the floor, he remembered Agent Lee, summoned him, forgave him. On the floor, unable to rise, he was guarded by soldiers even then. On the floor, he said goodbye to his father […]. And on the floor, still as far from white men as the limitless continent they once dreamed of, he died.
With his body, he demonstrated that the floor of an Army office was part of the land, and that the land was still his.”
It’s a soaring passage.
And it’s made more moving by the fact that I listened to it while driving across the American plains as part an eleven-part series on Custer, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse—done masterfully by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.
THE LESSON
What I want to focus on is Frazier’s ability to condense the character of a lifetime into a single, pregnant image: the space between the cot and floor.
“On the cot, he would have been, in some sense, ‘ours’.”
“But on the floor Crazy Horse was Crazy Horse still.”
Some might say he reads too much into it. And, of course, there is a danger of imbuing tiny details with an excess of significance.
But I don’t care. I love it.
And there is a lesson here for those, like me, who want to use words well.
Now more than ever, our audience is drowning in a sea of white noise: emails, calendar invites, unbidden incursions of all kinds.
What they need is an arresting image on which to hang the point we want them to remember: “What a distance there is between that cot and the floor!” That’s it. That’s the brilliance of Frazier’s passage.
If we can give them that—in a way that elucidates rather than distorts the truth—then we will breathe life into the cold, dead words that often sit corpse-like and content upon the “cot” of our narration.
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“The world reveals itself to those who walk.” So said Werner Herzog.
I’m flying back now from Budapest, where I had the privilege to speak to a group of European church leaders. I was lucky enough to bring my eldest daughter with me. And we had two days prior to the conference to explore one of Europe’s great cities. (It’s been special and I’m grateful for the invitation.)
In Budapest, we walked a lot.
As always, I conceived of things while moving slowly on foot that would not have pressed themselves upon me otherwise. Like: Hmm…, Hungarians are thinner. I bet it’s partly the walking.
Then this gem from L. M. Sacasas hit my inbox (here).
Sacasas writes thoughtfully on the crossroads of technology and culture on his Substack, The Convivial Society. (You should subscribe to it.) In his words,
“To walk, then, is to inhabit a fitting scale and speed. It is the scale and speed at which our bodies are able to find their fit in the world, and the world rewards us by spurring our thinking and disclosing itself to us.”
I’m pondering that wisdom as I lament the fact that my next book (or rather, books) don’t seem to be revealing themselves as readily as prior ones. Reasons are numerous. I have more jobs and “hats” than five or ten years ago. More kids. More soccer games. More emails and calendar invites. But I wonder if it isn’t also that I’m just not walking and thinking enough to have worthwhile things to say. (I suspect most preachers and teachers can relate to that.)
Sacasas wonders if the reason walking and writing pair so well is that both require a kind of deliberate slowness. Because, “Past a certain speed, we simply cannot perceive the world in depth.”
Both writing and walking . . . seem to calibrate the tempo of our minds to the rhythm of thought.
Yes, cars and jets and computers and smartphones are useful—I’m boarding a transatlantic flight in a few minutes and typing on my MacBook. But as always with technology, there is a cost to our sedentary connectivity.
Namely, “the tool we think enhances our capacity may also diminish it” (…a note to all incautious evangelists for the gospel of AI).
To this end, Sacasas then quotes Rebecca Solnit, who observes,
The mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.
Of course, not all sidewalks are created equal—the trash-strewn footpath by the Casey’s is not the Danube promenade by the Hungarian Parliament. Nor are all motives for our ambulation equally transformative. The tourist and the pilgrim differ in subtle and important ways. As Sacasas puts it,
The tourist bends the place to the shape of the self while the pilgrim is bent to the shape of the journey.
Those differences aside, mt overarching takeaway—and one I hope to embody more this summer—is as follows:
There is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it.
I’d say more, of course, but it’s time to strap myself to a metal tube that moves around 500 mph. No time for irony (or editing).
But here’s to more walking when the jet-lag wears off.
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“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
He penned those words in 1854, but Jonathan Haidt argues they are even more important now in an age of digital distraction, and the bottomless scroll of social media.
In part 1 of this series, I offered a short overview of Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In part 2, I’ll move beyond summary to a short response from my admittedly limited perspective as a parent and professor.
In short, I find Haidt’s argument largely compelling: By swapping a play-based childhood for a phone-based one, “The Great Rewiring” has created a generation that is more anxious, scattered, and distracted than ever. And I also agree that one positive solution involves more free-play and independence—even if that’s hard for parents who, myself included, worry about our kids’ safety.
Despite this broad agreement, I’d like to focus on some additional factors that complicate Haidt’s book, even if they do not contradict it.
#ParentsToo
A first challenge for parents (like me) is the charge of hypocrisy that easily attaches if we move to limit unhealthy digital behaviors in our children while we too are compulsively engaging in them.
Kids see us. They know our habits. And it’s tough to go all “Molly Hatchet” on your daughter’s screentime if you’re a raging digital addict too. (Picture a 1920s prohibitionist trying to close the local speakeasy by selflessly drinking all the liquor before it harms the kids.) Given this worry, a prerequisite for adopting Haidt’s advice may be to detox ourselves from screens and devices before preaching such an unpopular gospel to our children. That doesn’t mean throwing my phone in the lake, but it does mean making some important changes.
Preteens are attuned to hypocrisy. Thus, it seems insincere to act on the issue in the way Haidt suggests till we “first, remove the plank [read: phone] from our own eye.”
Knowing isn’t Enough
While I hope Haidt’s book makes a difference, Alan Jacobs makes the point that “knowing” is NOT our problem when it comes to the dangers of smartphones, social media, and the zombie-fication of the American amygdala.
“Everyone knows that living on screens is making children miserable in a dozen different ways, contributing to ever-increasing rates of mental illness and inhibiting or disabling children’s mental faculties.
Everyone knows that engaging creatively with the material world is better for children — is better for all of us.
Everyone knows that Meta and TikTok are predatory and parasitical, and that they impoverish the lives of the people addicted to them.
Everyone knows that social media breed bad actors: each platform does this in its own way, but they all do it, and the more often people engage on such platforms the more messed-up and unhappy they become. […]
Everyone knows all this. Some people, for their own reasons, choose to deny it, but even they know it — indeed, probably no one knows all that I’ve been saying better than Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew and Sam Altman do.”
If that’s true, another book or blog post may not move the needle. Our problem is not a lack of knowledge. Our problem is a lack of will, fueled by compulsion and disordered loves.
Already Dated
A third issue for Haidt’s research (and one he readily acknowledges) is that his book is already dated. This doesn’t change the overall thesis, but it does mean the situation is already substantially worse than his data suggests.
Because of how long it takes to publish peer reviewed studies, the The Anxious Generation barely touches on the new developments in the digital landscape: AI, VR, and TikTok. And for those of us in education, we can attest to how TikTok especially has abbreviated attention spans ever further.
To address that challenge, Haidt has a website that promises to add to the conversation as new data emerges (see here).
Beyond Anxiety
Publishers (not authors) determine titles. And it’s no wonder why Penguin chose this one: Anxiety is front and center, especially in Gen Z.
Still, I think we shortchange the conversation by making it primarily about “anxiety.” To view fretful nervousness as the main cost of The Great Rewiring is already to prioritize the individual, therapeutic self as most important: “‘x’ is bad because ‘x’ makes me anxious.” Yes. Indeed. But there are moral, spiritual, and intellectual problems that go far beyond that.
The Great Rewiring is also troubling because it makes us more shallow, stupid, sleepless, sexually stunted, spiritually vacuous, and incapable of normal human interactions. That matters too. But we’ll need a rubric larger than anxiety to appreciate it. (To Haidt’s credit, he works to balance this trend with sections on porn, video games, and a need for real-world play.)
I witness this cost weekly in university chapel services where it sometimes feels like almost every student around me is staring blankly into smartphones, “forever elsewhere.” The same distraction afflicts classrooms, dinner tables, date-nights, Bible studies, and literally every waking moment.
To be fair, we shouldn’t blame Gen Z entirely. For the first time in history, a generation was captured by powerful tech companies before puberty, and captivated by digital stimuli for which they had no preparation. It happened when they were too young to know it. But the costs go far beyond anxiety.
A God-shaped Hole
Since Haidt is an atheist, it was interesting to find him affirming Pascal’s famous line about a God-shaped hole in every human heart. In his words, “if [that hole] doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” And with the rise of smartphones and social media, “that garbage pump got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”
Haidt thus joins a line of recent atheistic thinkers (most notably, Richard Dawkins) who want to extol the virtues of religion, but without the actual “God part.” (On this point, Dawkins created quite a stir recently by espousing what he calls cultural Christianity [see here].)
I appreciate Haidt’s respectful posture toward people of faith. Indeed, he seems like exactly the sort of measured, thoughtful, humble public intellectual we badly need. Still, I find Nietzsche’s critique of this brand of godless religion and post-Christian morality to be far more persuasive than the appeals of Haidt or Dawkins to “our elevated nature” and “cultural Christianity.” For all his terrifying faults, Nietzsche rightly saw that we have no basis for prioritizing (or even discerning) “our elevated nature” once God is dead and gone.
Collective Action
Let’s end with application.
Haidt admits that his four action steps are hard to follow alone. If your kid is the only member in a friend group without a smartphone, then that isolation may be almost as bad as the negative effects of being on the platforms. (I can relate to this personally after hearing a child lament that “My friends already think I’m weird for not having one!”)
For that reason, Haidt hopes parents can act collectively. I must say, I’m not optimistic.
But perhaps he’s right to hope for incremental, voluntary change. After all, lots of harmful adolescent activities—from teen smoking, to drunk driving, to kids without seatbelts—used to be completely normal. Now they’re not. We changed in response to evidence. So while these problems still occur, they are not nearly as common.
Maybe in fifty years we’ll look at big tech companies capturing childhood much as we now view Big Tobacco using cartoon characters and product placement during kids’ programming.
Still, how we urge collective action matters. I’m wary of parental shaming that makes others (moms especially) feel like they’re failing because they don’t parent like the latest guru says. Hence, I don’t want Haidt’s work to become the latest bludgeon in the ongoing Suburban pastime of “parenting as competitive sport.”
We need to be clear that phones are harming kids. But we need to communicate that reality with humility and grace.
One of the best parts of The Anxious Generation comes in the form of practical, positive steps to get kids out in the real world, doing things that kids used to do for generations—playing, learning skills, and building confidence apart from screens. After all, the real cost of digital distraction is not just anxiety—it’s all the stuff we miss out on while staring vacuously into a phone. Again,
“The cost of a thing is the amount of LIFE … required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
Grace and peace, JM
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“Soon after teens got iPhones, they started getting more depressed. The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest.”
“overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world are the two main reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.“
I snapped up Haidt’s book on preorder and have been sorting through it ever since. It’s full of charts, graphs, and data—but in many ways, the studies merely confirm what my students know already: those little rectangles rule our lives, rob our sleep, amplify anxiety, and scatter attention. Frankly, I feel it too. As a reader and an academic, I relate to the words of Nicholas Carr: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
We are, in the words of Jean Twenge, “forever elsewhere”—as many of us stare into screens even when surrounded by real people.
HOW IT HAPPENED
With the rise of high-speed broadband in the 2000s, iPhones (2007), the “like” and “retweet” buttons (2009), front-facing cameras (2010), and Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram (2010), our society effectively swapped a “play-based childhood” for a “phone-based childhood”—and in so-doing, we thrust children into a world for which they are simply not designed.
We got overprotective when it came to playgrounds, letting kids walk to school, or trying to socially manage each physical encounter. And we simultaneously became massively underprotective with regard to the new world into which the younger members of our species were suddenly thrust.
Girls were hit hardest. Haidt argues that teen and preteen girls are more sensitive to visual comparisons (affecting body image), their conflicts are more prone to relational aggression than physical violence, and they are more likely to be approached by predatory men online.
For boys, the digital dangers are more linked to porn and excessive gaming—both of which contribute to a failure to launch as well as other issues. All these findings require the “on average” caveat to avoid overgeneralizing. But Haidt’s data suggest that the worst years for girls to be on social media were 11 to 13, while for boys it was 14 to 15.
As for some good news, teens are involved in less of the “bad” stuff that used to be more common—binge drinking, unwanted pregnancies, car accidents, fist fights, even speeding tickets. But the reason is largely because they have withdrawn from the embodied world of human interaction, not because they are actually healthier in terms of their psyche.
The phones function ironically as “experience blockers” (separating us from the real world for which we were designed), and over-stimulators that drown us in a tidal wave of vanity, comparison, pornography, breaking news, conspiracy theories, and online disinhibition. And yeah, a lot of good stuff too.
WHAT TO DO
Haidt’s practical suggestions are as follows:
1. No smartphones before high school. In their place, parents should opt for so-called “basic phones” with limited apps and no internet browser. 2. No social media before 16. Let kids progress through this vulnerable period of brain development before being connected to the full deluge of social comparison, pornography, algorithm-based influencers online. 3. Phone-free schools. From elementary through high school, smartphones and other devices should be kept out of the classroom and stored in either phone lockers or locked pouches (not just slipped into pockets). 4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Kids should develop social skills, resilience, and independence the way they have for thousands of years—through embodied, personal, (relatively) unsupervised play.
CONCLUSION
As a theologian—not a social psychologist—I lack the expertise to respond fully to these claims. But as a parent and a teacher of Gen Z students, I care about them.
Hence, part 2 of this brief series (forthcoming) will move from a mere summary of Haidt’s claims to a brief response. Stay tuned.
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I came down sick with COVID a few weeks back and (sadly) missed the funeral for a friend of mine named Charlie.
Charlie was a retired judge, a longtime member of our church, and a constant encourager to me. I came to know him, first, by email. Charlie was wont to send me lengthy emails after one of my sermons or blog posts. And like most pastors, I have some latent anxiety that spikes whenever I open a message to see not sentences but paragraphs. Paragraphs are bad. All preachers know it, even if we only tell our therapists.
But Charlie’s emails weren’t critical. They were funny, encouraging, and (above all) marked by signs of a first-rate mind at work. Invariably, when I referred to an author in my message—Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Becker—Charlie would approach me afterward to chat. He’d read them, even the not-so-churchy ones. And I came to relish his long emails.
At the funeral (which I watched on video), Charlie’s wife shared openly about the prior chapters of his life: the ones I didn’t know. The Navy. His years as an avowed atheist. And the alcoholism that might have killed him. Miraculously, Charlie eventually found sobriety and Christ. And at a mid-stage of life when most men sink into the comfortable ruts of a long-held career, Charlie went back to school to become a lawyer.
Eventually, he became a judge.
One legal story from the funeral struck me. It was of a young mother in Charlie’s jurisdiction who faced serious charges stemming from her opioid addiction. Instead of sentencing her to prison as he might have, Charlie got her help, he provided her a path to drug court, and her life was transformed just as his had been.
He was a just judge. But he was also an empathetic one, partly because of his own battle with addiction. He had been there, and it helped him help others.
On Holy Week especially, Charlie’s story reminded me of another reason Christians find the Jesus-story so compelling. The Messiah is indeed the Judge of all humanity, before whom we must stand (2 Corinthians 5:10; 2 Timothy 4:1). Yet Christ is also empathetic. To be sure, merciful understanding was never absent from the life of God. (Thus it is wrong to say Jesus somehow transformed the Father from a vengeful tyrant to a kindly grandpa.)
Long before the time of Christ, the psalmist wrote the following:
13 As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; 14 for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.
(Psalm 103:13–14)
Yet Jesus’s unique empathy flows from his firsthand experience of suffering and temptation. Though Christ was sinless, he experienced the full weight of human frailty, abuse, and death itself.
The Book of Hebrews thus picks up this empathetic thread when speaking of our great high priest:
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”
(Hebrews 4:15)
On Good Friday, this message in especially important.
In a way, my lesson from Charlie is that justice is not only about retribution. It is also about a battle-hardened empathy that leads to restoration, and—if you’re lucky… —long emails.
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I’ve been on the family farm the past few days, with my wife’s folks in central Kansas. On Tuesday, we woke before dawn to watch a nearby “little house” of lesser prairie chickens (that’s what they’re called, apparently) do their colorful springtime dance, which takes place in the same plot of ground each year.
The kids have been riding dirt bikes, checking baby calves with grandpa, and playing in their palatial tree house. I’ve been cutting firewood and generally enjoying some outdoor time away from the indoor office since it’s Spring Break at the university.
Considering all that, I was struck by these lines that I read yesterday from the Belgic Confession of 1561. (I always save my 16th century Calvinists confessions for Spring Break; or as I call it, Presbyterians Gone Wild.)
In a lovely passage, the confession celebrates that we know God not only by Scripture but also
“. . . by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book, in which all creatures, great and small, are like letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God . . .”
The chief author of the statement was Guido de Bres, who was later martyred for his faith. The language of the “two books” (nature and Scripture) is familiar to many Christians. Yet I was struck less by what the Confession affirms than by how it illustrates it.
Creation is God’s beautiful book.
And all creatures, great and small, are like letters that pour forth from his pen.
In the 16th century, with the invention of the printing press not long ago in recent memory, the accessibility of books was skyrocketing. Thus, the confession locates us in a world that is no longer ancient or medieval; yet not quite modern, mechanized, and disenchanted. In that space between antiquity and the modernity (papyri and iPhones) sits the book—now in our own day increasingly a dusty museum relic in the age of Tik toc, Tinder, and attention spans approaching the breadth of a sneeze, even as anxiety tracks in the opposite direction (see here).
To liken creation to a book is, in a roundabout way, to venerate the act of writing, and the need for careful reading. The Reformers knew this more than most. Their movement would have floundered without Gutenberg’s invention. And they had seen their favorite texts—including the New Testament—banned in common tongue. In the end, their message depended partly on a public that could comprehend (and would want to comprehend) the written works that folks like Luther, Calvin, and Arminius were churning out with a rapidity to make even a chat bot green with envy.
In the analogy of the Belgic Confession, books matter—as does God’s creation.
Yet it is not just any book to which the world is likened by de Bres. After all, a text may be accurate, informative, useful, or just plain dull. Yet the confession calls creation God’s “beautiful book.” To be fair, this beauty is more apparent in some instances than others. (I wrote a whole chapter in Perhaps on Darwin’s haunting question on what he called “the suffering of millions of lower creatures,” and how he came to think that formed an argument against an all-loving and all-powerful creator. I beg to differ. But one can’t deny the force of Darwin’s “reading.”)
Yet amidst the dancing house of prairie chickens, and the smell of storm-felled and time-seasoned elm, one has a sense that Guido de Bres got that part exactly right, even if Hopkins said it more poetically.
“And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
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When Andy Warhol unveiled his Campbell’s Soup Cans art exhibit in 1962, reactions were closer to befuddlement than praise.
Was this art? Where was the beauty, drama, grandeur, sacredness, or seduction that had previously marked great paintings? And who would pay the exorbitant sticker price of $100 for something that could be purchased at the grocery for ten cents?
Of course, Warhol’s cans now fetch massive sums. One reason was that they offered an ironic critique of modern life. For good and ill, we are now drowning in cheap, mass-produced, pre-packaged, disposable, easily accessible, low quality but quickly replaceable “stuff.” (I originally opted for a different word to end that sentence.)
It’s Campbell’s soup—brought to us by Chinese sweatshops and two-day shipping.
I’ve thought about those Warhol paintings several times of late as I have received Holy Communion.
Out of noble health concerns starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches moved away from traditional Communion methods in favor of individually packaged, disposable, mass-produced, plastic “blister packs” (actual description) like the one seen here.
I agreed with this move and gave thanks for it.
The tiny packages encase a single crumb of bread on one side, and—when you flip them over to remove another “blister” coating—approximately the same amount of liquid as contained within a single teardrop.
In evangelical congregations, I am used to Communion being spoken of as a mere symbol that helps us remember Christ’s sacrifice. “It’s not about the elements,” the pastor may be heard to say. So instead of the Gospel line, “This is my body”—many a minister feels compelled to amend the text to avoid misunderstanding: “This bread represents my body,” etc., etc. “This wine—I mean grape juice…—represents my blood.” I’ve grown accustomed to these things. And truth be told, I am not a believer in something like Catholic transubstantiation.
But I’ve also tired of Communion “blister packs.”
Despite understandable concerns for germs (with which I sympathize), I’ve begun to wonder what the “Oscar Mayer lunchable” approach to the Eucharist says about the modern church—not just on the Lord’s Supper, but on how we value symbols, sacraments, and physicality.
At the risk of overreaction, it sometimes feels as if we have set out to take the most beautiful and sensory-laden sacrament and turn it into something that has the aesthetic value of a roll of bubble wrap.
Even if it doesn’t burst like a juice box in my kid’s backpack, one looks around the sanctuary to see some churchgoers struggling with their teeth and fingernails—like racoons trying to unlock iPhones. By the end of the process, the elements usually find their way into digestive tracts—but something is lost from the meal that Jesus gave us. It has been commodified, sanitized, mass-produced, and individually packaged—like much of modern life.
What, then, is the solution?
My goal is not to add one more curmudgeonly complaint to the endless pile that pastors face. (It has not been easy to lead anything these past few years.) Nor is it to shame one or two churches to switch back to more traditional Communion practices. That too might be a malady of modern ecclesiology: (1) Someone complained. (2) So we stopped.
Instead, what we need is a more holistic way of noticing how unexamined modern values of convenience and commodification have caused us to do strange things in the realm of the sacred.
The French philosopher and theologian, Jacques Ellul, is helpful here. Ellul’s most important work, published back in 1964, is called The Technological Society. He sets forth two key concepts for diagnosing the side-effects that come with mind-blowing technology, inexpensive factory production, frazzled busyness, and consumer competition. He calls them (1) technique and (2) efficiency.
For Ellul, technique is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.” Technique aids efficiency; and as we know, being more efficient can save time and money.
To be fair, we can all name aspects of our businesses and bureaucracies that badly need to be streamlined. The trouble, Ellul argues, is that the values of technique and efficiency easily move out of their rightful domains, and they begin to corrupt and commodify the way we relate to people, food, art—and God.
How do you find a mate? Swipe right. How do I form a nuanced view of Shakespeare’s Othello? ChatGPT. How do I eat, given that I’m frazzled and rushed? McDonalds. How do I check “Communion” off my to-do list? Blister packs.
In all these areas, there are costs to maximally efficient solutions.
Moving back to Communion, note how our modern ways of approaching the Eucharist make it difficult to “feel” and “see” what Paul alludes to when he writes to the Corinthians:
“Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.”
1 Corinthians 10:16-17
In the end, I remain grateful for a necessary safety measure in a time of emergency. What’s more, we should probably keep some “blister packs” on hand to love and serve our brothers and sisters who have health concerns.
And as usual, my attempts to be pointed or humorous run the risk of oversimplifying—and overreacting. That too is a byproduct of the marriage of technology and efficiency: What are blog posts if not a maximally efficient form of publishing.
Enjoy your soup. I slaved for minutes over it.
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I’m excited to say that my next book now has its own page on Amazon, and is available for pre-order (see here).
Unlike my last two projects, this one isn’t academic. It’s accessible for all audiences (not just theologians). And as the title suggests, it aims to unpack How Jesus Saves: Atonement for Ordinary People.
We’ve shot video curriculum to go with it for small groups or individuals, and it includes discussion questions at the end of every chapter.
Essentially, it’s like Long Story Short, but for the doctrine of atonement.
I’d love it if you’d consider pre-ordering it since that can help a lot in the run-up to our release date in early March.
In the meantime, here is a blog post that has just been released today over at my publisher’s website: Seedbed.com.
joshuamcnall.com 