The right kind of secrets

There’s a scene near the end of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in which Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) finally locates the long-lost James Francis Ryan (played by a young Matt Damon). Damon’s character is in shock, after learning that his three brothers have been killed in action.

After years apart, he struggles to visualize their faces. So Hanks’ character suggests a trick he uses to recall his old life before the war:

Well, when I think of home, I… I think of something specific. I think of my, my hammock in the backyard or my wife pruning the rosebushes in a pair of my old work gloves.

Ryan tries it, and a risqué story follows about the brothers before they left for war. When the men stop laughing, he asks Captain Miller, “Tell me about your wife and those rose bushes.”

“No. No,” Hanks’ character replies, “that one I save just for me.”

THE SECRET PLACE OF THUNDER

I thought about that scene as I read John Starke’s book, The Secret Place of Thunder: Trading our Need to Be Noticed for a Hidden Life with Christ.

Starke’s claim is that we have entered an age of “performative individualism.” In this context, every moment of our lives—traumatic events, acts of service, sitting down to read a book—is curated for the gaze of others, usually online. (And as I type that, “curated” feels like one of the sadder words in our cultural lexicon.)

The vehicle is social media, but the driver is an age-old longing to be noticed, affirmed, and validated. Cue Ron Burgundy: “Hey everyone! Come see how good I look!”

“We have internalized the idea,” writes Starke, “that the markers of ‘being okay,’ of having an admirable life and enviable success, are primarily visible.”

Pics or it didn’t happen.

Ironically,

A deep loneliness comes for those who live off a curated image. … We can have many followers but few friends, lots of comments but no communion.

YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR REWARD

Into the performative rat race, Jesus offers a word of warning: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). To do so is to have received your reward. God is interested in virtues done in secret—not because the homeless get less if I vlog my service at the local soup kitchen (though they might, if I’m preoccupied with my smartphone), but because I do.

Starke notes that in this passage Jesus doesn’t warn against flaunting our wealth, our power, or our giftedness; he warns against trumpeting our virtues: praying, fasting, giving to the poor.

And in our day, the “virtues” includes a kind of performative vulnerability: “I cried for hours… and then I wrote this.” (Use code #vulnerable for 10% off.)

I’ve thought a lot about what this means for ministries and Christian non-profits that manage online spaces, especially since sometimes what seems required for “marketing” often sounds like what Jesus told us not to do. I don’t have easy answers there, but it deserves some thought.

THE RIGHT KIND OF SECRETS

In the end, let me be clear about what I’m not saying: It is obviously beautiful and good to share our lives with one another, including certain deeply personal moments. It is also wrong to label every act of online sharing as “performative.”

My point is more limited and unique to your own life and personality.

It comes down to this: We need the right kind of secrets. Not the kind that fester and metastasize because we refuse to share them with the right person in the right place: the addiction, the struggle that needs community to heal. Rather, we need the kind of secrets that retain their beauty and formative power precisely because they are known only to God, us, and perhaps those closest to us.

To share those things (whatever they are) may be to cheapen and commodify both us and them. As in the famous double slit experiment from quantum physics, the act of (constant) observation changes us, and not always for the better. In that way, the old indigenous taboo is right: the camera has the power to steal part of your soul.

I’m not sure what that looks like for you; and I don’t pretend that it looks the same for all of us.

Still, the longer I live in a performative age, the more I side with Jesus and John Miller: “No. No… That one I save just for me.”

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

[Indistinct chatter]

“If I ever write a book about technology and modern life, that will be the title.”

I said that to my wife recently as we were watching Netflix. We were using closed captions since the kids had just been banished to their rooms. And during the course of the episode, I was struck by how one caption appeared more than any other, entombed in brackets: [Indistinct chatter].

And now that I’ve mentioned it, perhaps it will stand out to you as well.

It appears everywhere on the shows we consume: In crowded restaurants, on bustling streets, inside Dunder Mifflin, in Ted Lasso’s locker room, and virtually everywhere else.

You might “indistinct chatter” is the soundtrack of our lives.

In a literal sense, and especially for the hearing impaired, the caption alerts viewers to a constant buzz of unintelligible and unimportant speech, humming somewhere in the background. But the more you think about it, the more it starts to feel like a kind of oracle or prophetic diagnosis of what ails us in our age of noise and news and social media. Who’s speaking? We can’t say. What language? IDK. What makes this wave of jumbled words more consequential than, say, the noise made by my neighbor’s lawn mower? Nothing, really.

Still, the caption-generating gods of Netflix feel compelled to include them in a font that is just as large and bold as actual dialogue, lest we miss this apparently important detail. And in a weird way, that’s basically my goal here. Have you noticed how much of modern life can be summarized by what’s in those brackets?

You could take that observation in a dozen different directions.

But here are two quick attempts at showing why it matters.

When words become white noise

First, we become so accustomed to indistinct chatter—unintelligible and unimportant words that wash over us almost constantly—that we find it hard to function without it. The chatter soothes us. Silence is unsettling. And we cannot bear to be alone with our thoughts. Eventually, washing dishes, driving a car, or even using the restroom become unthinkable without a verbal (or visual) security blanket of incessant, often vacuous, noise. Air pods, tik tok, twitter. You hear it now.

I’ve seen the effects of this especially in college students who say they cannot read, focus, or do homework without various forms of media running constantly in the background. This too is indistinct chatter. Though “Background TV” is another for it. And despite some obvious benefits—dampening the noise across the hall, or making one feel less alone within an empty apartment—psychologists also caution that our addiction to such electronic noise carries costs: We use it to drown out inner monologues that need attention, and we may eventually find ourselves unable to follow more complex arguments, conversations, or plot-lines since our word-diet is now filled with empty calories. Reflection becomes difficult. And idiocracy encroaches further.

Only the shrillest are heard

Second, to be noticed in a world (or news cycle) of constant chatter requires one to shout–or perhaps to make a scene. Subtlety is lost. And eventually, poets, preachers, and reasonable politicians are replaced by demagogues and provocateurs.

Before we know it, our cultural Caps Lock remains constantly illumined like the faulty tire pressure light upon your dashboard. After awhile, you don’t even notice it. We are seeing the cost of this now in our shared political lives especially, where (to quote Yeats), “the worst are full of passionate intensity,” while the rest are just really, really tired.

So what’s the solution?

As usual, the way forward begins by noticing the way that caption has come (metaphorically) to dominate our lives. In the words of Andy Kennedy,

Every great solution starts with someone noticing a problem. Noticing is underrated. Notice more. Good things will follow.

But noticing is not enough. We must also make decisions, at least periodically, and for sustained intervals to unplug from machines and environments that threaten to drown us in indistinct chatter.

Here though is an irony. As I write this, I am seated outside by the fire while robins and bluejays and large group of black crows are performing their own bit of background noise. It too is unintelligible. Yet it hits differently than a steady stream social media alerts, breaking news, doom-scrolling, calendar reminders, and the targeted ads that constantly assault us. Is it chatter? Of a sort. And yet.

As the Psalmist writes:

There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race” (19:3-5 KJV).

Which is to say, go touch some grass. And for just an hour, disable captions.

Hello friends. Please subscribe to these posts via the button on the home page to receive future posts by email. This is helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. I’m grateful for you. ~JM

Review of “The Anxious Generation” (part 2)

Henry David Thoreau once wrote,

“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.

As Jacobs writes,

“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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Review of “The Anxious Generation” (part 1)

Somewhere around the 2010, childhood changed.

In the words of Jonathan Haidt,

“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.”

“The Great Rewiring” is Haidt’s phrase to describe the disastrous effects of smartphones and social media on young people. Haidt is an NYU professor and social psychologist, and his latest book is entitled, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

His thesis runs as follows:

“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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After insurrection

What do you say after watching a violent mob at the Capitol mercilessly beat a fallen police officer with American flags, while chanting Pro-Trump slogans and hurling profanities?

What do you say, especially if you are a pastor?

While the past year has been hard on everyone, my heart goes out to pastors. They have been tasked with reinventing weekend gatherings, distance-shepherding, budget shortfalls, and attempting to hold together congregations divided by political and social disagreement.

Then came January 6th.

How do pastors and Christian leaders respond to that?

Perhaps it is worth noting some of the different approaches on the table.

Ignore it, because anything you say will be used against you.

This is the coward’s way, but I sympathize with it. Even the blandest statements will be challenged on social media, so it feels like there is no way to win. I’ve seen pastor-friends excoriated for what I take to be the most basic and biblical repudiations of such violence. Seemingly anything can be met with a digital conflagration of “Whataboutism.”

The temptation, then, is simple: Just talk about the new women’s Bible study on Esther (Er… bad example, she confronted the king; Ruth? No, she left behind her nation’s gods. Okay, maybe something on the Enneagram.)

“We just need to pray.”

This approach is like the first, with the caveat that it acknowledges some vague problem. Call it division, discord, unrest, anger, polarization, upheaval—but don’t get into specifics. Don’t renounce or repent, just lament.

I sympathize with this approach too. We should pray, even when we don’t know what to say (Rom 8:26). And in some contexts, this may be the only path that will not result in a full-fledged revolt (still a metaphor?) from certain factions.

Nevertheless, in at least some instances, both Christ and the prophets were specific. They were willing to call out specific sins committed by specific groups. They weren’t cowards.

That’s why the mob killed them.

The “both sides” approach

I sometimes choose this path too. After all, if all people are fallen, then “both sides” in any given dispute usually have done something wrong.

Clearly Leftist groups have engaged in violence too, even in recent memory. And that too should be condemned.

But the danger of adopting a “both sides” approach to every incident is that of falsehood and false equivalence. If one of my children beats the other senseless, I do not denounce them all because the others have also acted out at various points.

Prophets like Isaiah and Amos did not worry about allotting an equal word count to the sins of Israel and those of pagans. Nor did Jesus focus equally upon the failings of Gentiles, tax collectors, and Pharisees.

In some cases, the “both sides” approach is warranted. But not on January 6th.

Pick a partisan team and go “all in.”

If the prior approaches suffer from a lack of courage, this one suffers from a lack of truth.

In polarized times, it’s tempting to choose Always Red or Always Blue, and then call balls or strikes to support that conclusion in every instance. You can build a big “platform” that way.

In this approach, “My side is never wrong.” And if the evidence appears otherwise, it must be a well-hidden conspiracy. “It must have been Antifa.”

To be honest, most pastors do not choose this path. It simply does not lend itself to leading a congregation.

Unfortunately, the so-called “leaders” of evangelicalism today have not been pastors—they have been self-appointed Thought Leaders™ without any theological training. They are “shepherds” who have never smelled like sheep. Or as they say in Oklahoma, “Big hat, no cattle.”

This approach produces cult members, not Christ-followers.

Use discernment on when and how to speak the truth in love.

I’m convinced that Options 1-3 are sometimes right. It is not a pastor’s job to comment on every item in the news. Sometimes we should be silent. Sometimes we should simply pray. And sometimes we should stand between opposing factions (like Jesus between Pharisees and Sadducees) and say “Both of you are wrong.”

But in other moments, we should reject false equivalence and partisan Kool Aid-drinking to speak a clear word with truth and love.

Conclusion

What happened at the Capitol this week was the predictable result of idolatry.

One segment of that idolatry was rooted in a so-called Christian nationalism (see here and here), conspiracy theories, social media silos, and a consistent rejection of the way of Jesus.

Not all evangelicals are implicated in that failure. Neither are all Republicans, or even all people at the rally, many of whom were peacefully protesting what they thought was an injustice.

But the endless game of “Whataboutism” and false equivalence should not prevent the church from speaking clearly when the banner of Christ (literally, in the form of “Jesus 2020” signs and other Christian symbols) are aligned with behavior that is, in fact, demonic.

It’s one thing to be assailed by angry flag-wavers, it’s another thing when some of those flags have Jesus’ name on them.

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You’re being programmed

“You don’t realize it,” states a former Facebook executive, “but you are being programmed.” And the programming is making us more scattered, shallow, angry, and anxious.

That’s from Nicholas Carr’s bestselling book: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. I’ve been reading it. The updated edition offers a cache of new data on how exactly our smartphones are transforming us.

Spoiler: it’s mostly bad.

And it raises a question Jesus never answered: Can a person serve two (competing) algorithms? Must he or she love one and hate the other? (Matt 6:24)

INVISIBLE “FORCE FIELDS”

Since I’m a teacher, I found the following studies fascinating.

A 2017 experiment from the University of Arkansas showed that college students who brought their phones to class scored a full letter grade lower on exams. Surprisingly, it didn’t matter whether they looked at the device or not. The mere presence of a smartphone correlated to lower scores.

Another 2017 study, entitled “Brain Drain,” showed similar results.

As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. It was as if the smartphones had force fields that sapped their owners’ intelligence.

I’ve sensed this in my own life.

Several years ago, I completed a research PhD in theology, which entailed hours of dense reading. I’m good at it—unlike my abysmal aptitude for math, science, and mechanical tasks.

But even I have noticed how the smartphone has changed my ability to focus. If my iPhone is within reach, it is just too tempting to set down the book every few minutes to scan Facebook or Instagram. It’s like placing a drink in front of an alcoholic.

Studies bear this out. When the elderly are taken out of the statistics, daily reading time (outside of one’s smartphone) has plummeted to an average of six minutes. In Carr’s words,

Curling up with a book is losing its place in the general culture. It’s becoming a quaint pursuit, like ballroom dancing or darts.

The claim reminded me of a troubling observation of the English Professor Alan Jacobs. A colleague asked him, “What are the most influential Christian books of the past decade?” Jacobs responded this way:

the answer to that question is: There aren’t any. In our moment, Christians are not influenced by books at all.

REWIRING OUR BRAINS

The problem is deeper than habit.

Neurologists suggest that our brains are being rewired by technology. The troubling effects are evidenced by the high percentage of Silicon Valley designers who keep their own children FAR away from the very products they create.

Carr’s research shows how complex algorithms have zeroed in on what grabs our attention (a neural system called the “salience network”) in order to bombard us with “supernormal stimuli” that hijack attention.

Sadly, we are far more likely to be “hijacked” by things that aren’t true or good or noble. A 2018 MIT study of Twitter showed that fake or grossly misleading stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than factual ones.

ESTABLISHING GUARDRAILS

Of course, technology has upsides.

My research time—say, when looking up a quotation—has been reduced dramatically. My “memories” feed sends daily reasons to be grateful as I look back at pictures of my children. And platforms like blogging have allowed me to connect with larger groups than I could have otherwise.

“[O]nly a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches,” Carr writes.

But. But. But.

We need some guardrails. Here are three of mine:

1. Set “App limits”

Under “Settings” and “Screen Time” I’ve been progressively lowering the amount of time my phone will allow me to use Facebook and Instagram (I’m not on Twitter). I’m down to a combined total of thirty minutes per day—but the catch is I have to actually hit “Okay” when it tells me my time is up in the evening.

2. Quarantine the iPhone (periodically)

For awhile, I kept my iPhone nearby in the evenings so I could see the time. (I am on a very strict schedule, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rainman.) But I’ve found that this is just too tempting.

Now I’ve started leaving the phone in another room and simply wearing my traditional watch.

3. Give extra credit

Since carrots beat sticks (no pun intended), I’ve started offering extra credit to any students willing to part with their smartphones during class.

(I was going to make a fancy box to put them in, but, you know… coronavirus.)

Rather than rant about how “narcissistic millennials” are addicted to their devices, it seems best to present the research and give them a chance to score some easy points. (Besides, some of the worst phone addicts I’ve known are older Americans, who use their devices to rant narcissistically about “narcissistic millennials.”)

CONCLUSION

If you’re interested in the research, or in making meaningful changes, check out the updated edition of The Shallows (here).

Here’s to rediscovering the deep end.

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Want to support this blog? Here are some other things I’ve written:

Long Story Short: The Bible in Six Simple Movements (Seedbed, 2018)
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When celebrities die

What exactly is going on within our collective psyche when a very famous person dies under tragic circumstances?

For the past few weeks, I’ve been researching the subject of my next book. Its focus is upon the way “celebrity” and a celebrity-obsessed culture has come to influence American evangelicalism.

My claim is that a fixation on fame and famous people is creating certain problems for the church, despite our claim that only God be worshipped and adored. My argument is that evangelicalism needs to be “de-famed” so Jesus won’t be.

Then, in the midst this research, a helicopter crashed.

AN UNDENIABLE TRAGEDY

Kobe Bryant, his young daughter, and seven others were tragically killed.

The internet exploded.

Like most people, I never met Kobe. I wasn’t a Laker fan. And I wondered (years ago) about the sexual assault charge that was ultimately dropped against him. How do you judge the character of someone you’ve never met?

Still, like everybody else, I was shocked and saddened. A rush emotions followed: His daughter too!? It can’t be. What must his wife and family be enduring!?

I wasn’t alone.

WHAT IS A CELEBRITY?

Then I began to ask another question: How does my strong reaction to Kobe’s death fit with my research into our celebrity culture?

In his book Celebrity Worship, Pete Ward attempts to unpack just what is a “celebrity” and why they matter to us.

A celebrity, Ward says, is a “mediated person.” Celebrities are those persons who have been elevated and magnified by a complex mix of technology, media, industry, and social relationships. Ward’s claim is that our deep connection to celebrities is not actually about them—it’s about us, and the formation of the modern “self.”

To see the young and smiling face of Kobe Bryant, memorialized on CNN, is to be reminded of how fragile our lives are. It is also to be transported back in time to watching basketball with one’s own father or high school friend. It is to place myself in Kobe’s seat in the helicopter (the seat of a father), and to look into my own daughter’s eyes. It is to empathize with a grieving widow and grieving children. It is to relive our own grief and trauma vicariously.

And after that, it is to find a collective outlet for that groan on social media. (This isn’t wrong.)

In Ward’s words, “Celebrities are important, because they are one of the primary resources used in processing the project of the self” (4).

WHEN CELEBRITIES DIE

After the death of Michael Jackson, and in spite of widespread evidence of child molestation, Ward notes how the public reacted with intense grief and deep affection.

MJ’s music had formed the soundtrack for countless lives.

Hence the public was not mourning an accused child molester, or even a phenomenal performer (he was likely both). They were mourning what his music represented in their stories.

A man named Paul put it this way:

“I immediately thought of my brother with whom I held great parties and where we danced like MJ, we were teenagers […] My brother was important to me.”

LISTENING AND LEARNING

These kind of celebrity deaths also provide an opportunity for us to ask important questions of ourselves. For instance:

1. What am I actually grieving?

Like the young man (Paul) who was thoughtful enough to link the death of Michael Jackson to his past relationship with his own brother—we should ask what our grief over persons we have never met might be trying to teach us.

What are we grieving beyond the individual who has died?

What if the death of Michael Jackson led not to a shrine at his personal amusement park (which, if we are honest, was more a crime scene than a temple), but to conversations with one’s own brother, mother, pastor, friend, or therapist?

We like to run from death and grief. And events like this ask us to connect to the deeper sources of our pain.

2. What about the others?

Here’s another question to be wrestled with: Do I really believe that every person—no matter how famous, beautiful, or powerful—is created equally in the image of God?

Equality is a value in the modern West. But our responses to celebrity raise questions as to how deeply we believe in it.

Is the death of a poor and unnamed Chinese girl every bit as precious in the sight of God as that of Kobe Bryant? Do I actually feel this to be true, despite the fact that the young girl’s death (or that of the unborn baby) will get little personal coverage, in part because a given government has a vested interest in saving face?

Celebrity deaths give us occasion to grapple with these uncomfortable questions about equality and the sanctity of life.

3. Is the ache an echo of a Voice?

The Judeo-Christian tradition has long held that God has placed eternity (or a longing for transcendence) in the human heart.

The ache over mortality is therefore meant to be an echo of a Voice. It is a “dispatch” from transcendence, and even ardent secularists can hear it.

In the words of James K. A. Smith (citing Charles Taylor), the “closed take” on reality (No God, no transcendent meaning, no afterlife)

can’t seem to get rid of a certain haunting, a certain rumbling in our hearts. There is a spectre haunting our secular age, the “spectre of meaninglessness”—which is a dispatch from [divine] fullness.

CONCLUSION

In the end, it is good and right to mourn celebrity deaths. It is good and right because they are people made in God’s image.

Yet these tragedies may also serve as reminders of important truths (or falsehoods) that we would like to ignore.

All life is sacred. All human death is an intrusion into God’s good world. And this mortal ache—while painful—may form a trail of breadcrumbs leading to a Table where we hear the same truths Kobe did at his last worship service, just hours before his death:

This is my body.

This is my blood.

Do this in remembrance of the Christ who conquered death, and who alone is worthy to be worshipped.

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Long Story Short: The Bible in Six Simple Movements (Seedbed, 2018)
The Mosaic of Atonement: An Integrated Approach to Christ’s Work (Zondervan Academic, 2019)

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Justice without mercy

“Excessive zeal for justice always becomes satanic.”

That line comes from Walter Wink’s landmark study of the demonic: Unmasking the Powers. His point is not to disparage our need for justice but to season it with mercy, lest “Lady J” transform into, simply, “the accuser” (ha satan).

“Justice” often turns, like sour milk, to vengeance.

A similar theme exists in this provocative claim by Alan Jacobs:

When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness.

The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness.

Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.

I’ve written on this before (here); but a similar point has now been made by a third and final figure: the famous atheist/neuroscientist, Sam Harris.

In reference to a recent spate of social media mobs that have called for the names, addresses, and (practically) the firstborn children of perceived offenders, Harris laments the fact that our modern culture has lost its ability to forgive (or even hear the evidence) amid its fervor for “justice.”

“We have to have a way back,” said Harris in a recent interview, regarding how the social media mob descends on certain persons with seemingly no mercy and no possibility of repentance or forgiveness.

Is there a lesson here from these three statements?

If anything, it is that a thirst for “justice” is not always an unalloyed good. We need mercy too. And humility (Mic 6:8).

Interested in understanding the Big Story of the Bible? Check out my new book: “Long Story Short: the Bible in Six Simple Movements,” available with Video teachings to help church small groups.

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Prophet or punk? (pt. 1)

Separating boldness from shrillness in the age of outrage.

Thanks to The Wesleyan Church for asking me to be part of their new “Voices” blog.

Here is the first installment in a multi-part series I’ll be doing on how to differentiate “prophetic boldness” from “dogmatic shrillness” in the age of outrage.

Read here.

Part two to come!

Check out my new book (Long Story Short: the Bible in Six Simple Movements), now available at Seedbed.com.

Signup here to receive bonus content through my email Newsletter (“Serpents and Doves”).

I will not clog your inbox, and I will not share your email address.

Personal website of Dr. Josh McNall | Reflections on Theology + Culture

THE SECRET PLACE OF THUNDER

YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR REWARD

THE RIGHT KIND OF SECRETS

When words become white noise

Only the shrillest are heard

Separating boldness from shrillness in the age of outrage.

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