How Then Shall We Live (Online)
I often find that it is easier to look for “big things” going on in the world or my life to determine how things are going. Let me suggest that it is often more fruitful to attend to little things. We should be troubled by many of the big things we see happening, but trusting in Jesus should reorder how we attend to such things.
When I think about little things, what I want to suggest is that what we often call “little,” Jesus makes major. In the kingdom of God the little things become substantial and significant. The little thing I want to focus on today is simply this: Your faith should show up substantially online, in such a way that the world should know that Jesus was sent from the Father.
The verse I am hinting at here is John 17:21, where Jesus says, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” There is a oneness we are called to in Christ, and this oneness should help us understand what it means to relate to other Christians.
I often find something different.
One of the major problems with online modalities like social media, podcasts, and even things like substack, is that what drives numbers is often antithetical to the cross. In other words, Christians are rewarded in these modalities for allowing the goal of “platform growth” to justify the means they use, such that they can fantasize about sowing in the flesh and yet (somehow) reaping in the Spirit.
I see this on podcasts all the time. Instead of “steelmanning” the other person’s view, which is when you present it in the best way possible in its strongest form (even if they are unable to do this themselves), we tend to strawman arguments. When we strawman an argument, I typically see this go on:
We just present the argument in a way no one would present it themselves. So, for example, I often hear Roman Catholic podcasters assert things like, “Protestants believe that every Christian functions as a pope because that is what sola scriptura entails. That is of course, absurd. But equally absurd is what I have heard Protestant podcasters say about Roman Catholics, like they don’t believe in grace.
Sometimes I just see fallacious argumentation, where the person will say something true, and then jump to a radical conclusion that simply does not follow. So they start with the truth, but then they assert “this must mean” and say something the person would never actually say. It is, of course, possible that this still be right (the person might not know what their views entail), but more often than not, in my experience, it is a way to demonize people we don’t agree with (or just don’t like).
Much of the time I see people replace argumentation with labels. Sometimes those labels are technical terms that have ceased to have concrete meaning, like liberal, fundamentalist, progressive, etc. Instead of addressing a person, we seek to make them into an evil lurking in the corner trying to kidnap your children.
Finally, I see a lot of argumentation that is nothing more than an assertion of “guilt by association.” Instead of dealing with what people have actually said, we just try to find a way to connect them with someone who is easier to demonize, and then we demonize them by association.
As a side note, I was once asked to speak at a church and the church got attacked for having me there. The people attacking me said that I talk about spiritual disciplines, and spiritual disciplines are codeword for “new age mysticism” (I’m not sure how reading your Bible is the same as new age mysticism, but we’ll leave that aside for a minute). Their evidence? They took a picture of the table of contents of my book Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards, that was….wait for it…a chapter arguing that the language of spiritual disciplines isn’t helpful and that the older language of means of grace was better.
Hilariously, in a book about Jonathan Edwards and the traditional means of grace I was labelled a new age mystic! New age?! Edwards died in 1758! The very connection they were trying to make was the thing I was rejecting. But no one bothered to look.
It is this I want to sit on for a minute. No one bothered. Discovering if they were saying something true wasn’t seen as important in that moment.
In the kingdom of God this is not a little thing.
Think of Psalm 50:19-23:
“You give your mouth free rein for evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you. “Mark this, then, you who forget God, lest I tear you apart, and there be none to deliver! The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me; to one who orders his way rightly I will show the salvation of God!”
I have been sitting in Psalm 50 for a while now because I realize how tempting this is, and I’m certain I’ve failed to do this well. Psalm 50 reminds us that God’s silence is not an opportunity to strawman fellow Christians and to deceptively lead people to think other Christians believe things they don’t.
Furthermore, it is significant that after Paul commands us, “to be ready to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone” (Tit. 3:1-2), he goes on to name what we should have left behind us after putting faith in Christ: “At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another” (Tit. 3:3).
Likewise, James names how wicked these passions are:
“Where do the conflicts and where do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, from your passions that battle inside you? You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask; you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions (Jas. 4:1-3 NET).
One of the values of social media in general, and things like podcasts in particular, is to speak quickly and decisively. Nuance and patience are not natural virtues in these modalities. I was listening to a podcast recently where it started out with a lot of nuance and concrete clarity, naming false teaching well and addressing serious problems, but then quickly devolved into baseless speculation and demonizing anyone who uses terms like spiritual formation, all without giving voice to what people really claim.
It is important to remember that bearing false witness is not a minor problem in scripture. It is not a slight slip that we can just brush pass and ignore.
Disconcertingly, in James 3, we discover how significant these things really are. There he tells us that there is a shared way of living that is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic (I address this in The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb). Adding “demonic” to that list is certainly sobering, but more so is the fact that James names two main attributes of this way of evil: jealousy and selfish ambition.
Too often jealousy and selfish ambition are the passions at war within us leading us to forget who God is, and to live in malice and envy, wielding platforms to cause division and secure ourselves as the true stakeholders of the truth.
Instead, James adds, “where there is jealousy and selfishness, there is disorder and every evil practice” (Jas. 3:16). Likewise, in Philippians Paul tells us, “Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility, be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself. Each of you should be concerned not only about your own interests, but about the interests of others as well” (Phil. 2:3-4).
What would it look like to treat each other as more important than ourselves in disagreement? What would it look like to do this with people who disagree with us politically or theologically? How can we steelman others arguments for them as a way to love our neighbor as ourselves?
I have met more people than I can possibly count who left the tradition they grew up in because they realized that they have been lied to. They had been warned about something unfaithfully and then they met someone in that other tradition, or actually read what they said, they realized that they had been sold a lie. When we continue to bear false witness we are sinning against the weaker brothers and sisters in our midst, and potentially doing serious harm to our brothers and sisters in Christ.
It would be better to have your podcast fail.
It would be better to not grow a platform.
Don’t forget who God is and don’t mistake his silence for confirming tactics of evil
As another aside, if you want a great example of someone doing this well, Gavin Ortlund is doing an absolute master class on Christian faithfulness on his podcast Truth Unites. Careful, nuanced, and clear, while steelmanning other positions and seeking generosity and charity in disagreement. I’m not sure I’ve seen a better example on the internet today.
For my paid subscribers, I want to share a situation that happened recently with a podcast and how I’m trying to navigate it (that led to me writing this post).