Why I Wrote a Book About the Internet

I’ve been asked a few times over the past year why I wanted to write Digital Liturgies: specifically, why write a book about the Internet. It’s a good question because it is rather counter-intuitive. The Internet is such a given, omnipresent mediation of our daily lives that writing a book about it for Christians seems simultaneously too obvious and too hard. When so many other issues press on us—sexual ethics, orthodox theology, justice and political theology, etc.—why spend time, and ask others to spend theirs, reflecting on a piece of technology that is both unavoidable and (in an individual sense) unchangeable?

Here are three answers to this question:

I wrote Digital Liturgies because the Web is the single most immersive cultural force in my life and in the lives of most modern people.

I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate how formative the social Internet is in the lives of most people in the developed world today, including Christians. If you want to linger over the statistics about Internet use in the United States, they will blow your mind. But just consider this reality: It is today a perfectly plausible scenario that a modern person can work, go to school, catch up with friends, conduct business, order food, shop, and even attend worship all without leaving her living room. And in fact, many people do exactly this.

This means that not only is the Web is a singularly powerful tool for achieving nearly every aspect of modern life, but that, in becoming such a tool, it has itself become the most important space to occupy for people under its dominance. There is hardly anything more integral to the day in, day out experience of a modern person than their Internet connection. Remove it from their office and their employment evaporates. Remove it from their school and their enrollment ceases. Remove it from their home and they are suddenly inert. Internet technology, whether we want it to or not, has completely transformed how we experience life.

I wrote Digital Liturgies because the Web is a habitat that teaches and shapes, not just a tool that extends.

This is the heartbeat of the book. Combining theology, philosophy, media studies, cognitive science, history, and personal experience, we are faced with the overwhelming judgment that the Web is not a neutral instrument but a language and emotion-shaping environment that creates certain kinds of thinkers, feelers, and worshipers. The question for Christians living in the digital age is not whether the Web will leave its imprint on us. The question is how deep that imprint will go, and how conscious we will be of it.

Why did God put his people into the church? Why are we members of a collective body, expressed in local memberships? Because the places to which we commit our attention and energy have an effect on us. The local church makes the truths of the gospel more plausible to us. But the same dynamic is true of the habitat of the Web. It too makes certain feelings, ideas, and habits plausible to us. Identifying these things—naming them, and in naming them, subjecting them to the mind of Christ—is part of living as a believer in the world and generation he has placed us.

I wrote Digital Liturgies because the Web is not going away, so we must learn to live as Christians in this kind of world.

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”

No matter how much we might wish we were born a few decades earlier, everyone reading this right now is exactly where an infinitely sovereign, infinitely wise, infinitely good Creator placed them. That is actually the very first lesson in the book: the lesson of givenness, of receiving our bodies and the world that God made from his hand, rather than reaching instinctively for tools that let us try to twist reality into something else. And it is the final lesson, too. Christian faithfulness in a digital era means resisting the allure of nostalgia and the delusion of temporal omnipotence. The grace that Christ promises us applies only to the lives we actually live, not our imagined ones. His word is enough for us.

I believe with all my heart that many people in the modern West have reached or are reaching a crisis point. Many are pinned between loneliness and burnout, suspended in mid-air between the crushing expectations of affluent society and an incessant voice reminding them of their guilt, their weakness, and their failure. A good deal of this crisis is the revolutionary redirection of our emotional energy, away from the people and places and tasks set before us, toward an infinitely expanding Everywhere that simultaneously exhausts and exposes us. This is a spiritual crisis. It is an opportunity for a deep and abiding renewal. My prayer for Digital Liturgies is that, in some small way for at least a few people, it will begin such a renewal by helping us name the crisis.

You can read the Introduction and Chapter 1 for free, right here.