In Praise of Books

Preparing Credible Witnesses for the Church's Social Teaching

At the beginning of the year, I wrote an essay for Dispatch Faith about young men

becoming Orthodox. While, as I said there, I am grateful for anyone who finds Jesus Christ and His Church, these new believers are not an unalloyed blessing. Along with those who are sincere (if necessarily immature) in the faith and commitment to the life of the Church, others are attracted for other, more worrisome reasons.

Referencing the work of the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann, I pointed out that the Orthodox Church, and all Christian communities, must avoid,

...both the temptation of “secularism—the progressive and rapid alienation of our culture, of its very foundations, from the Christian experience” [as well as a] Manichean rejection of the world, [as] an escape into a disincarnate and dualistic ‘spirituality.’

Both

attitudes distort … the wholeness, the catholicity of the genuine Orthodox tradition which has always affirmed both the goodness of the world for whose life God has given his only-begotten Son, and the wickedness in which the world lies, which has always proclaimed and keeps proclaiming every Sunday that ‘by the Cross joy has entered the world,’ yet tells those who believe in Christ that they ‘are dead and their life is hid with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:3).

In my work as a college chaplain at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I see that for many young people (and especially, young men), their first contact with Orthodoxy is with an online Orthodox media personality.

These online voices are a diverse and uneven group in terms of content. Clergy and laity; irenic evangelists and polemical culture warriors. Some have formal, theological education from an Orthodox seminary, while others are autodidacts. Here again, we need to be careful in assuming that the former are trustworthy while the latter are not. There is simply no way for us to determine the quality of all the material being presented by the different online Orthodox voices; we simply do not have the necessary time and resources.

Even assuming high-quality, soberly presented material, we cannot predict how any particular individual will understand (or misunderstand) what they hear. Think here of the parable of the sower and the seed. Good seed that falls on rocky, thorny, or heavily traveled ground will not produce a rich harvest. Only the seed that falls of good soil and receives appropriate amounts of rain and sunshine will produce an abundant harvest.

Important as content is, we should not overlook the limitations—and real dangers—of what Brad Edwards the author of "The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism," and the lead pastor of The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado, describes as the “empty ecstasy of digital crowds.”

He writes that

Like that of drugs, alcohol, and recreational sex, the ecstasy of digital crowds is ultimately dehumanizing. ... Their easy belonging slowly disenchants our experience of embodied belonging. In search of our next “hit,” we’re unlikely to even notice that we’re becoming radicalized by ever-more-extreme crowds. The more we indulge the temptation of easy belonging, the more we’re inoculated to the discomfort of belonging to anyone.

Reflecting on his post-COVID lockdown experience as a pastor trying to re-establish weekly, in person attendance at services, he realized that

Meaning derived from belonging to someone—even if only in the moment—becomes more elusive the more that “internet brain” handicaps our social capacity. The ease of online connection makes otherwise effortless habits like small talk, or even eye contact, feel less tolerable in person. If you extrapolate this digital conditioning of interpersonal relationships to our relationship with institutions, it’s no wonder churchgoing might “hold less and less appeal.”

His observation about social media companies also applies to online discussions more broadly. Both are based on a business model that requires “the world ... to keep burning for platforms to keep earning, digital crowds will likewise be fueled and perpetuated by crisis. The same algorithms that sort us into digital crowds also weaponize the narcissism of minor differences to monetize our attention.”

In the online world, “Pillaging is the point, not problem-solving. Our social actions look more like populist crusades and less like town hall meetings, and crusades make meaning by making enemies.” However noble the inspiration, it does seem that the path of online discourse tempts us to burn “down our enemies’ institutions” as an essential “part of the grand strategy.” “Blessed,” as we are by “an omniscient algorithm, we’ll never run out of meaning-making opportunities because we’ll never run out of new enemies.”

What does this mean for the life of the Church and her social witness?

Again, as I argued in my essay, we should not assume that increased interest and even conversions to Orthodoxy are without serious challenges beyond the practical concerns of having enough well-trained, spiritually mature priests and church buildings. Yes, these are part of the challenge, but so too is healing the damage caused by the “‘growing ideological chasm’ between men and women leading to a crisis in dating, but the same chasm is also starting to threaten otherwise stable marriages.”

To this we must also add the challenge of ministering to those who form their lives based on a toxic “fusion of expressive individualism and ‘digital gnosticism.’” Those who do find themselves trapped in a rigid vision of self and others. That their neurosis (for that is what it is) is self-created and even welcome does not mitigate but amplifies the harm they do to self and others.

Put another way, the Church is facing a situation in which people come to us to know but not be known. They come not to learn and so repent. Instead, many come as a new class of religious consumers and spiritual tourists seeking affirmation for their choices. That one of these is becoming Orthodox changes nothing.

Too often, we are eager to bless their choices. When we do, we can easily overlook the neophyte’s commitment to both secularism and(as I wrote at Dispatch Faith) a “nostalgic apocalypticism and authoritarian politics,” which allow them

...to avoid what Schmemann calls “our real question: … how can we ‘hold together’—in faith, in life, in action-these seemingly contradictory affirmations of the Church, how can we overcome the temptation to opt for and to ‘absolutize’ one of them, falling thus into the wrong choices or ‘heresies’ that have so often plagued Christianity in the past?”

All of this presents a real challenge not only to the internal life of the Church but also to her social and evangelical witnesses. The temptation in both cases is the same: to put old wine into new wineskins. And if we do? [T]he new wine bursts the wineskins, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined” (Mark 2:22)

Sorting through these challenges will only become more difficult as more and more laity—and clergy—formed (and deformed) by a social media-driven understanding of the life of the Church.

What then can we do? Where can we find the new wineskins that will allow the new wine to age?

Honestly, I am not sure.

What I do know is this. For better and worse, social media and online theological discourse (like this substack blog) are here to stay. Or at least stay until they are replaced by something else. Whether this new thing is better or not remains to be seen. If I were to hazard a guess, whatever comes will probably be, like social media, a mix of both good and ill, a blessing and a curse.

For now, I think the best way to help the current and future leaders of the Church rise to meet the challenges we face now and they will face in the future is to encourage reading.

This should include not only theological and philosophical texts but a broad range of texts that compose what was once the standard liberal arts curriculum. Reading old authors does not mean forsaking new ones. The liberal arts tradition is broad and flexible enough to incorporate contemporary thought and forms of expression. To know the great works of an earlier age, to be formed by them intellectually and morally, gives us the ability to evaluate these newer works and see in them what is lasting and what is transitory.

Mostly, though, we need to read.

Whether physical or electronic in form, there is no substitute for books. We need to read because we need social witnesses and evangelists who are broadly and deeply formed in the textual tradition of not only the Church but of (in the case of America and Europe) the Western Liberal tradition.