Podcast: Why You Can’t Stop Looking at Your Phone (Samuel James)

September 04, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How Technology Has Rewired Our Brains

In this episode, Samuel James reflects on the ways that new digital technologies themselves—not just the content that we consume through them—shape us at a profound level, whether it's how we think about our relationships, how we engage with information, or even how we define the good life. James sets forth a distinctly Christian theology of technology, one that is profoundly realistic about its power, both for good and evil.

Digital Liturgies

Digital Liturgies

Samuel D. James

People search for heaven in all the wrong places, and the internet is no exception. Digital Liturgies warns readers of technology’s damaging effects and offers a fulfilling alternative through Scripture and rest in God’s perfect design.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:15 - The Rise of ChatGPT

Matt Tully
Samuel, thank you for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Samuel James
Thanks, Matt. Glad to be here.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about technology and our lives as Christians and the ways that that technology impacts us, perhaps in counterintuitive ways—in ways that we don’t often think of. But before we jump into some of the meat of that, probably the biggest news right now in the world of digital tech over the past few months has been the rise of ChatGPT—this AI powered chatbot that everyone’s been playing with and experimenting with these days. For those who aren’t familiar, explain briefly what ChatGPT is and why it has taken the online world by storm.

Samuel James
ChatGPT, to the best of my understanding, is an artificial intelligence software. And the way this works is that this program receives just millions upon millions upon billions of bytes of information that people put into it to program it how to respond. And the end result is that a normal person can go to this software and say, Write me a short story featuring a famous pastor, and lo and behold, you’ll get about six hundred words of a moderately amusing short story featuring this pastor talking and behaving kind of in a way that he might in real life. So this machine is somewhat intelligent. It can recognize patterns. It can memorize information. And then you can get it to give you amusing things in response to your prompt. So I think a lot of people right now are realizing, Hey, this software is very, very capable of creating things that I find amusing. You don’t have to go find a specific bot written by a specific individual. It’s this one program that’s just got so much information loaded into it that it knows about just about anything imaginable.

Matt Tully
It seems like one of the interesting things about it that’s so remarkable for many people is that it can understand very natural language. You can kind of just talk to it like you would a friend, ask it questions like you would someone that you were sitting across from the table from. And yet it can construct and synthesize information in really surprising and even seemingly creative ways.

Samuel James
Yeah, absolutely. One of the weird things about it is that you can ask ChatGPT, What should a Christian’s perspective on technology be? And it will respond with something that could easily pass for a blog post or an article on a major Christian website. It’s well written, it’s maybe not super insightful, but its vocabulary and syntax are right. Its grasp of Christian theology is more or less okay. So it’s just strange to see a machine basically doing this. But that’s where we are right now.

Matt Tully
Have you played with it at all?

Samuel James
Yeah, a little bit.

Matt Tully
What are some of the prompts that you’ve given to it that you found interesting?

Samuel James
I actually think I did the technology one, just to see if it was going to plagiarize me at all, but it didn’t. It was actually pretty good. I think I’ve asked it to do silly stuff, like write about John Piper being a superhero, or something like that. And it actually comes out decently entertaining. And then there’s some prompts that, interestingly, it won’t respond to, like if you say, Why should abortion be legal? I don’t know about that specific one, but there are questions like that that it will say, I’m just a learning software. I can’t give an answer to that.

Matt Tully
So there are limits that the creators have put on it.

Samuel James
Right. And not for lack of ability. It could clearly answer that question, but it’s obviously not in these companies best interest to program that.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting that ChatGPT, and then there are other other AI software out there along the lines of image generation. There are things like Midjourney—you put in a prompt, and it can create photorealistic images. It looks like a photo someone took, but it’s completely manufactured. The other day I was browsing Twitter, and I scrolled past a picture of Pope Francis. He was wearing this big, white, puffy coat. I stopped for a minute. I think the caption was something like “Pope Francis, staying warm in the cold” or something. And I stopped for a minute because it was this huge puffy coat, and I thought, That’s kind of a funny look for the Pope. I wouldn’t expect that. But then I just kept scrolling and didn’t think anything else of it. And it was only days later that I read that that image was actually completely artificial. It was manufactured. He didn’t actually wear that coat. That picture was never actually taken. It’s funny because that is such a relatively insignificant and meaningless deception. It didn’t really affect anything about how I thought, and yet it’s kind of stuck with me because I think it’s the first time that I’ve been deceived in a way that I didn’t even know it was happening. So how do you think about that? How does that experience, and the experience with AI that we’re seeing more and more, how does that fit into some of the things that you’re talking about in your new book?

Samuel James
That’s a good question. When you read the history of the internet and the history of personal computing, this type of technology has been talked about since the very beginning—the idea that you could have a computer program, or a network of computer programs, that were so intelligent that they could basically replace human personality, in a sense. That actually is very old and very integral to the history of the internet. You can go back and read the history of the Whole Earth Catalog and the people that influenced Google and Apple, like Steve Jobs and Larry Page. They were caught up in this 1960s counterculture that was also pretty philosophically learned, and they were very influenced by the idea that computing can get us to a place where we transcend human personality. I talk a little bit about that in the book, but I think AI is the most obvious example of that that we’ve seen hit the broad market, where it’s clear that the upshot of this technology is that you can replace human beings with this. You may not need to hire a human copywriter anymore; the machine can do it. You may not need to hire a human movie writer or a novelist; a computer can simply do this. And these conversations are happening, especially in higher education right now, where the question is, What student is actually going to write a research paper if they can simply send a prompt to ChatGPT and get back 1,500–2,000 words? And so I think the idea of replacing human beings with technology strikes at the idea that is central to the book, which is that technology shapes us simply by virtue of what it is. Every technology, simply by virtue of what it is, says that this should be possible. The jet airplane tells you that you should be able to travel from Louisville, Kentucky to Wheaton, Illinois in just over an hour. And so it’s not simply that that technology is available to you. It’s that now it has recalibrated— maybe over a few years—but it’s recalibrated cultural expectations to say that actually is part of the good life. That is part of an effective company. That is part of what it means to be traveled, or whatever it is. So technology tells us what the good life is simply by virtue of what it can do and of the role that it seeks to fill in our lives. And so when you’re looking at something like AI, it’s fairly obvious that AI’s version of the good life, if you really interrogate it, is, Hey, human beings don’t have to do any of this. We don’t have to think. All we have to do is build machines that are capable of thinking for us. And then we can get on with whatever we’re supposed to do after we stopped thinking—which I’m not sure some of these philosophers of tech have answered that question very satisfactorily.

09:44 - The Deceptive Power of Technology

Matt Tully
That’s one of the most perplexing and, in some ways, scary things about AI in particular is that even more than other technologies that have come before, I think for many of us it feels like something we don’t understand—I don’t know how a computer could do the things that it’s doing. And you have this interesting quote in the book. You say, “Our inability to really comprehend the technological revolution that has permanently altered nearly all of our lives is a profound spiritual, emotional, and cultural dilemma.” Again, AI feels like it’s perhaps the ultimate example of that. And as you said before, it has burst onto the cultural consciousness in a way that maybe other technologies have kind of slid under the radar. Has that been your experience? Do you think there is something about the AI revolution around us that could help wake us up, perhaps, to the power of technology to shape the way that we think?

Samuel James
Absolutely. I think that’s possible. Whether that will happen, I don’t know. I certainly think it’s possible. One of the things that, like I said, higher education has to answer is how do we teach the value of writing and research when there are tools available that can do this? I think Alan Jacobs and Andy Crouch have both written along these lines. But the challenge now is for higher ed to figure out what’s the purpose of education. Because if the purpose of education is to get people to produce a certain kind of product that’s consumable, game over.

Matt Tully
Because we can already do that.

Samuel James
Because we can do that. This is it. And so if students think that the goal of their education is to basically just put word salad on a word document or on a research paper, then game over.

Matt Tully
Or regurgitate facts.

Samuel James
Or regurgitate facts. Take journalism as an example. If the goal of journalism is simply to string words together to support a narrative that maybe borrows some statistics, game over. Computers can do that. So we’re having to answer the question, What are these things for? What is education for? What is journalism for? And so I think as we answer those questions, some people are going to realize, Wait a minute. The way we’ve been viewing and handling technology up to this point has actually put us in a corner with AI, because we’ve been allowing technology to determine our values, to determine our priorities up to a certain point. And now what we’re seeing is that once you feed the beast, there’s no moderating it.

12:20 - Technology Determines Our Values

Matt Tully
Speak more to how technology has determined our values. You talked about how jet technology kind of changes our expectations of what the good life could be or what’s possible. Unpack that further. How does the phone in my pocket shape the values that I have, or the things that I view as good in day to day life?

Samuel James
Absolutely. That’s a great question. Digital technology is mostly premised on the idea that no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter where you’re sitting, you should be able to be omnipresent, in a sort of sense. For example, even though I am a 34-year-old man sitting here in Wheaton, Illinois, and pretty limited in the kinds of conversations that I can have right now and the kind of information I have access to, if I pull out my phone, I can now be part of any conversation. I can now access just about any information that I want. I can basically escape my embodied givenness. I can escape it through technology. So the idea is that I have a body, I have a location, and that is limiting me in some way. And the premise of a lot of internet technology—and this is kind of the transhumanist philosophy that I talk about in the book that I think is showing up, especially with AI—is the idea that you shouldn’t have to be limited by your body. You shouldn’t have to be limited by your physical self. You should be able to enter the metaverse. You should be able to join a conversation on Twitter between people you don’t know on a topic you don’t really care about in a context that’s completely remote to you. As we engage those technologies, it tells us that this is what will make us happy. If we can just consume more content, or if we can be part of somewhere else or some time else with other people, then we’ll be relaxed and we’ll be happy. And that has a shape on our values, because that’s the kind of thing that we are prioritizing when we just give ourselves to these digital apps. It’s a way of escaping our humanness. Because the alternative is that we might have to be limited in the kinds of things that we can see, the kinds of things that we can know, and the kinds of things that we can participate in.

Matt Tully
I could see someone listening to that and saying, I don’t know about transhumanism, but I’m thinking about my ailing mom. She lives over on the West coast. She’s old and not doing very well. Through things like FaceTime, I can call her up and I can see her and I can be present with her. And that’s a good thing. That has helped her. It’s helped me. Or I think of COVID and the way that so many of us—all of us to some extent—were affected by the lack of interaction with other humans and the ability to work from home and do video calls and all of that. Probably some people would see that as an unalloyed good. That was a wonderful thing that we had. So why would you point that out as potentially a bad thing that we need to be careful about?

Samuel James
There’s a distinction to be made between something that’s capable of doing good things and something that is totally neutral. Technology is capable of doing amazing things. It is fantastic that we are able to connect with friends and family members in remote parts of the world in seconds. That is fantastic. It is fantastic that I’m able to live in one city and work for a company that’s located in a different city. That is a blessing and just something to be treasured and be thankful for. That does not necessarily mean, though, that these digital technologies are completely neutral and simply give you whatever you put into it. As we were saying before, when you think about technology holistically, you realize that everything a technology is and does says, This is desirable. This should be done. And so when we’re talking about these apps that help us transcend our bodies or help us be in another place mentally while we’re physically in a different place, we have to recognize that while that can be a blessing, it can also be a contributor to a worldview, or a feeling that we have toward reality that may take us places we don’t intend to go. And so rather than seeing technology as completely neutral, or rather than seeing technology as completely evil, I think there’s an alternative. We can see technology as a non-neutral, conscious-shaping thing that nonetheless can give us great blessings, but then also requires us to bring Christian wisdom up against these technologies and to locate ourselves correctly in how we relate to them.

Matt Tully
So you’re saying it’s impossible for something like a phone to give us the ability to do a good thing—FaceTime with a relative far away— and yet even that good ability that results in a good experience for us, even a spiritually good thing, can nevertheless have this shaping power over our lives that could end up being harmful?

Samuel James
Absolutely. And I think it’s important for Christians to recognize that when we say this, we’re not saying that because technology has a shaping effect on you, it’s sinful.

Matt Tully
Because all technology is shaping us.

Samuel James
All technology has a shaping effect. And that’s part of the point of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and all these kind of technological theorists who said, Look, there is no such thing as neutral technology because human beings make technology, and that technology speaks back to culture by virtue of what it can do. So when we say that technology is not neutral, we’re not saying that you’re sinful for using it. We’re not saying that we have to get rid of all of our tech. We’re not putting the technological Pandora back in its box.

Matt Tully
It’s not possible to do that.

Samuel James
It’s not possible. And even if it were possible, I don’t even think biblically you could make a case that that would be desirable. I think instead what we have to do is we have to engage technology as what it is. Instead of simply saying, Well, it doesn’t matter how I use this technology as long as I’m never looking at anything bad or never using it to go anywhere bad, we need to recognize that this is actually shaping me to be a specific kind of person. And that specific kind of person may not be the same kind of person that Scripture is shaping us to be.

18:42 - Are Some Technologies Inherently Sinful?

Matt Tully
You note that throughout human history humans have created and tried to use different technologies to “liberate themselves” from God and from his rule. You mentioned everything from the Tower of Babel, which is maybe the classic example from Scripture, to slave ships in the Atlantic, to even the crematoriums of the Nazis during World War II. So, is this a correct application of what you’ve been saying: Are there some technologies that are inherently sinful or wrong for us to pursue because of their shaping power over us?

Samuel James
That’s a good question. I think it would depend on how we define technology. So there are certainly certain things that I think raise immediate, inherent problems for Christians. And I don’t want to be too specific on this for listeners, but we can think of examples of whether or not you believe that a certain app or a certain website, if you define that as a certain technology, well, then it becomes pretty apparent that, yes, there are some things clearly off limits for Christians. If you think about, perhaps, medically assisted suicide, a lot of Christians would have strong theological problems with that. And so if you view that as a particular technology, then that advances the conversation. If you take a more 50,000 foot view of technology, then I think that’s a conversation that has a lot of nuance. Is technology defined and constrained by what you do with it, or is there something more granular that you can’t quite say, This is always off limits? But I think the point is that even technology that’s clearly not off limits for Christians, even that technology has an effect on us. There’s a wonderful book called About Time, and it’s basically a cultural history of the clock.

Matt Tully
The clock on your wall?

Samuel James
The clock on your wall. It starts in ancient Greek culture with sundials and everything, goes all the way up to the modern jet engines and the way they keep time, to the Apple Watch and the watch on your phone. It’s a cultural history of the clock. One of the interesting themes that the author pulls from that book is that the clock was used as a way of telling the people a certain kind of story about the world they lived in. For example, for one particular people who were subjugated and colonized, the large clock that their colonizers built in the middle of their community was a reminder of who they belonged to. And so you were on Imperial Time. The author traces those kinds of things out. There’s religious context to the use of the clock. There’s economic implications of having a culture that is timed, basically. It’s really interesting. So that’s a good example of a completely neutral—or I’m sorry, not neutral—of a completely morally acceptable piece of technology that nonetheless definitely communicates a vision of what it means to be a person to us.

21:52 - Tech Optimist vs. Tech Pessimist

Matt Tully
I’m struck by two things as you talk about. On the one hand, so often our conversations about technology are so limited to “digital technologies”—the here and now of what we’re experiencing in terms of technological progress. But really, these principles, these big concepts that you’re talking about, apply to any and every technology throughout all of human history. But the second one is just the nuance and how complicated, in some ways, this conversation is. It’s not as simple as if we can just take a given technology, say a clock or a pencil or a smartphone, and just tally up the good results and the bad results and then make a determination of This is good or This is bad. There’s so much more to it, and so much so much of it is this subtle shaping of how we think about the world and how we view ourselves and other people. And that could be harder for us to land the plane on. That leads to maybe an overly simplistic kind of question, but I’ll ask it anyways. Oftentimes when talking about technology, you have two camps. You have the tech optimist on the one hand, who think that, by and large, technology is leading to human progress and development. It’s leading to more flourishing, both socially and economically and culturally. And then on the other hand, you have the tech pessimists who tend to say, at least today, that a lot of these technological developments are really dangerous and they’re having this deleterious effect on our culture and society and we should really be careful about these things. I wonder, o you accept that paradigm, that kind of a question, the spectrum there? And if you do, where would you put yourself on that spectrum?

Samuel James
I think, simplistically, that binary is true, as binaries tend to be true in some ways and not true in other ways. I feel a little bit like C. S. Lewis, who had a wonderful quote about duty. He was asked, What is the role of duty in the Christian life? And he said, Well, a perfect man would never need duty. A perfect man would always want to do the right thing. So he would never need this emotional sense of obligation, because he would just do whatever he wanted, and whatever he wanted would always be the right thing. That’s what a perfect person would do. And so I kind of think of tech pessimism a little bit as the duty element in that. To the degree that we are really being shaped by Scripture, that we are really allowing the Lord to set the terms of how we view ourselves, to the degree that we are growing in Christ and growing in grace toward each other, I think tech optimism can work and it makes sense. It’s because we are fallen and because we don’t tend to do that perfectly that we need this tech pessimism to tether us to objective reality. So I think the tech optimism and the tech pessimism question is probably a question of which do you presume a little bit more? Do you presume that you are in a context that is really growing? The people that you interact with on a daily basis, do you see a strong awareness of these digital liturgies and how they shape us? Or do you kind of see yourself in a context where those things are not as taken for granted and there’s a lot of confusion? And I think whether you describe yourself as a tech optimist or tech pessimist will kind of depend on what you perceive the need is around you. And so for me, in my context, because I’m not as sanctified as I should be and because I tend to see in my generation particularly a proclivity toward falling off the far end of the spectrum of tech maximalism, I tend to be a little more tech pessimistic. But I think it’s a question that depends primarily on what you perceive the need to be in your context.

26:00 - Can We Blame Social Media for the Downfall of Our Society?

Matt Tully
I think context is really important for that and so many questions like that. But it does seem to me, though, if you kind of take the broadest view possible, it does feel like there’s a growing cultural awareness, at least in the West and in the US where we are. Some of these technologies of the last decade or so ran headlong into—and this gets us into the topic of social media, which I want to talk about next—some of these technologies that we kind of just naively embraced and incorporated into every facet of our lives, we’re now starting to see the damage that those have caused on our society, and in particular on young people when it comes to social media. And there’s a certain kind of a wake up to what’s happening there. So let’s talk about social media. One of the most interesting developments, with regard to thinking about social media for me, came in the middle of last year, in May of 2022, when social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt—many of our listeners might be familiar with him; he’s written some books and writes lots of articles—but he wrote this incredible piece for The Atlantic called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” How’s that for a great title? And I want to quote a little bit from that article and hear you respond to that and hear how this connects into some of the points that you’re making in your book. Haidt writes,

In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring, which was fueled and organized through social media tools, and ended with the global Occupy movement. This was also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones. So you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we ever had been to being one people, and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.

But then Haidt goes on and spends the rest of the article explaining how everything started to fall apart after that—how social media began to have this destabilizing, corrosive effect on our institutions, on our politics, on our discourse, and even our children, which is what we’re seeing a lot of today, it seems. Did you read that article? What did you think about his argument there? How does that, perhaps, illustrate what you’re talking about?

Samuel James
I think that was a fantastic essay. I do think he underestimates, in the context of that essay, the power of these technologies in themselves. Toward the end of the essay he prescribes a more legislative response, like let’s regulate these corporations.

Matt Tully
Which is the conversation happening right now with regard to TikTok and other platforms.

Samuel James
Yeah. And I think there’s a place for that, but I think there’s also an opportunity to say what he doesn’t say, which is, Hey, actually these technologies have shaping effects in themselves. And regardless of whether you’re fifteen or whether you’re thirty-five, you need to be aware of this, and this technology may actually be turning you into the type of person that you don’t expect it to be. In the timeline that Haidt describes there, I think one thing that happens is that technology goes from tool to ambience. In particular, internet technology.

Matt Tully
What do you mean by that?

Samuel James
Prior to the smartphone, to access the internet meant to go to a corner of a room, to get onto a large machine that was literally connected to the wall.

Matt Tully
I can hear the dial up sound in my head.

Samuel James
That’s right. Brothers and sisters would fight for whoever could get online first because it would tie up the phone line.

Matt Tully
There were limits to what you could do.

Samuel James
Absolute limits. So if you wanted to go online, you had to go do something. It was opt-in. You had to opt-in to going online. With the smartphone, that changes because now the smartphone brings the internet to your pocket. Now the smartphone is not relying on particular devices that are plugged into particular places that stay there so that when you’re done being “online,” you get up from your chair, walk away, and do something else.

Matt Tully
You’re offline.

Samuel James
You’re offline. No one’s offline anymore.

Matt Tully
Yeah, we have push notifications now.

Samuel James
We have push notifications. We have GPS tracking. The internet is no longer opt-in; it’s opt-out. You have to do something intentionally in order to not be online. So that’s the difference between a tool to an ambience. A tool is something, in the context of the internet, that you can stop doing, walk away from, and then that tool stays where it is.

Matt Tully
And you know you’re using the tool. When you’ve got the hammer in your hand and you’re pounding, you are conscious of that fact.

Samuel James
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so because the internet is now an ambience, there’s really no escape from it. It has shaped the way we expect each other to act, the way we expect institutions to act. Part of the problem, I think, of cancel culture, which people are very interested in nowadays for good reason, I think part of the reason is that my generation has grown up expecting that the way we encounter the world is we can mute, we can block, we can delete. That technological experience of the world—

Matt Tully
On social media.

Samuel James
—on social media and broader computer technology in general. But if you are accustomed to encountering the world through a technology that lets you delete, block, mute, or get rid of, then might that not condition how you expect other people to relate to you in offline life? This person is offending me. Why are they still here? Because what you’re thinking is, I should be able to get rid of them.

Matt Tully
And it’s not conscious. You’re not thinking, I can do it on Twitter, so why can’t I do it in real life? But it’s more subtle than that.

Samuel James
Right. You’re not walking up to that person and trying to find the mute button on their shirt. But like what we said earlier, technology trains you in what is the good life and what should be possible. And I think this is one area in which technology has trained us to expect that anything that makes us uncomfortable should not be allowed to exist, because I have this sort of power over what I encounter when I get on digital technology. But the problem is that the digital technology has now informed how I live my offline life, and culture can’t work that way.

32:39 - The Digital Liturgy of Authenticity

Matt Tully
You call this training, those experiences, “digital liturgies.” That’s the title of the book, and that’s kind of the main focus of what you’re looking at. What are these digital liturgies? What are some examples of those? You mentioned outrage culture and the way that we think we can control what we have to be exposed to. What are some of the other things that we’ve been trained into thinking?

Samuel James
The first digital liturgy I talk about in the book is authenticity. It’s the idea of my story, my truth. On the internet, and on the broader web of social media in particular, because we are disembodied and because we are encountering one another not as whole persons but as basically names and avatars, there’s the need for a new social currency. If I just encounter you online, I don’t necessarily know where you’re from. I don’t know your family. I don’t know your credentials. So what is the social currency? Well, it turns out that the social currency of the internet is story. Whoever has the most compelling personal narrative wins the day.

Matt Tully
Why do you think that is?

Samuel James
A couple of reasons. I think story engages the emotions in a way that is very important online. Again, when you’re talking about a disembodied space, you are talking about people who are engaging with one another primarily mentally. So I think the role of emotion becomes very important when you’re talking about that. I think it’s a symptom of expressive individualism. I think the internet is by far the most effective vehicle for expressive individualism. More so than education and more so than politics, I think it’s the internet. And so what you have is you have a culture online where if what you have to say as a person doesn’t match up with my felt experience, then your role is to be quiet and to learn from my felt experience. And so your knowledge, your arguments have to always be conditioned by my experience. And the same is true just down the line. And so that’s how you end up with a situation where, one of the primary influencers of the transgender revolution are social media apps like Tumblr. If you read Abigail Schrier’s book Irreversible Damage, she talks specifically about how, in her clinical research, so many of the teenagers who seem to be living perfectly normal gendered lives will come out to their parents as having gender dysphoria or transgenderism. And what she finds is that almost all of them found a social media community. And the social media community not only influenced them to think this way, but it prepared them against objection by saying, This is your felt experience. Your parents do not know what they’re talking about.

Matt Tully
And your experience is king.

Samuel James
Absolutely. Your experience is normative. Because that’s what you own. That’s what you own online. In the world of the internet, it’s almost like a hyper-democratic space, because my degree means nothing on social media. My employer means nothing to someone that I’m in an argument with on Facebook. Those traditional forms of authority, and I think Haidt talks about this in the essay, those traditional forms of expertise and authority don’t matter online because it’s a hyper-democratic space—everyone gets the same amount of bandwidth as everybody else. So what really carries the day is if you’re able to appeal to emotion and a sense of identity by having the most compelling authentic narrative.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting that authenticity is so prioritized and prized, in terms of these kinds of conversations, and yet, at the same time, many people have noted that the internet is one of the least authentic spaces. People are able to construct identities, construct a presentation of themselves to the world that is totally detached from reality. And it’s actually less authentic in so many ways than actually sitting across from somebody where you actually have to have a real conversation face to face. What do you make of that, that there is this contradiction built right into that?

Samuel James
I think it’s extremely unhealthy for us to be deeply emotionally tethered to a space in which we have no shared objective reality. And so your presentation of yourself is all I’ve got to go on. My presentation of myself is all I’ve got to go on.

Matt Tully
My carefully chosen and Instagram-filtered pictures. The rise of these Instagram filters is a great case in point where it’s remarkable what can be done through these tools, and it completely changes the way that people are presented.

Samuel James
Yeah. Absolutely. I hesitate to tell this story, but I will tell it. There was a particular experience that I had some time ago where this guy online had come at me a little bit for an opinion I had. So we kind of sparred a little bit.

Matt Tully
A good caveat is that you are pretty active on Twitter.

Samuel James
I’m a recovering Twitterer.

Matt Tully
You’re not coming at this whole topic from this ivory tower. You actually are engaging in some of these tools and platforms. Go ahead.

Samuel James
This is a book I wrote to myself as much to anyone. I had this encounter with this guy on Twitter, and it got pretty heated. I don’t think I said anything that I regretted, but fast forward a few months after that. He ended up blocking me, by the way. He just didn’t like our disagreement. Fast forward a few months. I randomly encounter this guy in a restaurant.

Matt Tully
In person.

Samuel James
In person.

Matt Tully
Oh, wow!

Samuel James
I know that I see him in the restaurant, and I just don’t know if he recognizes me yet. So I’m thinking I’m just going to keep my head down. I’m not going to make a big deal. This guy comes up to me, and he is so nice. He’s so polite and kind and gives me his hand and we shake hands. He’s like, Hey, I just wanted to meet you and let you know I’m this person. I just hope you’re having a great day. And I was like, Yeah, okay, great! Good to meet you. Inside I’m thinking is this like a setup of some kind? I’m getting a little nervous. But we have a totally pleasant exchange, and then we go our separate ways. So I was like, okay, well, you know, maybe things cooled down. Maybe things changed. So I was like, okay, let me go see his profile. I was still blocked. And it was like, okay, I think that’s an example of how an internet self and an offline self don’t always meet.

Matt Tully
They can diverge.

Samuel James
They can diverge. And the question people always want to ask is, What’s more real: my online self or my offline self? And my answer is, yes. They’re both real. It’s just that your offline self and your online self are immersed in habitats that bring out particular elements of who you are.

Matt Tully
I think the scary thing about that is that so often for most of us, probably for this guy that you were talking about, it’s not intentional. We’re not conscious of the fact that I’m cultivating one sense of self over here online and one sense of self with my family and my church and my friends in the real world. It happens under our radar almost unintentionally. Have you found that in yourself? Have you noticed that tendency?

Samuel James
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think I have felt especially an urge to be seen as the expert. If there’s a new conversation or a new topic, I’m like, Man, I really need to get a hot take out there. I don’t have Instagram, so that element of it I don’t necessarily encounter. But for some people it’s Instagram and wanting to appear a certain way, having your family like all dressed up all the time and it’s like, Oh man, this person’s life is awesome. Why don’t I have that? And for some people it’s a more intellectual pride thing, which actually I think may be more dangerous in the long run. It’s wanting to project to be a certain kind of person. And I think in my own heart what I’ve seen is that I turn to the internet to do this when I am most insecure about my life in that way. When I am feeling like I’m just not doing a good enough job as I want to be doing, or I haven’t achieved enough as I want to achieve, my temptation is to turn to the internet and say, Well, I can kind of control how people see me online. And so if I do things a certain way, if I do things in a calculated enough manner, I can get people to at least see me as the expert online, even if the people I’m living with and working with and fellowshipping with offline don’t have that impression.

Matt Tully
You can cultivate a community of followers, of subscribers, or what have you, online that don’t necessarily know the real you in the real

Samuel James In fact, it’s probably better if you’re wanting to do that so that people don’t actually know the real you in the real world.

Samuel James
In fact, it’s probably better if you’re wanting to do that so that people don’t actually know the real you, because if you show the real you, you’ll probably lose followers because we’re all sinners.

Matt Tully
You’re not quite as impressive.

Samuel James
Nobody’s as impressive as they are in real life. I’m tempted to go back to when there was a conversation around Instagram a few years ago where it was turning out that people were doing sponsored posts, but they weren’t revealing it.

Matt Tully
They weren’t disclosing it.

Samuel James
So they would take pictures of themselves wearing these super expensive outfits or taking these super expensive trips, and it was that a company was paying them to do this. And it turned out that a lot of people weren’t revealing that, and so it just looked like these luxurious lifestyles that were actually just commercials, basically. And that is actually more true of the internet than it’s not true, that most of what we present to the internet is a kind of commercial of the self.

42:48 - The Digitual Liturgy of Shame

Matt Tully
We’ve talked about authenticity, we’ve talked about outrage a little bit—another one of the digital liturgies that you highlight in the book—and a third one is shame. What do you mean by that?

Samuel James
The place of forgiveness is crucial to the Christian life—the idea that because we’re all sinners, because we are all at the mercy of God (who we offend with our sin), that we ought to be merciful with each other. That’s in the Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those trespass against us.” On the internet, however, the digital liturgy of what we talked about earlier, of just having this godlike control over everything you encounter, it leads not only to a controlling of our environment, but it leads to this punishing moral one. If somebody tells a joke that offends us, or if somebody does something or says something that really bothers us, then we feel a permission to make this person go away. And the illustration that I lead within the book is a little interesting because it’s an illustration from a journalist and her encounter with what she calls “shame culture” in the earlier days of the internet. She was on television, and an ex-boyfriend was on a panel with her. The ex-boyfriend basically, on a CSPAN panel that was about politics, starts just ripping into his ex-girlfriend, who’s right there, and just saying all kinds of mean and nasty things about her. The audience is in shock like, We don’t know what to do. Well, of course it goes viral. And so she ends up being the butt of comments that say what a horrible person she must be. She had no intention of getting into that in front of millions of people, but it just happened. And so she talks about how disorienting that experience was, of being the target of so much online shaming. It seems to me that the digital liturgy of shame is a direct modern replacement for repentance and redemption. Because we don’t have, in our expressive individualist culture, because we don’t have the categories of sin and redemption, what we do is we outsource this inherent feeling that we have.

Matt Tully
There’s a true recognition there, that there is such a thing as sin and transgression, but just not the tool to deal with it.

Samuel James
Absolutely. It’s always projected outward. It’s always projected onto groups, it’s always projected onto institutions, but the problem of sin is way more personal according to the gospel. And so what we do is we project the problem of sin on to other things, and then what we say is, Well, there’s no redemption for you. Once you’re on the bad side, you have to go away now. You have to be destroyed. That’s basically what is said in our culture.

Matt Tully
Cast out.

Samuel James
Absolutely. And I think that is a result of how we have jettisoned the concept of sin, of atonement, of forgiveness in our society. There’s a wonderful essay called “The Strange Persistence of Guilt” by Wilfred McClay, which I really think is an essential piece of writing where he examines this at length. What happens when you have people who feel guilty because we have consciences and our consciences convict us, but they are told from an early age that the guilt they feel is a psychological malady and that the real problem is outside of them?

46:33 - The Digital Liturgy of Consumption

Matt Tully
Another digital liturgy you talk about is consumption. What is that?

Samuel James
We’ve all been there, right? Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. You look up and it’s like midnight. You’re like, When I sat down it was 9:30. What happened? It’s just this mindless consumption. We even have language for it. We talk about binging Netflix. We talk about binging social media. There’s even a pornographically shaped lingo on the internet where even things that are not pornography are called “something porn.” So if you want to go watch earth porn, it’s basically just pictures of earth. If you want to see food porn, it’s just pictures of food. But the idea is that you are consuming this content just passively.

Matt Tully
And kind of excessively, perhaps.

Samuel James
Yeah. So you’re just like, Okay, I could go outside and I could see nature, but I’m just going to scroll pictures of earth. I could take my wife to a restaurant, but I’m just going to scroll pictures of food. So everything kind of becomes pornographically shaped on the internet to where it’s this second hand consumption.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the most interesting things about all of this, is that the internet is an endless stream of interesting things. There is so much there to consume, and so much of it is interesting. So how should we think about that? I think we know that it’s not healthy for us to just sit there and binge and scroll endlessly, and yet we feel ourselves drawn back towards it all the time, because there’s just always something interesting to look at.

Samuel James
Comedian Bo Burnham has a song called “Welcome to the Internet,” and the hook of the song is “Welcome to the internet. This is everything, everywhere all of the time.” It’s just like this absolute fire hose of existence that’s coming at us constantly. So I think the temptation there is that we can often turn to passive consumption to give ourselves like a self-therapy when we’re feeling anxious or when we don’t really want to just kind of rest in silence. We want some noise to drown out the insecurity or the wrestling with feelings. And then I think sometimes it’s honestly just that we get into a habit of it. It’s just so easy to just scroll and just stream.

Matt Tully
It’s funny. I found myself sometimes when I have my phone open and I’ll be looking at something, I’ll close the web browser, or what have you, or I’ll close the podcast app, and then I find myself seconds later pulling my phone back out and I just open it almost instinctively. I’ve seen how it’s not even conscious. It just happens.

Samuel James
In many cases, I’m not even looking for something. I just open it. I just open the tab or go back to the website or refresh the page or whatever. There’s a film called The Social Network, which is the dramatization of the founding of Facebook. The last scene—I don’t know if you remember this—the last scene of the film is him just refreshing his page to see if his ex-girlfriend has accepted his friend request. So there’s kind of this personal thread through it, but it’s also that the scene of somebody just mindlessly hitting refresh is just utterly symbolic of what these technologies have tended to unleash in the broader culture. We’re all just passively waiting for something to fill the void. And once you get hooked on that, it’s very difficult and it’s counterintuitive to peel yourself away from it. It just becomes so, so essential. Andrew Sullivan, who’s a journalist, wrote an essay several years ago called “I Used to Be a Human Being.” And he was talking about encountering and dealing with the way that his phone and his internet addiction had completely ruined his ability to read, to be silent, to just kind of lay in peace, to be okay alone with his thoughts. He got addicted to the noise. It was just constant. He just needed this constant new input. And so the title of that article, I think, is just so revealing—“I Used to Be a Human Being.” We know that something is off with the way we’re using this technology. It makes us stressed and it makes us frustrated, but we often can articulate why.

Matt Tully
I was going to say that the constant consumption of this information—this media, these videos, and these audio clips and posts—they’re not satisfying. Often we feel actually very unsatisfied and a sense of, Ugh, that was not what it was supposed to be. And yet it’s so hard to actually break the addiction.

Samuel James
Yeah. How many times have you gotten up from your desk or your chair and been like, Man, that Instagram session, or that Twitter session, was awesome! I just feel so edified. I feel like my mind is just so focused. Oftentimes what we’re just doing is we’re doing it out of habit. We’re doing it mindlessly. And then what happens is exactly what you said, just with pornography, it kind of leads to the sense of frustration—I know I should do better. That’s what it leaves us with. It leaves us with the sense that we didn’t get what we were looking for, but we don’t really know how to stop looking there.

51:35 - Why It Matters That We Are Embodied People

Matt Tully
That connects to something that you talked about before, the issue of our bodies and how these technologies can tempt us into thinking that we can transcend our bodies, that we don’t need to be bound by any bodily limits, whether that’s geography or attention or what have you. But you argue that one of the problems that we’re facing, even as Christians in particular, is we lack a robust theology of the body. We don’t have an appreciation for the importance, the significance of having an embodied existence from God. So what does that lack of understanding look like in practice? Help us see where we all might be expressing a deficient theology of the body.

Samuel James
It’s a great question. I think our tendency as evangelicals is to put so much emphasis on our spirits and our minds that we forget that we are embodied people. I think one real example of this is the advent of digital church services. When I talk to people who stream their church service, and not just when they’re sick, but all the time.

Matt Tully
Like, This is my church now.

Samuel James
Yeah, this is replacing going to church. When I talk to people who are in that mentality, every time they say the same thing, and that is, I can hear the sermon from here. And so what they’re saying when they say that is that going to church is mental downloading of information. And if I can mentally download information from my living room, why can’t I and why shouldn’t I?

Matt Tully
That’s more efficient.

Samuel James
Right. Actually, no, it matters for you to be in church because you are with your brothers and sisters in the Lord. And not only that, but you are physically present in a habitat, a liturgical habitat that is actually showing you the gospel. It’s not just mental download. It’s communion. It’s baptism. It’s singing. It’s fellowship. It’s praying with other people. These things are conscience forming just like the internet is. And I think part of the reason that we’re seeing more people say Well, I can just stay at home and watch church is that they haven’t been taught to think of themselves as embodied spirits. They’ve been trained to think of themselves as spirits, as if this is a wholly disembodied thing.

Matt Tully
Or even spirits with bodies, but we’re fundamentally spirits.

Samuel James
Right. That fake C. S. Lewis quote that goes viral every—

Matt Tully
What is that?

Samuel James
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” Totally fake. Not a real C. S. Lewis quote. So if you see somebody attributing that to C. S. Lewis, you can say that’s not real.

Matt Tully
Samuel James told me that wasn’t real.

Samuel James
That’s right. We tend to think of ourselves as essentially souls, and our bodies are problems to overcome.

Matt Tully
Or the vehicle that carries us around in this life.

Samuel James
The vehicle that just carries us around. But eschatologically, that’s not true. We’re going to have resurrection bodies. We are going to be embodied creatures forever. The Lord is going to make us just like him, and the Lord Jesus, right now, is sitting on his throne, on the right hand of the Father, embodied. He has a body. That is the ultimate vindication of our bodies. And what that means is that our bodies are blessings to embrace, not obstacles to try to transcend.

Matt Tully
But how does that fit? How do we know where the limits of where technology is becoming this vehicle for transcending our bodies? I think of even something as simple as Jesus. Jesus rode a donkey. A donkey, in a sense, in the saddle that he was sitting on is a form of technology that helped him, in some definitions, transcend the limits of his physical body. It allowed him to travel further without getting as tired, perhaps. That’s where the crux is—how do we bring together and affirm our bodies and our embodiedness, but also use technology wisely?

Samuel James
Absolutely. And there are more examples than that. The nets to catch fish or something like that. It’s a great question. And I think Andy Crouch has really nailed this distinction when he talks about the difference between devices and instruments. He says instruments are are pieces of technology that exist to extend a person’s real physical capabilities in an embodied context. For example, an instrument would be a bicycle. The bicycle is clearly a piece of technology that amplifies what you can do, but you’re still involved with pushing the pedals. You are physically involved in that technology, and that technology basically serves to center and amplify you as a whole person. A device is different. A device uses technology to essentially replace human involvement. So this would be an example of AI. The difference between those kinds of technologies are that one kind of technology still helps us to be whole, embodied persons, and it just helps us to do it in a way that’s beneficial to us and to other people. But then the other kind of technology—the devices—those tend to promise us that if we will actually recede into the background as whole persons, if we will let technology take over, then we can get what we want even more easily.

57:08 - Digital Sleep

Matt Tully
On that point, one of the most insightful quotes from the book—I had to stop and kind of just think for a little while about what you said—you talk about how digital devices in particular, and the worlds that we can create through them, the disembodied digital worlds that we can create and inhabit through them, that they have this way of causing us to desire digital sleep rather than real world wakefulness. Unpack that. What is digital sleep?

Samuel James
When I think of technology, and internet technology in particular, I tend to think of this kind of passive, totally inert sense that I want the world to come to me on my screen. And if I’m insecure about how I look, if I’m insecure about the kind of job I have, or the kind of house I live in, the kind of person I am, then the answer is for me to whip out my digital technology. And then this will keep me safe from people judging me from me being insecure. I can encounter the world just the way I want to. I can reveal myself to the world in just the way I want to. And I think what that means is it’s basically this retreat. It’s a sleep. It’s a I don’t want to engage with the body that the Lord gave me, or the life that the Lord has given me, or the responsibilities that he’s given me right here. I’d rather dream.

Matt Tully
I think in the context of the book you’re talking about the film Inception from Christopher Nolan. For those who haven’t seen it, you should probably go see it. What’s the premise there, and how does that fit into this?

Samuel James
The premise of the film is that at some point in the future there’s a technology called dream sharing. And what they can do is they can give you a sedative and they can connect you to a device and people can actually enter your dreams.

Matt Tully
You can share dreams together.

Samuel James
You can share dreams, and like your subconsciouses are talking to each other, and that’s a way to get information from people that they’ve buried in their subconscious. And so there’s one particular scene in the film where the protagonists are taken to the basement of the man who makes the sedative. And what they see in the basement is dozens of people who are kind of like lying in cots, all connected to these dream sharing devices. And they say, What’s going on here? And they say, Well, they all come down here to sleep and to dream together for hours on end each day. And one of the characters says, They come here to fall asleep? And the maker of the sedative, the chemist, says, No, they come here to wake up. The dream has become their reality. And so the idea that this digital sleep can actually become what we feel is most real, most important—this is where we live; this is where our emotions are invested—is such a real danger and a temptation for us in a technological age. So the question is not, Are we going to live in a digital age? Because we definitely are and will continue to do that. The question is, Will we be wakeful in an age where it’s so easy to fall asleep?

01:00:22 - We Can’t Construct Our Own Reality—This Is Good News

Matt Tully
You argue in the book that one of the fundamental differences between a Christian worldview found in the Bible and the worldview cultivated by so many of these technologies around us is that Christians believe that we can’t construct our reality. We can’t go into our dreams and construct a sense of self and identity for ourselves that we then control. Rather, we try to cling, I think is the word that you use, to the meaning that we’ve already been given, to the reality that God has imposed on us. But to many in our culture today, I think that is a really countercultural idea. The idea that the meaning for our lives, the reality that we have to be defined by—our identities—is something that’s given to us, rather than something that we control or build. Speak to the person who maybe wouldn’t put it in that language, but nevertheless feels like there is truth in that. I don’t love the idea of being controlled or bound or restricted by a meaning that someone is imposing on me. How can that actually be good news that we are, in these ways, controlled or restricted?

Samuel James
That’s a great question. I think the essence of what it means to be free is to be free to be exactly who you were made to be. The question of freedom and the question of identity is tied to our creation. So whatever we are meant to be, whatever we are created to be, the closer we get to that, the freer we will be. So just like a piece of technology is a desirable piece of technology to the degree that it fulfills exactly what its creator wants it to do, that’s kind of the same thing with human beings. We are created for a purpose. We are created with purpose and intentionality. And the closer we get to that, the more freedom and the more purpose and the deeper our identity will become in our own minds. It’s not a question of inventing our identity; it’s a question of finding it and receiving it.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that that definition of freedom and what you just said, that freedom is defined as we’re free to be who we were made to be, whereas it seems like the world’s definition today is that freedom is not having been made to be anything. Freedom is fundamentally about not having to conform to something that someone said about us. So how do we think about that difference? That’s a pretty fundamental different definition there.

Samuel James
Well, it hasn’t led to greater self-fulfillment. We are a digital age, and we are an expressive individualist age. As a person sitting here in 21st century America, I have almost a limitless ability to curate my identity with very little things in my way. For the average person, the same is true of them. It has made us miserable. It has made us exhausted. One thing I like to tell pastors and people who are ministering to the current generation is get rid of the idea that the average millennial is just this totally self-satisfied, impenetrable, can’t be reached with the gospel person, because the opposite is true. There is a lot of woundedness. There’s a lot of tiredness. There’s a lot of exhaustion. There’s a lot of search for something else.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting. In all the tech optimism language that sometimes these tech leaders will kind of spout, there’s this utopian ideal that is often put forward that these technologies, these abilities that we are offered, are going to lead to happiness and joy and personal freedom and expression and deeper community. But it does seem like that’s the case, that it feels like there is so much anxiety today, so much depression and discouragement and social breakdown today, in part because of these technologies that promised the opposite.

Samuel James
I think if listeners want to check out the work of someone named Jean Twenge, she wrote a book called iGen, and she’s very active in this sociological research. Some of the data that they’ve uncovered about when depression and anxiety have started to peak with millennials and younger, they really trace it to the late 2000s, and in 2008–2010 in particular, which is the advent of the iPhone. The idea there is that that’s not a coincidence, that’s not an accident. When this technology became ambient, when it became something that we could take with us wherever we went, the result was not just limitless freedom and satisfaction, but we actually found ourselves oppressed by these technologies. And I think that’s part of what comes when we are trying so hard to craft our own identity, when we want to kind of control our environment. We just realized that we can’t. That’s the problem. We can’t. We’re not God. We can’t actually give ourselves an identity. We can’t control our world. And so the most we can do is to kind of immerse ourselves into our technology to make us forget that fact—digital sleep. And so in those moments where we’re awake, when we have to encounter the world as it really is, we realize that we’re finite, we’re broken, we’re limited, we’re sinful, and we need more than technology. We need a Savior to transform us from the inside out.

01:05:38 - How to Live in a World Immersed in Technology

Matt Tully
What would you say to the Christian listening who accepts all that you’re saying and wants to embrace the value of our embodied relationships, but feels like they’re constantly swimming against the tide in that? They feel frustrated and even uncertain how to move forward when so much of our communities are happening online. Just to live in our world today requires plugging into the matrix, so to speak, in ways that feel inherently damaging or at least dangerous.

Samuel James
Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Which, by the way, we might edit this out, but I don’t know if you’ve read Atomic Habits by James clear. What does he say? Best way to get rid of a bad habit? Develop a good habit.

Matt Tully
Replace it with a good habit.

Samuel James
It’s like, this guy’s writing Scripture and theology, and he doesn’t even know it. But anyway, Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. If you want to create a new way of living and feeling, don’t primarily focus and start with what you have to get rid of. Start with what you have to add in. For any of us Christians who are feeling like, I want to have this kind of existence, but it’s just so hard because I live in a digital age, don’t focus on that. I think the key is to start building these healthy habits into our daily rhythms, as much as it’s in our power. I don’t think people should be motivated by guilt and shame here. I don’t think that’s going to build the life that the Lord is looking for in each of us. I think what we have to do is we have to be captivated by this vision of what it means to be whole people in Scripture. And if that really captivates our hearts, I think we’re going to take measures to gravitate toward that. And I think it can be simple as give that person a call, not just a text. Or, go out to lunch with that person; don’t just check in on their profile and see how they’re doing.

Matt Tully
Talk about that texting and calling thing. That’s something that I know I’ve experienced, and I’ve heard many other people give voice to that. There’s this preference and lack of comfort with talking on the phone, which is a pretty disembodied type of thing to do, but even that is like too much for us. And so instead, we prefer to just send a text.

Samuel James
I’ve thought about that a lot. On one hand, I get it. I get that when you have to talk to a person on the phone, you kind of have to deal with awkward silences, you have to try to listen to their intonation.

Matt Tully
There’s also the asynchronous dynamic, too, where you can send a text anytime, and they can read it and respond anytime.

Samuel James
Right. And if you call somebody at 11:30 at night, you’re probably not going to get a good conversation out of that. But, again, I think because we are embodied people, we communicate with more than just our mental words. We communicate with our voices. So if you and I went out to lunch and we’re talking about how each of us are doing in our marriages and our kids, I can text you, Hey, how’s everything going? And you can text back, Good. And as far as I know, you either said that as Good! or Good. I don’t know. But if I ask you over lunch, How’s life going? How’s church going? How’s work going? and you go, * . . . Good*.

Matt Tully
You hear the pause.

Samuel James
You hear the pause, and then you get the kind of like, Do I want to go into this? Now, that may or may not be a cue depending on our relationship, but what you’ve just done is you have communicated, using your whole self, that actually maybe something is not that great and maybe you’d actually really like to talk about it. And that is what we completely miss with these technological ways of communication that strip us of our voice, that strip us of our embodied personality.

01:09:36 - The Key to Meaningful Transformation

Matt Tully
You mentioned habits a few minutes ago, and it leads me to one of my final questions. When it comes back to what it looks like for us to push back, as Christians, against these digital liturgies that threaten to kind of overtake our lives, and maybe already have in so many ways, we’ve all felt the frustration and the failure of trying to do that and failing over and over again. We’ve all been there. You talk about how, when it comes to breaking the bonds of these kinds of addictions to technologies, you write about your experience:

For most of my life, I have believed that the way meaningful transformation works is this:

  1. I earnestly pray for and try to generate strong feelings.
  2. Once these strong feelings are achieved, doing the right thing will feel natural.

And yet you say that you’ve come to discover that that way of thinking about change for us misses a really important biblical theme—maybe the key, or a key, to actually making progress. So what is that missing key? And why are we so often missing it?

Samuel James
I think the missing key is habit. The missing key is the idea that there are particular practices that I need to put into place that will actually train my affections. We tend to think of change as being starting emotionally and then going outward.

Matt Tully
Or we might not even say emotionally, but starting spiritually. We think, even in our circles, perhaps, the answer is “the gospel.” It’s loving God more. It’s a repenting of our sin more or better. So how is that not the right answer?

Samuel James
Well, I think it is the right answer, but I think we need to avoid a reductionistic understanding of the gospel. The gospel is not simply mental information that I can download, and now that you’ve downloaded that mental information, go and do likewise. The gospel is the good news that God became a human with a human body. Jesus Christ is embodied. He was embodied when he was on earth, he was embodied at the cross, and he’s embodied forevermore, resurrected. So the gospel is an affirmation of who we are as whole persons. Not only that, but the gospel tells us that this embodied self is actually created in God’s image. It’s a good thing that we ought to steward. So I think the answer really is the gospel, but it’s not simply, Just think these thoughts, and you’ll be fine. It’s about how the Bible gives us practices. It gives us spiritual disciplines. In the old Testament, the Lord didn’t just write the Ten Commandments on stone and say, Okay, now you guys figure out how best to obey this, and you’re on your own. The Lord gave them festivals. The Lord gave them a Sabbath. The Lord gave them particular types of clothing. He gave them a tabernacle and later a temple.

Matt Tully
Even the sacrificial system.

Samuel James
Even the sacrificial system. The Lord surrounded His people with events and physical rituals. They didn’t contain salvation in themselves, but what they did was they continually pressed home on the hearts of the worshipers the promises of God. And that’s what we have as New Testament people. We have spiritual practices that press that on our heart. And the primary one is corporate worship; assembling together in the local church. Not simply to just check it off our list or to mentally download the sermon, but to encounter one another, brothers and sisters in the Lord, to see visual manifestations of the gospel take place. And I really think that for most Christians, the place to start is there. If you’re wanting to have a more humane approach to your life, start with the people who you are around every Sunday. Ask those people out to lunch. Be there on Sunday morning. Invest in those relationships. Create that sense of embodied connection with those people, because that is the spiritual practice that the Lord gives us. And there are other things, too, as well. Obviously, personal Scripture reading and personal prayer.

Matt Tully
Even during corporate worship, there are two particular physical practices that very directly teach us the gospel—baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Samuel James
Absolutely. And if anybody wants to read a really good book about that, our colleague Kevin Emmert has a book coming out called The Water and the Blood, which I highly recommend. It’s specifically about how those two practices shape us as Christians. But yeah, you’re exactly right. Our church worship services are given to us from Scripture as physical places, as physical habitats, that shape us. So I think that’s where our attention needs to go first and foremost.

Matt Tully
If that’s true, if from the very beginning, going all the way back to the ancient Israel but even through to the New Testament church, the Christian religion has been irreducibly embodied, how is it that we’ve lost sight of that? How have we lost an appreciation for that fundamental facet of our faith and the way that that shapes us?

Samuel James
It’s a really good question, and I don’t know that I can answer that question fully. I would love to read something that talked about exactly that. I suspect, though, that part of the issue has been that we’ve over-spiritualized the gospel primarily to make it more efficient. In order to kind of help our evangelistic efforts, in order to feel like we’re growing the kingdom, we’ve kind of reduced discipleship to, Okay, are you going to make a decision to follow Christ now? Okay, check this box on this card. And I’m not saying there’s no place for that kind of thing. I am saying that I think it is possible to focus so much on whether or not we are eliciting people’s emotional reaction, and then can we get them to say yes when we ask them the key question? And then we just leave it at that. We don’t really disciple them into what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And so I think downstream from that is where we just kind of focus on the world of the mental—mental ascent and redefining the Christian life to be this purely mental exercise. But honestly, the Lord’s Day, the corporate worship service, is a reminder every week that we are physical people. And I think no matter the contours of church history that have made us tend to minimize that in our own tradition, I think we fight back against it every Sunday if we’re doing it biblically.

Matt Tully
It’s fascinating because even this is like a great microcosm of what we started our conversation talking about, the way that technologies can subtly, even good technologies that do good things for us, can subtly shape us in ways that are sub-christian. I think of even the way that preaching can, through the advent of whether it was radio in years past or the internet today and the ability to stream sermons from across the globe, that has led to so many good things, and yet it also can maybe reinforce certain ideas about what church is and what it’s purpose is that are not right.

Samuel James
And like we said earlier, the task on us is not to pretend to live in a world without these technologies; it’s to name the world for what it is. It’s to say that these technologies are doing this, and I will live in this world, but I will not be of it. I will not have my conscious shaped primarily by these technologies. I will believe what Scripture tells me about what it means to be a human created in God’s image, what it means to be a follower of a risen Christ, and I will pursue that in community with other people.

01:17:15 - Lightning Round

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final set of questions, I’d love to do a lightning round with you, Samuel, and hear your quick, off the cuff response to some of the most pressing questions, at least for me, when it comes to some of these technological topics. First question: What’s the worst social media platform out there, and why do you say that?

Samuel James
TikTok. It’s irredeemable. It’s mindless. It’s all the bad digital liturgies rolled up into one.

Matt Tully
What might social media look like ten years from now?

Samuel James
That’s a great question. I tend to think it’s going to be more interactive. It’s probably going to use more augmented reality, maybe even some virtual reality. It’s going to be more convincing in its replication and replacement of—

Matt Tully
Is that a good thing in some ways? Does that promise to bring more of the nuances of physical embodiment to? It seems like that’s what’s behind a lot of this is I want you to be able to stand there and look at a whole avatar in front of you and see their gestures and see their facial expressions. Could that be a good thing?

Samuel James
But it’s not really their gestures. It’s not really their facial expressions. It’s their image of themselves. It’s an image that you have control over. You can craft it. So, I think we’ll see about what these technologies can actually do, but I tend to think that this will leave us where we are.

Matt Tully
Should we be afraid of AI? And if so, what exactly should we be afraid of?

Samuel James
I don’t know if afraid is the right word. I think we should be mindful of AI, and I think we should be mindful of it precisely because AI often comes from a worldview that seeks to replace human involvement with technological achievement. So I think we should be mindful. I don’t like saying we should be afraid of it I think. Honestly, I kind of wish more people would realize that we are the creators. We have power over this. We can junk it if we want to. There’s no cosmic law that says we have to produce this technology.

Matt Tully
When it comes to mitigating all of the damaging effects of these digital technologies on our society, what’s the right balance between personal responsibility and some of the things that you’ve talked about, even as a Christian, in your book, and government intervention helping to control things? What would you say is the right balance there?

Samuel James
I think government intervention is appropriate in many situations. I don’t believe that twelve-year-olds should just be able to access these platforms and to be able to bring their iPhones to school and everything like that. I think we should show some will for the common good there. At the same time, legislative efforts are not going to help us become whole people. They can be exertions of our political will for the common good, but they’re not going to solve spiritual problems. And so this starts, I think, at an individual family level, and then it goes to a church level, and then we can talk about bringing people in from levels of power to help and especially protect vulnerable people, like children, from these platforms.

Matt Tully
What do you think about taking technology fasts, so to speak, from time to time? Have you ever tried that? Do you think that’s a helpful way to think about this?

Samuel James
I think it is. I honestly think that’s probably the simplest and most straightforward thing that most of us can do. A lot of people, for their work, they can’t just delete their accounts. But one thing they can do is they can take breaks.

Matt Tully
Go on vacation and don’t bring it.

Samuel James
Andy Crouch, in his book The Tech-Wise Family, which is a great book, I think the system he recommends and that he presents as what his family does is one hour every day, one day every week, and one week every month or year. I can’t remember that last part. But it’s the idea of just these kind of incremental breaks. Start with one hour a day, and then go to one day a week where you’re not checking your phone. And Christians have a great day of the week where that comes ready made for us—Sunday. So just start there. Take breaks. One thing I do is I give my wife my Twitter password, and I say, Change my password and hold on to it for a few weeks. Let me just take a break. And we do that for each other. I have her Instagram password. She has my Twitter password. And we’re kind of like partners in crime in this because we know each other’s tendencies. We’ve talked to each other so many times like, I’m so tired of this! I think I’m slipping back into the wormhole again. Can you just change my password?

Matt Tully
But being willing to go that extreme, because changing a password makes it so you literally cannot get into it without her giving you that access. I think that’s a good principle there, that sometimes, to maybe borrow a phrase from Jesus, we have to be willing to cut off our arm or poke out our eye to avoid that temptation and not think it’s no as big a deal as it actually is.

Samuel James
And I think we would be surprised to find how many people around us might be willing to do it with us too. I think we tend to think that we’re the only ones who have problems moderating, or we’re the only ones who feel exhausted. I think it’s a lot of us. And so I think going out to lunch with somebody and saying, Hey, why don’t we help each other take a month off from our social media platforms. Honestly, I think you’d find a lot of people who’d be very excited about that.

Matt Tully
When do you plan to let your kids get a smartphone?

Samuel James
Oh man. So my kids are six, four, and six months. Not for a long time. That’s a good question. I tend to think that the phone question, in general, should not probably arrive before the driver’s license. There’s probably some listeners who are upset about what I just said and will be like, How am I supposed to keep track when they’re at school? And I get it. This is not dogmatic. This is not like Thus sayeth the Lord. But that seems to be a fairly clean thing. And I know some families that will give their kids phones that are totally locked down except to call mom and dad.

Matt Tully
Some kind of dumb phone or something.

Samuel James
Yeah, some kind of dumb phone. And I think there are solutions like that that are good ideas, but I do think that one of the things I’m trying really hard to do as a parent of very young children is to give my children memories of an at least partially screen-free childhood so that they’ll be able to think back on growing up and think about the games that they played with mom and dad, or the pretend that they played with each other. Because I have those memories too. You and I are of a similar age. We’re in that generation that saw all this technological advancement in social media, and so you and I can think back to growing up without these things, and that’s something that we treasure.

Matt Tully
It’s interesting that younger generations maybe don’t have that experience. It’s actually a very different world than it was even twenty years ago.

Samuel James
And it feels a little bit to me, at least, like the circle is closing a little bit. The generation that came after us is more willing to say, Why do I have to have this? Why do I have to have this phone? I think it’s people like you and I—our age—that our lives were changed so much by these devices that we just went all in. And I think our kids' generations are probably going to have a little bit more of a sober mindedness about it.

Matt Tully
If you had to pick one piece of practical advice for our listeners, people who are adequately sobered by this conversation, beyond picking up a copy of your book and reading that, because it is a wonderful, helpful, wise book, alerting us to some of these things, what would be that practical piece of advice for a next step? What can I do today or tomorrow to help take steps toward more biblical wisdom in the face of this?

Samuel James
Buy three copies of the book. I’m just kidding.

Matt Tully
Give away a couple.

Samuel James
I think a great first step for all of us is to go to somebody who knows us, who loves us, who has some kind of presence in our lives and say, Hey, can you be honest with me for one second? How do you think I’m doing on this? Do I seem distracted? Do I seem discontented? Do I seem mad? Do I seem passive in my consumption? Be honest with me. What kind of person do you feel like I am in these things? Have an honest conversation with somebody, and that person might have to say some hard things and say, Yeah, I feel like you’re always on your phone, or You don’t really respond when people ask for help on stuff, or I think you’re ignoring your kids. That’s where it’s really getting personal.

Matt Tully
So don’t ask if you’re not ready to get that feedback.

Samuel James
If you’re not ready to hear hard truths, then go to Jesus and pray that you’ll be ready to hear hard truths, because we all need to hear hard truths. But I think that would be a great first step. But then second of all, don’t get bogged down in shame once you hear those hard truths. Trust in the gospel. The gospel is the opposite of shame culture. It’s not If you are guilty of this, then you need to go away. It’s You are guilty of this. Jesus Christ took your penalty on the cross. He died, he rose again, he’s King forever, and now His Spirit is living inside of you to grow to be more like him. Run with that. Claim that forgiveness. Claim that power to live well in light of the gospel, and pursue it from there.

Matt Tully
Don’t forget the gospel as we pursue these habits. Samuel, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us and offer us some of this good, important wisdom for living in this world today.

Samuel James
Thanks, Matt. Enjoyed it.

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