I have the privilege of having a job in which I get to take Communion to the homebound on a regular basis. Many of these folks are elderly and many are deeply committed Catholics. One of the things I hear repeatedly is a lament that their grandchildren, though often raised in Catholic families and often with twelve, if not sixteen, years of Catholic schooling, do not have much or any interest in continuing to practice the faith. It is usual for them to speculate about some of the reasons for this, which are obviously various and mutually enforcing: the world is increasingly “secular,” even Catholic schools; there are new moralities, especially where sex is concerned; the internet exposes kids to a range of views they never used to encounter; many parishes are lukewarm at best, and some have adopted a policy of accommodation with the modern world, and in turn, have failed to provide adequate Catholic formation. And so forth.
Certainly all these and more are part of the picture, and important. Yet here I want to suggest that there is another biggie, arguably one of the biggest, which I never hear added to this list: not the content of technology, but the use of it. Or, perhaps more accurately, as I will suggest, its use of us. What do I have in mind?
When I talk about “technology,” I mean to simply refer in general to our use of tools. The ones that dominate our world most obviously these days are of course smartphones and computers of all kinds, with their attendant applications like Facebook and text messages. But I am also talking about automobiles, airplanes, screens of all kinds, and also all the high-tech devices that make modern medicine, science, commerce, transportation, as well as warfare, possible.
I want to suggest that there are some largely unnoticed negative consequences in our intensive use of such technology, and not just that it distracts us, makes us anti-social, and that it is part of the motor that is destroying the environment. That is all true. But below I want to underline the way that the ubiquity of such tools makes Christianity unattractive and increasingly difficult to practice by cultivating moral and intellectual habits directly opposed to the Gospel. Technology makes us different people—people who are less inclined to be Catholic.
To see this we are going to have to think about what it is to think Christianly about technology, and when we do this we will see that it should be no surprise that our elders’ grandkids—who might be our kids—have little or no interest in the Church.
It is necessary before going further, however, for me to say that I am no technophobe—I will not be suggesting that because there are dangers with technology we have to simply return to a time before electricity. To be critical of some of the effects of technology on us is not to reject it wholesale, were that even possible.
What I will be suggesting, rather, is that we have to develop an asceticism, a life-giving discipline, around our use of tools, in order to preserve and recover what their intensive use endangers. Just as the Church gives us disciplines around food, drink, and sex in order to preserve our freedom towards these very good gifts of God, so freedom around technology—also a good gift from God—today requires perhaps even greater discipline.
Thinking Christianly About Technology
Modern technology is so significant for the formation of children, and all of us, because it forms our habits. And as any good OCIA program or Catechism will tell you, Christianity is all about the cultivation of habits—the moral and religious habits that make up the virtues and the vices that constitute who we are—our character. Moral habits of this kind are cultivated the same way that other habits are: by repetition and practice (and always with the help of grace).
Do you want to become more generous and self-sacrificial in order to be more Christ-like? The only way to do it is to find a thousand little actions, in day-to-day living, that are generous and self-sacrificial. Give to the poor. Forgive your offensive coworker. Do kind things you do not want to do for your family members. Smile at strangers when you are grumpy. Likewise, if you do not do this, and you take those thousand opportunities rather to practice greed and selfishness, those are sure-fire practices that will cultivate not good moral habits, but bad ones. Virtues are holy habits, vices are sinful ones. Christianity is all about becoming a saint, becoming is saint is about cultivating virtues, and virtues are won by all the little ways we habituate ourselves every day. This, I think, is just Christianity 101, or it should be.
The blind spot, for us, is all the little ways that tools habituate us every day. When we drive a car, for instance, we become habituated to speed. We get used, in other words, to the fact that we can go sixty miles an hour, and this quickly morphs into the habit of thinking that we should be able to get anywhere within a mile of where we are in about one minute. And we know that the habit has really taken hold, because, like all habits, it affects not just the way that we think, but how we feel and act. So, when I am expecting to get somewhere at the rate of a mile a minute, and then I hit a traffic jam, I am immediately impatient, irritated, and maybe even a little indignant (as if my car gave me a right to go fast). This is how I know my car has gotten deep down into my soul.
It is important to note that this has very little to do with what we think or what our attitudes are. No: if we ride in a car we just cannot help but be this way. Whatever our better intentions are, our first intention in getting into a car is to go fast. And so, “I want to go fast!” becomes part of who we are. The placement of our body creates the disposition, and our mind, more often than not, has no choice but to follow the placement of our bodies.
I can tell myself over and over again not to get used to going fast when I drive, but there is nothing I can do about it. I can likewise try to “psych myself out” and remain calm when I am sitting in a traffic jam, but such mental gymnastics are usually of little avail. The very fact that we have to use them shows that the position of our body is more determinative than what we are trying to do with our souls. Or rather, as Catholics know well, what we do with our bodies is the way that we shape our souls. Our addiction to speed shows that there is a significant part of technology that is always using us while we are using it.
We also carry the habits we form in the car with us into other areas of life. They shape our total character, not just what we do behind the wheel. So when I come home from a commute, freshly practiced at wanting more speed, it is not a coincidence that I snap at my two year old when he does not get into his booster seat for dinner as quickly as I would have liked.
But of course the car is just one example. Consider another obvious one, the smart phone. There are lots of habits these form in us, and all the more intensely and quickly because they become, literally, attached to our bodies and so almost like a second brain in a way that even a car does not.
Perhaps the most obvious habit it forms is the desire to be distracted by something new. When I have been texting with friends in a series of regular exchanges for an hour or so, and then the conversation dies down, I notice I have a strong and constant urge for something new to pop up on my phone. I feel like I need a “hit” to keep me going. This is both a craving for novelty, for the next new thing, and a craving for distraction. The phone trains me to get bored very easily, and it discourages my ability to focus or think deeply about anything—all I want is the latest trivial update, and that keeps my thinking in the shallow end.
A final, often noted, habit that comes with smartphones is the preference for screen-time over face-to-face interactions. Everyone has heard the jokes about a group of twenty high school students sitting silently around a room together all at their phones communicating with each other through media. As many have noted, this preference for the virtual over the real stunts authentic community formation in profound ways.
When we are online, we can meticulously manage the way that we present ourselves, in a way that we cannot in person. Increasingly, then, we avoid in-person contact when possible, out of fear of not being able to control our encounter in the same way. This means that normal abilities for in-the-flesh relationships go underdeveloped and this has, and is having, catastrophic social consequences.
Technology is Not Morally Neutral
While all of this will be relevant for why our pews are getting empty, my main purpose so far has just been to convince you that our tools habituate us—they form our character and our dispositions, what we like and what we do not. We do not use them without them using us. This is true of all tools, but intensive tool use like we have in the modern world, as opposed to an ax or riding a horse, habituates us as never before. If you want proof of this from a secular angle, there is no better place to look than Nicolas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
What all this means is that our use of technology is not morally or religiously neutral. The kinds of devices we go about using all day long have a profound effect on the kind of people we are. And of course, that determines everything: what we like to do, who we like to hang out with, even the kinds of things we are likely to believe.
In other words, if Christianity is all about habits, then technology has everything to do with Christianity.
But this is not all. We miss the major impact that our tools have had on the practice of Christianity in our day if we do not see exactly how the habits and dispositions of technology users can directly oppose the habits and dispositions required for Christian flourishing. Let us take a look at some of these contrasts.
We have mentioned that technology cultivates the desire for speed. This obviously carries with it an increasing inability to tolerate going slow.
Yet the ability to go slow, and spend time—you might even say “waste” time—simply “being with” God and neighbor is essential to Christianity. It is the heart of prayer, and it is the heart of fellowship. But no one is going to practice their faith with much enthusiasm or consistency if they always feel like it is taking too long.
We have mentioned that desire for the next beep or buzz, and this (especially coupled with our habits of consumption) has easily become an ongoing quest for novelty. We spend our lives in pursuit of the “next new thing,” and we are so easily bored when it does not come: not only the next beep, but the next phone, the next gadget, the next scientific breakthrough, the next Amazon package.
Yet learning to be a Christian demands saying the same old prayers over and over, staring at the same icon for hours, or even over years, in silent prayer, and learning to love the most ordinary and unexciting people in our lives, day in and day out, over a lifetime, long after they have ceased to be new and exciting. Indeed, it is usually in these unflashy and, to the modern mind, very boring things, that our tradition tells us we really learn to find God.
Relatedly, our tools and the noise of our lives constantly distract us. We get used to soothing our lack of inner peace with a thousand external stimuli. And this is primarily a lack of attention, the virtue that is the opposite of our constant quest for more stimulation.
Yet attention is essential to what theologians have always called contemplation, which our tradition places among the highest activities of Christians. It is not just “thinking,” but attending to reality (whether divine or created) in all its beauty. It is essential to worship, and it requires us to focus our minds and our hearts and our senses. We would even be right to say we cannot be truly happy without it.
Our tools also make us value the future over the past. The demand for novelties is the demand for “new things.” But new things only come in the future. The more our devices train us to distraction and novelty, the more we develop an unconscious but definite sense that then will be better than now. This only reinforces our common perception that, in light of modern advances in science and technology, the future cannot but be better than the past. All this becomes not so much a rationally thought-out position, as a sort of visceral inclination for anything but what we have now. Once again, our machines push this view on us largely without us knowing it. They secretly determine what we love. And we might not know why, but we love the future and we scorn the past.
Yet Christianity not only does not scorn the past, it lives from the past. It is a living tradition of loving attention to the slowly won insights of long dead men and women. Trust in this tradition—and thus a certain identification with the past—is a large part of what faith is. And so having faith will be increasingly difficult if we are always living in the future. If you cannot love the past you will not be a Christian for very long.
Finally, we have already highlighted some of the ways that our machines degrade community. But we should add that communication technology has so greatly increased our range of potential electronic “friends,” that local community becomes unnecessary. It is replaced by a “network” (which we sometimes mistakenly call community) of all those people we keep in the orbit of our cars, planes, texts, emails, “posts,” and phone calls. Each person is the center of his own network, and network is not community.
But Christianity demands local community. It is local community. The body of Christ is a social body and not just a collection of individuals that occasionally gather for pious exercises. The first Christians had “all things in common” and they “always kept together,” says the Acts of the Apostles (2:44). And, on another level, but perhaps more pointedly, never was there a religion that took root deep in anyone’s heart that was not supported by a warm and confident band of fellow believers in the flesh. It is hard enough being a Catholic today; it is impossible without stoking the flames of faith by constant encouragement from our friends. Catholics without community will not be Catholics for long.
It’s Not “Just” a Tool
This list should impress us. It shows how some of the most vital aspects of Catholicism—community, tradition, faith, prayer, contemplation—are directly undermined by the dominant habits of technology use. Technology then, in a strange way, and usually without anyone intending it, ends up taking aim at the very fabric of Catholicism. It shapes our character when we use it, whether we want it to or not, so that those who use it intensively are likely to be disinclined to be Catholics. This is especially true for young people today, many of whom have never had the privilege of knowing any other world.
As I said, then, tool use is not neutral, or indifferent; it is deeply moral and religious action. We often hear, “It’s just a tool, . . . I just use it to get around, . . . I just use it to keep up with people.” Those are lies we are encouraged to make our own, and harmful ones too; they are part of the ideology of a technological society.
This does not mean that every push of a button or trip to the store involves us in mortal sin. But it does give another powerful reason why more and more people and especially young people are checking out of the Church. They are simply not interested in it; they are interested in the things their material culture makes them love.
And this explains, too, why we are losing even the majority of those who go to Catholic schools. People learn from schools more than just the content of the curriculum; they learn the form of life that is embodied in what happens at school every day, hour by hour. So when even the most doctrinally orthodox and rigorous curriculum is conveyed largely by way of modern gadgets, the student is pulled, in a way, in two directions at once: she learns one thing in religion class and another by the computer she takes notes with for the same class.
Pile all this hidden character formation on top of two dozen other ways it is difficult to be a Catholic today, and add to it the normal temptations and desires of youth, and it should be no surprise when Confirmation becomes Catholic graduation.
Technological Asceticism
But this is no counsel of despair. For there are Catholics today, after all. There are even young people who stay or even become Catholics, and often with great zeal. And increasingly, when I meet these young people, they are sustaining and nurturing their faith with precisely those essential aspects of the Gospel we mentioned above: intentional face to face community, blocks of time set aside for quiet and prayer, and study of the riches of the Tradition. It is no surprise, then, that these same young people are also actively disciplining their use of technology. They limit their “screen time,” choose low-tech schools—I have even met one that does not have a phone!
And we can do the same thing. We can choose this sort of technological asceticism for the sake of the Gospel.
For thinking Christianly about technology means seeing it as part of, and not separate from, the whole set of practices and disciplines that we take on as part of a life devoted to Christ and his Church. We know that strip clubs, violent movies, junk food, drugs and alcohol, and bad company have detrimental effects on our faith, and we go about limiting or excluding them altogether for ourselves and our children.
We can, we must, do the same with technology. We can look at screens as little as possible. We can leave our phones at home or at least turn them off for some of the day. We can close our social media accounts and call people or visit them in person. We can walk or bike or ride the bus as often as possible. We can listen to the birds instead of a podcast or music when we go for our jog. We can cook our meals together with our friends rather than running through McDonald’s or popping something in the microwave.
This is technological asceticism. All these sorts of disciplines bear the twin movements away from technology and toward what you might call real relationships. And the biggest thing that I have discovered as I have tried to do this in my own life is what a difference this makes in the way I experience the world.
For lack of a better way of describing it, I would say it is a rediscovery of the bodily-ness of being human. It is the rediscovery of a three-dimensional world, a world of five senses, of time; a world of persons where after a while what is happening on social media seems trivial; a world of voice, of glance, of touch, of eyes and faces, of the smell of dirt in my yard; a world where I can delight in this person that I am with here and now in this unique moment, this space that can only come into existence between my flesh and your flesh. I discover that the world, in other words, for which I came equipped out of the womb, is an endlessly more exciting and satisfying one, than the one we have made.
And this real world, this world of flesh and bodies and living souls, is after all the world that the Lord of heaven and earth took to himself by taking on the same flesh, body and soul. It is no wonder that if we lose this world we lose knowledge of him. We would better get to work trying to find it.
