How Technology is Affecting Faith

We are well acquainted with the crossfire that consumes Christianity in its bondage to both conservative and liberal captivities. The cultural enemy might be Pope John Paul II or the latest Episcopal bishop, Jerry Falwell or the Jesus Seminar. The stereotypes and the resulting analyses are predictable. Like their counterparts on the evening political gatherings, the church is caught up in the fray and expends a fair amount of emotional energy in discussions about whatever grasps our attention in the moment.
Yet amid the turmoil that exists within denominations and even congregations, a quieter struggle is taking place, around the unquestioned role of technology in our lives. The prophetic voice who has spoken most clearly is Albert Borgmann, Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana and a devout Roman Catholic layman.
In a series of works across a lifetime, and most recently in a collection of essays entitled Power Failure (Brazos Press), Borgmann makes explicit connections between Christianity and technology. He describes technology as an almost invisible culture, one that permeates our lives and one in which we participate uncritically: "It is in the dailiness of modern life that technology has been most powerful and consequential," he insists.
Technology, he suggests, constitutes our "modern rule of life," intentionally borrowing a term from the classical spiritual disciplines. We are shaped by technology without even knowing it. Thus we eat meals in the evening, rarely in the presence of families and friends, and then we (90 percent of our population, by some estimates) settle in for a couple of hours of television. Afterwards, perhaps, we lament the quality of what we have just ingested and viewed!
We have lived through a time of unprecedented technological innovation. Our lives have seemingly been made easier by the elimination of activities that require effort: preparing meals, reading to our children, walking through neighborhoods. Devices, in the beginning, provide real help, but in time they become ends in themselves. "They help us," Borgmann argues, "in ways that we do not need to be helped."
Devices intended to make life more pleasurable have instead shaped us in unintended ways. We listen to recorded music (or "burn CDs") instead of learning to play music ourselves. In the process we do not develop the virtue of patience. We watch televised dramas instead of telling stories. Our imaginations are thus impoverished. Preachers search the Internet for sermons instead of preparing them. Congregations allow corporations to describe the demographic characteristics of our communities instead of engaging in the contemplative work of understanding them from within.
Borgmann calls for a "culture of word and table." A culture of the word includes the practices of conversation and reading. Christians will quickly associate these practices with the acts of listening and sharing, even testimony, and the study that gives depth to preaching, teaching and the spiritual life. This is in contrast to a recent New Yorker article, "Chicken Soup Nation," about the millions of books, produced for every possible sector of our society, composed of stories that target the emotions.
A culture of the table is the presence of a family, or a gathering of friends, around a dinner table, the bringing together of food and conversation, body and spirit. The connection with the Eucharist is obvious, as the meal which helps Christians to remember God's gift of salvation in Jesus Christ, and of course is also patterned on an earlier meal, the Passover.
We would do well to meditate on the limitations of technology. We can give thanks for the positive benefits of technology: staying warm, the elimination of disease, the possibility of travel throughout the world. But we should also be clear that our way of life is no longer shaped primarily by faith. The most powerful cultural threat to faith is neither conservative nor liberal ideology. It is the behavioral change brought on by the centrality of computers, televisions and as yet uninvented devices, which immerse us in realities that become a kind of "default culture" -- the latest gossip, scandal, oddity or horror.
For this reason the practices that have been so central in congregational life -- participating in the Eucharist, studying the scripture, serving the poor, gathering with friends around fellowship meals, observing the Sabbath, singing our faith -- will become more important than ever. The abundant life has not come by way of technology. It is not evident that it will come by faith either, Borgmann insists. But it might be helpful, as a beginning, to reflect on the relationship between a technological culture and the practice of faith.