Why the church can rescue us from our smartphones

Andrew Sullivan confesses that he “used to be a human being.” In a provocative essay in New York magazine, Sullivan writes about the ways smartphone technology and its constant connectedness have disconnected us from our sense of our humanity and from one another.

I was most intrigued by Sullivan’s proposals for the church to be a haven in a digitally exhausted world.

“If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation,” Sullivan writes. “’Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasm, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.”

He is exactly right.

Sullivan, a Roman Catholic, calls for the rediscovery of the monastic traditions, of contemplative prayer in the Catholic tradition. But I think the problem he identifies must be addressed more broadly within the Christian ecosystem, including within the sectors of evangelical Protestantism.

The digital revolution has made visible a spiritual problem that has rocked our churches for a very long time — the idea that identity is found in frenzied activity.

Years ago, one would sometimes see a sign advertising a church — usually an evangelical or Protestant congregation — with the words, “The Church Alive Is Worth the Drive.” Apart from the commodification of the worship of God implied in such advertising, there’s an even deeper problem: the definition of what it means to be “alive.” In most contexts, the “alive” church is one with bustling ministries, a cornucopia of activities, and a worship service choreographed so that there is no “dead space” — no silence — between singing and talking, talking and singing.

The church justifies its existence, in this way, by the bustle of its business, the obviousness of its “aliveness.”

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