when I teach on cultural apologetics I open each class session with a segment I call making the modern mind we discuss a technological artifact from throughout history and how it changed culture including religious life artifacts include movable type the cotton gin and electricity one of our most important sessions covers the smartphone hey you probably had one if you're listening and watching here for the last 10 maybe even 15 years you know useful in a wide variety of ways like the Swiss army
knife of the internet age you're almost certainly listening to me now on a smartphone and Beyond making your life somewhat easier and somewhat more distracted have you considered though the story that your smartphone tells has ubiquitous access to the internet brought about by the smartphone made wisdom easier for us to attain or made wisdom more attractive for us to to pursue well Samuel James explores these fascinating and vital questions in his new book digital liturgies rediscovering Christi
an wisdom in an online age published by Crossway Samuel is the associate Acquisitions editor at Crossway an author of a a newsletter of the same name digital liturgies where he covers Christianity technology and culture and his newsletter you're going to get his thoughts on everything from Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to the crown on Netflix some of my interests there as well Samuel uh in this book he summarizes the story of the internet age he writes this quote the digital liturgies of the web
and social media train us to invest ultimate Authority in our own stories and experiences as they separate us from the objective giveness of the embodied world end quote to be more specific we become users known by words pictures and shares instead of Flesh and Blood voices and facial Expressions now Samuel explains that this story is not accidental it was explicit from The Architects of our age according to Samuel they told quote a story of humanity wherein salvation consists of overcoming giv
eness itself curating a custom existence and achieving freedom from boredom limitation ignorance and even death end quote well we need biblical wisdom then to understand and resist these cultural narratives to thrive in our time we need God's help that we might love him love our neighbors as ourselves so Samuel joins me on gospel mound to understand more of the digital story and offer advice to parents pastors and even the editor and chief of the Gospel Coalition so Samuel thanks for joining me
thanks Colin it's great to be here uh first question I have to read this quote and ask if you really mean it we're going to do a little little little truth test here you're right quote every person living in a modern digitally connected culture is constantly inhabiting a moral and intellectual habitat that distorts the biblical story of reality end quote now Samuel you probably heard just as I've heard from many different people technology is supposed to be neutral so is this really any differen
t from the TV Era radio era newspaper era explain yeah it's a good question and I think the best answer to the neutrality question I actually heard from Tony ranky um and I think he was quoting someone else and I'm sorry I can't remember who he was quoting but he said something to the effect of technology is neither good nor bad nor neutral and that's a very provocative idea because it suggests that technology operates on Human Society at a much deeper level than simply the level of volition the
level of conscious Choice um so when we ask like what kind of world does technology create well this is this was the question that really animated Marshall mcclan back in the early 20 century and mclin's was who's famous for the sentence the medium is the message mclin's entire idea was that regardless of what users of Technology intend to do with it the technology itself has kind of this identity that creates a world in its image and this is this is true of all technology it it's not simply di
gital it's not simply uh you know 21st century technology um if you take the jet airplane so the jet airplane you which you might use to go on vacation with your family or go share the gospel overseas or any any number of virtuous uses the jet airplane creates a world that now has the plausibility of its own potential written into it so this is why you get like massive airports and this is why uh you know businesses can hire people to uh to work in one city while there may live in a different on
e so it creates this kind of social domino effect where the availability of this technology leads to a world that actually looks like this technology was always here and I think mclen the example for mclan that stayed with me was the example of the railroad so the when the railroad is created and towns and even States and territories are connected you have railroad cities that grow up around those rail the the major Rail stations and then you have particular industries that take off in response
to rails like the steel industry and things like that and all of this creates this a different kind of world than if you never had this technology so when we apply that kind of thinking to the digital age to the internet age what becomes very important is identifying what the digital age is so it's this it's this very autonomous feeling uh technology that basically presents to us the power to be to consume and to kind of place our attention anywhere we wish in independent of the the kind of pers
on that we are where we're located where we're situated so the ability to kind of direct my attention and direct my energy in any any direction at all regardless of where I am regardless of who I am has in itself a a worldview that is itself a worldview and that worldview creates different things in response to it and so we are different kinds of people we think about our own bodies and our own selves and our own powers differently because we have the ability to look at anything to consume anyth
ing to purchase anything to put ourselves in any particular context regardless of of where we were born of where we live who our parents are and so that radical divorce from giveness from the things that simply are the the identity that we must receive that radical divorce from given us Mak us certain kinds of people and the what we choose to do with that will not always be bad things obviously we can do great things through these Technologies the question is does the technology have a mind of i
ts own and I think the answer is yes I think this next question then is probably pretty closely related would the transgender Revolution we're living through be possible without the internet well whether it's possible or not that's a really intriguing question um I don't think we ever want to underestimate the depre ity of the human heart so never never tell the human heart what it could not come up with if it didn't have X technology um but I I think at a at one level the answer could be no um
there is no transgender Revolution without the internet and listeners of gospel bounds several of them might be also familiar with the witch trials of JK Rowling which uh was a long form podcast by the Free Press um and there's an episode of that podcast which is not which is not produced by Christians it's not written by you know people who are necessarily thinking about things from a Biblical worldview but there is an episode of that podcast where they come very close to saying that Tumblr was
instrumental in the creation of the transgender Revolution because Tumblr had this particular ecosystem that combined kind of erotic fanfiction with this um fan culture of people ID identifying as their favorite characters and kind of almost wanting to do this role play as as things that they saw in entertainment and for for a non-believing podcast to actually come as close as they do to saying that transgender the transgender Revolution is Downstream of the way the internet has kind of just sh
aped our souls and our minds uh is remarkable and I think I think it absolutely is the case I I think it's one thing to say and this has been staple of the sexual Revolution forever it's one thing to say that as long as it doesn't hurt anybody as long as it's in the privacy of your own bedroom you can do whatever you want and so that that has been with us for a very long time what is radically new is the idea that if I say I'm one thing then you must agree with me you must agree with whatever I
identify as and I do think that is indicative of a world in which we have become accustomed to inhabit our P almost like digital Persona so the digital Persona is whatever I create I don't exist online independent of the content I produce I there is no Samuel James on the internet independent of the pictures that I upload the tweets that I send the things that I write there is no Samuel James on the internet now in real life it's different I I inhabit a body I you can come if you haven't heard f
rom me for a year you can come see me at my house I am a person independent of my output that's not the way it is online and so the way output gets conflated with identity means that if I choose to produce this kind of content if I choose to put this out there then you must accept that as my given identity and I absolutely think that that is very dependent upon the technological age in which we live let's look at another underlying concept that's the difference between content and form could you
explain the difference between content for and form and then also explain why do evangelicals struggle so much to make this well really to understand this distinction yeah absolutely so content is probably what we're thinking of as evangelicals when we think of Purity and the internet so if if you think of being a Christian on the internet immediately your mind probably goes to avoiding certain sites so not looking at what you shouldn't be looking at not saying things you shouldn't be saying yo
u're thinking in terms of the the particular images the particular media that is presented to you on the internet so that's content form is how those images are brought to you in the first place so and whether or not it's it's something that is explicit that you that is sinful or whether it's something that is not necessarily sinful like a podcast or a TED Talk the form is the same in both cases and so the question is is there a relationship between content and form in other words does form at t
he just the the technical identity of something independent of what it produces does that have some influence over the kind of thing it will inevitably produce and I think it does and Marshall mclan and Neil Postman and other technology critics believe that it did that form dictates content eventually that eventually what you see out of the machine is what the machine was built to give you um and so I think Evangelical struggle with this uh a because everybody struggles with it you know so evang
elicals are no different from you know most people in that regard I don't think most Americans are thinking this deeply at a level between form and content but I think evangelicals have been unable to kind of lead from ahead on this issue primarily because we don't really have a Theology of things we don't have a Theology of material things our we're constantly kind of this is a bad word but you know what I mean we're constantly spiritualizing we're constantly kind of looking for the immaterial
for the um for the platonic so to speak and and I think what that has left us with Colin and you've written on this you know we've kind of lost the Theology of the local church as evangelicals over the last few years I think that's one of the reasons why we've lost the Theology of local church is because people are so used to saying well the church isn't a building so I am the church so wherever I am I'm having church and biblically you can't say that like that that's just not the image of the l
ocal church and I think one of the reasons why is because the Bible's Theology of the local church is more earthy it's more physical it's more tangible it's it's people gathered together uh for a particular purpose and so I think Evangelical have struggled to articulate a Theology of ordinary things and one of the things I talk about in the book you it's interesting how many how much of the Old Testament is the Lord giving his people physical objects and physical rituals and physical places that
are all part of their worship it's not as if he simply gives them the Torah and says okay now it's your job Monday through Sunday to just remember this and try as best you can he gives them festivals he gives them a Sabbath he gives them clothing he gives them a temple right there is this great attention to the way that physical reality interacts with our souls and I think evangelicals really need to be recovering that because in the digital age where we're increasingly abstracted from physical
reality there's just a lot of need to recover a sense of what is real yeah you've got a lot of stirred up a lot of thoughts in that respon one of them is I was just trying to think of why what is it about Evangelical spirituality that struggles with the tangible and struggles with the the church struggles with the ecclesial and I was just thinking about how especially if you're a North American Evangelical but including uh some anglo-americans the three formative experiences that have defined o
ur movement were all anti-church uh first the Reformation now was a recovery of the Gospel but against the hierarchical church in in the west then again the Evangelical Awakening especially in its English or British manifestations go to the fields and there was a strong note on both sides I mean Edwards was a church figure but there was a lot of opposition from churches and a lot of criticism of church leaders so you whitfield's locked out of pulpits he goes to the fields you know we can experie
nce God even better perhaps in the field and then again the fundamentalist um uh response which then helps to produce the Evangelical um Awakenings after World War II it's also because they've lost the churches they've lost the denomination especially the northern Baptist Presbyterians that's a response to that so it occurs me I can I can see then why evangelicals why we have a hard time is because our formative stories all have to do with sort of the experience of the spiritual when you are exp
unged from the tangible and the hierarchical um hadn't quite thought thought about it that way all right completely pivoting from that um I know this is an impossible question but I still ask it in my classes and it's instructive if no no other reason than as a thought process um let's take our kids our grandkids our great grandkids in 100 years they're going to look back in our ERA this is a defining era because of the rise of the internet also the personal computer also the smartphone now also
we're seeing uh artificial intelligence which one of those do you think would be remembered they might all be remembered in some sense but which one of those would stand out and I know you could easily say probably we don't even know cuz something else is going to come well I mean that's possible but pick one of those and explain explain why well Colin it doesn't matter because this is a simulation and 100 years like the the aliens will just pull the plug and and start a new save file in other
words The Matrix is what you're telling me they're all going to remember Neo yeah um no I so if I had to guess now I would probably say the smartphone and here's why I think the smartphone is at the center of a infrastructure revolution in society that the other things that you mentioned are not quite eliciting so um and I think Co perhaps accelerated this but I know the NFL just take one somewhat trivial example but the NFL is trying very hard to phase out physical ticketing and and I think a l
ot of stadiums already have yeah so and and you're talking about like in terms of physical event tickets this is something that literally goes back hundreds of years like people have had Paper Tickets forever and so and then you're also thinking in terms of finance and you know I don't want to get too speculative because you know bit Bitcoins rise and fall and then you know PL is an example of how it's a fo's erand to prophesy these things um but I I do think like the the way that finances is ch
anging in response to people just being on their phones and doing Finance from their phones and things like that I I think the smartphone it represents the hardware Revolution and right now and I think Hardware revolutions tend to be more permanent than software revolutions it's it's it's one thing to kind of have a different website or a different app or you know a different way of doing things uh but the I mean legally the smartphone Colin I know you know this too the fact that I can do my boa
rding pass my ticketing everything from my smartphone I don't even have to have a physical boarding pass anymore and and now a lot of airports are getting to the point where you can do facial recognition and and you know with in connection with your phone to board a plane the hardware Revolution seems at this point in time to be more likely to be something that we're still kind of we're still living with 100 years from now even when maybe other techn Oles have have fallen by the wayside or been
so retooled that they're not recognizable but I do think the smartphone Revolution is probably um here to stay at least for a very long time yeah yeah I think um it it whether the hardware changes from a smartphone or to something else the fact of internet connectivity being able to go with you anywhere right that was the key Evolution there yeah um and the way I've I've put it is that um once the internet could go into the bathroom with you that's when that's when everything changed that's when
you truly can't go anywhere any longer to not be connected to something um now we might imagine that the the internet is similar to the printing press which that had we just mentioned the Reformation earlier revolutionary implications from everything from politics economics religion family formation I mean just one of the most revolutionary inventions of all time it had democratizing effect as well sort of a populist effect empowering creating broads spread L broad uh widespread literacy broad-
based literacy which did not exist before um and then it's really hard to imagine our economic the market system hard to imagine Democratic politics all of those things are just not possible without that printing press at least as far as we would understand it now you also identify the democratizing effect of the internet um which is very dramatic in its own way now I'm going to throw a curveball at you here um I've heard it said that the internet is not so much akin to the printing press as it
is to the invention of language itself I don't remember where I heard it but it's been a thought-provoking uh statement to me what do you make of that you think there's any truth to that I'd have to sit on that one for for maybe a day or two that's a big one that's a big one that's that's a big one so I I don't necessarily want to be super dogmatic I I think that that probably does Express something even even if so let's take it seriously but not literally um I think that does Express something
that is true which is that the internet is not simply or we should say the internet is more than simply a new way of quote unquote doing language the internet is a new language so you know as opposed to the the printing press where you know you have this new way of printing language well you know as Nicholas car shows in in his book the shallows the printing press doesn't simply kind of recapitulate language just on a new format it creates a different kind of learner so if if you can give a pers
on their own codex then that person can actually have a one-in-one encounter within information that is unlike the tradition of oral learning it's it's it's very much unlike that so it and I would encourage listeners to to go read what Nicholas car says about the revolution that that was and so the internet really has that kind of same effect where it creates the the hyperconnected learner so you're you're learning how to read the way a computer reads so you're you're just kind of skimming thing
s and then and then hypertext creates this kind of multi-dimensional Rabbit Hole uh that can connect you with ideas but are not necessarily connected logically but they're connected aesthetically and so it's it's almost like it's almost like a magazine that comes to life where like this one article will be connected to this ad which suggests that it's connected to this cause and this everything like that and and that's a that's kind of an abstract way of understanding it but I do think the inter
net is its own type of language it's its own way of expressing ideas and that's why um you know if you took a person who spent their entire Life In traditional educational institutions and you know you taught them habits of thinking that were common there and you gave that person at the end of you know 21 years of formal education if you gave that person a Twitter account and said okay now your goal is to you know put that put all those habits of thinking to action in the world of Twitter that p
erson is going to despair because what they're going to figure out is that the habits of thinking the abits of learning the way they formulate ideas the way they communicate the way they learned how to do that in traditional classroom structures has almost no purchase on Twitter and so they're not going to be a they're almost not going to be able to communicate and we we've all seen and I know you've seen it too we've all seen examples of this in real life of people that struggle to articulate t
hemselves in a digital Commons and it's not because they're unintelligent in fact it's often case the opposite they're probably more intelligent than most of their commentators but it's they just don't think like the internet and so I I I do think there's there's some truth in the idea that this is a new language it's not simply recapitulating what we already know in a different format it's a new way of thinking and that's kind of what the book is about yeah no absolutely again talking to Samuel
James about digital liturgies rediscovering Christian wisdom in an online age from Crossway now here's another thought I had Samuel in the internet age unprecedented wealth acrs to Young entrepreneurs Jobs go to graduates with the most recent education what would you describe are the spiritual implications of this inversion of power from the older to the younger well I think of that episode in the Old Testament where um the the son of uh Solomon I think was gave was had an opportunity to to be
king over a a United Kingdom and uh and he asked the the older guys what should I say and they said hey be speak kindly to this people and they will be your servants forever and then he goes to ask his his uh his text thread uh his buddies uh what what he should say and they said hey they they said my my little finger is thicker than my father's thigh like you know crack these crack the whips on these jokes um and so he followed what his younger friends told him to do and the Kingdom of Israel h
as not been United since um so I I think that's that's just a a Biblical anecdote that illustrates the power and the consequences of divorcing knowledge received from Generations so when when one and it doesn't matter if it's if it's happening upward or downward because it happens both ways we're not we're not just saying it's always the younger versus the older but when you separate the generations and they no longer transmit to one another really bad things happen uh and I would suggest to any
one interested in this topic to go read Jee tw's book um Generations which captures I think in a in a dispassionate very fair way how Generations uh change from one group to the next based on experiences and unique uh cultural events that take over um so I think one of the one of the spiritual effects of of kind of the inversion of expertise and the inversion of cultural power is that you're you're going to see a lot of wisdom just lost you're going to see a lot of life experience just lost and
I I I think this is probably has something to do with the conversations about delayed and foregone marriage and not having children and people not able to settle down or not able to understand the opposite sex I think you're seeing this this handicap of Life primarily because we as a society we've been trending toward this way of existence where people are immediately sorted into their peer group group and they almost never get out and they almost never experience a meaningful relationship with
someone who is a generation older than them and unfortunately there's a lot of churches where that's that's the case as well everyone is sorted so neatly into their age group and there's not that cross-generational discipleship and what what do you lose when you lose that well you one of the evidences I think is that you lose young people who know how to form attachments they know how that they might be very good at school they might be very good at making money they might be very good at buildi
ng a platform for themselves at kind of projecting themselves that's what young people do right young people put their foot forward they're they're good at kind of being charismatic and attracting attention to themselves it's as we age that we learn the skills of relationship that we learn how to build things that last that we learn how to cultivate relationships that end up resonating throughout Generations it's we are literally laying down the pathway for future Generations that can only happe
n as we age and I think that inversion of authority that you're talking about is going to result in a lot of you know what Zuckerberg called move fast and break things you're going to see a lot of that you're going to see a lot of dynamism but you're not going to see a lot that passes the test of time yeah that's a really good way to put it I mean you're talking in this book about the way that new technologies create new cultural narratives it's just interesting that you can't imagine an old old
er person making an invention that would be significant today I mean that that's just we you can't that's not does not fit our cultural narrative in there and yet that says okay what does that tell us I mean that communicates a story that old people are fundamentally a problem because they don't really contribute to the Future um and maybe that's why you see a lot of movements toward euth in Asia in places like Canada uh especially in parts of Western Europe I don't know but that's just a good e
xample of how technology will will have those effects and how different other cultures are this is just basic cultural anthropology that the West would be an anomaly uh especially compared to Native cultures in places like North America or East Asian cultures or all sorts of other places where this the inversion where your elders are honored and sort of those things or but we we just that doesn't really make a lot of sense to us for a lot of reasons but especially now I think because of the way
um the sort of techn Technology works with with the internet in particular um you also write in the book Samuel that the hashtag killed moral relativism so briefly can you give us a bit of a Theology of repentance for the internet age like what should we do or not do there I mean I'm I was um a guest that I've had recently on gospel bound Yasha monk talks about these internet swarms and that we see all the different times certainly you see it in my position but we all see it happen to someone an
d we all kind of know it's going to happen to us eventually it just kind of the way the internet works it's always looking for its daily or weekly Target in those ways um he he says you really only apologize if you've done something wrong and it's interesting how often there seems to be no consideration for whether somebody has done anything truly wrong but merely how other people feel about the situation and then it takes on an entire life of its own where the repentance seems to be utterly dis
connected from any truth or validity but merely as a way of sort of a satiating the satiating the mob so again what what does a Theology of repentance look like in the internet age yeah it's a great question I I think in our own culture there's almost an inversion of the relationship between guilt and public repentance so the more actually guilty a person is the less likely they they are to give an authentic apology and and I think of and I don't I don't mean to pick on the NFL I'm an NFL fan bu
t I mean you have a lot of you have a lot of athletes who actually get caught in domestic abuse situations or they get caught you know drunk driving and hitting somebody and the apology that comes out is I'm sorry for the people I've disappointed you know that that kind of just the issue is not me the issue is all these other people who are disappointed in me and then when you have a comedian who you know they're jokes from 10 years ago are dug up on Twitter uh they come out with this very Earne
st I'm not the person I was like I I I can't believe this was me I've undergone so much growth I I totally repudiate this other version of me and so it's almost like you've got this total inversion where the guiltier a person is the more inauthentic their apology happens in politics and in international Affairs like the bigger the sin the less you have to apologize for it it's almost like the the smaller the more fixated everybody becomes on it and then when you show that you begin to actually a
pologize then it seems like that becomes an opportunity for people to actually demand more and more and more and you realize you can't really ever get on the other side of it there's no um there's no propitiation ultimately and certainly no experation um either side of that I I kind of wonder if the reason for that is with a with a you know let's let's let's think in terms of sins and faux PA when someone when someone commits a faux PA the apology is authentic because they think that actually th
ey can get past it because they think if they're just apologetic enough they can make it go away and when you're dealing with a sin like something that is very extreme because we don't have the gosp because we don't if you're an unbeliever you don't have the gospel you don't have a Theology of atonement and forgiveness there's almost this despair this cynical despair that pops up that like well I I can't even do anything about this I can't get past this this has now defined my life so I might as
well not gravel about it because that just makes it worse there's there's no way to kind of take this stain off of my life and so and so it's interesting how Christian theology is the exact opposite Christian theology says that in sin we are all guilty but there is a real mechanism for atonement and I think this is why social media has become defined by activism because activism really secular activism much of it is this kind of way to kind of scapegoat and to rid the community of this of this
evil but you don't have a object of reconciliation you don't have an atonement so and I know you have been U have been very influenced as I have by uh willfred mcclay's magisterial essay on the strange disappearance of guilt which I recommend to everyone in quote in the book and and I think that is to to this day one of the best articulations of where society that has denied real guilt and real propitiation ends up just throwing all of its moral energy at purging these faux PA from its Mist beca
use it doesn't know how to process guilt and so I I think Christians in the digital age I think have an opportunity to be known oh you're you're Christian you guys are the ones who actually believe in forgiveness you guys are the ones who actually take in people who have sinned and you say that God loves you and has made a way for you to be forgiven you people are the ones who don't throw people away why is that what what do you mean by that and and I think Christians are going to be some of the
only people who who do that who teach that way because without without a Theology of atonement without a Theology of reconciliation that is divine you're just going to see more more and more moral energy expended upon trying to punish enemies and reward friends and that kind of thing and I I think that's why we're seeing this little movement of non-Christian Liber who are kind of breaking from progressivism precisely for this reason because they say well this is liberalism has become punitive I
don't want any part of it and often people like Andrew Sullivan or or other people like that end up talking almost unintentionally biblically about the relationship between forgiveness and sin but they just don't they don't have the belief for it they don't have the faith actually in the Messiah to do that so I think Christians have an enormous opportunity to witness just through the way we actually believe that forgiveness is real and possible yeah I think in a post-christian and in an interne
t age the ways we tend to stand out are not by trying to keep up with all the different changes but by doubling down on basic practices and basic wisdom that get lost you've mentioned earlier going to church having actual in-person friends I think we could take it a few steps further actually still getting married and having kids that's practically I mean in many major cities that's already wildly countercultural for Christians or or Mormons or Orthodox Jews things like that but that's becoming
more of the norm um so just getting married just having kids um not getting rid of your elderly actually caring for your elderly that's another thing that's going to be something that that comes to characterize Christians and sets them apart and then having a process by which people can find Refuge from internet shame but also find Refuge from where real repentance I Repent of that sin I've turned from that I've accepted the Forgiveness that's made possible through the blood of Jesus Christ and
now I can walk forward where people can be can be restored um in a place where your record not just criminally but even just on the internet just follows you everywhere and it cannot really be spune the internet just doesn't just doesn't forget um there those are just some basic things that I see um let me ask you this as a as a quick question what are some you know Sammy you're you're you're so digitally connected as I am as much as we're talking about this stuff I think in part it's because we
're so fully immersed in it that we perceive so many more of the dangers because it's it's an occupational hazard um in many ways for our work what are some of the most important habits you employ to stay connected to embodied and also spiritual reality uh cuz both of them get easily distorted by the internet yeah yeah it's a it's a really good question I I apologize for saying that my wife told me a few months ago you know when you're on a podcast you say that's a great question flatter very fl
attering but yeah but you know Colin Hanson just asked really great question after great question so this you really mean it it's flattery with all the other hosts but it's real when you're talking I I I would not flatter you Mr Colin um so no I I think I think it's so important for people to to think about this and I digital liturgy is my book the number one criticism that I've gotten from the book or about the book is that it's not practical enough and that it doesn't really offer enough pract
ical suggestions on one level I concede the point I wish I would have written much more about practices but on this on another level I think partly that was intentional and the reason is that when you dive deep into biblical wisdom you see you start to see the reality that according to the Bible wisdom is about becoming a certain kind of person not necessarily knowing what sort of rules to follow so there's there's always this inward Direction with wisdom wisdom is always kind of pushing toward
the heart and it's always trying to create certain kinds of people and I think one of the reasons for that is uh there's there's there's far too many scenarios that you may run into in real life than there are Bible verses for that you can clearly say like this is clearly wrong I should not do this or this is clearly right I should do this those situations exist and probably there's more of them than modern people like you and I would even want to admit but there are way too many scenarios in li
fe where really the question is going to be what kind of person am I what kind of person am I wanting to become where are my instincts where are my loves what what am I treasuring most what do I most want to be 10 20 30 years from now and so I think when we think about habits that's where I start and so part partly that has meant U one of my foundational habits is to bring other people into my tech use so for me it's been my wife so I have social media memberships where she has the password and
I don't and what that means is I have to say hey could you log me in now I that I say that to people and I see the look on their eyes and they go hey I'm I'm calling you know I'm calling whatever Authority I have to call to report your you know dysfunctional marriage and I know that sounds Byzantine but for somebody like me to bring another person into my relationship with tech automatically creates this almost this bare barer of wisdom and I'm not saying it's infallible I'm not saying it can't
be overcome but it's a barrier of wisdom where if I have to admit to her that I've been hooked on Twitter or whatever for the last 72 hours you know debating with people who are wrong online if I have to ad implicitly admit to her it forces me to implicitly admit it to myself and I'm like you know what I I probably should disengage from this and Colin I think one of the things that vast majority of people who have these Technologies they don't have anyone like that in their life they don't have
anyone like that that they want to invite I I I've counseled a lot of guys through pornography addictions and things like that the vast majority of them can't even countenance the idea of somebody having their screen time code for their for their iPhone much less just a general social media password that that the idea of privacy the idea that I I should be able to have a one-on-one relationship with this technology that nobody else should be pulled into and nobody else should be able to tell me
how to use it is so woven deeply into our conscience As Americans and I I think you I think in terms of practices you can start there we can start by bringing other people into our Tech use and it might look like sharing passwords it might look like hey inviting someone at church to say hey if you ever see me post anything that you're like I don't know about feel free feel free to message me and say hey I I I don't know about this it you know take that proactive step and then create rhythms of S
abbath um you know I I love Andy crouches um I think it's an hour a day one day a week and one week a year I think of of being totally unplugged and I I realized this is going to look different for different people in different seasons of life and the Lord knows that but I I love the idea of taking just one hour a day preferably not between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. when you're Stone asleep so you can satisfy that requirement uh but but taking a conscious hour out of your day to say hey I'm not go
ing to be bothered by by what's out there I'm going to attend to what's in here I'm going to attend to my responsibilities I'm going to attend to these friends I'm going to attend these relationships I'm just going to sit down with the word and I'm not going to take a picture of my Bible and post it to Instagram just getting away from that noise reminds you that there it's like coming up for air when you've been underwater it reminds you oh wait this is what it's like to actually live life out f
rom under the digital gaze so so those are two very basic habits that I think anyone is capable of pursuing well that's really helpful let's keep in that vein here as we wrap up let's do the last three quickly here talking with Samuel James author of digital liturgies rediscovering Christian wisdom in an online age all right again quick answers here number one what is the most important advice you'd give to parents reject privacy okay reject privacy related to what you just said right there the
Assumption of the internet age is privacy that's the cultural narrative so if you reject that premise changes everything okay very good that's good second what's the most important advice you'd give to pastors watch your own soul okay expand on that one a little bit Yeah I I'll expand on that one so I I I think I think one of the Temptations Colin for pastors right now is going to be to use social media and the internet to alleviate the the symptoms of pastoring and what I mean by that is pastor
ing is hard for a lot of pastors pastoring is lonely and for a lot of pastors uh pastoring is obscure that no one sees their sacrifice no one is text no one is emailing and texting them saying well done great sermon uh thank you for being at my mother's bedside last night right their labor is obscure and I think the Temptation for pastors is often to go to go to social media and to be the public Theologian that you don't feel like you can be with just your embodied Ministry yeah that's good one
of the things I always appreciate about your perspective Samuel is having grown up in a pastor's home and you often bring that to bear that's really helpful to me especially as I'm trying to parent my kids and talking to pastors but having never been on the other side of that it's helpful all right last question I'm going to make you tgc's editor-in chief for a day um don't let it get to your head the pay is not great and the responsibility is not what you think but um here's the question you ne
ed to answer um interesting one of the things you talk about in the cultural narrative is how it prioritizes stories over arguments the internet conveys stor more more so than arguments so here's your decision would you invest in building a great Tik Tock account no okay tell me [Laughter] why uh I think the medium is the message and I think Tik Tock first of all other than being this glaring national security threat that our our our Elites apparently don't have that much motivation to to uh add
ress or are paid off by a certain or are paid off yeah well we we'll just we'll say whatever reason it is I don't want to get any uh any messages from my elected representatives on this one um I I think I think the medium is the message I think I think Tik Tok is of course capable of broadcasting gospel truth but I think that Medium will always tend toward a way of thinking and a way of processing information that is hostile to to biblical wisdom yeah I had um was meeting with some Christian col
lege students a couple years ago and they were saying effectively if it's not on Tik Tock we don't see it our generation just doesn't really care about anything else it's all Tik Tok and I thought huh and then I just said well and and they were talking about how distressing that is about how many arguments or how many stories or how many one minute tearing down the Bible Christians are wrong about everything Christians are immoral the Bible is stupid anybody who believes it is stupid that they s
ee all of the time how popular those accounts are and I thought well don't you think a Ministry like the gospel collan should be there to try to help respond or how you know to tell different stories and they were like they were repelled by the idea they just said that sounds horrible no you shouldn't do that and I said wait a minute but if I'm trying to reach your generation how can I not do Tik Tok and it just you you could just see them try to process and say wait a minute the only thing we c
are about is Tik Tok yet the medium doesn't allow Christianity doesn't it doesn't work and I thought oh boy there's a lot to ponder there and ultimately Samuel it's why I think your book is really helpful because that's the kind of book that helps people to connect these dots that are floating out there and you're thinking how can these things coexist and they're very concerning but then you go back to okay what are the principles of disengagement that we need to to implement to be able to prese
rve U genuine wisdom so check out Samuel's book digital liturgy rediscovering Christian wisdom in an online age you can also I'm sure you've read his work at at Crossway whether you know it or not um books like Andrew Wilson's remaking the world Samuel played a crucial role in and also check out his newsletter digital liturgies Samuel thanks again for joining me on gospel bound thanks Colin
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