Why is our Faith Shallow V
Matthew Lee Anderson says that our culture is in a crisis of attention. I think we all know this, even if we haven’t used this language. Have you noticed that it’s increasingly difficult for you to read books with sustained or difficult arguments? Or to read a physical book at all? Have you noticed how you want to skip from app to app as you scroll and tap? Have you noticed how you can’t even queue for the bus or watch the adverts without needing to pick up your phone?
Our capacity for attention has been eroded. Though, for all the smartphone has been a culprit here, Neil Postman was decrying a similar problem caused by television in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr said similar things about the internet in The Shallows. This isn’t a new problem, but it’s an accelerating problem, I fear. We see this play out in many directions, not least in our politics, but I’m trying to explore the causes of our shallow faith.
My concern is that this inability to give sustained attention to one thing is a cause of our shallowing faith. To put it another way, along with the shift in our Sundays and preaching; the loss of community and catechism, we have a fifth problem: the rise of entertainment.
Is entertainment bad? No. But the modern entertainment systems—and I think particularly of the physical technologies, but it would also be true of the content of what we ‘consume’—have shifted us in some ways that are counter to Christian formation.
There are two aspects of this, the first one could be overstated, but essentially we spend an inordinate amount of time consuming entertainment. If the aspects of Christian discipleship that we’ve touched on take time—and most do in one way or another—we don’t have much time. Sometimes because we’re living lives that are too busy, and this is often what people blame, but I suspect that for most people it has more to do with the amount of entertainment we watch.
I can’t remember the last time I met a Christian who didn’t have a TV. 20 years ago I knew several. I have a TV. I probably watch too much of it. I also use social media a fair bit, maybe too much. If you’re in a young enough generation that you’d never watch TV, assume that I mean YouTube. People find it strange that we don’t pay for a streaming service, which has been an economic decision rather than a moral one and we have access to some from family members. People seem surprised that we only have some of them.
I’m not on Matthew Lee Anderson’s ‘Quit Netflix’ bandwagon, but we have to admit to ourselves that we’re absorbing large amounts of entertainment. This can get in the way of forming community, let alone forming our hearts or minds. I’m not considering in this post the nature of what we’re consuming, and whether it’s forming us towards Christ or not—an important question—but thinking more about how watching lots of entertainment, which is increasingly fast and built to hook your attention, makes it difficult for us to pay attention to things that aren’t like that. Like Church. Or friendships. It’s not really any different if you’re watching something that on the surface looks ‘virtuous’, like The Chosen, than if you’re watching something that really doesn’t, like Game of Thrones.
If we’re honest, reading short form media on a phone like most of my readers right now isn’t necessarily loads better for us. I require you to click in order to read, my readers go up when I give a sensationalist headline (and use the word ‘crisis’), the attention economy is difficult to escape.
If the first track is that it takes time from us, this is the second: it forms us away from the ways of being in the world which are conducive to following Jesus. We struggle to pay attention.
This isn’t a boring preacher’s attempt to lambast those who nod off in their sermon (or I hope it isn’t, I have put people to sleep a time or two, especially earlier in my preaching life), but we struggle to pay attention to the person in front of us. Or to the quality of the sunlight, or the grace of the trees.
I’ve also noticed that very intelligent people seem to be finding it harder and harder to read texts, including the scriptures. They struggle to parse relatively simple sentences of the Bible, where the answers to their questions are literally what we just read. I think this is because they aren’t used to reading. This is, at least partially, due to the attention crisis caused by our attention economy. We are in a post-literate society. Sometimes people push back on that because they’re reading the words ‘post-literate,’ but the claim is that we have culturally shifted from written to visual media as primary, and that we’re post-book (accompanied with the claim that the short sentences of social media form you away from the skills needed to read books).
I notice this in myself. It’s difficult to follow the arguments of difficult books, especially older books. I think I’m finding it harder than I used to.
This isn’t a fixable problem. There might be some strong upsides to getting rid of your TV or smartphone (I note Rhys Laverty’s reports on how much easier parenting is without a television), but you’ll still live in a world structured and defined by them. We’ll still live in this attention economy that leads to a crisis of attention. To escape it requires escape in the monastic sense.
Perhaps that’s an option for a few, but not for most. I’m not sure that’s to be sought except for as a respite from the world. If it’s not a fixable problem, instead what we need are ways of being in the world knowing this is the case. Perhaps they might mitigate the worst dangers, but we also need to learn how to be digital disciples, how to do Christian formation in this particular world that we find ourselves in. I don’t truly understand the challenges of the high Middle Ages and how it made following Jesus more difficult. There will inevitably have been some, even if there were less. We need to understand the unique challenges to following Jesus here and now. Inevitably the way to live among those challenges will be found in the scriptures and the Christian past.
Our faith is shallow because our lives are shallow, because our cultural moment is shallow. Many like it that way as it makes it easier to sell us stuff. Jesus is calling us to depth, further up and further in forevermore.
Photo by Paolo Bendandi on Unsplash
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