Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

Samuel D. James, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023.  208 pp., paperback.

Does a fish know that water is wet?  A ridiculous question perhaps, but an analogy that James employs at the outset of his book.  The point is that water is all-encompassing for a fish.  It knows nothing else. It never pauses to question its interaction with water, which of course is fine for a fish.

What of Christians and our interactions with our culture?  We are swimming in a digital stream with strong currents.  The internet has become so pervasive in our lives that we have all but ceased thinking of it as something separate from ourselves, from our being.  Perhaps in some degree it is not separate from us?  Do we, as Christians, have the luxury of accepting the digital world uncritically?   What does it mean to be “in the world but not of the world” in the internet era?

This is the aim of James’ book, to enable us to step back from the internet far enough, particularly the social web, to see how it is shaping us.  The title may seem curious – joining a religious term like liturgy to the digital world? If we think of a liturgy simply as a habitual way of doing things, then we begin to understand James’ use of the term.  He tells us, “…even our most allegedly ‘nonreligious’ spaces are deeply spiritual.  They tell us a story about the good life: what it is, and how we can get it. These spiritual habitats train our hearts and make certain ideas and behaviors more desirable, and others less so, by immersing us in a particular narrative.” (10)  Another way to think of liturgy would be as a means by which we engage God and ultimate reality, or what is often called a “worldview.”

James focuses on our epistemology as affected by our digital habits. Epistemology is often defined as a ‘way of knowing.’ It is being able to step outside our context long enough to look back at it and see the manner in which we ‘live and move and have our being.’  James asserts that “the internet… is an epistemological environment…that creates in its members particular ways of thinking, feeling, and believing.” (9)  He claims that these ways of thinking are ultimately sub-Christian.

How then do Christians begin to examine their interactions with the online world?  The subtitle, “Rediscovering Christian wisdom in an online age,” frames the discussion.  James does not attempt to prescribe a one-size-fits-all response but seeks to engage and challenge us to think and reflect deliberately and critically about the things we marinate our minds in day by day. The goal is to help readers examine their own engagement with these things in an ongoing manner. Digital discernment rather than digital detachment.

James challenges us to see that tools/technologies are not benign, much like Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and others have done.  Whether the technology is a plow, a book, a television, or the internet, there are inherent ways in which the tools themselves shape our world and us even as we employ them.  James explores ideas of Postman and Carr in particular, but he is not overly dependent on them.  The themes those writers develop are helpful, and James does a good job building on their work.

The core of what James will focus on is what he calls the social web.  He warns, “The spiritually formative nature of the web is inherently powerful precisely because it is so immersive and so assumed in our modern life, and we are becoming – physically and psychologically – different kinds of people because of it.” (62)  James points out that this leads to a disembodied sense of the self.  By its very design, the web does not want us to disconnect and re-engage with people face to face.  Think of the panic that sets in when we forget to take our phones with us somewhere (or, heaven forbid, lose them!) – such is how the web changes us.  We are never more disconnected than when we are connected.  I scroll, therefore I am.

James does a good job of exploring how the nature of the web has affected our views of the truth.  He says, “the privileging of personal experience as ultimate truth is not just something we find online, it’s the very logic of the social internet itself.” (72) Indeed, he states that the recent so-called gender revolution is unimaginable apart from the web (something which Carl Trueman’s The rise and triumph of the modern self handles in greater depth).

With the web, we create our own truth(s).  He notes, “the labor of self-creation is founded on the unknowable.  If you can find your deepest identity only after it is consciously crafted and curated, the work of crafting and curating runs on zero fuel.” (85)  But perhaps the web leads to self un-creation? Is it not the dissolution of self-knowledge which leaves us empty? Thus, we try to create new selves in an endless, futile, doom loop.

James’ most jarring assertion comes in the introduction: “…the internet itself – i.e., its very nature – is like pornography.  There’s something about it that is pornographic in its essence.” (8)  He doesn’t return to that theme until chapter 7, but it is easily the most provocative and interesting part of the book.

The reason behind this assertion is that the structure of the internet, even apart from the content, draws us in.  “It is not just that much pornography can be found online. It is that the web, by virtue of what it is, is intrinsically pornographically shaped.” (130)  If readers think he is focused on the wicked content of much of the web, they will miss the point.  James is talking about the similar nature of how pornography and the internet draw us in.  “There’s an important synergy between the logic and structure of the web itself and that of pornography.  …the habits, feelings, and ideas that the web makes more plausible…are the same habits, feelings, and ideas at work in the person who is hooked on porn. …Put differently, the internet is pornographically shaped.” (134) It is a jarring analogy worth exploring.

James posits three particular aspects of this pornographic shape of the web: novelty, consumption, and isolation.  The latter two may be more readily apparent.  Novelty is a more subtle.  The more we scroll, the more numbed we become to content, and the more we seek something new, something novel, something sensational.  It’s the constant drifting of our hands to our phones to see if we’ve somehow missed something even though we’re not sure what that ‘something’ might be.

The question is not if the web changes our thinking; the question is how and to what extent.  James wants us to think Christianly about these things: “To think as a Christian means that knowing something is off isn’t enough. Christian wisdom is not a texture-less posture of pure critique.  Rather, it is a gospel-shaped, spirit-empowered intellectual habit that reflects spiritual reality.” (101-102)

Whether it is the way computer algorithms skew our attention or how the vapid, banal content of the web trivializes reality, we need to make an effort to examine what shapes our minds and hearts.  “As we confront our digital habits with biblical wisdom, we see the way God’s word reorients us and pulls us back from the beliefs and attitudes that we tend to cultivate online.” (167)

Some of the themes in this book have been previously explored by James in his Digital Liturgies Substack blog and elsewhere.  The book has a bit of a disjointed feel at times, perhaps because it represents gathered thoughts of prior writing?  But it is still readable, engaging, and a worthwhile read.  Hopefully James’ book will encourage us to ask ourselves, are we living by a divine liturgy or by a digital one?

Kenneth J. McMullen
Reformed Theological Seminary Charlotte