If you know anything about religion and social-media, you know that Catholic Twitter can be a wild place.
Niche digital religion is really something. I mean, if Elon Musk decided to swim the Tiber, all of the Big Tech servers would probably turn to pillars of salt. If he became an evangelical Protestant this White House might resort to nuclear weapons.
The question many Catholic priests, and other mainstream religious folks, have asked is rather basic: Is something like Twitter a good, safe, worthy place to invest their talents? Or should they consider it a dangerous waste of time?
I’ve read some interesting essays on topics related to this question and, this time, I will share one as this weekend’s think piece. The headline at RealClearReligion.org is rather blunt: “Catholics, Log Off.” The author is Jack Butler, an editor at National Review Online and a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University in America.
Let’s start with the obvious: What would Satan tweet?
The fight against Lucifer was going pretty well — until the devilish enginery appeared. As John Milton depicts the battle of Satan's rebellious angels against the forces of Heaven in his epic poem "Paradise Lost," the demons were on the backfoot, until they devise "implements of mischief" that will "dash/To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands/Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd/The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt."
Not all artifices are inherently evil. But if the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel is true and demons "prowl about the world, seeking the ruin of souls," they can show up in our devices, too. William Peter Blatty suggests this in his novel "The Exorcist." The demon Pazuzu, having possessed a young girl, is asked if it minds being recorded. "Not at all," the demon says. "Read your Milton and you'll see that I like infernal engines. They block out all those damned silly messages from him."
But what does it mean for technology to obstruct our path to God?
To put this in small-o “orthodox” theological terms, technology is merely another development in a world that is both glorious and fallen. In a previous era, I used to tell my Mass Comm students that I would imagine that there are just as many people who have been led astray by preaching as by MTV. So much depends on the intentions of the people/artists doing the preaching.
Butler is pretty clear on the mixed blessings in the digital age, noting: “Technology has made our lives better. But it has not altered human nature.”
However, this doesn’t mean that all forms of technology have the same strengths and weaknesses. Some are better than others at communicating certain types of message. The paraphrase one media theorist (I think it was George Gilder), smoke signals were great at delivering messages like: “Buffalo herd turning into the sunset.” It would be harder to use that technology to say: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. …”
Social media is a great tool, if the goal is uniting choirs of people inside concrete bunkers of information. It doesn’t work very well if the goal is delivering crucial information needed to unite citizens during, let’s say, a pandemic.
As it turns out, Twitter is really, really good at doing one thing, according to Butler.
If there is one sin most endemic to Twitter, it is wrath — wrath produced in ourselves by learning of things that anger yet don't really affect us; wrath spewed forth from ourselves toward some chosen foe; wrath at our own wrath. In this, it is deeply unhealthy, and un-Christian. Yet there are some voices, even Catholic ones, who profit from the wrath economy. These jackals have discovered that the platform rewards their anger, that pettiness there beats piety, and that exhibitionism on it beats out restraint. They have earned great followings. Worse yet, many Catholics, especially similarly overly online younger ones, have come to admire and even to imitate such voices, seeing in their performative outrage evidence that they are responsive to the supposed demands of this moment. But so many of our era's maladies arise from precisely this kind of behavior. Thus, good Catholics are led away not only from the civic virtues that our republic requires, but also from what Catholicism itself teaches.
What’s the solution to this hellish puzzle? Butler says: “Going off the grid, like a Desert Father, is impractical.”
What’s the answer? Here’s a clue: Don’t let digital demons cut your ties to real people and real communities. Yes, I frequently tell people the same thing when they ask me questions about the state of modern journalism.
This isn’t a long think piece. It will not take much time to read it all.