“Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age,” by Samuel James: A Review

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age
by Samuel James

Crossway | 2023 | 208 pages (softcover) | $16.99

Over the past few years, Samuel James has become one of the most insightful commentators on the formative power of digital technology in our lives. Through several articles in a variety of publications and through his Substack, James has been developing an argument that focuses not primarily on the content found on the internet, but more so on the form of the internet, which he argues is shaping us in more ways than we realize. In his new book Digital Liturgies, he refines, expands, and extends this argument into an accessible book that will help readers reflect on the formative nature of the digital world and our digital habits.

I remember when I first came across James’ work and was captured by his reference to the internet as an “immersive, epistemological habitat in which hundreds of millions of people have regular, active membership. The Internet has transformed the way humans read, learn, communicate, labor, shop, recreate, and even ‘worship.’ No other technology is as disruptive to traditional forms of human activity.” He went on to persuasively argue that the very forms of digital and online technologies are “powerful instruments of personal formation that push us in a certain spiritual and epistemological direction.” Since then, I’ve been waiting for this book—and James delivers. He articulates—more clearly and accessibly than many contemporary commentators on technology—just how formative the digital environment is on our desires, habits, and lifestyles. If you’re wondering why the internet is having such profound effects on everything from anxiety and suicidality, to friendship and community, to marriage and family, this book is an approachable place to start. In the book’s first part, James lays the groundwork for his understanding of digital technologies as formative and liturgical in nature, shaping us and molding us in unhealthy and inhumane ways. In part two, he describes five specific types of digital formation that impact us all to varying degrees.

Digital is Different: Why Digital Technologies Are Not Just Like Other Tools

As the book begins, James first establishes a helpful definition of what he means by terms like “internet, web, social media, and digital technology.” He uses them to refer to one single idea:

The disembodied electronic environment that we enter through connected devices for the purpose of accessing information, relationships, and media that are not available to us in a physical format. (12)

One of James’ main arguments in the first part of the book is that technology is not, nor ever has been, neutral. This is key, and one of the most common misconceptions people have about technology: it’s simply a tool that can be used well or poorly, to good or evil ends. While it’s true that technologies can be used in good and bad ways, it’s also true that they mold us in the process of using them.

To make his case, James takes an interdisciplinary approach, pulling from theology, the philosophy of technology, recent sociological and psychological research, and current events to make a convincing argument that digital technologies are more than just tools—they form and shape us into certain types of people. As he puts it, “rather than being a neutral tool, the internet…creates in its members certain ways of thinking, feeling, and believing…The web speaks to us” (9-10). And in that speaking, it shapes us in ways that work against the grain of reality. He writes, “every person living in a modern digitally connected culture is constantly inhabiting a moral and intellectual habitat that distorts the biblical story of reality” (25). Digital technology has become not so much something we use but the way we experience and envision reality—a reality mediating mechanism. The web has become so basic to human existence in realms of work, entertainment, relationships, transportation, and more that “it is becoming the foundational medium, the superstructure of nearly every other experience.” And, James argues, we are becoming “different kinds of people because of it” (62).

Digital is Formative: How Digital Technologies Are Liturgically Shaping Us

In the book’s second part, James goes on to show how we are becoming different people by tracing five digital liturgies—common formative patterns by which the online environment shapes our lives. Here are the five he sees as most prominent and powerful:

• Authenticity: Digital environments further cultivate unhealthy expressive individualism by centering the self.
• Outrage: Digital environments reinforce outrage by feeding users more extreme and polarizing information to keep their attention.
• Shame: Digital environments make it much easier to shame or cancel others for any wrong, whether perceived or real.
• Consumption: Digital environments feed our consumption habits through a listlessness and restlessness that grows the more we are online.
• Meaninglessness: Digital environments place us in unending pools of information, leading to further distraction, discontentment, and dislocation.

Tracing these five liturgies forms the bulk of James’ book, as he takes the reader through a consideration of everything from Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, to alienation, pornography, and polarization.

Digital Dot-Connecting

James is an elegant and approachable writer, weaving together personal stories, historical examples, and insights from philosophy and theology in a relatable and engaging way. He is frequently memorable and easily quotable:

“Pixels are not created in the image of God. People are” (109).

“Consider three major phases of how civilization has logged online. We could consider these as three distinctive chapters in the life of the web: the lab, the living room, the pocket” (138).

“The age of connection is the age of loneliness. The age of productivity is the age of burnout” (163).

One of the things James does very well is tie several of the defining cultural issues of our day to digital technology. The identity crises we are seeing, the rise in anxiety, the sexual revolution, self-body dualism, anemic anthropology—all of these are connected to the digital revolution. James explains, “the major argument of this book is that Christians can only understand and respond to these and other cultural shifts correctly if we understand them in the context of digital technology’s undermining of biblical wisdom” (31). In connecting these issues to the nature of the digital environment, James has filled an important gap in some of the other treatments of these topics.

Perhaps the most provocative claim of the book is that the nature and form of the internet itself is inherently pornographic. James explains, “the nature of the web forms an astonishingly powerful complement to the function of pornography. 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….Pornography is a logical and predictable creature of the spiritual habitat of the internet” (130-131).

As an aside, James provides some stimulating reflections on whether the typical modern person (digitally embedded as we are) needs to hear more law or gospel. While of course the Word of God must be carefully applied to each individual and situation, James suggests that the default setting for most people is not one of self-satisfaction and pride but anxiety and guilt.

One of the misconceptions I hear from many evangelicals about contemporary society is that most people are happy and satisfied with their autonomous moral existences and that the facet of Christian truth that must be amplified the most when preaching to this generation is the law….This is a case of offering the right solution to the wrong problem. It is absolutely true that the gospel destroys our sense of autonomy and self-righteousness by revealing God’s truth, and God’s wrath against those who suppress it (Rom. 1). Yet it is not true that the dominant characteristic of contemporary culture is one of worldly joy and satisfaction….The ambient culture is practically begging for someone to articulate a theology of repentance.” (124)

Despite the book’s strong critiques of the digital world, James doesn’t raise these concerns as judgments from on high. Rather, he includes personal stories and struggles, making it clear that he’s not above the real temptations and effects of our glass glow-boxes. James also avoids becoming too prescriptive, noting in the opening pages of the book that “I’m not going to tell you to permanently unplug, find a cabin in the wilderness, and ‘go off the grid’ so that you can be a better Christian” (12). In the book’s final pages he adds, “this is not a book telling you to delete your accounts and throw away your devices. The key is to understand how digital technology affects us and to engage with it accordingly” (173).

It’s important to be clear that we shouldn’t turn digital habits into a gospel issue or go beyond what is written, and James tries to thread that needle. However, at the same time, I wonder if it weakens the overall thrust of the book, which persuasively contends that the digital world frequently deforms us. This is part of a larger challenge in many of the critiques of technology—where do Christian freedom and Christian wisdom meet? It’s not inherently sinful to participate in, say, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram. However, it’s also probably not wise to spend large amounts of time on such platforms. All of this is to say that there are two possible questions at this point, as I see it.

First, is James too strong in his critique of the digital world? My hunch is no, because he provides the types of clarifications and qualifications mentioned above. The closest he gets is in his argument that the internet is inherently pornographically shaped (which is quite a powerful section in the book).

My second question is essentially the inverse of the first: Is James not proscriptive enough? If digital technology really is as deformative as he suggests, why not provide clearer guidance and suggestions for living in such a world? What does digital engagement formed by Christian wisdom actually look like? These topics are the ones so many folks are craving guidance on, and trying to face this issue alone is daunting. Is there a place for communal discernment, pooling our Christian wisdom to form networks of resistance to digitalization? Perhaps pairing James' book with Justin Whitmel Earley's The Common Rule, or Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family would be fruitful in this regard. And, Robin Phillips and I address these types of questions in relation to education, church, family life and more in Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine.

Of course, threading this needle is a perennial challenge, with ditches on both sides of the road (legalism and libertinism). This challenge makes it even more understandable why James takes the approach he does. James concludes the book with a powerful acknowledgement of how our desires for something more can find distorted expression online, while the very fact that such longings exist hints at our greater destiny.

The web is a curious, marvelous thing. But at the end of the day, I believe its power and its appeal are simple. The web is a promise that we can be more than we are, do more than we can, and feel more than is near us. The web lays its billions of pages out in front of us, its incalculable hours of ‘content,’ and beckons us to a place where there can be fulness of joy—a place we are freed from our dying bodies, liberated from the search for home, and emancipated to experience nothing but newness. In fact, I think that every time we log on, we are looking for something. We are looking for heaven. (181)

James suggests this should drive us further into the community of the church, where we get a foretaste of our final destiny, where we experience true community, where we are known and loved. The church is where all the digital distortions we’ve absorbed are recalibrated around fully human and fully divine things—and ultimately the one who is fully God and fully man: Christ who has taken on flesh.