The greatest threat facing the church today

In my latest piece for Christianity Today, I propose the following thesis:

The greatest threat facing the church today is not atheism or secularism, scientism or legalism, racism or nationalism. The greatest threat facing the church today is digital technology.

That’s a controversial claim for many reasons, and I’m not dogmatic about it. It could be wrong. Moreover, it’s not self-evident that there is a meaningful hierarchy of threats facing the church. Perhaps there are a handful, all on the same level; or a variety that are incommensurable. Finally, a year or two back Alan Jacobs and Andy Crouch took me (ever so kindly) to task for a claim like this one, proposing instead that Mammon, not Digital, is the principal threat; and, further, that Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mammon.

With those caveats in place, what are the candidates for this particular category? What are the most significant threats facing the church today? By what measures should we judge them? And which church, or churches, or regions and cultures of the world, should we have in mind?

The range of answers would at least need to be large enough and systemic enough to threaten millions of believers at once, and in insidious and powerful ways difficult to suss out and extinguish. In the excerpt above I mention some “isms” that people are worried about. Let’s expand that list:

• Capitalism

• Progressivism

• Liberalism

• Secularism

• Atheism

• Scientism

• Legalism

• Racism

• Nationalism

• Imperialism

• War-mongering

• Industrialism

• Environmentalism

• Utilitarianism

• Individualism

• Nihilism

• Anti-natalism

• Technophilia

• Thanatophilia (i.e., the culture of death)

The important thing to see is that the nature of the threat doesn’t consist in discrete events or even types of events—famine, plague, poverty, war. These are evils and cause mass suffering, but they aren’t threats to the church, at least not in the way I’m using the term. These and other trials the church will always have her. They’re part of the way of the world, the world we long for God to redeem. They aren’t systems or structures or ideologies perpetrated by human beings (except when they are—but they are rarely reducible to ideology or policies, for the simple reason that they are insoluble, perennial problems of finite, mortal existence in a fallen world). More to the point, in the midst of great suffering the church sometimes rises to the occasion in service, courage, and sacrifice. In the face of danger, damage, and pain the church can fail, falter, or flourish. But she can’t be what God calls her to be if she isn’t prepared—if, that is, her foundations are so eroded that she forgets her own reason for being.

It is the question of what enacts such erosion that I am naming with the language of “threat.” A major threat to the church would snuff out its life whether it was the best of times or the worst of times; it would silence the gospel before anyone could hear it or live it out at all.

Another way to put it would be to ask, as I did recently, what idol or idols a given generation or place or people worships, and why, and what counterfeit blessings it receives in return, and how its worship and what it receives in turn shape and form it in the image of said idol(s).

I’m far from dogmatic on this question, as I said at the outset. If I had to pick five, I suppose I would choose technophilia, individualism, utilitarianism, capitalism, and progressivism. But then, how many of these are birthed from or contained within liberalism, understood as the ideology developed and advanced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Not to mention scientism, which arguably is concomitant with both liberalism and utilitarianism and, later, with the love of the future that finds concrete expression in progressivism and technophilia.

And is Mammon then the devilish father of them all? I leave the question open for others to chime in.

Update (seconds after pressing publish): I realize that I did not specify that I am here thinking exclusively about exogenous threats—if I were put on the spot about internal threats, I might say that church division is the single greatest threat to the church’s integrity and to the credibility of the gospel she proclaims to the world. Not in view here!

Alan Jacobs on avoiding unpaid labor for surveillance capitalism

...it’s important to understand that a lot of what we call leisure now is actually not leisure. It is unpaid labor on behalf of surveillance capitalism, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. That is, we are all working for Google, we are working for Facebook. I would like to spread a model of reading that is genuinely a leisure activity and that escapes the loop of being unpaid labor for surveillance capitalism. That will start small, and maybe it will stay small, but my hope is that it would be it would be bigger. Even people who have very hard, demanding lives can spend an enormous amount of time in this activity that we have been taught to feel is leisure, but is as I have said unpaid labor.

It’s interesting to see how things come into fashion. Think about how in the last few months we have decided that nothing is more important than the Post Office—that the Post Office is the greatest thing in the world. One of those bandwagons that I’ve been on for my entire life is libraries. I think libraries are just amazing. I grew up in a lower-middle-class, working class family. My father was in prison almost all of my childhood, and my mother worked long hours to try to keep us afloat. My grandmother was the one who took care of my sister and me, and we didn’t have much money for books. There were a lot of books in the house, but that was because members of my family would go to used bookshops and get these like ten cent used paperbacks that had been read ten times and had coffee spilled on them and so forth. So we spent massive amounts of time at the library. Once a week my grandmother and I would go to the library and come out with a great big bag full of books and we would just read relentlessly.

I’m the only person in my family who went beyond high school—in fact I’m the only person in my family to graduate from high school. Yet we read all the time. We always had a TV on in our house, but nobody ever watched it. A characteristic thing in my family would be me, my mother, my grandmother, my sister when she got old enough, sitting in a room with the TV on, the sound turned down, and we were all just sitting there reading books. That was everything to me. It opened the door for everything that I’ve done in the rest of my life. I owe so much to the city of Birmingham, Alabama’s, public libraries. I think when I was doing that I was simultaneously engaging in genuine leisure while also being formed as a thinker and as someone who could kind of step out of the flow of the moment and acquire perspective and tranquility. So I believe that I’m recommending something that is widely available, even to people who have very little money and very few resources, and I know that from my own childhood.

—Alan Jacobs, "The Fare Forward Interview with Alan Jacobs," Fare Forward (30 Dec 2020)