Proclaimer Blog
Real? Yes. And no.
Last weekend, there was an interesting piece in the Times magazine by über-feminist Caitlin Moran. I’m not normally a fan, but this was an insightful article. In it, she explained how she had immediately googled for the leaked celebrity pictures of Jennifer Lawrence once she heard they were online. “Just a bit of fun,” she argued to herself. The article is her apology: “I’m an idiot. It’s all real. Of course it is.”
Her argument is that we convince ourselves the internet is not real. “Humanity has a weird perception glitch: that the internet isn’t real. In the internet, humans have created an infinite new continent. A limitless, seething megalopolis in which we do everything that we do in a realmegalopolis – shop, chat, meet – but in which we seem to believe the laws that humans painstakingly constructed, for the good of the ‘meat’ world, don’t count.”
In other words, we think the internet is a place of freedom precisely because it is not real. I think Christians increasingly have embraced this concept. We think we can maintain friendships on Facebook alone (I’m on Facebook myself, and it’s not all bad). We can survive in a mediocre church because “my church is online and Piper’s my pastor.” Christians spend more time reading blogs than they do well-argued books. And so on. We prefer to live-chat than pick up a phone.
There is a sense in which Moran is right. It is real. People we interact with on Facebook are real people. Insults (and this is the point she makes) via twitter are real insults. But that doesn’t make it normal. It is real and yet it is not. And for Christians who are Spirit-wired to be relational beings, serving one another, that’s a real problem.
The reality the internet brings is not the reality we need. It may serve our reality, but it cannot replace it. And Christians need to understand this.