David T. Koyzis
Does the proliferation of social media and our increasing electronic interdependence make for stronger and more resilient communities? Or might it be further fragmenting us?
We live in an age when there is an unprecedented amount of information bombarding us from all directions. With computer technology’s great leap forward in the 1980s and ’90s, our social networks have expanded exponentially, keeping us in constant contact with friends, family, and co-workers around the world. This interconnectedness has refashioned our notion of community, bursting through the old geographical limits that once circumscribed our social circles.
But what has this done to our lives as members of specific communities? If our loyalties are more diffuse than ever before, and if each of us can in effect create his or her own community, how has this affected, for example, the political bonds of solidarity that hold citizens together in a public legal community ordered to doing justice? What, further, is this doing to the church institution?
I will argue here that the pseudo-communities we create online are a poor substitute for genuine communities, such as state and church institution, and that we need to renew our efforts to maintain the latter.
Virtual Citizenship
As the name implies already, citizenship was once tied to specific cities. To be a citizen meant that one had a relationship to a city permitting one a role in its governance.
In ancient Athens, during its democratic periods, all citizens had the right to participate in the assembly, which in effect constituted a committee of the whole, a grand parliamentary body composed of everyone. Well, not quite everyone, because only native-born male heads of household possessed citizenship, with women, minors, non-heads of household, resident aliens, and slaves excluded. Of course, those falling into the latter categories made up the majority of Athens’ population, meaning that citizenship was effectively restricted to the few. In the book of Acts we read that St. Paul the Apostle was a Roman citizen (Acts 16:16–40; 22:22–29), the significance of which is likely to be lost on today’s readers, who expect that anyone born within the borders of a particular state is a citizen. But in the first century AD, to be a citizen meant to have a special legal standing relative to the city of Rome, which, somewhat anachronistically, still considered itself a republic.
During the European middle ages, with the continent divided into a plethora of overlapping dominions, the notion of citizenship became dormant, as particular individuals claimed allegiance not to a community of citizens but to the suzerain over the land on which they lived and worked. This language of being subject to a ruler was retained well into the twentieth century, when, for example, those born in Canada or the crown colony of Cyprus, where my father was born and raised, were considered British subjects, a status that slowly faded as the British Empire became the Commonwealth of Nations and its members gradually gained independence.
At the outset of the modern era, as the west European monarchs were consolidating their sovereignty over specific territories, something we now know as the state came into being. While we sometimes consider state and government as synonyms, they are not identical. Governments have existed from the beginning of history, as a chieftain, along with a body of elders, ruled a clan, tribe, or city, without his sphere of authority being carefully delineated. Nevertheless, a body of unwritten customary law was understood by everyone to be normative, not only for the people he ruled, but for the ruler himself. He could not rule just as he pleased; he was bound to govern in accordance with the law, and the community as a whole was responsible for ensuring that he did so. However, at this early stage in history, to speak of the state or citizenship would be inaccurate.
What is the state then? The state is the community of citizens and their government bound together by uniform principles of right within a particular territory. To be a citizen means more than being subject to the laws and policies of a government. It means to be an active member—a participant—of a political community oriented to doing public justice. Much as Paul had a certain standing vis-à-vis the city of Rome, to be a citizen of, say, the United States entails having a legal standing with respect to the institutions established by the Constitution. Moreover, citizenship entails a certain responsibility for the direction of the nation in the future.
In a democratic state, citizenship gives one the right to vote and to express oneself on the political issues of the day. Not everyone eligible to vote necessarily does so, of course, but the right is available to all who qualify. Moreover, some go so far as to assert that citizens have a responsibility to vote, implying that those who do not are derelict in their duty. Beyond voting, citizens have the right to stand—or run, depending on your preferred metaphor—for public office in election campaigns. Short of this, they are welcome actively to support candidates for office, to publish their thoughts in a newspaper’s opinion-editorial pages, to engage in free discussion of the great issues of the day, and to organize their fellow citizens for political purposes. Today, of course, it is easier than ever to publish our thoughts, without waiting for a periodical’s editorial board to accept a letter to the editor. All we need to do is to start an online blog, post our thoughts, and build a reading audience.
On the surface, this would seem like a very good thing. The dissemination of information has been radically democratized in recent decades, especially since the turn of the millennium. An example from my own past will illustrate how much things have changed.
In the summer of 1974 Cyprus was forcibly divided between ethnic Greeks and Turks. As Turkey’s military forces intervened to divide the island, virtually all of our relatives, including my ageing grandparents, fled before them, becoming refugees in their own land. At first, of course, the newspapers and magazines were filled with reports of Cyprus, and it dominated the airwaves as well. But once the conflict had hardened into a stalemate within a few weeks, the story drifted to the back pages and then disappeared altogether. Those of us who remained interested in Cyprus had to rely on personal communications from relatives and friends. This was an era when news reporting in the United States was dominated by such professional organizations as the Chicago Daily News, TIME Magazine, and the three major commercial television networks. We were pretty much at their mercy. If they lost interest in something, we were left in the dark. Of course, those of us with access to shortwave radio, a youthful preoccupation of mine, could follow the BBC or Deutsche Welle to get an international perspective. Yet even then we were dependent on professionals to keep us informed.
Nearly five decades later, things are quite different. Even if news of Cyprus is not carried by the major television networks or the print media, I can follow events in that country quite easily by downloading the Cyprus Mail app on my iPad or by using a search engine. I am able to track matters of little interest to the vast majority of North Americans on a daily basis. The same is possible with Togo, Tonga, and Tuvalu, countries which are well outside of western awareness. Surely this is a progressive development? We are surrounded by huge stores of information waiting to be unlocked. This should make us better citizens, right?
It should, but, if contemporary trends are any indication, it doesn’t. Why?
Political Community and Political Responsibility
Not all political communities are democratic, of course, but it is fitting that citizenship in a state should entail a certain participatory role. Even the ancient political philosophers believed that a properly constituted polity should have a democratic component, even as they generally thought unmitigated democracy a bad thing.
Beginning with Polybius (c. 200 BC–c. 118 BC), the larger western tradition of political philosophy generally advocated a mixed constitution that would encompass the best features of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, combined into a single polity. Far from being a lofty ideal along the lines of Plato’s vaunted republic, the mixed constitution can be said to characterize a large number of empirical political systems around the globe, as executives (monarchy), parliamentary bodies (aristocracy), and electorates (democracy) form essential and complementary components. In this respect, it is almost certainly incorrect to label Canada, the US, and the United Kingdom democracies pure and simple. They are polities with democratic institutions, or what we have come to know as constitutional democracies.
For a constitutional democracy to function well, a number of preconditions must be met to enable the smooth flow of information and to facilitate ongoing conversation among citizens. The first of these is shared political culture and traditions.
The rule of law and constitutional governance cannot be legislated in a cultural vacuum. Many countries boast expertly drafted constitutional documents which are nevertheless routinely ignored by citizens and rulers alike. The 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation reads very well indeed but has not prevented Russia becoming a “Putinocracy.” There will always be a certain distance between codified law and actual usage, but where the two are so far apart as to be routinely opposed to each other, it is difficult to speak of a healthy polity, and arbitrary rule may come to supplant active citizenship.
Of course, the citizenry may be culturally divided so as to render constitutional governance difficult if not altogether impossible. Yet even in this case there may be shared traditions of mutual accommodation that make it possible for the leaders of distinct communities to collaborate for political purposes. The literature of consociationalism offers, once again, not an ideal to be striven for but an empirical account of the power-sharing practices in such countries as the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria with sharply divided polities.
In the second place, a common language is necessary to enable citizens to deliberate over the great issues of the day. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) argued that politics at its best consists of action and speech among equals. Sir Bernard Crick (1929–2008) believed that the political task calls for conciliating diversity within a particular unit of rule—a responsibility requiring people to talk with and listen to each other. Of course, most countries contain communities speaking different languages. In Canada, English and French both have official status, with scores of aboriginal and immigrant languages spoken locally and in the home. India, one of the largest countries in the world, boasts hundreds of languages and dialects spoken within its extensive south Asian territory. Yet for many common purposes, English has become the working language in India, binding at least the educated élites together and enabling them to communicate not only with each other but with others around the globe.
The third precondition is that there should be legally-recognized freedom of speech and a free flow of information among citizens. If the print and electronic media are controlled by government or closely associated with it, it will become difficult to communicate points of view that conflict with the official narrative. In Canada we have the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a Crown corporation supported by the public purse, but it is by no means the sole source of news and information, nor does it toe a pro-government line. There are also CTV, Global, The Globe and Mail, The Montreal Gazette, Maclean’s and many other sources scattered across the country. Although the majority of the media may tend to gravitate towards a particular narrative, they need not do so. Freedom of the press is important for keeping citizens sufficiently informed about issues of shared concern.
It is on this third precondition that we have seen the greatest change over the past decades. Traditionally, our sources of news and information were professional organizations established specifically for providing us a window to the world. When I was growing up, the most trusted person in America was said to be Walter Cronkite (1916–2009), the beloved anchorman for the CBS Evening News between 1962 and 1981. But Cronkite was only one person. Behind him stood an entire team of professional reporters, news gatherers, and editors responsible for weighing events, discussing their relative importance, and putting them into a format that the public could easily digest.
Corporate sponsors bankrolled this enterprise, and entire generations of Americans got through war, depression, prosperity, and scandal with the help of CBS News and other similar media organizations. At 6:30pm Americans could choose among CBS, NBC, and ABC, or read instead TIME or Newsweek, the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune. Certainly these media sometimes got matters wrong, as in 1948 when the Tribune erroneously reported that Thomas Dewey had won the US presidency. Nevertheless, these print and electronic media were generally careful to provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” as The New York Times famously boasted, and nothing that was not. This meant that they would do their best not to publish mere rumours and to make sure that their sources for a story were reliable.
However, since the rise of the internet and the world wide web in the last decade of the twentieth century, the dissemination of information has been radically democratized, with mixed results. True, as mentioned above, we can now follow developments in Cyprus or Tuvalu without waiting for the traditional media to decide what’s newsworthy. In theory, we should all be better citizens now that we have access to so much information about virtually everything. But this is not how it has turned out.
If we all have the ability to create our own virtual communities, we may deceive ourselves into thinking we can each create his or her own reality. This has two related results: first, it may give us a weak grasp of the difference between truth and falsehood, and second, it may attenuate our sense of loyalty to and responsibility for the ordinary communities of which we are part, such as family, marriage, neighbourhood, church, and state. Indeed the most significant of these communities are not those we have chosen for ourselves but the ones we are born into, including family, church, and state.
Too Much Information?
First, because anyone can post almost anything on the world wide web, and because even flagrant falsehoods can easily be made to look true with a professional-looking website, we may take the easy road and neglect to employ our ordinary powers of discernment. Concerns over “fake news” have come into the foreground in recent years. We may be led to believe that violent crime is on the increase when it is actually decreasing. As citizens we may furiously call on our leaders to do something about this supposed explosion in criminal activity when no crisis actually exists.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon. During the 1960 presidential campaign in the US, candidate John F. Kennedy called attention to a supposed missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union, in which the latter was thought to be outpacing the former in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the late 1950s. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Eisenhower administration knew otherwise, yet the gap became fixed in the public mind. This episode revealed how easily public opinion can be manipulated under the right conditions.
Second, because creating online community is so easy and offers something like instant gratification, we may be tempted to assume that all communities should be like this. We may give up on the genuine communities of which we are part and neglect the flesh-and-blood people around us. We come to feel less invested in them, because maintaining them takes hard work, considerable emotional energy, and a sustained commitment to their future. Virtual communities require none of these elements. They are fluid, constantly changing shape and making no demands on participants. No sacrifices are required. They endure for no longer than we wish them to.
Again this approach to community is not altogether unprecedented, as the social contractarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), sought to reduce community to a mere voluntary association among sovereign individuals. As the modern world has enhanced the status of the individual, more clearly differentiating her from her communities, many are tempted to make communities revolve around the subjective needs of the individual, thereby diminishing that which is held in common.
The result is that people wear their attachments lightly, putting only as much personal energy into them as they believe they are likely to receive in kind. Our world becomes a gigantic marketplace in which we are all freely-choosing consumers of various social goods. Something that began centuries ago with the dawn of liberalism has now reached its apogee in our digital age, greatly accelerated by the new electronic media of communication.
If this is so, then we may need to consider the possibility of a fourth precondition for constitutional democracy to thrive. We need to have specialized communities committed to informing the public in accordance with their respective worldviews. An undifferentiated mass of people isolated from each other and creating their own protean communities of discourse is not sufficient to maintain the diversity of genuine communities needed for a healthy body politic.
Over the past thirty years, especially since the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the language of civil society has made its way into academic and popular discourse. The Catholic tradition speaks of subsidiarity, a principle which holds that the most significant tasks in any society ought to be performed by the smallest and most local of communities, the state intervening only to offer correction when needed. The Reformed Christian tradition, following Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), speaks of sphere-sovereignty, or sovereignty in its own sphere, recognizing that the mature differentiated society is made up of multiple communal formations, the most basic of which are institutions of a nonvoluntary character, such as family and state.
Yet even the voluntary association needs a certain staying power. Little is lost to the larger social fabric if a particular chess club or bowling team folds, its members opting to spend their time engaging in other unrelated activities. But it matters very much that chess clubs and bowling teams exist as vehicles for channelling ordinary human interests and social instincts. These should not be transitory phenomena either. Although no organization endures for ever, the most successful play their respective roles for long periods of time, binding people together across the generations, shaping and becoming part of a familiar cultural fabric on which such people can rely. The same can be said of business enterprises, professional associations, labour unions, news organizations, and, last but not least, gathered church communities. Nurturing such communities requires a level of commitment greater than the self and its constantly mutating desires.
Doing Church in a Digital Age
If the dawn of the internet has tempted people to think that community is something that revolves around their own interests and aspirations, how has this affected the institutional church?
We have long heard relatives, friends, and neighbours tell us that they can worship God anywhere and do not need to go to church for this purpose. On the surface this seems unobjectionable, and some might even think it a profound insight. We constantly hear people tell us that they are spiritual but not religious, embracing a vague sense of the divine while avoiding an organized worship community with its apparently oppressive standards. After all, I can pray while driving to and from work, ploughing the fields, or balancing the books. I can hike in the woods and pray to God, who hears his children wherever they are. Why then attend the local church on Sunday morning? What will it do for me?
The very way these questions are posed assumes that I and my subjective needs are at the centre of life. It is difficult to wean people away from this individualistic approach to faith, given how easily it resonates with the current cultural mood. Yet we know from Scripture that God has called out of humanity a new people—a community of faith whom he has chosen for himself. As the apostle Peter puts it, “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Pet 2:9). Moreover, the entire redemptive narrative of Scripture is about God working through history to save a peculiar people—a community chosen not because of any merit on their part but because God is gracious.
This community is the church, which, following Kuyper, can be understood in two senses. To begin with, the church as the body of Christ, or corpus Christi, is made up of all those saved by his grace and encompasses the whole of their lives, including marriage, family, work, education, art, leisure, and, of course, formal worship. In this sense the church is not manifested solely in a single body but is dispersed throughout the full range of communities differentiated by their respective structures and tasks.
But there is a more focused sense of church as well in which this body is manifested in a particular institution whose very purpose is to worship God, chiefly by preaching the Word, administering the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and maintaining discipline among members. Such worship brings people together in one place as a local manifestation of Christ’s body. They are precisely called to come together to worship the God who has created and redeemed them in Christ (Heb 10:25, cf. Acts 2:42).
The Christian faith is not just a matter of individuals relating independently to God as they themselves see fit. Rather, it is a path of corporate obedience to the God who has revealed his will in the Scriptures. This is why for two thousand years believers have gathered together to confess their faith in God and to hear his Word for their lives in community. Meeting together regularly is not an optional pursuit for those who simply happen to like that sort of thing. It is the very life blood of the community of those belonging to Jesus Christ. Not only do we receive thereby the ordinary means of grace throughout our lives, but we may be less prey to the various ideological illusions that hold the larger culture in their grip. If each Christian were to worship separately on his or her own terms, the community would become fragmented and easily conformed to the ways of the world. In effect, it would cease to exist.
The denigration of corporate worship is not new with the dawn of the internet. For decades, preachers have used radio and television to reach viewers with the message of God’s word. This is a good thing, of course, but it is no substitute for coming together physically as church, as we have discovered, to our sorrow, during the current pandemic. The church’s sacraments cannot be administered over the airwaves or via the congregation’s YouTube channel into people’s homes, although our own congregation has had to settle for a second-best approximation of the Lord’s Supper during the quarantine. Under ordinary circumstances, we gather in one place to receive the grace the sacraments communicate to us. As the Heidelberg Catechism teaches about baptism, “as surely as water washes away the dirt from the body, so certainly [Jesus’] blood and his Spirit wash away my soul’s impurity, that is, all my sins” (Question & Answer 69). The recipient of baptism must be physically present to be washed in this way.
Finally, to be part of the institutional church requires a high level of commitment and dedication. It entails accepting the discipline of this local community of faith, which calls for something alien to our larger consumer-oriented culture: obedience. The willingness to obey requires that we recognize that we are not our own—that we do not belong to ourselves (1 Cor 6:19). It means that we are not ultimately in charge of our lives and our relationships. Children owe obedience to their parents. The need for obedience comes to an end as children reach maturity, but the obligation to honour and respect parents extends throughout their lives. We do not choose family; it is given to us. The same can be said of citizenship in a particular state. We are born to citizenship, which brings with it certain responsibilities to our political community.
Church membership is the same. We cannot treat our local community of faith as if it were merely a provider of spiritual goods in an open marketplace. The church is not a voluntary association of like-minded individuals who happen to enjoy worshipping in the same way. In fact, ancient tradition goes so far as to describe the church as our mother. St. Augustine tells us that “the Church is truly the mother of Christians.” John Calvin reiterates this claim: “For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast . . . . Furthermore, away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation” (Institutes IV:I.4). We cannot be Christians by ourselves without the mediation of the larger community of faith. And much as we owe our mothers in the flesh obedience when we are children, so also do we offer obedience to the church, assuming of course that it speaks biblically.
One of the side-effects of the invention of the internet may be a further weakening of the institutional church. There is a huge number of Christian blogs and online resources for prayer and Bible study. But once again these do not add up to church, which is more than the aggregate of like-minded individuals. This demonstrates once again that the most important communities are not the fleeting ones that we form for and around ourselves. The most basic of communities, such as state and church institution, have a durable organizational presence binding us together with others in the present and bridging the gulf between past and future generations. The challenge today is to recognize the limits of digital communities and electronic relationships and to work to build up and maintain the flesh-and-blood communities that shape our lives and enable us to flourish as human beings created in God’s image.
Let not the reader assume that my remarks amount to a tirade against technology, to which many people, including Christians, are prone. As Derek Schuurman has rightly observed in his path-breaking book, Shaping a Digital World, “God placed within the world the latent potential for technology and computers.”1 Arbitrarily cutting off our use of technology invented after, say, 1980 fails to grapple adequately with our ongoing relationship with what is genuinely a gift of God’s common grace.
As members of Christ’s body, we have an obligation to make proper use of technological developments in a spiritually discerning fashion. This entails weighing the pros and cons of each innovative means freshly at our disposal while bearing in mind that the most significant of human communities cannot be replaced by the thin electronic ether of a virtual world centred in the freely-choosing self.
This is an adaptation of a chapter, “Ilusão virtual,” published in Pedro Dulci, ed., Teología na era da Internet: as novas relações virtuais e os desafios à fé cristã (Brasília, DF, Brasil: Editora 371, 2018), 32-50. Used with permission.
David T. Koyzis is a Global Scholar with Global Scholars Canada. He holds the Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Political Visions and Illusions (IVP Academic, 2019) and We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God (Pickwick, 2014).
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen
- Derek Schuurman, Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 31.[↩]