The Internet Perpetuates Our Spiritual Dementia

Spiritual Dementia

Dementia has cast a cruel shadow over my family for many years. Both my mother and my wife’s mother battled dementia for more than a decade. Mom died in September 2018. We lost my mother-in-law fifteen months later, in December 2019. Both women were diagnosed with forms of dementia when they were in their fifties. Both were younger than most dementia patients. Both suffered for years. So did their families and closest friends as they navigated the effects of a terminal brain condition on a loved one. In the end, as their brains quit communicating with the rest of their organs, we lost these women far earlier than seems right.

Dementia is a thief. It steals your life by impairing your memory. Every dementia patient’s story is different. Mom would remember things incorrectly. In the same conversation, she would recall some details perfectly, but others would seemingly come out of left field, leading to confusion and sometimes conflict. Her personality changed in troubling ways. Then she declined rapidly, over about six months. In many ways, my mother-in-law’s situation was even worse: she simply stopped remembering. For the final years of her life, she didn’t know any of us. She had forgotten everything. It was a long goodbye before she finally passed away.

The church is always tempted by a form of spiritual dementia. But unlike the medical condition, this type of dementia is self-selected, whether passively through neglect or actively through rebellion. In the fourth century, the Arians forgot who Jesus really was and led much of the Eastern church into heresy. In the medieval West, various popes and other ecclesiastical leaders forgot what it meant to be shepherds and embraced moral profligacy while courting political power. Christians from the 1500s to mid-1800s forgot what it meant that all people are created in God’s image as they enslaved Africans and their descendants for centuries. In the twentieth century, many German Protestants forgot what it meant to obey God rather than men and supported the murderous Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. In our day, many professing believers have forgotten what it means that God created humans male and female, or that his intention for men and women is a lifelong one-flesh union, or that humans are embodied creatures, or that humans have greater inherent dignity than other creatures, or that every human possesses dignity.

Scrolling Ourselves to Death

Brett McCracken, Ivan Mesa

Drawing from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and applying his insights to today’s scrolling age, this book helps believers think carefully about digital technology and inspires the church to turn difficult cultural challenges into life-giving opportunities. 

Spiritual dementia is incompatible with Christian faithfulness. As both a church historian and a pastor, I’m increasingly convinced that life in the digital age compounds the potential for losing our theological and ethical memory. Our highly digital existence enables us to remain connected constantly through what Chris Martin calls the “social internet.”¹ While this technology is convenient in many ways, it often drives us to narrowly prioritize the present moment at the expense of the bigger stories and wider contexts that make sense of our lives. Such stories certainly include the narrative arc of Scripture, which has rightly been called “the true story of the whole world.”² But it also includes lesser, though still important, stories that form us: The stories of our families. The stories of our communities. The stories of our nations. The stories of our vocations. And the story of Christianity—church history.

Arrogance of Amnesia

No technology is simply a neutral tool to be used for whatever utilitarian purpose we deem appropriate.³ This is certainly true of the internet, the influence of which touches almost every part of our lives. Like Sauron’s malevolent ring from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the internet seeks to subdue every rival and rule them all. It demands our full attention. It seduces us into increased allegiance. And prolonged, unreflective exposure to the internet withers our souls until we become diminished shades who forget what life was once like in the real world. The internet conditions us to embrace what I once heard church historian Timothy George refer to in a different context as the “arrogance of amnesia.” We no longer remember who we are and how we got here, but we assume we know more than everyone who came before us because of our constant access to nearly limitless content.

None of this digitally induced amnesia would surprise Neil Postman. Though he died shortly before the digital revolution took off, his writings about the relationship between television and memory proved prescient. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued “television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium. Its grammar, so to say, permits no access to the past.”⁴ I’d suggest this is far more the case with more recent forms of digital media—particularly smartphones—which have the potential to keep us mediated nearly every moment, no matter where we are. Even more than TV, the internet keeps viewers hooked on the present, their eyes glued to the momentary distractions passing across their screens or feeds.

Postman argued that the coming technological dystopia looked more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) of pleasureinduced compliance than like the totalitarian coercion of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Generally, I agree with Postman on this point. But in at least one important way, our digital age calls back to Orwell’s famous novel. In that story, the ominously misnamed Ministry of Truth manipulates the population by controlling all information. Whenever new propaganda is published, all older material is deposited in chutes found throughout the building that empty into a giant incinerator hidden away in the building’s recesses. These chutes are called memory holes. The past is regularly pushed down the memory hole, thus keeping the populace focused on the ever-reinvented present.⁵ In modern usage, the term “memory hole” has come to refer to any attempt to revise the past by ignoring it, suppressing it, or simply rewriting it.

The internet, and especially the social internet, functions like an ever-present, ever-growing memory hole. I don’t simply mean people are always scrubbing or reframing “inconvenient” information from the internet and reinventing themselves, their organizations, or their causes—though that is certainly true. Rather, I mean that the internet is designed to keep us fixated on the present, rewarding and reinforcing engagement with what is current, new, and seemingly urgent.

In his much-discussed book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues, “Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.”⁶ This isn’t a bug but a feature of the internet. Carr’s book shows how our brains are rewired by nearly every aspect of the internet, how companies exploit this, and why we should be concerned. One cognitive casualty is our personal memory, which can’t help but atrophy the more we depend on the artificial digital memories we access online. Carr’s assessment is pointed: “The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.”⁷

While the internet’s erosion of our ability to remember is troubling, this is coupled with the reality that the digital world almost compels us to be focused on the present. The twenty-four-hour news cycle that accompanied the rise of cable news networks in the late twentieth century seems quaint compared to the sheer number of options (both good and bad) and the cacophony of competing voices available online. Much of the social internet is driven by emails addressing the needs of the moment, group texts that keep us engaged in ongoing conversation, social media updates that keep us plugged in to what’s trending, and influencers who promote contemporary trends. Felicia Wu Song rightly refers to our digital lives as “mobile, social, and infinitely novel.”⁸

A generation ago, Postman compared television to a mirror. The technology was designed to reflect the ever-changing preferences of the moment rather than point us to the wisdom of the past. He quoted broadcast journalist Bill Moyers, who referred to the 1980s as an “anxious age of amnesiacs” and warned that “Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”⁹ Television dulled historical memory, and while some programming certainly focused on historical topics, these periodic forays into the past were hardly an antidote to the present-driven demands of the medium. Postman lamented, “We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember.”¹⁰

In Technopoly, Postman advised that “when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”¹¹ Few heeded these sorts of warnings when the digital age began, nor did many of us have concerns when the social internet first became part of the fabric of our lives. We have reaped the consequences with our diminished ability to remember the past, which should be especially troubling for believers who understand we are members of the communion of saints that stretches back to creation and extends into eternity. God desires for us a better way.

Remembering and Recounting

In her insightful book The Spiritual Practice of Remembering, Margaret Bendroth argues that in the Christian tradition, “remembering and forgetting were decisions with moral consequences.”¹² As a historian and archivist, Bendroth is concerned that believers (and others) remember rightly the Christian past—the good and the bad—so we might better embody present faithfulness. In the Pentateuch, God remembered his covenants as a sign of his unchanging character (Gen. 9:15–16; Ex. 2:24; 6:5; Lev. 26:42, 45). God also commanded his people to remember both his mighty acts (especially the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian enslavement) and his commandments (Ex. 3:15; 13:3; Num. 15:39–40; Deut. 5:15; 7:18; 16:12). These themes continued throughout the Old Testament, especially the Psalms and the Prophets. As the psalmist exclaimed,

I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes,
     I will remember your wonders of old. (Ps. 77:11)

Importantly, this spiritual remembering was not just a facet of individual devotion but a multigenerational practice. God’s commandments were to be told and retold as a formative reminder of who—and whose—Israel was:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:4–9)

Remembrance was at the heart of Israel’s devotion and shaped the rhythm of the people’s spiritual lives, both individually and corporately.

This emphasis carried over into the early church. Notably, Jesus cited Deuteronomy 6:5 as the first and greatest commandment, which the Holy Spirit led Matthew to record for the earliest believers (Matt. 22:36–38). Paul referred to traditions he handed down to the early church (1 Cor. 11:2; 2 Thess. 2:15; 3:6). Peter reminded believers of truths they already knew (2 Pet. 1:12–13). Jude 3 commanded Christians “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” These texts imply acts of spiritual remembering that were consistent with, and an expansion of, the earlier commands for Israel to remember and pass on the truths of God and his ways.

Postman argued that “history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.”¹³ As believers, we certainly believe this is the case. God calls us to remember the past. This includes first and foremost Scripture, which recounts the words and ways of God from creation to consummation and forms our biblical worldview. But it also applies to the Christian past, from the end of the New Testament age to yesterday. The digital age has made our memories sluggish. We must retrain ourselves to be what the eighteenth-century Anglican evangelical Ambrose Serle called “Christian remembrancers,” reminding ourselves regularly of biblical truths and their implications for our lives.¹⁴

Cultivating Christian Remembering

England declared war against Germany on September 3, 1939, thereby entering a second European war in less than a generation. A little over a month later, C. S. Lewis delivered a sermon in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, titled “Learning in War-Time.” Lewis told the congregation of students that there is no such thing as a normal life, so they should continue to pursue their studies just as much in a time of war as in a time of peace. He also spoke eloquently about the need to understand the past:

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.¹⁵

Spiritual dementia is incompatible with Christian faithfulness.

The digital age is certainly characterized by “the great cataract of nonsense.” We need to resist the tyranny of the present, which is the warp and woof of the internet, by cultivating habits that help us remember the stories that matter most. We need to find ways to practice the spiritual discipline of Christian remembering. Here are a few suggestions for how you might do that:

• For your regular devotional time, read from a physical Bible and incorporate creeds, confessions, liturgies, and older hymns into your prayer life.¹⁶
• Supplement your Scripture reading with edifying biographies of faithful Christian leaders.
• Consider following C. S. Lewis’s suggestion to read one old book for every new book—or, “if that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”¹⁷
• Listen to podcasts or audiobooks focusing on church history during your daily commute, while exercising, or when doing chores around your home.
• Lean into the historical continuity of Christianity. At church when you hear Scripture preached, take the Lord’s Supper, watch someone get baptized, greet one another, take up tithes and offerings, and engage in other worship practices, self-consciously remind yourself that believers have been doing these things for two millennia—and are doing them still today, all over the world. Your story is part of a much larger story, and your pursuit of godliness can be shaped by the example of saints from bygone days.

For pastors or church leaders, I encourage you to include Christian history in your church’s discipleship menu:

• When you preach and teach, cite regularly from past Christian leaders who offer evergreen spiritual wisdom. (I know Spurgeon is great, but try to stretch yourself.)
• Incorporate creeds or selections from your tradition’s confessional statements into your church’s liturgy.
• Consider offering a short course for church members on church history or the history of your particular ecclesiastical tradition.
• Host a reading group that works through a short survey of church history or the biography of a famous saint.

These are just a few ideas, but this is the larger point: you must be intentional about making the practice of Christian remembering a part of your strategy for spiritual formation. In the forgetful age of the social internet, remembering is resistance. So, as you seek ways to rightly order your digital life, make sure you include counterformative practices that remind you that memory matters for our spiritual flourishing. After all, the present always lasts only a moment, but the wisdom of the Christian past will continue to speak into eternity.

This article is by Nathan A. Finn and is adapted from Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa.

Nathan A. Finn (PhD, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the dean of the School of Theology and Missions and professor of theological studies at Union University. Nathan lives in Jackson, Tennessee, with his wife, Leah, and their four children.

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