OPINIONS

Prayer in the Facebook Age with all your heart, with all your
soul, and with all your mind. Lov
by M ark Bauerlein ing your neighbor comes second.

e are in danger of losing

t is easy to overlook those mo should not depart from them. Here

W these replenishing, correc
tive moments of solitary
faith. Silence and seclusion are harder

I
ments in the Gospels when Jesus and elsewhere, the people press and to find, and fewer people seek them
withdraws from others. They beseech, and Jesus needs a respite. out. You find a lone bench in the park
come across as pauses, a rest But, of course, the isolation has a on a fall afternoon, gaze up at the sky
between miracles, parables, and positive content. Its not about get through the branches, and begin the
edifying encounters such as that with
ting away from others but about go Rosary only to have a power walker
the rich young man. The work of Je ing toward something else. Jesus isnt march by barking into an invisible
suss ministry takes place amid oth alone. Hes with the Father. Prayer mic. Its not just the noise, its his con
ers, and the exchanges can be taxing, can happen in company. Church nection to absent persons, as if to say
as when the Canaanite woman asks worship is corporate prayer. But that being in one place alone with the
his help and he replies that his bread there must be times when a soul peti Lord is insufficient.
is not for dogs. And she said, Truth, tions the Father in solitude. The Cat Social media is the culprit. Text
Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs echism o f the Catholic Church says ing, selfies, updates, chats, snapchats,
which fall from their masters table that faith is not an isolated act. No tweets, multiplayer games, blogs,
(Matt. 15:26-27), and Jesus relents. one can believe alone, just as no one wikis, and email enable people to
The souls he helps and tangles with can live alone, but Jesuss example gossip, boast, rant, strategize, self-
make him weep and roar; he de shows the periodic necessity of mak promote, share, collaborate, inform,
nounces, mourns, blesses, and heals. ing God your only companion. Too emote, and otherwise connect with
Disengagement allows for calm and often the world draws you away from one another anywhere and all the
quiet. Especially in Luke 4:42, his sol him, and so you must slough off your time. The volume is astounding. Ear
itude marks a retreat from the mad circumstances and address him by lier this year, Facebook boasted 1.23
ding crowd: And when it was day, he yourself, oriented toward nothing billion active users, while late last
departed and went into a desert place: else, no outside distractions or com year Twitters 200 million users sent
and the people sought him, and came mitments. The first commandment is, 400 million tweets per day. Accord
unto him, and stayed him, that he You shall love the Lord your God ing to Nielsen Media, a teen with a
mobile device sends or receives on
Mark Bauerlein is senior editor o f F irst Things . average around 3,300 text messages

17
 OPINIONS

per month, in addition to logging 650
minutes of phone calls.
Those habits, which researchers
term hypersociality, dominate lei
sure time. Data analyst Bill Tancer
found in 2008 that social media
had passed pornography as the most
popular type of search. The whole
range of fallen human motives passes
through the tools, but the prime one
is, precisely, I want not to be alone.
ome commentators highlight the
abandonment, quarantine, a de
nial of support. The astronomical
success of their ventures suggests
that many, many people experience
solitude in just that way. When these
Silicon Valley moguls explain their
creations, they set money, power,
and fame below the pledge to cure
the human condition. They may be
insincere, but their dosages of social
media have proven spectacularly
irresistible.
Loneliness is everywhere. I see it
Friends and People Talking About
This. A fresh request compliments
you, but only briefly, so you yearn
for more, as if a steady sequence of
friends and strangers regard will
expel your loneliness for good. The
motto is Only connect, and do it of
ten. Maintaining that network takes
hard work, but the lure of recognition
and the pain of forlornness provide
enough excitement and desperation
to keep it going, however vainly.
And two, most pitiably, it ob

S narcissism and frivolousness (the

top tweeter, with 53 million fol
lowers, is Katy Perry, Justin Bieber
coming in second with 52 million
Pope Francis has 4.6 million); others
emphasize the human communities
social media creates and the revenue
it generates for businesses. But the ti
tans of social media understand quite
well the social need behind it all. In
his Time magazine profile of Mark
Zuckerberg, Man of the Year for
2010, Lev Grossman stated the aims
of Facebook:
Facebook wants to populate the
wilderness, tame the howling
mob and turn the lonely, antiso
cial world of random chance into
a friendly world, a serendipitous
world. Youll be working and liv
ing inside a network of people,
and youll never have to be alone
again.
Zuckerberg told a reporter the
same year, And no matter where
you go, we want to ensure that every
experience you have will be social.
Reid Floffman, founder of Linkedln,
announced in a 2012 talk at MIT,
Were social animals. Its deep into
our identity about how we discover
meaning in life, what we think is
important about what we do. In
conversation with Andrew Keen, Biz
Stone, cofounder of Twitter, states
bluntly, The future will be social.
. . . The social will be the killer app
of the twenty-first century. By this
way of thinking, isolation is hurtful
in my students when I tell them to
turn off the TV while studying and
one blurts out, I couldnt do that
the silence would drive me crazy. Or
scures the surest and permanent
source of comfort: God. People
awash in social media cant get past
the paradox that the best salve for
when you watch someone at a bus loneliness is properly applied alone.
stop end one phone call and promptly They look for answers in added con
dial up another one, and the words nections, and more-emotional ones,
you hear have no urgency to them, but God isnt a closer contact and
proving that the only need lay in better friend. Fie transcends the so
finding someone to talk to. Contact cial, and you must seek him beyond
fends off the terrible feeling, the un the medium of share and like. In
ease Robert Frost caught while star solitary prayer, the secular pleasures
ing at the snowy field and desolation dissipate and the successes of social
enveloped him: media melt into nothingness. You
drop your social self.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness At the same time, the more you
Will be more lonely ere it will be socialize, the less you follow Jesus
less. into the wilds and prove the psalms
promise, The Lord is my rock, and
A voice, a photo, some words from my fortress, and my deliverer. You
someone, somewhere, hold it at bay. build your life upon sand, and when
I may be only one of Britney Spearss the sand shifts, you add more sand ...
37 million followers, but a short mes and more . . .
sage makes her a part of my life. I
may be estranged from my job, but if his may explain the findings
my Linkedln connections reach three
figures, a richer future awaits. T of a recent study showing a
correlation between Internet
use and religious disaffiliation. Using
he sad truth about all this has data from the General Social Survey,
T two parts. One, the friends computer scientist Allen B. Downey
and connections one forms, concluded that Internet use accounts
for 20 percent (5.1 million people) of
the attention one gathers through
digital tools, fail to meet the spiri overall decreases in religious com
tual hunger. The universal hope that mitment since 1990. The science is
I-am-not-alone-and-unacknowledged fuzzier than Downey allows, but the
needs stronger stuffwe arent so trend matches our assumption that
shallow. This is why the stunning more social media means less prayer.
geometrical growth in social-media People spend fewer minutes alone
volume has occurred. This and with God, and, more damaging, they
that connection arent enough, so acquire a sensibility less inclined to
you grasp for more of them, more seek him out.

18
 FIRST THINGS December 2014

T hat disposition has hit most
strongly among the young, the heavi
est users. To reverse it, my advice to
parents, ministers, and other men
tors is not to speak to them of Gods
greatness and love, nor to assure
them, God is with you always and
best felt in solitude. Young people
trust most the evidence of their own
experience. So, give them a spiri
tual exercise to perform before each
session of social media begins. When
you buy your seventeen-year-old a
new tool, hand your charge three
psalms, or the Sermon on the Mount,
or the Nicene Creed, and say, Here
is your gift, but you may have it on
one condition. When you sit down
in Starbucks, before you open the
tablet, you must recite these words.
When you walk home from school,
before you text your friends, you
must recite these words. Say them
slowly and mean them. It will only
take a few m inutes. I w ant your
promise.
Prayer must become a practice
among our children, and if we can
use the bait of social media to plant
it into their daily affairs, then we may
have faith that the call of God will,
sometimes, entice them more than the
news of their friends. Q

New-Time Religion
by Wesley J. Smith

he West, we are told, has image? Why worry about heaven, transhumanism for lacking. (More

T
entered the secular age. hell, or the karmic conditions in on that in a bit.) Pellissier traveled a
Religious faith is irre which we will be reincarnated when long and peripatetic road to transhu
versibly shriveling, open we can instead enjoy radical life ex manismfrom Catholic, to hippie,
ing space for a society tension, perhaps even attain immor to Daoist, to Quaker, to an atheism
governed by reason. What such state
tality by uploading our minds into so militant that he once organized
ments miss is that while traditional computers? Indeed, transhum an an atheists conference that included
religion may well fade, we will never ist prophets such as Googles Ray a Bible-throwing contest. When he
see an end to something like religious Kurzweil and University of Oxfords found Dawkins-style atheism too
belief. Were subjective beings whose Nick Bostrom assure believers that bashing, he embraced transhuman
need for meaning will never be satis science will soon wipe away every ism-although he now is thinking of
fied merely by what can be proved. tear from our eyes, and there will be converting to Judaism (Reformed, he
Thus, even if Judaism and Christian no more death, nor sorrow, nor cry assured the audience) because one of
ity are reduced to vestigial influence ing, nor pain, for through technology, the lesbians in a couple to whom he
in America, they will be replaced not the former things will all pass away. donated sperm is a rabbi.
by unbelief but by different creeds. I took in this new religion at the
Nothing illustrates this phenom recent Religion and Transhumanism he religious nature of transhu
enon better than the recent rise of
transhumanism, a futuristic social
Conference in Piedmont, California.
The human hearts thirst for mean
movement that offers a worldly tran ing was epitomized by the opening
scendence through faith in technol speech of conference organizer Hank
T manism was described by the
conferences keynote speaker
Ted Peters, a professor emeritus at
Pacific Lutheran Theological Semi
ogy. Why consider ourselves made in Pellissier, director of the Brighter nary in Berkeley who researches
the image and likeness of God when Brains Institute. He seems a very how displaced religious sensibilities
we can recreate ourselves in our own, sweet man-evinced by his stated resurface in secular forms. He sees
individually designed, post-human zeal for charity, which he criticized transhumanism as aspiring to replace
the worship of God with a perception
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institutes Center on of evolution as something of a mysti
Human Exceptionalism. cal force to which homage must be

19
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