Why I'm Quitting Facebook

The role of the church is to take up space in the world. But in our brave new social media world, governed more by virtual reality than physical presence, it’s becoming harder to do so. In a culture when nearly everyone is living an alternative reality on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is it possible for the church to offer a divergent reality?  Simply, does the Gospel have an answer for the social media trends disfiguring our humanity?  If Jesus doesn’t, Don Draper sure does…

The day he quit tobacco was quintessential Don Draper: impetuous, brash and utterly brilliant. His advertising agency on the hit show MadMen was teetering near bankruptcy after the loss of their largest client, Lucky Strike cigarettes. Hoping to change both the conversation and the trajectory of the company, Don’s ‘I broke up with her, she didn’t break up with me’ full-page New York Times editorial condemning the cigarette industry saved SCDP’s soul, and her bottom line.  

His agency was peddling a product that never improved, caused illness and made people unhappy. Everyone knew it wasn’t good for them, but they couldn’t stop.  Don could have written the exact same thing about another addictive product: social media.

The average American spends over 11 hours a day online, three of those hours spent on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In fact, if Facebook was a country it would check in as the third largest nation in the world, with over 1.3 billion users. It rarely improves, makes people psychologically unhealthy and is creating a culture of lonely narcissists. And akin to tobacco, it is killing us. Much like Draper’s chain smoking customers, we are addicted.

A 2012 Harvard University research study revealed that sharing personal information about ourselves is an intrinsically rewarding activity targeting the ‘nucleas accumbens’ area of the brain. This is the very same region of the brain that lights up when cocaine or other illicit drugs are digested. In a separate report, The University of Chicago determined that social media cravings rank higher, and are harder to resist than nicotine cravings.  “If you look at people in a restaurant, nobody is having conversations anymore. They’re sitting at dinner looking at their phones because their brains are so addicted to it.”  And why? Because we are both bent toward narcissism and bored with reality. ‘Like’ me, notice me, help me escape the here and now. The constant contact from status updates, ‘favorites’, re-tweets, and ‘likes’ attempts to fill the vacuum in our soul. But in reality, we are more isolated, alone and distracted than ever before. “This media we call social is anything but.”

Social media advertises real relationships and personal significance by making three bold promises: you will never be alone, you are not bound by place or time, and you are perfectible. Online, you are no longer tethered by human limitations. Yet our physical nature begs for concrete existence.  Being human necessitates we inhabit real, geographic place: this town, this neighborhood, this house with these people. Second, we are anchored in time. We have a fixed past, we inhabit the present, and we anticipate a real future. And finally, we are broken and incomplete, not ideal.

Yet social media sells a surrogate personal phenomenon, one that may not be very human after all. On Facebook, you can be anywhere and everywhere all at once, yet present nowhere. You can chat with Sam in Vancouver, while ‘liking’ Brandon’s pictures in New York, all the while neglecting your kids in the next room. Secondarily, you can manipulate your past, control your present and project your perfect self.  The virtual you isn’t fixed, it isn’t fallen, it is editable and perfectible. You can take the perfect picture, from the perfect angle, to pimp your perfect self. But, is the virtual you the real you or a distorted version of reality? And, how is the endless amount of time spent on ourselves impacting our witness in the world?

We’ve added Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to our lives but haven’t added any hours to our day. “The decision to be on online on Facebook is simultaneously a decision not to be doing something else.” We are trading connection for intimacy, self-promotion for presence, and the virtual for the real. Social media isn’t making us more human, in many ways it is creating ‘post-humans’, disembodied creatures disconnected and disengaged with the physical world. And while virtual existence is expanding our world, it is also shrinking reality down to the three inch screen in front of our face. It seems being informed is more important than being present.

The totality of our technological enculturation is causing the church to lose her identity. We are abandoning both the tradition and praxis of living as the physical manifestation of Christ in the world. Christianity is more and more inward, private, individualistic, and neighborless. Instead of enduring as parish people rooted in a geographic community, we are tempted to exist primarily in pseudo-reality, tending to our own needs instead of the needs of the other. In fact, the virtual world has no use for the outsider. The sick, the vulnerable, and the handicapped don’t even exist in cyberspace. But the Body of Christ abides in the present to call into question this provisional reality.

“We need to learn to be where we are.”  The Gospel isn’t an abstract theory, it is a lived reality. Yet our addiction to the virtual is hindering the ability to be the fully enfleshed Body of Christ in and for the world. In a culture of social media addicts, the church functions to challenge the dominant ordering of relationships. The prophetic call of God is for his people to live as an alternative social reality, to nurture and nourish a subversive narrative. As the world runs headlong into the virtual abyss, we stand fixed in the physical, advertising the one corporeal thing we have to give, our full humanity. “It is hard for us to admit that our flawed humanity is the nearest thing to God on earth and that what gives humanity its special character is precisely its possibility and desire to become ever more like God.”

The Incarnation reminds us that God is very interested in the physical. “Matter matters to God.” Bread, wine, water, hands, and feet divulge the divine. The material is sacramental. It’s what Walter Brueggemann calls ‘the scandal of the particular.’ Simply, the physical world is a doorway to the universal. God has chosen to reveal eternity in the concrete, making our very humanity the sacramental expression of the living Christ. Maybe that is why we should be so cautious when abandoning the physical for the virtual. 

Christianity will not survive without the body. An embodied, present God desires an embodied, present people as His witness to the world. Our existence with others is the physical mediation of spiritual reality. Being mindful of, and living in the daily may well be the path out of our virtual, self addiction. What could you do if you took back those three hours a day you spend on social media? Your full presence in the life of the world may not only change your community or neighborhood, it may well transform your own physical and psychological well being. 

That’s why I’m breaking up with social media. It’s not you Facebook, it’s me. 




Originally published by Missio Alliance

Thin Places: The Veil Between Heaven and Earth

Rising 192 feet above campus, integrating earth and sky sits a 2 ton Celtic cross, the highest point on Milligan College.  For 50 years, she’s been an icon in the community, representing God’s reign over this little corner of the world.  The cross’ history dates back to Scotland and the Celtic monks on the Island of Iona, who are credited with saving western civilization through their diligent preservation and protection of Ancient Hellenic manuscripts.  Alongside their conservation of classical culture, they also carried on the Christian tradition immediately following the withdrawal of the Roman army and the collapse of civilization at the hands of the Angles and Saxons.[i]  Their mystical style of Christianity still shapes modern thought.  There is a Celtic axiom declaring heaven and earth to be but three feet apart, but in the ‘thin places’, that distance is even smaller.  These ‘thin places’ exist where the veil separating heaven and earth is pulled back, revealing the glory of God. Sitting there, you reach out your hand and expect to feel Him, it’s that palpable. These are not simply places where God’s presence is felt, but hallowed ground where heaven and earth are one, giving us a tiny glimpse of God’s kingdom, regenerating creation all around us. 

Mark’s gospel, written circa 66-73 C.E, is a story about and for a community living in ‘thin places’, whose very lives point to the nearness of God through their commitment to His redemptive work of justice, peace, compassion and liberation.[ii] By living according to the rules of this new kingdom, Christ’s community reveals the glory of the living God right here, right now.  Doing so requires the shedding of cultural and normative values that so many of us simply take for granted.  Mark therefore demands a redefinition of our view of power, the role of government and geopolitical conflicts, class struggle, family dynamics, economic principals and sexuality by taking a fresh look at life through the lens of God’s Kingdom.  

Kingdom living is so subversive, so revolutionary that it can only be accomplished by wiping clean the slate, starting life from scratch with the process of new creation.  Only a new earth has room for this new kingdom.  Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised with Mark entitling his work “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Messiah”[iii] “It can hardly be doubted that the arche ( beginning) of Mark 1:1 has a paradigmatic or metaphorical relationship to the arche of Genesis 1:1…There is another first time despite the fatigue of world-history.”[iv] Mark boldly states in his prologue that Jesus is ushering in a fundamental regeneration of salvation history through his life, community, vocation and death by delivering the coup de grace to Caesar and his reality.  Gospel itself is a first century Hellenistic term translating “news of victory”, uniquely applied to military or political battles.[v]  Herein lies yet another hint of Mark’s seditious story, this gospel is challenging imperial Roman authority and their way of life through heralding a new king and kingdom. Specifically, the public action of Jesus’ baptism ushers in this new imperial model.

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John into the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’.”[vi]

If redemption discharges past social obligations, the symbolic act of Jesus’ baptism should be viewed in social terms:

“It is a genuine act of repentance. As such it ends his participation in the structures and values of society. It concludes his involvement in the moral order into which he was born…the totality of the Jewish-Roman social construction of reality, has been terminated…He has become wholly unobliged.”[vii]

Jesus’ baptism inaugurates new creation and the possibility of thin places existing here, forever destroying Platonic dualism. He renounces the old order by declaring his kingdom come to earth as it also is in heaven. Because of this, thin places don’t just exist on the mystic moors of Scotland, they exist everywhere Jesus’ kingdom ethics are lived out.  The veil between heaven and earth is torn asunder when wealth is redistributed through tithing, when third world debts are cancelled with the celebration of Jubilee, when broken hearts are healed, when liberty is proclaimed to the captives, when evangelism spreads through love and not coercion, when governments exalt the good and punish evil, when the old are not left alone, and the strong learn to care for the weak, when paternalism and hierarchy are replaced with egalitarianism, when justice reigns and truth finally wins, when there is no poverty or crime, when work is rewarding and rest is sweet, when the color of our skin won’t get you in or keep you out[viii], when children are safe in their homes and the cult of narcissism is replaced by self-sacrifice.  Scattered throughout the four corners of this world, individuals and Christ-following communities reveal thin places daily; they are a small glimpse into the new heaven and new earth.

“For I will create a new heaven and a new earth; the past events will not be remembered or come to mind. Then be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating: for I will create Jerusalem to be a joy, and its people to be a delight.”[ix]

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[i] Email from Dennis Helsabeck, Milligan College Professor.  November 13, 2011.

[ii] Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus.  (page 11).

[iii] Mark 1:1.

[iv] Via, Dan. The Ethics of Mark’s Gospel-In the Middle Time. 1985.

[v] Myers. Binding the Strong Man. (pg. 123).

[vi] Mark 1:9-11.

[vii] Waetjen, Herman. The Construction of the Way into a Reordering of Power: An Inquiry into the Generic Conception of the Gospel according to Mark. 1982.

[viii] Mullins, Rich. Song lyrics: The Maker of Noses.

[ix] Isaiah 65:27-28.