Years ago, at a men’s breakfast, I listened in amazement to an 80-something-year-old Jerry Bridges share openly about an instance of fighting lust.
When our pastor followed up Bridge’s message, he immediately spoke to the discouragement that he knew many young men were feeling. The idea that we would still have to fight lust into our eighties was a daunting thought. The pastor wanted to guard against the frustration and resignation that can grow when we realize how long and inescapable the fight against temptation can be.
It’s a similar feeling that I get from knowing that there are Amish millionaires using cell phones.
Seeing solar panels above a horse and buggy would feel strange for most of us, but it's a pretty common sight across the street from my parents house. So are fluorescent yellow construction jackets hanging alongside bonnets and head coverings on a washing line while women use leaf blowers to clear the driveway. The Amish of northern Lancaster County sometimes still replace tractor tires with wooden wheels, but they have modernized in a number of other ways that uniquely demonstrate the unrelenting spread of modern life.
My uncle, who lives down the street and was a dairy farmer for most of his life, now hauls goods for various neighbors, including the Amish. And he told me two previously unimaginable things about the Amish that he works for: all of them are millionaires, and all of them use cell phones in one form or another.
It’s a little easier to accept the concept of Amish millionaires when we consider farm ownership in light of rising real estate values. But Amish cell-phone use is harder, and more disturbing: if even the Amish can’t resist the modernizing pull of cell phones, what hope is there for the rest of us to manage our phones in a healthy way?
Of course, the Amish who have cell phones (probably) don’t use them for social media and all the other soul-draining uses like so many of us do. But the feeling of knowing that they have them at all is kind of like hearing someone you admire confess sin: if even that person struggles, what hope is there for me?
I don’t want to become Amish and I don’t want to give up Wordle, let alone the entire internet. But somehow I felt a little safer thinking that there were some people who were (seemingly) successfully and effortlessly resisting the trappings of the modern world.
This isn’t to say that fighting the troubles of technology isn’t beneficial. I agree that parenting can be easier without screens and that there are significant, untapped benefits to boredom. Fidelity to daily tasks, government regulation of smartphones and technological ascesis are all needed and of great benefit.
But the failure of the Amish to measure up to the imagined vision I had of them forces me to seek a greater solution than ascetic, disciplined commitments.
We need to see technological asceticism as a matter of both yeses and nos. John Mark Comer quotes Ronald Rollheiser as saying, “Every choice is a thousand renunciations,” and then explains, “every yes is a thousand nos. To say yes to Jesus’ invitation to apprentice under him is to say no to countless other invitations.”
A thousand ‘nos’ is a very hard way to frame the life we are to live, not unlike hearing that Jerry Bridges was still fighting lust in his 80s. We need a more positive framing: we don’t need to say ‘no’ less often to digital temptations, but we do need to clearly see what we are saying ‘yes’ to.
Sabbath rest is one clue toward finding the yes. To ‘sabbath’ means ‘to stop’, and this stopping is for the sake of rest. ‘Nos’ are for the sake of the ‘yes’; they go together, as paradoxical as that may be. As Comer points out:
No wonder the writer of Hebrews, speaking of Sabbath and its spirit of restfulness, called us to “make every effort to enter that rest.” Notice the irony of that command; we are to work hard to rest well.
The fight to say ‘no’ must be connected to the fight to say ‘yes’. Or as Flannery O’Connor put it: “The struggle to submit… is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion.”
Recently I have been rereading John Piper’s Desiring God, both nostalgically and critically. My criticisms of Piper remain but I’ve found the forcefulness of his driving point to seek pleasure in God to be helpfully orienting in my willingness to say thousands of no’s:
For many… childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.
And the irony is that we have aided and abetted the desiccation by telling people they ought not seek their own pleasure, especially in worship.
It’s not that thoughtful asceticism towards technology is wrong or unhelpful–it’s essential! Those who advocate for ascetic responses to the troubles of smartphones and social media are not wrong, they are completely right. But we cannot end there.
It is one thing to be frustrated at the world we live in and the life of a thousand ‘nos’ that we must live–it is another thing to fall into resignation. The willingness and necessity of saying a thousand ‘nos’ can only be sustained by the pursuit of the ‘yes’ we get in God. As Piper writes, “The enemy of worship is not that our desire for pleasure is too strong, but too weak!” And to guard against resignation in the face of digital temptations, we might say, ‘the challenge to our asceticism is not that our desire for pleasure is too strong, but too weak’.
What pleasure might we gain in God when we say no to the demands of digital life?
Let us fight hard for a thoughtfully ascetic response to modernity and phones, and let's do that all the more because we fight for delight in God.
The Amish can be millionaires with cellphones if they will.