I wonder what the prophet Daniel’s retirement party looked like–if he even got one.
Dragged away from his homeland as a consequence of the sins of his fathers and forced to serve multiple pagan kings with a skillset given to him by the Lord, I can only imagine how Daniel felt when the day finally came and he was no longer responsible for serving the empire that ruined his life. Perhaps he never consciously saw that day; we do not know how Daniel died. Yet I imagine that, deep in his bones, he looked forward to the day when he was free of the calling the Lord had given him. He must have been eager to get out of Babylon–and get the Babylon out of him–for good.
I resonate with Daniel’s life because I too looked forward to a similar day: the day where I would be free from social media management and the horrible addiction that it brings. Specifically, I dreamed of the day I could be freed from Twitter (now X). I have been addicted to X for more than ten years, about the length of my career as a social media professional. Like Daniel, I did not ask for this. The story of how I ended up in this field, culminating in becoming the social media manager of The Gospel Coalition in the fall of 2023, is too lengthy to tell here, but suffice to say it was not a path I chose for myself. Like Daniel, I had to wrestle with the fact that what I wanted to do with my life in pursuing vocational ministry was not, in fact, what God was calling me and gifting me to do. Like Daniel, I had to learn how to live faithfully to the Lord in Digital Babylon, seeking its welfare while yearning for the Lord to restore the fortunes of Analog Jerusalem.
When I left my role as social media manager for TGC this past August to finally take a pastoral ministry role, I had a window of opportunity for the first time in nearly a decade to escape X for good. But leaving X was challenging for two reasons. The first is there were things I used X for that were legitimately good: people whose work I wanted to keep up with, peers that I wanted to stay in touch with, and conversations that I wanted to pay attention to. The second is that, well, I was addicted to X. The imaginative gridlock that comes from addiction, from resigning yourself to the fact that your circumstances will never change and you can never escape them, is too powerful for logic and reasoning alone to break. I had lived so long in Digital Babylon that I had just accepted that I would never get the chance to leave it. I wanted a life without X, but I could not imagine one. Where else would I go?
But thankfully, I got out. Three months later, I never want to go back. It’s all thanks to the Society of St. Anne’s, the Mere Orthodoxy Discord server.
When social media changes–and it is changing, again–it usually does by addition. Existing features are constantly adjusted, but the addiction is so deeply set in that most users register just a sigh and keep on swiping. It’s the new features of social media, added on top of platforms full of bloated features that rarely get used to begin with, that makes up most “change” in this industry. But as social media enters its maturity as a product category, every combination of text, image, and video that could exist now does in several platforms. There is competition, but also stagnation, because social media is now largely “solved”.
What then is left to change? To go back to an older way of using the Internet: huddling around digital campfires.
Wait a minute, you may be thinking. I’ve been using the Internet for a long time and I’ve never heard the phrase “digital campfire”. You’d be correct. The term is new, but the concept is not. One marketing guide describes them as “spaces where people can engage in deeper, more focused conversations rather than scrolling through an endless feed of content.” A digital campfire does not require an algorithm to mediate between you and the people you want to talk to. You can talk directly to them, in semi-real time, and only them if you wish; no unwanted ads, engagement rage bait, or AI slop required. While the term is mostly being used to describe the meteoric rise of Discord and increased importance of Reddit and Substack in the social media ecosystem, you can think of Facebook groups in the early 2010s, web forums in the 00s, even AIM chat rooms in the late 90s. As people grow tired of “unconnected content” that leaves them alienated from the people and causes they care about, these spaces are growing in popularity once again. Traditional social media may not be going anywhere, but it is no longer the only choice on the table.
What makes the Society of St. Anne’s, Mere Orthodoxy’s Discord server, truly special are the people who use it. Only available to those with a Mere Orthodoxy membership, the server includes people from all over the world, in vocational ministry and secular trades, readers, writers, musicians, and more. Some of the conversations in the server have already born fruit outside Discord, such as Haley Baumeister’s writing on Protestant social teaching on fertility and reproductive ethics within Christian marriage. Inside-baseball conversations between pastors of different Reformed denominations can get ugly in the public spotlight, but inside the walls of the server become mutually edifying conversations serving ministers in the Reformed catholic church. This winter, a group of us are reading through C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, some of us for the first time. The Society of St. Anne’s has proven to be some of the best of what Christian X once was–and this, ultimately, is what convinced me that there was a life beyond X.
But the benefits of the server go even deeper for me. Social media managers have a unique perspective on how social media corrodes their souls. You routinely witness the worst of sinful human behavior at scale. You are required to view trash, slop, violent, and sexually explicit content, sometimes on an hourly basis. Your work goes wherever your phone goes and you do not get to look away; as I used to joke with my colleagues, “it’s my job to know so you don’t have to”. To be able to use a social media platform like Discord in ways that refresh the soul, rather than cause it to shrivel away, is an indescribable gift. To see Christians interact with each other in Christlike ways on the Internet is healing to someone who has seen–and even studied–some of the worst behavior among evangelicals on X. It doesn’t have to be this way, and the Society of St. Anne’s is a Christian vision for social media realized, a very small foretaste of the communion of the saints in glory to come.
Mere Orthodoxy is financially supported by its readers. The mission of Mere Orthodoxy is broader than running a Discord server, but the Discord server is one of the many ways Mere Orthodoxy serves pastors, theologians, seminarians, and other "Christians who are faithful, reflective, and patient [and looking to find] guidance, support, and encouragement as they seek to follow Jesus in our cultural moment.”
Could the Society of St. Anne’s carry on if MereOrthodoxy disappeared? Perhaps. But the shared appreciation of MereOrthodoxy and its mission fuels this community and the people who belong to it. Without MereOrthodoxy, the collaborative support, encouragement, and critique among individuals in this Discord server would not easily happen, and would make platforms like X appealing once again. To be clear: X is not going anywhere. It is a critical region of Digital Babylon, and depending on the life God has called you to live, you may not have a choice in using it. But for those who have the option to leave X–for Christians who are looking for deep conversation about worthwhile topics and fellowship without the dangerous side effects of a public algorithm–X is no longer the only place to get what Twitter once promised you.
For less than the price of an X Premium Plus subscription, you can support a rival alternative to X that is good for the souls of the Christians who use it. Become a member of Mere Orthodoxy, join the Society of St. Anne’s, and let that satrap Musk find others to throw into his lion’s den.