This is a lightly edited manuscript of the remarks I shared at this week's event with Mission to North America held in Denver, CO.
The thing that probably did more to make me presbyterian than anything else might surprise you. It was a year or two after I finished college and I was still relatively new to the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), having only come in through my time in Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) back in college.
There was a small church plant in our presbytery, only a couple years into its life and not yet particularized. And then one Sunday things turned upside down for them: The planter and senior pastor had to be removed from ministry over a serious moral failure. It was the sort of thing that you would almost expect would sink a church plant. But it didn't.
Instead, the presbytery got involved to support the parties involved and to provide for the church, taking a significant weight off the church's plate in the months following the scandal. The church's associate pastor who had helped plant it stepped up and provided support and care for the congregation. A bivocational minister who was also attending there and had recently been ordained also stepped forward to provide additional help. A counselor in the church made herself available to congregants. And in the months following that scandal... the church grew. Watching all that happen—and knowing how it might have happened had the church been independent and lacking outside support or accountability—was a revelation to me. And ever since when I think of what healthy presbyterianism looks like, I think about that story.
Before considering the problem of social media, I want to start with what I hope is sound footing for all of us here. I think I can take for granted that all of us are committed to what one might call the atmosphere and norms of Presbyterianism–we believe in things being done decently and in good order, in the wisdom of groups made up of competent judges, and in the capacity of well-designed juridical processes to help us more reliably arrive at justice and truth amidst conflict and complexity.
There are several things we need to observe about this before talking about our technological moment.
First, presbyterianism is inherently slow. In order to do anything, we have to adhere to certain rules and procedures and convene certain groups of people who must then deliberate together about how to act and then they must announce and enforce the decision, which also often takes time. Whereas episcopal or congregational polities can sometimes allow for rapid movement, it is almost impossible for presbyterian polity to both function according to its design and move quickly.
Second, authority in presbyterian polity is not really located in individuals. At most it is located in offices. But even there it is actually located in a plurality of offices and all of those offices derive their authority from texts–Scripture first and foremost, of course, but secondarily our confessional standards and the Book of Church Order. This means that authority in presbyterian contexts is both highly contextual–it presupposes relationships between people, offices, and texts–and highly diffused.
Years ago a man came into one of our churches on Sunday morning and, during the sermon, stood up and began rebuking the minister and a number of women in the church, who he believed to be in sin because they were not wearing skirts or dresses. After the initial shock of the disruption wore off, one of the ministers stood up and said, "Excuse me sir, but by what authority are you doing this?" Note what is assumed here: Authority in our churches is an interactive relationship between the infallible and inerrant rule of Scripture, our confessional standards, and the individuals ordained to the ministerial office. We did not simply here a man shouting scripture and say "well, he has the Bible, so he is our authority." No. Instead, one of our pastors stood up and asked him where he got his authority from. Then, when the man was temporarily speechless in response to such an apparently unexpected question, the pastor continued: "I am a minister of Christ's church, lawfully ordained by this presbytery," and then he walked the man out of the sanctuary and continued to speak with him outside. That is how our polity works; authority is emplaced within a preexisting community governed by Scripture and the standards and conferred by the presbytery and the congregation. It is not simply presupposed or assumed for oneself.
Third, authority within presbyterian spaces is narrowly defined and specific. The Stated Clerk’s job, for example, is not “the presbyterian version of an archbishop.” Rather, the Stated Clerk’s role is very specifically defined in the BCO. Beyond the responsibilities identified as belonging to him in that document, he has no further authority. So while the Stated Clerk might also serve on the session of a local church, he does not have veto power over that session, nor does his vote count more than the vote of an ordinary ruling elder. This understanding of office and authority holds across our polity. Our pastors are not expected to be gurus or influencers, but ministers of word and sacrament.
What all of this means is that presbyterian community requires some fairly specific behaviors and commitments to work well. Apart from those things, it tends to either become corrupted and to more closely resemble the anarchic nature of congregationalist community or the more monarchical style of an episcopal church polity. Traditionally this has meant, of course, that we tend to be fairly protective of our ways of living together in the church and generally have only conferred power on those who have demonstrated over a substantial amount of time their understanding of our ways and their commitment to them. We expect our pastors to have undergone three or four years of seminary training, for example. Agency heads are expected to have had a long duration of service in more junior roles in the church. Even ruling elders and deacons are not simply appointed over night on the basis of talent alone, but on the basis of their maturity and understanding of what their role in our community would be.
In short, healthy presbyterianism relies upon the existence of presbyterian communities in which the atmosphere of presbyterianism can be caught and the norms and processes can be taught. People formed outside of such contexts often struggle at first to understand how we operate and also can prove highly disruptive to our communities if elevated to positions of authority or prominence too rapidly. Even the way I have explained this demonstrates some of that—I did not grow up presbyterian, but I came into a healthy presbytery where the ways we live together as a church could be both caught by me and taught to me by people already well formed in our church life.
With this background stated at the front end of the conversation, I think we can now turn to perhaps the central challenge to presbyterian Christianity of our moment, which is the question of digital technology and, particularly, what the philosopher Anton Barba-Kay has called “digital formation.”
Sometimes one can hear people speaking of social media and digital technology as if it is a kind of tool we pick up and set down at discrete times. And, perhaps, the speaker might even grant that when we are using the tool we seem to be more prone to anger and anxiety and reaction, less marked by sobriety, care, and discernment. So, they might grant, perhaps it would be best for us if we set the bad tools down and tried to stay away from them.
But this actually misrepresents the problem, I think.
The problem is not that we used to have a shared space where rational actors deliberated together but now due to social media and smartphones we have a shared space where irrational actors shout at one another. Such a scenario would actually be better than the one we truly have. The problem before us is that the shared space itself has evaporated, floating upward into the cloud.
Specifically, Barba-Kay argues that digital formation is defined by the loss of geographic and in-person contexts and their replacement with a kind of everywhere and nowhere context that exists only in digital “space.” The outcome of this is that digital technology makes lofty promises with regards to communication, connection, and community, but it only delivers on those promises on its own terms. In other words, it delivers 'community' but on the condition that we understand community in the decontextualized way of digital technology.
My friend Jon Askonas, in a series of essays for The New Atlantis has named the problem accurately. To briefly summarize a quite extensive and excellent series of essays, the issue is that digital technology has dissolved our sense of shared reality, replacing tangible contexts we can recognize and share, with an amorphous and intangible digital “space” that is conditioned to the unique tastes and behavior and devices of each individual, rendering 'reality' unknowable in some sense or simply relativized and personalized in another. Understanding this point allows us to make a deeper critique of social media that more accurately names the challenges that social media formation poses to presbyterian formation.
Because of this change, things we once took for granted–'facts' for example–are now contested. When I was younger, it was still common to hear Christian apologists sometimes refer to a 'fact/value dichotomy' in which facts were regarded as fixed, values were negotiable and personalized, and, so the argument went, the problem facing us Christians was that all our core beliefs were classified under 'values' rather than 'facts.' The problem facing us now, Christian or not, is more severe: Now it is not only values that are treated as personalized and relative, so are 'facts.'
To put it another way, the collapse of shared context has led to the collapse of consensus reality; what we are left with is a kind of contextless void in which we project our personalities into the ether, thereby creating some sense of self, some story or purpose to guide our lives.
What this means is that digital space, by its very nature, tends to be corrosive of the values that shape us as presbyterians. Digital space is not governed by shared loci of authority founded on offices and texts. Digital space does not constrain authority, but rather concentrates a universalized sort of authority within certain brands, customized and defined by unseen algorithms. Digital space does not abide by slow processes involving many parties and many lines of inquiry, all existing within a presupposed structure that is shared by all.
The problem facing us in this moment, then, is whether spaces of presbyterian formation can endure in a digital moment.