Welcome to the New Mere Orthodoxy

From Jake: It is a significant day in the life of Mere Orthodoxy. Today we launch our new website and member dashboard. But behind that launch is a much larger story about the work that media projects like our own have to do today. It is a truism at this point to lament the division, anger, and extremism that is now ubiquitous in American life. But hidden inside the many problems now afflicting us is an exciting opportunity. 

Mere Orthodoxy exists to form Christians in the church who participate in broader culture for the common good. Today’s essay is my attempt to reflect on that opportunity by talking about how we got here, what challenges we now face as both Christians and members of a pluralistic civic experiment, and what we at Mere O are doing to try and seize the opportunity before us to build up both the church and our civic life.

We built the website and member dashboard not simply because we need a website of some kind, but because we want the site and member dashboard themselves to serve our goal as a media project. Given that, I’ve written a larger essay below that seeks to position the site and dashboard within that larger endeavor.

If you want to understand what we are doing and why, read the whole thing. If you want to learn specifically about our new website and member dashboard, you can use the navigation links now embedded in our articles to navigate to the relevant section of the essay. 

As always, thank you for reading!

Sometimes when I am asked to talk about writing, I like to take people back to what the writing life once looked like for many professionals in the United States and elsewhere. I take them back to films like All the President’s Men or Spotlight or perhaps share some of my own much less interesting stories from my too-short time spent in old daily newspaper newsrooms.

Though the memory is fading now, there was a time when such papers could be found in any town of significant size in this country–and in larger cities you might have had several such papers.

I still remember as a kid snagging the Sunday copy of the Lincoln Journal Star on the way out the door to church so I could read the sports page in the car on the way and, if there was time, maybe some of the comics as well. And when I got to church, I could reliably count on meeting other people there who would have read the same news stories and comics that I had, who subscribed to the same paper our family did.

In those days before the internet, this was how media worked: The main problem when it came to getting information out into the world was that it cost a lot of money to do it. You needed large printing presses, a fleet of delivery trucks, a huge number of workers to man the presses, drive the trucks, and deliver the papers, and, of course, you needed the reporters and editors who made the product, to say nothing of the advertising people (often forgotten) who ran the classifieds sections, which brought in a significant amount of the paper’s revenue.

There were, obviously, many downsides to this model, not least the exorbitant ad rates that papers liked to charge local businesses to advertise. Yet the tradeoff here was that information distribution tended to concentrate around geographically constrained publishers, which meant that within a geographic area most readers were reading the same things, and the publishers were reporting on matters of interest to people in their city or region, and the publishers often had plenty of money to maintain their work.

Put another way, geography created social context for readers. Media then existed as part of that social context and commented on it, helping their readers to interpret it, improve it, challenge it, or simply to enjoy it.

The arrival of the internet turned all of this upside down. The cost of information distribution trended quickly toward zero for publishers, which meant that the barrier to entry for new publishers almost entirely disappeared. This meant that newspapers and magazines suddenly found themselves competing against a previously unimaginable number of new publishers, most of whom had dramatically lower costs than the legacy institutions.

The cost of advertising–a form of information distribution–also trended toward zero, which almost immediately destroyed the primary revenue stream for most daily papers, who always made far more from classifieds than they did subscriptions.

Finally, once we combined powerful search engines and social media platforms with the arrival of smartphones, the challenge of finding and accessing media became similarly trivial. The consequences of these various digital revolutions are hard to overstate.

First, legacy media began to collapse, which had immense economic ramifications for journalists. Specifically it meant that stable entry-level jobs disappeared. This meant both that finding work now became far more difficult and that the early career incubator period that allowed new journalists to learn their craft in a stable institution with respected, experienced peer journalists ceased to exist. In such an environment, one secured a livelihood in journalism through the force of one’s personality and the reach of one’s personal platform on social media. In short, media shifted from being centered on institutions to centered on personalities.

Second, as the volume of media content exploded, maintaining reader trust became an enormous problem.

Third, as people became more dependent on their phones and personalized online algorithms to access content, the thick social context once supplied by geography and the high cost of information began to dissolve. Over time, the very idea of consensus reality began to crumble.

The outcome of all of this is that media audiences shifted away from being groups of people who shared a thick common social context, typically centered around a place. Media audiences, instead, became universalized online masses that could live anywhere and whose only common context was the content they consumed online. Yet, because all of us still live in geographic places, we still exist within a place. But the experience of the place transformed as more and more of our mental, emotional, and social life was experienced online and mediated via our devices and various algorithms.

The outcome of all of this is that the way we define the audience for a media project has changed. We are losing the idea of our audience being “readers.” That older model is being replaced by the idea of a “fan.”

As I noted in a recent essay, “readers” can be thought of as people who share a common context with the other consumers of a media project. The obvious applications here are magazine or newspaper readers. But you could even see people who listen to local radio or watch the local news as fitting in this category. The key idea, as I already said, is that readers exist in a given social context and the role media plays is to comment on that context in some way.

Fandom, by contrast, does not presuppose a given social context, but is built around chosen media brands. Because the geographic and social commons have dissolved, what we are left with is a paralyzing amount of choices for what media to consume, and our own personalized social contexts are then built atop those media we choose to consume.

So we relate to media producers in the way we relate to sports teams, associating ourselves with them not because they speak into something we already possess and share with others, but because we privately enjoy what they produce and identify with it rather than identifying with other producers. So media production becomes agonistic in some sense, a kind of Darwinian struggle between competing brands. This re-fashioning of media creates significant problems for both Christian media consumers and for American civic life.

Media Fandom and the Christian Reader

First, we need to talk about the challenges this creates for Christian media consumers. 

I take for granted the fact that Christian readers have certain moral restraints that dictate how they can relate to media if they wish to do so as Christians. 

Our Lord, for example, commands us to let our yes be yes and our no be no, which means something for how we speak as Christians. It means that we can’t become so lost in irony and sarcastic humor that our actual beliefs become lost or obscured. This command alone will bar us from producing anything resembling most dissident media, whether that comes from the “dirtbag left” of an older internet age or the various successors to the “alt-right.” Christian speech needn’t shun all irony–Paul himself sometimes seems to speak in ironic terms–but it does seem to exclude the sort of endless irony and mockery that defines a great deal of podcast media especially.

Additionally, the Ninth Commandment says that we are not allowed to bear false witness against our neighbor. The church has traditionally interpreted this command in quite expansive terms because Jesus himself interprets simple moral commands in such ways, as when he says that anyone who has hated his brother has “committed murder in his heart.” Taken in this expansive way, the Ninth Commandment does not simply mean that we cannot lie. Rather, this is what the Heidelberg Catechism says is required of us by the Ninth Commandment:

I must not give false testimony against anyone, twist no one's words, not gossip or slander, nor condemn or join in condemning anyone rashly and unheard. Rather, I must avoid all lying and deceit as the devil's own works, under penalty of God's heavy wrath. In court and everywhere else, I must love the truth, speak and confess it honestly, and do what I can to defend and promote my neighbour's honour and reputation.

Needless to say, simply taking these two basic Christian moral norms seriously would require many contemporary media producers to retract huge swathes of what they have published or to cease operations altogether. It is likely no overstatement to say that taking the Ninth Word seriously would require many Christian social media users to delete most of their social media posts.

But the problem actually goes deeper than this. Fandom models of media are basically amoral; we do not typically think of our sports fandoms as having moral significance. As much as I am sometimes tempted, I do not view support for Arsenal Football Club or the Iowa Hawkeyes as evidence of moral deficiency. But when we apply the fandom model to media, we reduce our relationship to media down to personal taste. This is a problem, of course, because media is speech and, as noted above, Scripture actually says a great deal about speech! So Christian media producers and consumers must participate in the media world in morally restricted ways while the bulk of the media world is not bound by such moral norms—which means that Christian media producers will feel a strong temptation toward the same sort of amoral style.

For media consumers, this can make it difficult to find trustworthy media and even more difficult to resist the deformative effects of consuming fandom-based media products that are unconcerned with basic moral norms. For media producers, there is a constant pull toward half-truth, mockery, or fabrication in order to expand one’s audience and to attract the attention of donors who care more about influence or victory than they do truth.

The outcome of this is that Christian media can easily over time become captive to unhealthy, sub-Christian audiences who demand something other than truth. This is disastrous for both Christian media producers and Christian media consumers.

Media Fandom and American Civic Life

We turn now to the problems this creates for civic life in America and, really, across the liberal democratic world.

It is significant that there are two types of institutions whose existence is assumed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. One such institution is the church. The other is the press. The First Amendment protects both churches and the press from government interference. Why?

Because the framers of the First Amendment seem to believe that healthy democratic life requires independent churches and independent media. Recall, for example, that when Hamilton and Madison wanted to make the case for the Constitution they turned to the press, which published the many essays we now have collected as The Federalist Papers.

The particular importance of an independent press is illustrated powerfully in the movie Spotlight when the Boston Globe editor Marty Baron meets the Catholic Cardinal and archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law. Law invites Baron into a kind of informal alliance with the church, saying that the city thrives when its great institutions stand together. Baron demurs, saying that for newspapers to do their job they need to stand alone.

It is this tension which captures the brilliance of American democracy. The health of our civic experiment depends not on the church, state, and press all standing together, reinforcing each other's power and influence, but rather on each operating with a fair degree of independence from each other, serving as checks against each other so that no one body or individual gains too much power, thereby allowing them to undermine, subvert, or destroy our democratic system.

We might think about it like this: In his book An Anxious Age the Catholic writer and editor Joseph Bottum argued that American civic society is built atop a three-legged stool. One leg is the government, which through laws define what our common civic context will be and through police and military secure the ongoing peace of that shared context. Another leg is the marketplace, which exists within that civic space and provides work and wealth to the American people, which they can use to preserve our common life and enrich it. The third leg is the church, by which he meant the Protestant Mainline, which provides moral direction and oversight to both the government and the market, helping the government to know what kind of space it should preserve and the market to know what the purpose of all its work and wealth actually is. Obviously the church’s ultimate purpose is not to provide moral direction to society. Its final and ultimate purpose is to be the people of God, united under the preaching of the Word of God and the practice of the church’s sacramental life. I am not saying the church is a utilitarian body of do-gooders whose purpose is to moralize at everyone else. 

That being said, it is legitimate to speak of the church having multiple purposes or functions, some greater than others, but all real. In its relationship to broader society, the church can and often has provided unique moral guidance throughout history, whether that is in its rebuke of Roman cruelty toward slaves and women in the church’s early days to the church’s 20th century rebuke of segregation and racial cruelty in the United States. Another example of this sort of moral witness can be seen in the film On the Waterfront when a Catholic priest rebukes corruption in the markets.

I would like to add a fourth institution to Bottum’s list, however–the aforementioned “press.” You might think of the press this way: If government, market, and church are the legs of the stool, the press stands to the side and insures that the legs are all sturdy and, if not, that they are repaired in the way they need to be so that they can continue to function.

One might say that because they are each legs of the stool holding up society, the government, markets, and churches all have certain incentives (in their social roles) to protect their own standing at the expense of long-term health. The press, by contrast, is meant to be indifferent to its own reputation or status, but simply to be aimed at speaking what is true, without institutional factors constraining its witness. A good example of this, in practice, can be seen in Spotlight: Because the Catholic church existed as a human institution with assets and liabilities, it was all too easy for church officials to conceal and minimize the horrifying abuses taking place in their diocese. The cost of acknowledging the scale of the abuse was simply too high in material terms. It was the external witness provided by the Boston Globe that was able to expose the rot and call  church leadership to account.

The difficulty we now face is that because the common social context of our common life has largely dissolved, the press struggles to place itself in relationship to what remains of that context. As a result, we have a press that often either does its job badly or has lost all interest in doing its job as envisioned by the founders. Indeed, the largest financial rewards for the press–whose business model was destroyed quite recently, you might recall–tend to flow not to those who seek to repair the common context, but to those who participate in its collapse.

This is another way of getting at the problem of “fandoms.” Because fandom is detached from any unchosen common context, the press’s ability to fulfill its social role as understood by the First Amendment is excluded from the start: If you’re a media producer working under the fandom model, you simply don’t see yourself as having any sort of altruistic social function. You are simply a business trying to win fans to the cause so you can generate the revenue and attention you want and need. What drives decision making, then, is not whether or not you as a media outlet are fulfilling your role within a shared civic project, but whether you are winning fans and, thereby, winning revenue.

Taken together, then, it is a fairly perilous time for Christians and for media producers. We are all participating in a media environment that is largely indifferent to truth, addicted to cheap attention, and incentivized to radicalism and extremism. And due to context collapse, the issue is not that we have some healthy and viable alternative model, if only we would reach back and participate in it. The media environment has been destroyed. The common culture has been liquidated.

The Need for Context-Creating Media: Introducing Mere O’s New Online Platform

This brings us to the work we are doing at Mere Orthodoxy. I understand I’ve spent an enormous amount of time getting to this point, but it’s all important to understand in order to really get what we are trying to do at Mere O, which is far more than simply building a successful magazine or media nonprofit.

We no longer live in a world of shared context where media simply speaks into pre-existing spaces. The sort of business model that sustained all those magazines is dead. What’s more, because we now live in a world mediated via the internet and dominated by platforms, we no longer even have a shared idea of consensus reality. The commons have been liquidated.

When I say that I do not simply mean that the idea of my neighbor and I sharing a common place has been eroded, though it has. I mean that the very idea of the “fact” has been largely dissolved. And we are all now left living in our own worlds of “truthyness” and “alternative facts” and “fake news.” The consequences of all this for both the church and our civic life are basically impossible to overstate.

One option we could take—and many media companies have taken this option—is to simply spend our time wringing our hands and lamenting the world we have lost, while suggesting to our readers that if only the right person obtained power or the right decisions were made in our churches or the right tech companies were rewarded or punished, then things would be fine.

But that is not true.

The problems we have stumbled into are far too large and too complex for such simplistic thinking. Not only that, but that sort of simplistic analysis will actually make things worse because media organizations pushing that habit of thought will form in themselves and in their audiences a spirit of hatred and rage aimed at whoever their great enemy and destroyer of all that is good happens to be. Simplistic solutions not only fail to address the problems before us, but actually form us in ways that make the problems far worse.

And it will not accomplish anything to simply wish it were not so. All we can do, as Tolkien reminds us, is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

So this is the task we have set for ourselves at Mere O: If fandom is the default model for media audiences today, we want to know if we can create a fandom of Christians engaging in culture for the common good and seeking to enrich the life of the church and of our shared commonwealth. 

Put another way: If we must have fans, can we seek to cultivate fans not of Mere Orthodoxy but “fans” of principled Christian piety and civic engagement within an inextricably pluralist society?

And while we’re at it, since we can’t create media that simply partakes of an already created, already shared context, can we create media that remakes that context for our readers, supplying common context for them?

And, let us be practical, can we find enough paying members, donors, and sponsors to support such an endeavor so that we can do it in a sustainable, enduring way so that, one day, we might pass this work on to a second generation of stewards who might carry it forward into the future?

Those are the questions that Mark, Ian, and I are asking, and that we are also thinking about with our board of directors and our editorial board.

How can we accomplish all this? There are two answers to that question.

First, we need to talk about the values we presuppose as an organization that constrain what we do and that we seek to commend to our audience. To answer the question, you might ask “what are the things that we simply take for granted at Mere Orthodoxy and try to teach our readers to take for granted in the same way?”

Some of these answers are explicitly theological: We take for granted that the things proclaimed in the Apostle’s Creed are actually true. We take for granted that God invites us to pray. We take for granted that God calls and equips us to follow the Ten Commandments.

Other things we presuppose are entailments of those prior theological commitments: We take for granted that there really is a common reality we all share and that we can reason about together. Because of that, we take for granted the ideas that persuasion is good (and actually possible!), that making arguments is good, and that having spirited disagreements about matters of great significance is good and fruitful.

If you have followed our work for some time, hopefully none of this is a surprise. These commitments are why we have a very uneven and tentative relationship to social media platforms. They are why we have loudly condemned revolutionary ideologies of all sorts. They are why we sometimes publish essays and reviews and interviews that exceed 10,000 words. They are why we still publish a print journal. These twin commitments to basic Christian orthodoxy and a kind of civically engaged Christian liberalism are foundational to everything we do.

But you can answer the question in another way as well, and this is where the new site is most exciting to me. One way of thinking about the internet today is that it consists of a series of walled gardens, all disconnected from one another. And these walled gardens are best understood as "platforms." Thankfully, Mere Orthodoxy is itself a platform because about 75% of our traffic comes to us either directly or via our own email list. So we access our audience without the need of social media algorithms or search algorithms. And so that makes us wonder what sort of things might be possible, given that fact. For example: Can we create a platform that through its design helps call people to love of God and love of neighbor?

In one sense, the answer is "no, we can’t." That work is something God does and he accomplishes it most simply and directly through other persons. You should not look to any online platform to do the work of the local church or of Christian fellowship with other believers.

That said, because media does play such a foundational role in shaping how people experience the world and because media has to be aimed at something in its design, we have designed something that we hope is aimed at encouraging people toward piety and neighborliness.

For our current paying members, you’ve likely had the experience at some point of realizing that if you need to change anything with your membership–shipping address, payment information, etc.–that you couldn’t do that. Our old website was built on Hubspot and Hubspot simply lacked the tools to allow us to create a dashboard for our members. So if you wanted to change any information with your membership, the only way was to email us and ask us to take care of it for you.

That, thankfully, is no longer true. All paid members of Mere Orthodoxy now have access to our member dashboard. And our hope for the member dashboard is that it would be a place that helps you grow intellectually and also grow in your awareness of the connections between our media diets and our Christian discipleship. So we have created a dashboard that allows you to change your payment or shipping information, but also does quite a bit more.

First, when you login to the dashboard, you’ll see a welcome message and a prayer for whatever season of the church year we are in which is pulled from the Book of Common Prayer. 

This is our simple way of acknowledging the point made so beautifully by John Ahern last week: The choice given to each of us is not to choose between ten hours in prayer or ten hours in our books; you can (and should!) choose to spend ten hours in prayer over your books.

Our hope is that this simple inclusion in the dashboard will prompt our members toward prayer even as they are browsing the internet. It is hard to hate someone when you are praying for them, after all. So we hope that this small encouragement to prayer might help all of us to approach our media consumption in the right spirit.

Second, if you scroll down you will find that all our different unique offerings to our members are now easily accessed: You can access our Members-only Discord, digital editions of all our print journals, and you can access bookmarks, which are a new feature we have on each article on the site, making it easier for you to access later. And if you click and drag over any quotes you want to remember from an article, you can click to “save” the quote and that quote (with a link to the article) will be added to your personalized Commonplace book:

The dashboard also includes a full reading history of everything you’ve read at Mere O, which we hope will make it easier to find any old pieces you might want to return to later.

If you scroll further down, you will see two more features in the right-side nav bar. 

First, we now have a link to the day’s morning or evening prayer readings from the Book of Common Prayer, which you can read within your member dashboard. Again, our hope here is that it would be a prompt to prayer and a reminder that even our reading and thinking is done before the face of God, that it is something for which we will one day give an account, and it is something which we can do in ways that please God. 

Lastly, you’ll notice an option to adjust the site’s color theme according to the season of the church year. It’s a relatively small feature, but another way in which we hope that the time you spend on our site will call you back toward an awareness of who you are as a human being—you are a beloved son or daughter of God who is made to know and love God forever. The work of growing to know and love God happens now in the world of space and time.

The thought process behind all of this is that if we no longer can assume a shared context between us and our readers and our neighbors, then the best thing we can do is try to create healthy contexts that call people back to the best of what has been lost and also forward into what good remains possible for us.

And now that I have thoroughly tested your patience with such a long introductory essay, I will simply leave it here with three closing thoughts aimed at anyone who wishes to be a properly Christian reader and a properly Christian member of a civil public square. 

First, if all this makes sense to you and it seems right to build media that values what we value and commends to our readers what we commend to our readers, would you consider joining us as a member? The reality today is that while we know now that reader-supported media can work as a monetization strategy, it is still an immensely challenging strategy simply because it is quite difficult to get enough paying readers to support the work.

Put another way: We can’t do this work without the support of our paid members. If our paid members left us, we’d be done. If you want media projects like this to exist, then we need your support.

Second, it is sometimes difficult to remember the things we know are true while we are online. Anger comes easily. So does mistrust and cynicism. If you want to be part of the solution to our ecclesial and civic malaise rather than a contributor to it, please engage online media from a posture of prayerfulness and quiet, patient devotion to God. And when you pray, please pray for us.

Third, remember that God loves the world and he made us to delight in it and steward it and form it. The work we do is an act of worship to God. He delights in the work of plumbers and electricians and teachers and nurses and lawyers and even politicians and journalists, at least when we do that work as an act of service to God and an expression of love to our neighbor. Never forget that the world is worth knowing and even worth loving because God made it, knows it well, and loves it best.

Thank you for reading and for being with us in this new chapter of Mere Orthodoxy.