Can Technology Reinvigorate Trad Life?
The Jacksonville Study and the Future of Evangelization
During my wanderings in college, I walked through a small circular plaza adjacent to the mathematics building bearing heavy foot traffic during the day as students scampered to and from classes. This particular space had a reputation as somewhere all the preachers would evangelize to some captive and most not-so-captive audiences, the majority of students ignoring them and going on their way.
They ranged from the fiery rhetoric straight from the Old Testament prophets, to the intelligent and discerning intellectual, to the milquetoast modern preacher. Some were composed and fully in tune with their faculties, while some were borderline schizophrenic. Many would follow a well-rehearsed script for their short, ten-minute sermon and then engage members of the audience stayed for the entire thing. While the preachers were mocked by a lot of the student body (and many deserved it), underneath the contempt was a grudging respect that they would put themselves out there. While they didn’t fear for their lives, were nonetheless in a hostile environment.
That was twenty years ago, and I have no idea if those evangelists are still preaching on campus, or whether the slow march of modernity has wiped out the fervor. What is clear is religiosity is collapsing, as the younger population has reached European levels of religious adherence in many places and showing no signs of subsiding. As meeting after meeting about The New Evangelization bears no fruit and continuously degrading dogma isn’t making modern man feel any more at home in the faith of his ancestors, many have resigned themselves to slow decline while others are pondering how to use the modern world to their advantage, using new tools to preach in an innovative, more modern way.
In Jacksonville, a pilot study was done to ascertain whether the seemingly endless data from the web could be used for something other than advertising and political campaigns. They had the idea to use social media and search data not to pinpoint possible customers for basic consumer goods, but locate people at risk for marital discord and divorce. They then made communicated services to them regarding local support groups who could assist with marital services.
The distinctive contribution of COFI in Jacksonville seems to have been its combination of microtargeted digital marketing with a broad network of religious congregations committed to strengthening marriage. By combining a digital air campaign with an in-person ground campaign, COFI was able to reach a substantial minority of the approximately 331,000 people who are married in Duval County. The digital messaging COFI sponsored also conveyed the message that marriage matters to a large number of people in Jacksonville.
Over the course of three years, 50,000 people were contacted in some way by the program, and many took part in the services offered. While the program wasn’t exclusively using Protestant and Catholic churches, those bore most of the effort. At the end of the three years, the divorce rate dropped significantly.
It is important to note that family stability was already improving in Duval County prior to the Culture of Freedom Initiative. However, the 24% decline in the Duval County divorce rate from 2015-2018 represented a substantial acceleration of downward divorce trends in the county
The pilot seemed to show a resounding success. Instead of the traditional means in the past, using Big Data was a powerful force in communicating to people who needed help. What should be noted is Big Data in itself can’t solve the problem, as a large portion of the marital issues stemmed from a lack of community and faith life, something that requires a brick-and-mortar building. All it did was find them. Once they were located and an effort was made to initiate them into a community, marital discord and divorce dropped significantly.
However, there are many doubters, largely from the ambiguous way the study used other counties to compare themselves against and other possible statistical issues.
A couple things about these very strong causal claims. First, they say nothing about how the “comparable counties” were selected. Florida seems to have 68 counties, 40 of which the Census gave me population counts for. Why not use them all? (You’ll understand why I ask when they get to the N=4 regression.) Second, how about that “exceptional impact,” the “remarkable decline” “rarely seen” in their experience as family scholars? Note there is no evidence in the report of the program doing anything, just the three year trend. And while it is a big decline, it’s one I would call “occasionally seen.” (It helps to know that divorce is generally going down — something the report never mentions.)
While the writer above clearly has a bone to pick with these initiatives and an interest in seeing them fail, it’s true we can’t directly put causation regarding the pilot and dropping divorce rates. However, it does show potential, and many organizations around the country are working their own programs based on Jacksonville’s preliminary success. I personally know someone working in a Midwest Catholic diocese that is planning on using the framework set out by the study. The problem is, it’s very, very expensive, as this data isn’t cheap, and neither is the outreach effort. As the coffers of Churches get smaller as congregations shrink, it makes it difficult to risk more money on a venture that could be ineffective, or justify redirecting resources from its already strained services.
As projects like this become streamlined as the older generations running the churches die off and more technologically comfortable people enter the fray, there’s going to be tension about this new way of evangelization. This is not a matter of irrational luddism either, as there are a multitude of issues in using impersonal algorithms to get the message to people. Instead of a personal meeting, the person becomes a number, a probability, a statistic, a slot in a spreadsheet to be filled out. When the Gospel is about a personal relationship with God through His Church, making everyone, first and foremost, a metric to improve is woefully mechanical and anti-human.
As we go through these one by one, you can see the similarities to all that we have been talking about in regards to original sin. Technology and technique do not escape, nor do they lie outside of the effects of sin and evil. Ellul acknowledges that you will get gains from the use of technique. But those positives will always be tainted. There is no technology free of negative effects. All technologies bring both good and the evil that comes with the corruption of what is good by sin. Remember that this is ontological, at the level of being. Ellul goes farther and argues that as you try to fix the problems of one layer of technological development with a new technique, that while there will be new benefits, the new problems will be greater and more numerous than the previous level.
As the scourge of managerialism permeates every bit of culture, the focus on data, best practices, and process can turns these parishes into the same empty vessels of mass propaganda that one sees in every corporation and government initiative. There’s a conformity to the thinking of the vast system we are all under, putting even our spirituality into its limited frame. Technocratic solutions by necessity turns human beings into cogs to be placed, whether it is in a position at work or a pew during mass. Either way, their humanity is erased, and turned into a pliable widget to be used as leadership sees fit. Hardly a Gospel message.
The pro-technology side can easily retort by asking what technology is off-limits, and where we draw the line. They could ask whether the medieval craftsmen using the best technology of their time in making the Cathedrals were sinning. They could ask why parishes should even have web sites, or whether it should be considered a sin to drive a car to Mass instead of walking like peasants did in the past. They could go as far as to ask whether writing, one of the most powerful technologies mankind ever produced, should be off limits.
The lunacy of these hypocritical cyber-Luddites — decrying the very technology they’re addicted to, while pretending to the holy purpose of its destruction — is only baffling if you’re completely blind to the Enemy’s demented tactics. Every molecule of their lives is a shabby lie: the clothes they wear, the comforts they enjoy, the dangerous tools they neither built nor comprehend. And at the bottom of these self-deceptions, the unholy lie that they would discard it all for the glory of God.
Well then, what are you waiting for?
Discard it, I say!
Smash your little black mirror with a hammer. No, no, not a hammer. Unless you made it yourself, that hammer is filthy with Satanic technology. Use a stone. But make sure it’s not a quarry stone, chiseled by a mech.
There’s a strong smell of fear with new ways of doing things that may turn things around for a nation that is rapidly secularizing. They can ask how to reach people who are increasingly holed up in their homes and won’t answer the door for strange preachers travelling their neighborhood. As young people spend vast amounts of time online, they’ll argue that you need to meet them where they are and at least be able to at least communicate that the church exists that is interested in them. For many lonely young singles, this could be enough.
The difficult part of this discussion is both sides are right. While cars were supposed to make it far easier to travel and keep touch, it became a tool to become completely rootless, moving every few years for one’s own personal gain and making it difficult for organic communities to form. When air conditioning became ubiquitous, homeowners stopped sitting on the porch during the summer. When social media came into fruition, millions of old connections were restored only for them to fall to the wayside again after the initial fun. In-person relationships then faltered as the masses congregated into online conclaves based on arbitrary whims. Human beings are notoriously weak at predicting second-order effects to new technologies that become ubiquitous with rapid speed, and the necessary anti-bodies appear far too late.
On the other hand, most everything necessary in the modern world requires at least making peace with technology. Even the Amish are forced work with technology in limited ways. Even if it was possible to make a hard boundary that said, “use X technologies, but no more”, any such boundary would be seen as arbitrary and silly by the outside, and the rest of the world would move on without you. Technology in itself is neither good nor evil, but it’s often the case that technologies in a certain environment can only bring about catastrophic negative outcomes for little to no gain.
Cutting Edge Technology as Necessary Surgery
The issues with modernity and its corresponding rot have created a near-terminal downward spiral that demands corrective action. The average person is more secluded than ever, more dependent on media than ever, and more untrusting of random physical interactions than ever. The people most in need of ministry have fallen into such a hole that they are near invisible to the physical world. In parallel, as Church membership has fallen, so has volunteering and finances, creating a systemic lack of the “free” evangelization Churches depended upon to swell their ranks. Also, the older, more frail parishioners aren’t nearly as capable of door-to-door operations, and the lower-trust environment creates far more hazards and distrust for such efforts than before.
In past times, if someone went wayward from his local church in some way, there would be direct nodes of contact, whether in friendships, family, or fraternal organizations he had connections to that would create and easy opening to get him back into the fold. Now formal organizations are withering away, families tend to live far away, with terminal separations becoming far more common, and people are reporting fewer close friends than ever before.
When in such a situation when organic structures have decayed to this extent, you’re entering a precipitous decline where the usual strategies will get you nowhere, and drastic action is needed.
Think of it like a diabetic, overweight man who never goes outside and eats absolute garbage that gets a heart-attack and needs surgery. Doctors will not give him health and exercise plan first but rush him to the surgeon to save his life. After the surgery, if successful, they will have plenty of time to teach the man how to properly take care of himself.
Even if the man resolved to exercise and eat better, his body is too far gone to make a difference without an aggressive intervention. The local Churches are currently in this decrepit state now, and radical action is necessary. While the surgery is not “organic” or “natural”, it still bears the strongest potential of allowing them to live another day.
This is largely the way I see this venture. The churches have been weak and sick for ages to the extent they can’t coordinate what used to come trivially. Because of the great falloff in attendance, the organic nodes that could be used as a gentle social pressure are gone. We’re close to a point where it’s more starting from ground-zero than any legacy institutional support.
Technological Capital and Social Capital
My local parish has a monthly event where volunteers go to the activity center kitchen and make a couple hundred lunch bags with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and other treats for the homeless. Many of the volunteers are elderly, but volunteering has spread to a growing contingent of young parents who want their kids to learn volunteer work. From a purely economic standpoint, it’s incredibly inefficient. More parishioners than necessary attend, the items are purchased from a local store instead of a cheaper vendor, and many of the volunteers who are busy spreading the jelly likely could easily fund an outside company to handle the entire endeavor.
Many churches do the same thing, to the extent that it would be easy to create a large, scalable operation to do that task in the more efficient way possible. The Churches could pool some funds and hire a service to create the lunch bags and distribute to the homeless with far less time and resources being spent. Then these churches could open up their spreadsheets, noting the line of lunches created and distributed going up on the graph while the time and overhead spent decreasing. The business case for “progress” would be rock solid. After all, it’s all about making and distributing lunches, right?
Any sane person would see that such a solution would be incredibly shortsighted and myopic. The graph doesn’t quantify the retirees who are a little lonelier now that the job has been outsourced, nor the children who didn’t receive an important life lesson on stewardship, nor the young parents who got together and formed friendships. This sort of paperclip maximizing is the bane of all managed, technological endeavors that want to quantify improvements more than anything. It goes without saying human relationships don’t work that way.
The issue with process, technology, and efficiency solutions is it trades social capital for technological capital, the intangible for the tangible. Some innovations have negligible negative effects on social capital and can actually free people up for more building, some are outright disastrous. No one is lamenting the parish bookkeeper who no longer puts expenses in a ledger, but in a finance software suite. No one blinks an eye at security systems that keep a church from being vandalized. One could argue that the security system made a guard unnecessary, or putting finances in a database severed the direct relationship between the finance committee and the accountant, but overall, the tradeoff is reasonable.
What’s been difficult about modernity is technological innovations that were supposed to increase social capital actually crushed it. Social Media was supposed to allow people to keep in touch in perpetuity, but it ended up keeping people holed up in their homes instead. The rise of megachurches was supposed to bring masses of people together and support all sorts of services and events smaller churches were unable to afford, and instead they turned into more a social club than a truly transforming faith experience. Attendance might be going up, but what is actually being taught?
Bob left them like an old, retired general dismissing his troops, another man ready to take the reins and lead them to their next battle. On the drive home, he passed billboards for ambulance-chasing lawyers and ED supplements that the FDA 'didn't want you to know about'. Bob wondered if what he did made any difference at all. The churches he helped start spreading the grace of God, but spoke little in the ways God called on his people to change. At the last opening Sunday he'd attended, a young man, maybe Sixteen, was talking to a group of boys about one of the young women he swore he recognized from her OnlyFans account. Bob wished he could go back to before he knew what that website was and to the time when he believed the family men he surrounded himself with were upstanding, moral patriarchs and less so a crop of degenerates, slaves to their lusts.
It wasn't that he was without sin. There was only one in Bob's mind who was, and he was murdered for it. No, Bob knew that in the eyes of God, his sins weighed as heavy as any pimp's or prostitute's. But he still lamented that perhaps he was building comfortable lies. Perhaps the barriers to entry that other kinds of Christians built were for some purpose. Maybe Johnathan Edwards had a point, and in the rush to grow, Bob did not consider that tumors can grow faster than a body can fight them off.
Traditional religious types are notorious for nostalgia, vying for an idyllic past we reached, only for it to be lost. Whether this Garden of Eden was 1950’s Americana or the Monastic culture of the High Middle Ages, there’s an idea that there’s a place to RETVRN to, usually with the imagining we can recreate the social mechanisms of these societies, only with modern technology. What’s forgotten is these constructs can’t coexist with modern technologies.
It’s simply not possible to recreate a 1950’s neighborhood that infuses modern technology, even if full freedom of association is implemented. Social Media would rapidly dilute local bonds into various political factions arguing about topics far removed from their proximity. Their homogenous culture would be constantly curtailed by countless niche internet cultures and interactions that distracts everyone from their neighbors.
You could, theoretically, create something a little like the 1950’s, granted you had strong covenant communities with a very unorthodox legal structure and a self-selecting population. This would require strongly curtailing the technologies allows, and with it the freedoms of the resident. It’s inevitable that every step into the future creates an environment where the immutable truths of a faith clash with circumstances that make transmitting the faith to another generation difficult. Every adult has to wrestle what a virtuous society they envision for their children, and grapple what a different world those children will inherit. They aren’t looking for someone to RETVRN to another place in history, but a visionary that will lead them to a better tomorrow. The modern bureaucratic, data-driven world actively tries to suppress the one type of man that can compel true change and renewal, The Prophet.
The Prophet Stands Alone
There’s a certain superstition in thinking if you write a document calling to evangelization just right, if you cater the words of your sermon perfectly for the sensibilities of your audience, if your ad campaign hits just the right people, your work is done. It’s pretty much a truism that any document labeled as “Visionary” is boilerplate, and anything labeled as “Innovative” is going to recommend something that has already failed a hundred times. The emphasis is always the words, and not the person behind them.
Maybe a church does make an effective ad campaign, getting a solid bang for their buck and getting several families through their doors. Now what? The modern, technocratic solution would be to showcase your services. Free babysitting on Tuesday evenings! Family dinner nights in the Social Hall! Access to discounts to the attached private school! Your kids will love the play area across the hall! Maybe they’ll stay and listen to the pastor give a milquetoast put passionate sounding sermon between praise and worship music, just entertaining enough to stay for coffee and donuts afterwards. The number goes up!
Yet there’s that core feature of every religious movement that’s missed, The Prophet, the man with a direct communication line to God, or perhaps being God himself, preaching with a wild-eyed intensity of truths revealed to him from above. Never has a religion been formed from a bureaucratic process with a show of hands, that were then written and sent to the masses. It was always the warlord, the wanderer, the seer that seeded the new movement. While there is constant debate as to what this prophet meant in such committees centuries after they left this world, the intense zeal can never be replicated in a sterile, data-driven, process-oriented way. The spirit of the original Prophet, though long gone, still dwells in the spirit of the preachers who speak on his behalf.
The Pastor, The Priest, The Prophet stands at every podium in every denomination, from the small rural parish to the biggest city megachurch. The Prophet’s job has never been to make his parishioners feel welcome and fill out the satisfaction survey with ‘Excellent’ across the board, but to make demands of his flock that goes beyond being nicer while leaving the parking lot or vague allusions to neighborliness. He demands everything of them, and somehow demands even more of himself.
His flock will often be confused at what he says, angry at what he demands, uncomfortable with his expectations, but they will follow all the same. When he makes a statement to follow the Gospel, the words are less important than the man behind saying them. The words of the Gospel without the person of Jesus behind it is just a collection of interesting tales. A Mission statement written by a focus group is a dead letter for a dead faith. No one has ever died for a Mission Statement, Growth Plan, or a new evangelization method. They die for their leader, and the leader does the same for his flock.
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
John 6: 60-69
Traditional communities have stayed resilient while the trend-chasing denominations have deteriorated because these organizations have catered to the zealous and agentic leaders that are willing to place the burden on their own shoulders. They attract talent that is willing to take risks and lead their flock, alone if necessary, to a cohesive vision. Some are tech-savvy, while some rely on classic skills of oratory, but all forms necessitate a truly human encounter that can’t be broken down into its constituent parts. Regardless of how well-run the organization whose umbrella these pastors operate under, they will always be only as good as the passion, level-headedness, and intelligence of the people running it.
There will never be a perfect evangelization manual anyone can memorize, nor a neat trick with Big Data to do the work of transforming man’s spiritual life. Such can only be done with an encounter with the Divine, working through His Avatars, whether they preach on the streets, college campuses, or in massive Cathedrals, still roaming this earth.
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Traditional religions also ask much more of their adherents. It's been discussed elsewhere, but people are actually more likely to stick with something that demands a lot of them than something that is just a convenient ad-on to their lives. The difference between the people who get a gym membership in january and inevitably stop going three weeks in and crossfit cultists.