Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
How do we stay spiritually uncompromised while living in the larger culture? This question has had to be repeatedly asked throughout the two millennia long history of Christianity. It is a question that has always needed to be answered in fresh ways by the contemporary Church of its time and never more so than now when our society is so greatly impacted by a constantly morphing popular culture born of the technological explosion of the past quarter century.
Our technological abilities, especially in the area of mass communication, have rarely advanced as rapidly as they have during this period. The primary example of what we might call the “Information Revolution” is the computer. It wasn’t so long ago that no one had ever heard of the term “personal computer” much less the “Internet”. When I was twelve my father bought our family one of the first home computers. It set us back a thousand dollars in 1980 and was obsolete in 6 months. That machine had perhaps 1/10,000th of the power of the one on which I now type these words (There was much talk at the time about how microcomputers were going to revolutionize our lives but it was painfully obvious to me that my Radio Shack TRS-80 with its “Tape Drive” and 16K of RAM was just not going to do it!)
Fast forward to today. The vast majority of Americans have either owned or at least operated one of these devices and at ever increasing levels of sophistication. What finally made these machines an integral part of our lives? The answer is the advent of the World Wide Web. The internet’s ability to open human beings to a new world of information and, perhaps more importantly, communication, has changed the Western world more profoundly than perhaps any other inventions in human history save perhaps the atomic bomb, airplane and radio.
One of the things the Internet has done is create a new conduit for popular culture to flow into our minds and hearts, a conduit so powerful that it most likely surpasses the influence any other communications media on our daily lives. TV, for instance, is an incredibly powerful medium for communication but its communication is only one-way. By contrast the Internet is interactive, allowing for two-way communication as well as the selection and perusal of perhaps hundreds of billions of bytes of information along with their accompanying images and ideas. Herein is the rub. By so effectively opening up our being to the surrounding culture the Net has made it far more difficult to be in, but not of, this world.
Much has been spoken about the struggles Christian men (and now, sadly, women) are having with internet pornography. The proliferation of sexually explicit material online continues and has created a multi-billion dollar industry. It is an obvious threat to Christian integrity and cannot be minimized as to its impact, but there are less obvious threats inherent in this medium as well.
The line is beginning to blur between our everyday lives and what might be called our “virtual lives.” On the Net we interact not only with other people but, in a larger sense, with our fallen culture as a whole. The Net is the place to find a plethora of artistic, political, sexual, scientific and social crosscurrents. In one sense we have been given an incredible freedom to explore the meaning of our world and our own existence. Unfortunately that freedom can so easily lead to spiritual bondage.
The Internet is not immoral, but amoral. In and of itself it is only an instrumentality; a device no doubt invented by sinful human beings but not an inherently evil one. We need to remember that truth in order to see this technological revolution in its proper context. The Web is morally neutral; it is those who use it who are the moral agents. That said, a huge portion of the internet is controlled by the Enemy of our souls and not just the porn sites. He also uses the medium to influence us in other ways, and often not so obviously. We can easily allow this technology to put us into a sort of “trance of tolerance”. “How wonderful”, we might say, “to be able to sample from so many cultures and ideas”. The problem is that the spirit of moral relativism abounds online and at times it is tempting to take off our spiritual armor and electronically “slip into something a little more comfortable”. Add to this the tendency to surf for hours that many of us have and we soon find ourselves almost living a double-life, one real and one virtual. Often the virtual life ends up not being under the Lordship of Christ.
For many years I had a small wooden cross that hung from my old desk top computer monitor. I put it there to remind me that there are places online I dare not go. The cross also reminds me that my electronic culture cannot be allowed to define or rule me. Only the Man who died on such a cross for me 2000 years ago can and should do that and for this to happen I need to be intentionally prayerful about where I allow myself to go on line (and, to be honest, probably more often than I am now.)
I also sometimes need to just power everything down for a while and re-enter the real world.