Back to Life. Back to Virtuality.

I was woken up at 4am last night, by a party outside our house. The relaxation of lockdown is bringing people out into the streets and parks. Recently, several beaches were crowded by hordes of holidaymakers, completely ignoring social distancing. And pubs overflow their seating on our pavements. That it is mainly the young doing this reflects the state of their hormones, and their innate desire to mix and mingle. It also instantiates Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of the “carnivalesue”: that people occasionally need to let rip.

A similar mood is seen among Christians: eager to resume meeting in church buildings, and gathering in parks for fellowship. We experiment with ‘guerilla church’, meeting spontaneously, unplanned, to sing and worship – and attract unexpectedly a small crowd, starved of anything much to do during lockdown.

And yet, there’ve been genuine gains throughout the pandemic. Our pre-recorded online services have drawn hundreds of ‘views’, and facilitated greater interactivity through the comments section on Facebook. Daily Youtube devotionals have extended our ministry to unknown individuals. Several online ‘shows, have addressed contemporary issues (including sexuality, Black Lives Matter, & technology). Small groups online, through Zoom, Whatsapp or Google Hangouts, have expanded the number of people involved in deliberate discipleship. We’ve also done Bible studies with olders at a local community centre.

And yet, many are excluded because they either haven’t got the technology or can’t make it work. Then there are larger issues regarding the nature of technology. As Marshall McLuhan said, we must distinguish between the “figure” and “ground”. We may think we are communicating our own message independently of the medium (here, the internet), but the medium is the message. That is, the means we use actually transmits its own meaning: about the nature of truth, the world, etc.

In addition, there is the problem of surveillance. We might think we’re exploiting virtual reality to promote a Christian message. But virtuality also makes us highly visible. Kai Strittmatter (We have been Harmonised) and Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), point out the way the net patrols & polices, and then predicts & produces, our online behaviour. The former analyses big government in China, and the latter big business in the West; the one producing a totalitarian, and the other a still totalising, tendency to control and cover the whole of life under their ideological and economic umbrellas. The room for independent thought will consequently be progressively reduced.

This is already leading to censorship. Leftwing magazine, Jacobin, ran an article where they worried about Facebook’s monitoring of racist and sexist hate-speech. Not because of absolute free speech concerns, but because they recognised they themselves could be similarly ‘cancelled’. For Christians the same danger applies. Already, anyone in a position of responsibility, who holds Biblical beliefs, for instance, on sexuality, can be exposed and lose their job. If they post on their own private social media account, there is a risk of being trawled and trolled.

Are we headed for a new marginalisation of faith?