If you read nothing else this weekend, make it this comment from a previous thread, by Edward Hamilton, who teaches at a small conservative Christian college in Texas:
“Technology has consequences for epistemology.”
As a “Ben-Oppish” commitment, my wife and I usually open up our house to anyone who needs a place to stay, for free. We’ve used the guest room for a professor who lived there for a couple years, and for a friend of my wife’s who had some serious family issues, but usually it’s my own students who have the greatest need. In the last month we’ve had two students staying with us for various amounts of time (and one of them brought his brother). The experience of being in close contact with a semi-random cross-section of millennials is really eye-opening.
Let’s talk about young men, since I know more of them. Young white male millennials (the demographic group I have most contact with, due to teaching science/engineering) pretty much live online around the clock during their leisure time. Faithful to the cliche, they enjoy playing computer games and watching streaming media content — but more to the point, they tend to organize their extended social networks around those leisure activities, and those networks exist largely in a virtual world. That world is universally scrubbed free of any trace of religious content, aside from a few vestigial holiday greetings. It’s a world in which the church has no presence and might as well not exist, the spiritual equivalent of tribes in a deep jungle in 19th century Africa before the arrival of European missionaries.
To provide some sense of its scale: The most subscribed YouTube channel, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, has 44 million subscribers. He can routinely generate five million views in a day. Have you ever watched one of his vlogs or LetsPlays? (Have you ever even heard of him, until now?) Odds are good that the answer is ‘no’ if you’re above a certain age, so I’ll save you the trouble by informing you that it’s the crude stuff you would probably expect, oversexualized slacker bro culture of a minimally articular sort with lots of energy and very little substance. If you believe traditional aspects of shared Christian life are nutritious meat and bread for spiritual health, and something like Game of Thrones is a bag of greasy hamburgers and fries, this is the equivalent of a shopping cart full of pork rinds.
But this online universe of vloggers and gamers is, in some weird sense, functioning as a replacement “church” in a way that traditional media hasn’t been. It’s shaping the values of a community of people who are in relationship and conversation with one another, in a very different way from a series of self-contained TV episodes like Game of Thrones. People are using this new media — centered around games and leisure — to form relationships which are satisfying the same emotional needs that previously were met by traditional religious institutions. They’re making church obsolete. The students who stay in my home? They live in PewDiePie’s world, usually for six to eight hours a day, playing video games and chatting on headsets. On Sunday, they sleep several hours past noon. These are students from an evangelical Christian college that most people would describe as hopelessly sheltered and conservative. And yet the amount of socialization they are receiving from social media and online gaming is dwarfing any contact they have with a church, by a time ratio of something like 100 to 1 in any given year (unless my sample set is totally unrepresentative). You can laugh all you want at the clumsy attempts of evangelicals to re-colonize TV and movies with spiritual ideas, but those projects are stunning successes compared to the void of spirituality in the top 100 most-subscribed channels on YouTube.
Let’s compare that subscriber base to religious denominations. Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination, have about 15 million members. The Mormons are about the same size, if you want to count them as Protestant. United Methodists, 8 million. Evangelical Lutherans, 4 million. Episcopalians? 2 million. All of them put together wouldn’t add up to the “Bro Army church” that tunes in for weekly sermons from PewDiePie. And most of those denominations are aging and in decline (except the Mormons, who are probably the best model we currently have for how a “Benedict Option” ought to push back against culture without hiding in bunkers). Go back to the PewDiePie channel on YouTube, gaze upon it in all its terrible grandeur — Hah, he’s stuffing a VR controller up his butt! — and think to yourself “This is the next empire, the barbarians scheduled to depose the Roman Senate.” And unlike Cavafy’s, you can easily confirm their existence by striking up a conversation with them in the comment boxes under any YouTube clip. (Well, “conversation” is perhaps too charitable a description for what will more likely be just stochastic concatenations of the word ‘f*cktard’, but the point is, they’re out there.) This is the stylistic template for what’s winning the culture, as the church loses it.
Then recognize that YouTube channel subscriptions are concentrated in that under-30 millennial demographic, the same people who are increasingly abandoning church.
And that’s our current sociological default for educated middle-class young adult males — the smart ones getting those STEM degrees that will keep them from becoming impoverished and allow them to support families. Oh, and I don’t mean to pick on bro culture, as though it’s distinctly worse. I could just as easily written here about girls posting semi-sexualized selfies on Instagram.
Sure, you say, your kids are different because they volunteer at the local charity and lead a Bible study, and whatever else, in addition to the responsibly small amount of online media they consume. That’s excellent. But they’re outliers. We have church membership figures to prove it. And when they head off to college and they don’t need to prove their worth to admissions committees, the default pattern for their collegiate and post-collegiate life is going to be dominated by the values and priorities and semiotics of internet culture. Donald Trump’s language sounds crazy to us, but he’s a model of high-class verbal sophistication by the standards of kids raised on this thin gruel for two dozen hours a week.
This isn’t just pearl-clutching about new technology. There’s a zero-sum competition for the time in everyone’s day, and media content has become incredibly adept at soaking up all the time that once allowed for traditional socialization. At the coffee hour in our church, many of the kids are just sitting around using portable electronic devices. Some of the adults, too.
I had to look it up, but apparently William Gibson (the author who coined the word “cyberspace”) is the originator of the familiar quote about how “The future is already here, it just isn’t widely distributed”. That seems appropriate. There’s your future, right there, if you just want to poke online for a bit.
That’s … stunning.
If the Benedict Option is going to be effective, it has to find a way to reach young men like this, and bring them back.