Christianity and Technology: A Primer
Many years ago, various circumstances led me to focus my research and reflection on technology. In reality, what led me down this rabbit hole was observing the rapid change in the world around me. I saw its influence on Christian thought and practice, and I was curious as to why much of the best literature on technology and social change was not produced by people of traditional religious faith.[1]
A recent CNN Films documentary reminded me of why more work should be done in this area. In the film Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, documentarian Alex Gibney explored the life and legacy of the late founder and CEO of Apple. Founded in 1976, Apple became the most valuable company in the world in 2011. Since Jobs’s passing, two motion pictures and numerous publications have explored the revolutionary impact of his company, inspiring nothing short of awe.
Although Apple’s story is intriguing in itself, it is more so for the Christian. The social and cultural impact of companies like Apple has been profound, and illustrates why Christians should have a basic understanding of what technology is and what it does. Any sound theology of culture, or even understanding of Christian spirituality, must account for the formative nature of the tools humans make and use.
In this essay, we’ll first consider a definition of technology, and then three propositions that provide a foundation for spiritual discernment in this profoundly important realm.
First Things First
Definitions are often difficult to come by, especially since the meaning of words can change over time. Take media for instance. People have come to use this word to refer to the news programs on television and the Internet. However, media is the plural form of medium, which itself is a form of mediating (or conveying), like in mediating information.
The early media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued that we ought to think more broadly than television, radio, or newspapers. Objects such as clocks, money, and clothing are also media since they help us amplify or extend ourselves through the world. Increasingly clothing (or the modern notion of style) is designed to communicate a message. But even if we restrict media to tools for verbal communication, all of these items mentioned are technologies.
We tend to think that iPods, hearing aids, and tablets are technologies. True enough, but the historic, semantic range of téchnē entails the skill, knowledge, or craft of making something. Only when téchnē becomes “tech,” “technique,” or coupled with logía (the study of something) do we see why we also call technologies devices. They are something devised by human skill. It is literally a process of ‘making’ before it is a ‘made’ thing. Technology, then, is concerned with making or devising something, as well as the artifact being created.[2]
For our purposes, let’s thicken this with some insight from an earlier Forum essay: A technology is a manmade tool, composed of manmade and/or natural materials, designed for the purpose of supporting, sustaining, or extending some aspect of human life.
Smartphones, or any type of phone, is a technology. A Model-T and a Corvette are technologies. Projectors and screens, as well as hymnals, are technologies. So are Fitbits and Rolexes. All of these are man-made means of overcoming or managing some problem or limitation—distance, diminished memory and vision, or time. Removing our modern blinders helps us to see technology as fundamental to human existence, whether we’re considering clothing or construction.
With this provisional definition in place, let’s consider three propositions that help form the necessary foundation to live wisely with technology.
Proposition #1: Technology Is Fundamentally a Way of Seeing the World
Some have argued that Americans are the first generation to attempt to do something simply because they can. The consequences of skipping from, “Should we do this?” to “Can we do this?” have been profound. Still, what is behind any technological effort is a desire to address some type of perceived limitation, problem, or need. It may be the production of food, construction of shelter, or keeping of time.
In premodern times, the commercial benefits of technological progress weren’t paramount. Certainly Demetrius the Silversmith made his living off making shrines of Artemis (Acts 19:24). However, most major technological changes have resulted from addressing a personal need or goal, or a humanitarian or social need. Technology, then, is connected to a mindset that assumes certain truths about the world’s potential, problems, and needs. As a result, it is never neutral since Christianity is the only worldview that gives the most faithful account of the world and the fullness therein.
Proposition #2: Technology Is Necessarily a Means of Making the World
Technology does not stop with assessing the circumstances of human life. It takes the next step of acting in and upon the world.
By ‘world,’ I mean this in two senses. First, the world is inherently God’s good gift toward all humanity. Even the unbeliever’s crops are watered by the renewing rainfall (Mt. 5:45). But peoples’ activities and tools reshape the terrain in intentional and unintentional ways. One need not be an environmentalist to understand that human activity, air quality, crop production, animal populations, and the water supply exist in a delicate balance. Thus, technological activity always has some type of influence on the natural world.
‘World’ should also be taken in a second sense—the social and cultural lives of human beings. The “Twitterverse” was not created ex nihilo. It came into being through people taking the next step in a long line of technical innovations to create a tool that has significantly altered the way large numbers of people think about being informed, self-aware, and influential.
This shows us that technology doesn’t stay confined to the realm of ideas and imagination. It leads humans to express their values and views of the world through making tangible (e.g., personal computers) and intangible (e.g., software) tools to engage and reorder the world, eventually making a new world.
Proposition #3: Technology Is Inescapably a Method of Revealing Human Nature
The documentary mentioned above includes many interviews with former colleagues of Jobs, as well as the man himself. In one segment, Jobs says of the early iMac computers: “It wasn’t a machine for you; it was you.” He further explained:
People sometimes forget that they’re very unique, and that they have very unique feelings and perspectives. You know, the whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side, and just focus on the technology. But we think there’s a whole other side to the coin, which is what do you do with these things? Can we do more than just spreadsheets and word processors? Can we help you express yourself in richer ways?
It’s no surprise, then, that a 2004 Newsweek cover featured Jobs’s face with the caption. It read “iPod, Therefore I Am,” alluding to Descartes’s, “I think, therefore I am,” and demonstrating Jobs’s significance in world history. Technology—especially in its modern forms—increasingly (and unavoidably) reveals peoples’ inner lives. Humans don’t just see the world, or make the world; they remake it in their own image.
Archaeologists and anthropologists study ancient artifacts from past civilizations to learn about earlier peoples. Yet if we look closer in our own day, our tools also reveal beliefs, values, fears, aspirations, and tendencies. We see ourselves individually at the pinnacle of life’s relational pyramid. And we owe it to the world and to ourselves to be authentic, expressing our unique individuality. We’re displaying what sociologist Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism” back in 1985. We’re just a little further down the road.[3]
Certainly the problems of pride and self-centeredness aren’t new. Yet among the things that are different from previous ages is that we have a profoundly efficient set of tools at our disposal. However, they not only facilitate communication and the transmission of information. They encourage us to share and embrace irreverent, silly myths (1 Tim. 4:7), vain words (2 Pt. 2:18), idle speculation (1 Tim. 1:4) and any number of other works of the flesh. As Langdon Winner famously put it, “artifacts have politics.”[4]
Moving Toward Wisdom
I have focused more here on description and analysis. However, this is essential because we won’t consider solutions to the problems in the world, the church, or the home if we can’t acknowledge that technology constitutes as much of a challenge as an opportunity. However, let me offer a few concluding, practical considerations:
(1) Cultural engagement, broadly understood, begins with a close reading of the world and how technology shapes it.
(2) Responsible Christian communities, congregations, and households must ask, “How are our tools shaping us? What problems are we really trying to solve with them? What does God, not Silicon Valley, require of us?”
(3) Finally, how would patiently embracing the Creator’s gift of time and space—by virtue of us being embodied creatures—change our approach to everyday life? How would we deal with people differently? How would we worship differently?
Ironically, faithful cultural activity begins with awareness, not activity. We should be aware that technology will always be with us. We must learn to let it remain a making, and not our unmaking.
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[1] This is changing, though. In the last five to ten years, more Christians have been engaging this topic from a religious and theological perspective. For a distinctly theological approach, see Brian Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); and Andrew Byers, TheoMedia: The Media of God and the Digital Age (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2013).
[2] In his excellent book From the Garden to the City, John Dyer lists at least four legitimate definitions of technology in society (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011), 57-59.
[3] For a fuller account of this terminology, see Bellah’s Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985). Interestingly, philosophers Alasdair McInytre’s discussion of emotivism in After Virtue, and Charles Taylor’s discussion of the “age of authenticity” in A Secular Age both seem to coalesce around this same basic narrative.
[4] Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Winter 1980.
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