Attempts to evangelize online are not wrong, but the venue is not
ideal.
When St. Paul arrived in Athens, he spent most of his time
debating the philosophers and citizens in the marketplace. But then, Scripture
tells us, they brought him to the Areopagus.
The Areopagus was set aside from the noise of the marketplace. It
was made up of a council of elders who heard the most important arguments
regarding serious crimes and matters of religion.
Even the pagans knew that Paul's ideas deserved a more important
venue because they had to do with fundamental truths. The marketplace was no
place for working out such sublime teaching.
Much religious discussion takes place within the walls of the
social media marketplace built by marketing companies like Facebook. Inside
these gated information factories, the noise is cacophonous as pitched debates
take place in comment feeds and Twitter threads.
Marketplaces are built on the idea that things can be created and
sent fast enough to fulfill our needs and wants almost as fast as we can
conceive them. Companies like Amazon have mastered this.
Likewise, in the digital age, we tend to imagine ideas and speech
as things to be sent as quickly as possible. What is often forgotten is that
speech is best performed in the physical company of others, not transmitted
over virtual networks.
There is a ritual aspect to speech that demands presence,
attention and respect. This is hard to accomplish online. When we say we are
"on" Facebook, we are not really there. We are uploading bits of
information to a distant server for others to see, freed from the limitations
that being present requires.
Words on the screen are like the seeds thrown among the thorns.
They risk being choked by the cares, temptations and idols of this world that
populate the online "marketplaces" like Facebook and Google.
Rather than spending so much rhetorical energy in the
marketplace, take it to the field. When Pope Francis says to go to the
peripheries, it is tempting to think that the online environment is one of
those peripheries. Sadly, the opposite is true.
The online venue is becoming the center of culture. It is
schools, parishes and homes that now sit at the periphery, looking in on the
culture through the windows of smartphones. Face-to-face encounters are far
less common than Facebook ones.
Changing the culture means getting back to our roots. Simple
Christian charity. Not pious pronouncements on Facebook or email campaigns
aimed at evangelizing the youth. Simple Christian charity is our most
attractive and addictive offering.
It's no coincidence that the word "culture" shares a
Latin root with cultivation. "Cultura" means tend and grow. A pagan
cult was one that tended to the shrine of its idol. We do a really good job
tending to the digital shrines on social media — making daily offerings and
making friends with others who like the same things we like — while the fertile
fields of our schools, parishes and homes remain fallow.
Be like St. Paul. Cast your seeds in the online marketplace but
do not be afraid to enter the Areopagus where your ideas and beliefs can be
tried face to face. Done in charity, it will bear fruit.
Robinson is director of communications and Catholic media
studies at the University of Notre Dame McGrath Institute for Church Life.
© Arlington Catholic Herald 2021