What I hope to offer is a practical diagnostic for Christians that helps them discern what technologies they will and will not adopt based on the purpose of technology to support humans in their calling to live freely before God and in community with one another. I call it the Terminator Test: does it aid human life, or does it try to replace it? I recently applied it in my own life to that smartphone I’m not supposed to imagine life without. Here’s what I learned.
I recently sat in on a presentation delivered by the president of a prominent evangelical seminary. The topic was discipling the next generation–what some have nicknamed “the smartphone generation.” At one point, our presenter pulled out his own device. “The next generation will not remember a time without one of these,” he said.
That Zoomers are inured to supercomputers in their pockets is not shocking. But the point is usually meant as a set-up for a more audacious–but no less fashionable–assertion: because the next generation won’t remember a time without smartphones, they can’t imagine a future without them.
Hence, the countless articles from evangelicals about discernment and technology, all assuming a kind of techno-inevitability. These typically present as a moderated position between two extremes–a “third way” between total adoption and extreme luddism. Many writers have recently questioned the third way approach to politics. It’s time to do the same with technology.
In his insightful critique of a “third-way” approach to politics, James R. Wood focuses on retrieving the telos of politics itself. The same can be done–and is being done–for technology, especially with an eye toward emerging technologies like AI. But it is also important that we apply such questions to current technologies–even devices like smartphones which so many of us have grown accustomed to. As Jon Askonas points out in his essay, “Why Conservatism Failed,” it was the adoption of new technologies like the Pill that did more to transform the household than anything else. Like a steroid to a muscle, technology causes the nascent power of the idea to explode. Transgenderism lay dormant in academic circles for a while but has now arrived in mainstream culture largely because of innovation and advancement in sex-reassignment surgeries.
That Christians today are departing from historic Christian teaching about sex, gender, and contraception in the time it takes to fill a prescription or set-up an appointment is a warning to us today. What if the next major technological shift to threaten Christian discipleship isn’t sitting in some R&D lab but in our homes right now?
What I hope to offer is a practical diagnostic for Christians that helps them discern what technologies they will and will not adopt based on the purpose of technology to support humans in their calling to live freely before God and in community with one another. I call it the Terminator Test: does it aid human life, or does it try to replace it? I recently applied it in my own life to that smartphone I’m not supposed to imagine life without. Here’s what I learned.
Smartphones aren’t conducive to freedom.
Everyone from Patrick Deneen to Death Cab for Cutie has discovered the crushing yoke of expectations placed on us by smartphones. So much was evident when I compared my life with a smartphone to someone without one.
As a user, I had special access to life online. I was accessible whenever and wherever. Every bit of content in the world was at my fingertips. And yet, I was far less free than the typical Amish man–an example Deneen employs in Why Liberalism Failed.
The Amish man’s religious views preclude him from owning a smartphone among many other modern devices. He has no internet access, no email, no social media, no online identity. And yet, he rises with the sun and sets his plow down as he wishes. He lives and dies by the fruits of his own labors. He joins his family every night for dinner, undistracted by emails or texts from a workaholic boss. He doesn’t receive a barrage of push notifications warning him of social media trends or new seasons of Netflix shows.
