You can take the man out of the church, but you can't necessarily take the church out of the man.
It's possible you've heard me say that before, and it's also possible that my little corner of Substack has come to be defined to some extent by that idea -- certainly more than I expected when I started noodling here. I am not what I'd call a "Christian" at this point in my life, and that's not a political statement: If there is a god, I don't really know what to believe about him/her/it and I'm not sure it matters. But I find my approach to the world is shaped, for better or worse, by many of the Christian1 ideas I once tried to hold to. In my heart of hearts, I believe that I should love my enemies and pray for those who persecute me. (Not that I'm all that persecuted, and not that I'm literally praying.) I believe that the peacemakers are blessed, that it is good to hunger after righteousness, that I should consider the log in my own eye before pointing out the speck in my brother's, that praying on a street corner for the whole world to see is something that hypocrites do.
Not all of this is meant literally, of course. But you get the idea.
So I want to praise a new book, Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community. It's by my friend and former editor Bonnie Kristian -- full disclosure that I'm completely biased here.2 It's a book that's written largely from a Christian point of view, mostly for Christians, but it's about the social media-epistemic crisis that afflicts all of us in the still-ongoing Trump Era. It's about truth, and its seeming absence from much of our public discourse, and what to do about it.
That's not just a church problem is it?
I'm going to largely skip Bonnie's overview of the issues at play here, because we're all pretty much familiar with them: We live in a society in the grip of misinformation and conspiracism and social media shaming -- "cancel culture" -- all of it amplified and exacerbated by social media technologies that both enrage us and keep us hitting the "refresh" button like cocaine-addicted rats looking for our next dopamine hit.
"In the span of a few decades we massively increased the quantity of information the average person encounters daily, much of which makes or assumes major truth claims," she writes. "But we didn't equip ourselves for those multiplying encounters. I suppose we assumed we could handle it. We could not."
That's terrible for democracy and our national cohesion, and it's terrible for any sub-community or-culture that A) is supposed to be about seeking the Truth with a capital T, and B) also supposed to stand apart from "the world" a little bit.
The frustrating thing? There's probably no quick fix.
Instead, Bonnie's solution to these challenges involve going slower, deeper, more relational in our approach to all the information being thrown at us, and the people we love. We're not going to convince our angry aunts and uncles on Facebook that the latest QAnon post is nuts by throwing a fact-check at them. "Bickering in the comments section" isn't going to solve much, she observes, and the odds for a "dramatic, epistemic intervention" are low with somebody you've been bickering with, anyway. Even without social media, humans aren't very good at changing our minds, even when presented with undeniable proof that we're wrong. Instead, she recommends staying in relationship with the people you love -- talking about kids, church, work, anything but politics -- and simply being available.
"Your aim, again, is not victory in a debate," she writes. "It's to strengthen your relationship so that if--hopefully, when-- your loved one begins to wonder if there is something amiss in his thinking, he knows he can come to you. He knows he'll be met with grace rather than belittlement." This is difficult, even counterintuitive stuff in our "somebody on the internet is WRONG" society. But I believe it is wise.
Also wise: Being ready to reconsider and admit that there's something amiss in our own thinking. It happens! One good way to start -- perhaps this advice will not be unfamiliar to you -- is to unplug once in awhile. Bonnie recommends turning off your phones and your favorite apps for a sabbath now and again, to reset your mind and (as the kids are saying these days) touch grass.
And when you return to the chaotic world of InstaTwitterMetaBook -- it's hard to stay away -- it's still ok to limit your consumption, to try to ignore much of what's being thrown at you. (A personal recommendation: I use a Chrome extention to block the "trending" section on Twitter's homepage, and it's made that site much more usable -- I chase the outrages du jour far less often. And I use the "latest Tweets" instead of the default algorithm-driven feed, which means the voices I see and hear are ones I've curated.) "Choose to know only a few stories well," Bonnie advises. "You do not need to be informed about every story. You cannot be well informed about every story."
Again, there's wisdom here -- which is no suprise, as I've come to value the wisdom in Bonnie's writing, whether it be at secular outlets or in her column at Christianity Today. Bonnie's still grounded in her faith, in a way that I'm not. But I can and do still learn from her.
Untrustworthy is available this week in hardcover and ebook editions.
I say "Christian" here but some of the stuff I hold to is broadly ... religious. It's just that Christianity provided the vocabulary I bring to the table.
I also followed along a little bit during Bonnie's writing process, reading some of the books that she was using to ground herself in the topic, like Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows.