How to Follow Jesus in Your Digital Lifeಮಾದರಿ

Pointing Fingers

One on hand, it is easy (and right) to say that technology companies—and even the government—should bear some of the weight of moral responsibility for the health of the public square, for the data they collect on us, and for the way they curate the things we see online.

At the same time, we are quick to fully shift the responsibility for these tools onto others by refusing to acknowledge our role in their development and how we choose to use them. We’d rather just lay the blame for the misuse and flawed goals of technology at the feet of the companies themselves or the digital world as a whole. We would rather point fingers at others rather than acknowledge our own responsibility. Worst of all, we may even lament and blame God for putting us in a world laden with ethical confusion.

But the Bible does not let us off so easy. As Eugene Peterson would candidly paraphrase Proverbs 19:3: “People ruin their lives by their own stupidity, so why does God always get blamed?” On top of this, Jesus would tell us that we cannot even see the real scale of another party’s level of sin until we remove our own, which is usually much bigger than theirs!

And seeing all these things together through the lens of the Christian worldview, we can see that Christianity has the answer that even the highest of tech leaders and government officials in our society can’t seem to locate: the deep-seated nature of sin, which infects all aspects of humanity, including the design of our technological tools and how we use them. Not only do our tools fail to live up to the goals or intentions of their designers, but the effects of sin cause us to abuse and misuse these same tools in ways that deeply alter our view of the world and our place in it.

Q: In what ways have you abused or misused the digital spaces in your life?

Q: What “log” exists in your own eye when it comes to technology? How might you remove it?