The Church in Dehumanizing Times

How then should we live?

Photo by Patrick Reichboth on Unsplash

This seems to be a perennial question: given the technological, political, cultural, and spiritual forces that are dehumanizing and disembodying us, what is the proper role of the church? To some extent, that has been the question for all my books. Disruptive Witness looked at how the forces of secularization and technology of distraction buffer belief and making witnessing difficult. You Are Not Your Own was entirely about the dehumanizing forces of the contemporary world which, I argued, largely come from the false belief that we are our own and belong to ourselves. Even On Getting Out of Bed is a text that addresses how to cope with the dehumanizing effects of the world. And finally, To Live Well is going to address how we navigate through these chaotic times practicing the seven virtues. What I want to address here, today, is the general posture we should have toward living through overwhelmingly dehumanizing times.

What sort of attitude should we have knowing that forces like AI are going to be built with or without our permission, and will alienate us and make us less reliant on each other and less intelligent and less capable of human thinking? What sort of posture should we have knowing that screens, smartphones, and social media are tearing us apart, depressing us, and harming our children? What kind of hope can we have when pornography only grows more and more graphic and widely available? What sort of spirit should we have when we speak less and less to strangers and neighbors and rely more and more on automation and delivery services? I don’t mean to sound like a Doomer. As you continue to read, you’ll see that I am not. But I am a realist about what we are living through and how burdensome it can be to our minds. How can we live healthy, ordered, community-based lives for God’s glory when the World is working against us at every turn? How can we have the hope to try? I think the answer is that we strive each day in hope to act in our sphere of influence to do what we can to live righteously, resisting the spirit of the age, but accepting that we will make compromises with perfection to live in the city of man. While these compromises cannot be with sin, they can be with issues of prudence.