You Had to Be There
Freya India, commodified Christianity, and the gathered church.
Besides Griffin Gooch — “The Gooch!” — Freya India is easily one of my favorite Substack-ers. Her incisive cultural insights are heads and shoulders above her peers. Freya has a knack for articulating Gen Z angst in ways that feel honest without becoming preachy or self-loathing. She’s able to name some of the foibles that are unique to her generation, many of which are either dismissed or ignored. Those memes that express the unending onslaught of existential crises that have seemingly become just another Tuesday for Millennials could just as easily describe Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
In other words, I’m not so sure we should be so quick to judge the “littluns” — I got such a kick out of that term while watching the most recent Lord of the Flies adaptation on Netflix! — for their apparent softness and the “ease” with which they grew up or are growing up. Just because certain tasks are easier than they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago doesn’t mean things are easier writ large. I honestly can’t imagine growing up in the Snapchat era, let alone the constant pressure that living with the unavoidable creep of social media on the “peace, and quiet, and good tilled earth”1 of everyday life.
To say that things have changed since the “back in my day” days is self-evident. But there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Starlink is here to make sure the remotest villages in Peru can doomscroll to their heart’s content, and A.I. is here to subsume everyone’s jobs, or so I’m told. It really just depends on which news outlet you’re sourcing. We’ve barely been able to reckon with, let alone process, what it means for childhoods to be swallowed up by screens, and we’re already pushing the envelope by adding artificial intelligence into the mix, because, why not, right? What can it really hurt at this point? I suppose the only certainty in a life full of uncertainties is the fact that things change.
But that’s not entirely true, is it? At least, it shouldn’t be. There ought to be another certainty, another hand-hold jutting out on the craggy cliff-face — namely, the church. Without digressing into a nerdy diatribe about what the church is in relation to Orthodoxy, it goes without saying that among the reasons, and there are many, the church was established in the aftermath of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension to bespeak what is certain amid a world enslaved to irreversible decay. And what might that be? It’s the Word of Christ that is preached, and the bread and cup of Christ offered in the Lord’s Supper. In a world that’s fraying at the seams, what doesn’t break down or fade away are the body and blood of the Crucified One.
Be that as it may, if Freya’s latest essay, “The Commodification of Christianity,” is to be believed, even the church has changed, to the detriment of those who are genuinely searching for something solid. After briefly mentioning her curiosity about Christianity, Freya bemoans the current Christian marketplace for its commoditization of “content about God” and the ways in which the church has joined the fracas of pumping out podcasts and reels that seem to merchandise your relationship with God. “It feels as if all of Christianity can be done on a screen,” she writes. “To stay connected with God, all we need to do is subscribe, download, press play.”
Without discerning the costs, the church has assimilated modernity’s apparatus for “performing everything to each other all the time for no reason,” to borrow Bo Burnham’s phrase. But have we lost something along the way as we’ve “gamified” the “faith once delivered to the saints”? Is there a disadvantage to making the Bible bite-sized? I would agree with Freya and offer a wholehearted yes to that. This doesn’t mean churches should ditch their Instagram accounts or cut their livestreams off. There are ways to utilize modernity’s technological contrivances to the benefit of heaven’s kingdom. But I wonder if the church has put too many eggs into the algorithmic basket?
Maybe churches have busied themselves trying to reach the avatars the algorithms tell them to reach to the point where they’ve forgotten the people next door. It’s easier to evangelize or proselytize someone when you don’t have to share space with them. When you don’t have to smell them. But is the church supposed to be easy? Is it supposed to be convenient? I don’t think so. This speaks to the apparent disconnect between the unconcerned embrace of social media and the mission of the church, which isn’t typified by gaming an algorithm but by a Word of grace that shapes and settles us.
Sometimes I think I’ll just watch the Sunday live-stream in bed, maybe skip through it a bit, or actually you know what I’ll just listen to a Christian podcast instead while I get on with other things. All the Sermons are on Spotify anyway! The awful truth of it, I have to be honest, is that I put off going to church because I know that I can. I’ve got my phone . . .
I tell myself I’m watching the Sunday live-stream to get used to the idea of going to church, then I’ll actually go. But this is the trap, and trust me on this, if you are trying to reach a generation that has spent more time on screens than face-to-face with other human beings, do not make it any easier to do things inside . . .
I think if Christians want to reach my generation, really reach us, they have to promise something totally separate from that, something otherworldly, something that doesn’t abide by market logic, something different, divine. Something, for once, that isn’t cheapened or commodified. And I hope some find the conviction to say that their faith is too complicated, too sacred, to turn into TikToks. If you want to know more about it, the subscribe button won’t help. You’ll have to step into church.
At the church where I serve, I’ve received feedback in the past concerning the quality, or lack thereof, of our Facebook and YouTube livestreams. The audio is tinny or poorly mixed; the camera isn’t centered, or it cuts out entirely, mid-stream, at random. To be honest, there’s a part of me that loathes such things. The perfectionist in me wants to meticulously dial everything in and get it just right, make it more than presentable. But there’s another part of me that has learned to be okay with all flaws, because maybe, just maybe, those technological deficiencies aren’t glitches but blessings in disguise.
Despite all the ways churches have evolved to keep up with the times, what has always been true, and what always will be true, is that for the church to be “the church,” her people must gather. “A church is not a church until it comes together,” writes Jonathan Leeman.2 Sure, we can commune with God and pray to him in the comfort of our own home, even with the assistance of finely coded apps on our phones. But the Christian faith has never been a faith performed in isolation. It’s neither static nor individualistic. It’s experienced as the community of faith meets together, corporeally (Heb. 10:25), to encourage one another through Word and Sacrament, two things that can’t be commodified.
What Freya seems to be after isn’t more content, but something that you participate in by using all five senses, which is exactly what makes the gathering of the church so powerful and poignant. “The fact that you are physically there. You see. You hear. You feel.”3 Some things, it turns out, you have to be there for. Freya’s longing for “something otherworldly” or divine is precisely what is found in the gathered church when its halls echo with the words of grace that invite us to take part in a story that’s infinitely bigger than us. One where earth is invaded by heaven, and evil is trampled by the nail-scarred feet of God’s Son.
Grace and peace to you.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 10.
Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman, Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 47.
Hansen and Leeman, 46.