While so much of social media has become about performing for an audience—whether that audience is comprised of your peers, your coaches, your parents, your sorority sisters, or your future employers, for some young adults, there is a much more important audience than all of the above: God. Religion is one of the most central and intimate parts of a person’s identity. If social media is the main way that young people today express that identity, it naturally raises the question: Where is God on Facebook?
5
PERFORMING FOR GOD
RELIGION ON (AND OFF) SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook keeps me in check with the secular world. Which is very important because I go to a secular university, I live in the secular world.
Zachary, sophomore, private-secular university
The Internet makes everything else easier to do. It’s easier to find recipes, it’s easier to find songs, it’s easier to find other people who have the same crazy chronic medical conditions as you do. It’s easy to find everything so of course it’s easier to find boys. It’s a side effect of the Internet which a lot of people don’t like, and that’s why there are some people who are Orthodox who don’t use Facebook.
Dinah, senior, public university
JENNIFER: GOD USES FACEBOOK
From the moment Jennifer sits down for our interview, I know I’m in for a treat. She’s a bright, bubbly senior at a conservative, southern, Christian university. A pretty redhead with freckles, she talks enthusiastically about all the things she loves about her studies, her experience at college (she’s made two “lifelong friends,” she immediately tells me), and how, during her four years here, she’s been “pushed in the best of ways.” She has a ring on her finger, too—she’s engaged and thrilled about it. At the core of all these things, for Jennifer, is her faith. She’s a devout Christian and a member of the Pentecostal Church of God, and she can’t really talk about anything without bringing up her faith. Her father is a pastor, and she both teaches Sunday school to preschoolers and works with her church’s youth group on Wednesdays. Jennifer is a psychology major, and while this has challenged her faith at times, she believes that her major has helped to “expand her horizons.”
“[Religion] is a big part of my life because I do have a relationship with God,” Jennifer says. “You know, we talk on a daily basis, and it definitely influences the decisions that I make. My faith is a big part of how I decide things I’m going to do, things I’m not going to do. I don’t think I worry as much as other people do because I believe that there’s a plan and there’s a purpose for everything that’s destined by God. So I don’t have to worry about the future as much, because even though it’s unforeseen, I know that everything will be okay.”
When I ask Jennifer what makes her happy and what makes her life seem meaningful, our conversation again turns to faith. “I know that I have a purpose, based on my faith in God,” she says. “I know that He created me to have a purpose for this life, and as long as I trust and obey Him, then He’ll make sure that His plan for my life is seen, or He’ll guide me into that plan He has for me.”
I begin to grow curious about the ways Jennifer’s Christianity will affect who she is online and what she posts, if at all. Most of the students I’ve interviewed are only nominally religious, so faith isn’t something they discuss when they’re talking about social media. And the more devout students I’ve met usually tell me that social media isn’t the place to talk about religion, and just generally students see posts that have anything to do with God, prayer, or even worship attendance as one of the biggest no-nos of online behavior, right alongside politics. It’s the old cliché about polite conversation updated for the twenty-first century. It’s best not to ruffle any feathers on social media—you never know who might be watching.
Even Cherese, who enjoyed expressing her opinions about everything—even politics and religion—on Facebook, spent nearly all her time navigating the seventeen groups she’d created to protect almost everyone she was friends with from seeing these posts.
But Jennifer is very different. At first, she sounds like most everyone else, saying that she never really posts anything bad on social media—if you have a bad day, you should keep it to yourself. She posts happy things and things she’s thankful for. Jennifer says that one of the things she asks herself before she posts is whether or not what she writes will “uplift” others. She wants to make other people happy; she believes people will be happy for her when she’s doing well, and she also gets pleasure out of seeing others doing well. Jennifer gushes about the announcement she and her fiancé made about their engagement and how many “likes” and sweet comments they got. It was her most popular, most uplifting post ever—exactly the kind of thing that belongs on social media, in her opinion.
Then I ask Jennifer if she’s open about her faith on social media. Yes, she tells me, she definitely is. At first the posts Jennifer mentions that relate to her faith seem pretty low-key. If she finds twenty dollars, she’ll post something like, “Lord bless me today, I found twenty dollars.” Sometimes she’ll ask for prayers on Facebook, too, usually for things like an exam she’s studying for or a paper she needs to get done, but never for personal or emotional needs. “I don’t think the whole world needs to see [those things],” she says. “There’s a lot of people on Facebook who, I don’t want them to know my needs. I don’t confide in them like that. The people who I would request prayers from for personal needs or emotional situations, I would confront face to face, usually one-on-one.”
This is where our conversation circles back to Jennifer’s earlier mention of God’s plan. “I think God can use anything for His glory,” she says. “Not everything on Earth may have been set up or created to glorify Him, but I think He can use it. So, I think you can spread the gospel, you can spread hope, you can spread love through social media, which would be, by doing that, you would be glorifying God and you would be uplifting Him. So I think He can use social media.”
I ask Jennifer to explain what exactly she means.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, laughing. “I mean, not literally, you know. He doesn’t sit down and type up a message for you, or whatever. But, yeah, I think through people, because people are the ones that are using Facebook, and God can use people, so if He can use people to do anything, to preach in a pulpit, to sing a song, He can use them to type an encouraging message on Facebook, or spread hope or love through a post that could uplift others, or encourage them to continue, you know, the fight or whatever.” It’s not as if social media is holy, Jennifer wants to reassure me, it’s just that the Lord works in mysterious ways and sometimes it’s through Mark Zuckerberg, even if he doesn’t realize it. “I’m pretty sure [social media] wasn’t created to glorify God, but it doesn’t really matter, I don’t think, because God can use anything.”
Jennifer goes on to say that social media can also be a distraction from God if you’re not careful, and anything that distracts from God leads to unhappiness. “I think a lot of things can pull people away from God,” she begins. “I think social media can play a larger role in pulling people away from God because it’s such a distraction with a lot of things that aren’t Godly. There’s a lot of things on social media that are not there to glorify God, to uplift Him, or to encourage people. There’s a lot of things there that can tear others down. People post things that the whole wide world doesn’t need to know. People put up situations that are discouraging. People post videos that can be hurtful. But there’s also just a lot of other sinful things too. Like language and videos, crude jokes, crude humor, that’s not glorifying God. So I think that can pull people away.” And while seeing hurtful, crude, or discouraging things on social media isn’t much different from seeing or hearing about them in person, “social media is at their fingertips all the time,” Jennifer says. “But once again, it’s not necessarily the media that’s doing it, it’s the people behind it. It’s the people that are posting those videos, posting those posts.”
While so many of Jennifer’s peers are working hard to please and impress their audience—future employers, professors, college administration, grandparents, sorority sisters, and fraternity brothers—Jennifer’s number one viewer is God. She believes God is always watching her, even on social media, so she posts accordingly, trying to appear happy at all times and to inspire others, but most of all to serve God.
When Jennifer goes online, she tries to ask herself, “Will this glorify God when I post this?” She doesn’t always do it, she tells me. She’s human, so she makes mistakes. But she believes that when she’s on Facebook she’s in a “role model state,” so she feels a responsibility to do the best she possibly can to allow God to work through her.
The difference between Jennifer and almost everyone else, though, is that the effort to please God and appear happy doesn’t seem to exhaust her. Rather, she seems invigorated by it.
JAE: BEWARE OF FALSE IDOLS
At this same Christian university, I meet Jae. A tall, lanky junior, Jae is quick to laugh and spends a lot of his time on Instagram and Snapchat—like everyone else at his college, he says—but he also likes to go on a Korean social media platform. Jae is in ROTC, which is where he met a lot of his friends, but he has a separate friend group made up of people who identify as “part Asian,” he explains. Jae is very religious. He prays regularly, and it’s important to him that his future wife is a Christian. He tells me that God makes him happy, that God is his number one priority, so serving God is what brings meaning to his life.
As with Jennifer, Jae’s relationship with God and his devotion to his faith have an enormous effect on his use of social media. He goes on Instagram and his Korean app quite a bit, though he doesn’t post much. When he does, he’s either trying to say something funny or putting up something that reminds him of God. “If I post a beautiful sunset or something and then I talk about how it reminds me of God’s beauty, it would help not only express my own gratitude of God, but it can help show other people who look at my page, like, ‘Yeah, he’s a Christian,’ and [it’s] a good way to get the word out.” Jae likes being able to remind people of the wonders of God through his posts.
But while Jennifer believes that God can use anything to glorify God’s self, and hopes that God works through her on social media, Jae worries that social media has the potential to get in the way of his relationship with God or even destroy it, if he’s not careful. In fact, he once quit Facebook precisely because he worried he was becoming obsessed with it, and obsessions are harmful to a person’s relationship with God. Social media can consume you and make you forget your priorities.
“Social media can be like another God to people,” Jae says. “It can be idolizing, and that’s not what I want, so it affects how much I go on.”
When I ask Jae why he thinks social media can be “idolizing”—in the religious sense—he talks about how tempting social media is to people. He explains, “People can be anything they want, they can do whatever, they can make multiple personalities of themselves that they can’t do or won’t do in their real life.” For just these reasons, Jae found himself fixated on Facebook for a while. He used to spend a lot of time scrolling through everyone’s feeds and obsessing over how many “likes” he’d get on his posts. Then, Jae started to feel emotionally unhealthy because of Facebook. He kept seeing posts he didn’t want to see: negative comments, negative images, and people talking badly about other people. Jae got to a point where he just “didn’t want to have those images or those thoughts in his mind throughout the day.” Plus, “I didn’t want to fall into the idolizing trap,” he says, where Facebook becomes like a God to him.
So one day, he quit, cold turkey. He tells me, “I was just like, ‘All right God, I see this is not going to be beneficial to me, for our relationship,’ so I just cut it off.”
Sometimes Jae misses Facebook, though. He worries he doesn’t really know what’s going on with a lot of his friends, or what’s happening on campus. He follows some people on Instagram, but Instagram isn’t the same, he thinks. Lots of people aren’t on Instagram. When I ask Jae whether he ever worries that Instagram will consume him the way Facebook did—becoming yet another false idol—he answers with a simple nod of his head and says, “Yes.”
SOCIAL MEDIA EVANGELIZATION
College students do not generally reveal their religious preferences, affiliations, feelings, or opinions on social media. At the thirteen colleges and universities that I visited—even the religiously affiliated ones—people like Jae and Jennifer were anomalies. Very few students posted about religion or spirituality.1 A small number admitted they occasionally posted a Bible verse, along with a photo of nature, or made a comment about praying for someone who is sick—certainly more so at the evangelical Christian colleges than anywhere else—but that’s about as far as their revelations go. Nobody wants to start a debate or cause a ruckus, and posting about religion is inflammatory, most students think.
In the online survey, students were asked to reply yes or no to the following statement:
I share my opinions openly about subjects like politics and religion.
Only 25 percent of those who answered said yes. But those 25 percent are fascinating.2
What is unusual about them is that they are, more so than their peers, empowered in their use of social media. Those students who allow the devotion to their faith to permeate their online worlds use their religious traditions as a framework for navigating their behavior and posts—one they find far more meaningful and sturdier than warnings about future employers and prescriptions for curating one’s online image. They are learning the dos and don’ts of social media from a higher power, and this makes an enormous difference. Just as students at the most prestigious institution I visited, who thought critically about social media, had a healthier relationship to it, navigating social media via one’s religious tradition also seems to give students who do so a heightened sense of control and purpose. And while these students are just as image-conscious and as aware as everyone else that they have an audience, having God and their faith tradition filtering their online decision-making seems to help them stay grounded.
Among this group are, of course, students like Jennifer, who posts to glorify God, and others like Jose, a young man I meet at a public university who is very involved in his church. He never stopped talking about God or the way that Christianity informs every aspect of his life. Like Jennifer, Jose sees social media as a tool for evangelization.3
“I was on Facebook right before I got here,” Jose says. “The vast majority of posts on my wall have to do with the church, or [are] talking about my relationship with God, things like that… . I’ll post stuff like a really big spiritual thing for me, like let’s say I had a great morning, had a great time with God.”
Jose thinks that “people would automatically label [him] as religious” based on his Facebook page. For him, social media is a way to connect to people at his church but also to Christians wherever they may be. “It’s a connection for me to have with people throughout the ministry, throughout, even the world,” Jose says. “Friends from China and Africa and Europe who are Christians, part of the churches there. And I can invite people to events, I can talk about what is happening in my life, and even if that one person sees it and it encouraged them that day, or brought them closer to their own faith, or made them interested in seeing more, studying the Bible maybe, then I think it’s worth it.” Jose, too, feels pressure to inspire others through social media. He practices a particular “brand” of Christianity and posts with a particular audience in mind—his own Christian community and, even more important, potential Christian converts he’s never met.
Jose actively tries to use social media “evangelistically,” as he puts it, though he didn’t always do so. It wasn’t until he “started using it” this way and “actually it worked,” he says, that he became a believer in the power of social media to draw people to Christianity. At his church, he was in cha
rge of a “social media day” at which people were asked to use social media “as tools to share our faith and go out there and reach out to people,” he tells me. They were given specific tasks: “Invite twenty people to church, share with ten people your conversion story, post up a picture of your baptism.” To Jose’s delight, they got some people to respond and come out to church. “I’m supposed to represent Christ wherever I go, and Facebook is no different for me,” Jose explains. To him, this seems simple and obvious. Posting about religion can help bring people to God, and this makes it worth any grief Jose might get. He doesn’t care if some people don’t like that he’s outspoken about religion. His attitude is, if you don’t like his posts, then “delete me or take my post off your wall.”
Evangelizing via social media is not the only thing that sets Jose apart from his peers. At no point does he mention being worried about future employers, or turning his Facebook page into a highlight reel or an online résumé. In fact, if Jose has any worry at all about the content and tenor of his Facebook page, it’s that it actively and honesty reflects his commitment to honoring God. When Jose mentions having “to be careful” about what he posts during our interview, he is talking about making sure that his posts about his faith are authentic and rightly intended.
The Happiness Effect Page 15
