Few of us would willingly repeat our middle and high school years. For many, the span from age twelve to seventeen held insecurities, fears, disappointments, and maybe even intense suffering that we would not want to relive.
Part of our trouble came from the adolescent tendency to filter everything, even our deepest joys and triumphs, through peers. If you’re like me, you can instantly recall moments when people you thought were friends turned on you or when nothing you did seemed enough for those whose affection and friendship you desired most. In those years, the pressure of vying for the approval of others could burden even our happiest moments.
Several years ago, I read a pundit who pointed out that social media is a lot like high school. I think he’s right. As much as we might reassure ourselves that we aren’t the same clique-ambitious, relationally anxious people we were in our teens, isn’t it often true that we feel similar emotions and make decisions for similar reasons online?
C.S. Lewis famously observed that “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things” (The Weight of Glory, 154). Lewis had a more traditional idea of an “inner ring” in mind: groups of embodied persons, enticing and excluding others in schools and offices and communities. But what if the inner rings that sway our loyalties are digital?
I submit that one of the biggest challenges to Christian faithfulness today is the way our technology has empowered us to create a near infinite network of inner rings.
Rings of Belief
Human beings are not autonomous thought-machines. We are social creatures who (at least partly) decide what we think and how we will live in response to those around us. This is not an effect of the fall; it’s simply part of what it means to be a creature. In fact, the social element of belief can be a tremendous blessing, because the true faith of those around us can inspire and fortify our own. Paul instructs Timothy to “continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Timothy 3:14). Paul appeals to Timothy’s trust in the people who brought him the gospel as an encouragement to keep believing in it.
So, in our own battle to keep believing God’s promises, it’s good to consider the faith of those we know and trust. But this godly imitation is different from what often happens on social media. Online, our constant exposure to the beliefs of a particular inner ring, and seeing this ring accrue benefits for their beliefs and values through “Likes” and shares, can push our beliefs to change. In this case, what we really want is glory. We want the attention and the affirmation that we see coming to certain people, so we are tempted to mimic their beliefs in hopes we will obtain some of the glory they’re enjoying.
This tendency isn’t new. Jesus took it head-on. “How can you believe,” he asks the Pharisees, “when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:44). Social glory is quicksand in the search for truth. And if this held true two thousand years ago, how much more relevant is it today, when the books we read, the opinions we have, even the people we love are “content” that we can publish for approval?
Faith does not grow in isolation from others. But neither does it grow for the sake of being seen by others. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray in secret, he was not forbidding public prayer; he was forbidding prayer for the sake of publicity (Matthew 6:1, 5–6). The challenge we face in the digital age is that social media has become integrated with so many aspects of life. It’s not easy to discern where “practicing righteousness” ends and “practicing righteousness in order to be seen by others” begins.
Inner and Outer Rings
Life’s migration to the Internet intensifies this temptation in particular ways. The more online we become, the more prone we are not just to develop a private inner ring — those accounts whose attention and approval we most long for — but also an outer ring. An outer ring represents the kind of people we dislike and distrust. Perhaps this is a group with a certain theological view we regard as so wrong that it makes everything else they believe suspect. Or, perhaps more likely, it’s a group with a certain political view that, in our eyes, disqualifies them from ever speaking wisely about anything.
Truth has boundaries. There is such a thing as damnable error (Galatians 1:8). And there are times and occasions for not even associating with those who teach or live by lies (2 John 10; 1 Corinthians 5:11). In these biblical situations, however, there is always an important element involved: the local church. The local church stands as an embodied community of Christians who hold the message of the gospel in good faith and enforce Jesus’s boundaries around it.
Our digital outer rings, however, are usually not shaped by the sober judgments of real churches but by our own opinions and preferences. What’s more, on the computer, we can easily mute or block anyone we don’t want to see. This practice trains our conscience to instinctively dismiss the people in real life who say or do things we disagree with. The more immersed we are in this digital liturgy, the more likely we are to draw our real-world outer rings in strange places, influenced more by second- and third-order issues (or maybe even plain old dislike) than by first-order ones. This is not what Jesus intends for his people.
The One Who Sees
In our hyper-transparent world, which invites us to publish everything we are and do, Jesus’s invitation to commune with him in secret serves as both a nonnegotiable command and a life-giving respite.
Constant performance is exhausting. Our digital inner rings cheer us on for a moment, but their praise is short-lived. After a while, we begin to get anxious until the next moment they reaffirm their approval. We grow weary of having to maintain our outer rings, hoping we’re never forced to look into the eyes of the people we’ve digitally shunned. Of all industries, buying and selling glory has the worst burnout rate.
Jesus has the antidote. Whether we’re helping to meet the physical needs of others or the spiritual needs of our own heart, Jesus draws our attention not to the cool kids watching but to the Father who “sees in secret” (Matthew 6:4). The digital inner ring draws us the most when we feel the eyes of God on our lives the least. For some of us, the digital inner ring feels like a way to make our own small and obscure lives seem bigger. Social media success can feel like the life we never got to live. But this is only because we’ve forgotten the One in whose presence we’ve lived every single day.
The paradox of our digital inner rings is that if they could see who we truly are, the parts of us that we refuse to publish online, they probably would put us in the outer ring. But God does see all of us. He has seen every evil thought, every cruel word, every impatient moment, every embarrassing act of selfishness. He sees in secret. And yet he still invites us to come into a small room, with just him, and to pour our glory-hungry hearts out to him. Instead of muting us, he offers himself as reward.
Friends, Not Followers
Lewis concluded his lecture on the inner ring by promising his young audience that if they resisted the temptation to use people to seek glory and instead enjoyed fellowship for its own sake, they would find something even better:
If in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product. . . . This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ringer can ever have it. (The Weight of Glory, 157)
In a world of digital inner rings, make real friends, not online followers. Allow yourself to be challenged and sharpened by the Christians in your church not like you, rather than curating your own private list of approved voices. And most of all, pursue friendship with the friend of sinners, who never casts out any who come to him.
Desiring God