Beware digital sanctity

With Lent beginning on Ash Wednesday, many Christians will be trying to go up a spiritual gear for the 40-days between now and Easter. This usually means prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Just a few years ago, at least for a Catholic like me, these would typically involve some new commitment to pray and do more spiritual reading, abstaining from some item of consumption like sweets or alcohol, and pledging to sacrifice some money or time for those in need. 

If you speak to many Catholics about their Lenten disciplines in the year of Our Lord 2025, however, it is likely that one or more of the standard practices above will be replaced by undertaking to consume some new religiously-themed digital media. Religious apps and suchlike have become so surreptitiously ubiquitous after the advent of the smartphone that people rarely take a step back and reflect on their merits and disadvantages. 

This Lent you might choose to download the Hallow app for $69.99, for a range of celebrity endorsed audio Bible stories, prayers, meditations, sleep sounds, and Christian music.  Or you could enlist with Exodus 90 for $90.00 and enjoy daily readings and prayers, and a bespoke messaging feature for Christian fraternity. Then there’s the Word on Fire app, or Fr Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast series,  Laudate, and the Ignatius Press’ Catholic Bible app. The list goes on and on. The week of Ash Wednesday is a boomtime for the providers of this media, with views, subs, comments, and pledges of financial support skyrocketing like turkey sales in December.  

There’s much to be said for it all, nonetheless. I pay an annual subscription to one of the apps above myself. At first glance, digital media about faith just means evangelising in the way people communicate today, as happened with the invention of the codex in the 3rd century, and the printing-press in the 15th century. This was the rationale behind that initially surprising moment when Benedict XVI did the first ever papal tweets at @Pontifex.

An incomprehensibly vast number of resources can now be accessed within seconds, and read with ease wherever one happens to be. The use of audio content just requires you to stick in your earpods, and you can nail a chapter or two of John while sitting on the bus on the way to work, or have guided meditations on the mystery of the Trinity while driving to Sainsbury’s. If people are going to take seriously St Paul’s admonition to “pray at all times” (Eph 6.18) – well, sanctifying the smartphone seems to get them some of the way. And anything is better for the soul than doom-scrolling, right?

Like much digital media, however, its dangers involve the way it clouds the distinction between reality and the mediation of reality. I spoke to someone recently about his decision to pray the rosary daily — “I’ve downloaded an app so I can do it while walking the dog”, he said. I know another whose decision to cultivate better Christian fraternity involved engaging more with a subscriber-only messaging app, as if fraternity could be captured by instant messaging (insert hug emoji). Almsgiving now means for some donating money to your favourite Catholic YouTuber. The false promise of digital sanctity is that the consumption of sanctified media is mistaken as constituting sanctity itself. 

There are obvious difficulties with this. In the first place, is the fact that media is consumed. Now one might say that reading Scripture or Hagiography is also consumption, but to do so is to ignore the user-friendly nature of online content, bringing with it a form of satisfaction or enjoyment much harder to attain by solitary reading. Digital media has to be appealing, on some level, especially in a competitive marketplace. By contrast, reading Scripture rightly can be not very enjoyable at all — more like detonating the explosive power of God’s grace in a way that throws all else into question, leading one to surrender things of one’s self to which you are dearly attached. 

If this reading is replaced by audio consumption, it all too often becomes something superficially “understood”, and then distractedly “applied” to the largely unchanged facts of your daily life. It is meant to be something that changes the way you understand everything else, not a background soundtrack. If not given adequate attention, it is all too easy to mistake the sense of satisfaction that comes from the beauty of the words with the awesome reality which makes them beautiful in the first place. This genuine beauty commands our full attention, if we are to engage with it at all. 

Leading directly from the consumption paradigm, there is also the fact that much of the content available is decidedly therapeutic in nature. As media it is intended to satisfy, and people are satisfied by being promised images of themselves they find appealing and seductive. The image of sanctity presented by much of this content is thus focused on achieving emotional stability and contentment, being the “person God wants you to be” in the sense of personal fulfilment and self-realisation. If people were really being offered the wilderness experience that a fruitful Lent is meant to involve, I doubt there’d be many paid subscribers. Fudging the boundary between reality and the mediation of reality means that you yourself remain centre stage, because reality means you become less important, and then religion ceases to be yet another means of personal adornment.   

Technology is in this precise, Christian sense, intrinsically inhuman

I’m reminded here of Philip Rieff’s description of the therapeutic nature of our dominant culture by calling contemporary psychology a “technology of the emotions”. By this he meant that the emotional life is being treated as something deterministic, like our instincts just have to be released or they will resurface as neuroses. This runs directly counter to the genuinely transformative character of what Christianity involves. It is not about learning to direct and manage your desires in the most optimum fashion, but about seeing those desires reconfigured in ways which no technique could ever capture. Technology is in this precise, Christian sense, intrinsically inhuman.  

Then there’s the fact many mistake an online following for something like a divine endorsement. The religious language of grace and favour is now often connected with increases in likes and subs, reposts and follower count. But big followings and viral content cannot easily be assumed to reflect proximity to God’s will. Before the advent of digital sanctity you’d occasionally meet people for whom their particular gifts were put to use in ways unseen, unacknowledged, and unaccredited. When this happened, you’d feel that you’d been reminded of what sanctity actually is. They did things like pastorally caring for souls, feeding the poor, tending to the infirm, instructing the young, or visiting those imprisoned. Now it’s rare to meet a devout person who isn’t harvesting content about themselves in some way — as if the selfie doesn’t immediately kill stone dead any and every work of mercy. 

There’s a reason one of the Ash Wednesday Gospel readings is from Matthew 6 — “Beware of practising your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father in heaven”.  If taking seriously Jesus’ command to “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret”, maybe this Lent people should beware of digital sanctity — and not take their phones with them.