This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Any organization—business, ministry, school, whatever—typically asks what the biggest threats are to its mission. The assumption behind that exercise is that the most dangerous obstacles are those that one never sees coming.
Consider for a moment that the biggest threat to evangelical Christianity might not be any of those about which we argue and strategize—not secularization or sexuality debates or political captivity, or institutional collapse or perpetual scandals or fragmentation and polarization.
What if all of these are just symptoms of the most perilous threat to the church since the Reformation? What if that threat is, quite literally, right in front of our eyes?
In his book Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror, Andrey Mir draws on the work of media scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Eric Havelock to argue that the technological advancements of our times are causing a shift far bigger than the one brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Mir contends that what is happening around us is akin to the Axial Age described by philosopher Karl Jaspers—a fundamental shift in human consciousness tied to the emergence of changes in human language roughly between 800 and 200 BC. The Axial Age led to the major world religions as we know them, as well as to science, agriculture, industry, and culture.
Whatever the differences between the scholars with whom Mir interacts, they agree that the primary shift of the Axial Age was one of media—from orality to literacy. That is about more than just the form that information takes.
Cultures of orality are “spiritual” in the sense that a human being is constantly embedded in an environment—all of the senses are active and on alert at the same time. In an oral culture, stories are passed down through repetition, usually through singing or storytelling, and are often heroic epics of past glories or tragedies. This requires a kind of totemic connection to nature and a collective attachment to the tribe. Usually it also requires some form of shaman, the keeper of the stories.
Literacy doesn’t just change the way thinking is handed down, Mir points out, but restructures thought altogether. It requires a momentary shutting down of the other senses in order to focus on only one, the eye, enabling an inward turn. That creates the psychological space for a person to be an individual, to abstract particulars into categories and to contrast their internal life with the overall story of the tribe.
Only with this inward turn can an individual stand apart from collective consciousness, if but momentarily, and experience personal transformation. They can have the potential for a personal relationship with God that transcends tribal and totemic religion.
It is no accident, Mir notes, that the shift from orality to literacy made possible what he calls “the great introspective religious traditions” of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam—all of which have sacred texts.
Mir believes that the acceleration of technology today means that what we now face is an Axial Decade, one in which, in just a few short years, the entire structure of human life will again be changed.
The media transformations of the internet, the smartphone, social media, and artificial intelligence are in many ways undoing the shift from orality to literacy toward what Mir calls “digital orality.”
Literacy required focused attention and internal reflection. But that is now replaced by something that still requires some aspects of literacy—an alphabet, for instance—but is more like orality. Digital life is less like reading a text than it is like joining a chant. It rewards resonance with tribal identity over any sort of quest for objective truth.
We are accustomed to debates over whether truth is discovered or revealed. In a digital orality framework, it’s neither. Instead, truth is performed.
Performed truths must be emotive, collective, and sharable. In social media culture, Mir argues, we now “vote for truth with clicks” the way villages once cheered for the bard. Instead of asking, “What is true?” we ask, without even realizing it, “Whose truth gets applause?”
Within the church, we often find ourselves arguing against the last bad thing—hence the relentless critique of individualism (think of how many people reference “Me and Jesus” who don’t even know it was a song). Mir argues, though, that what we now face with the onset of digital orality is not individualism but the replacement of individuals with what he calls “dividuals.”
Algorithms customize everything to us not on the basis of who we are personally but by the categories by which we can be marketed to. This coincides, he contends, with the identity politics we see characterizing both the right and the left in Western society. We find ourselves defined by the identity-marker characteristics that submerge the personal into the political or the customer tribe.
This, Mir argues, leads to a “digital retribalization” of sharable identities in which tribal loyalty seems, once again, to be a matter of life or death. A byproduct of this retribalization is the inability to form the kind of detachment that would, for instance, place truths and principles over the friend/enemy distinction of who is “one of us” and who is not.
Moreover, the person in a digital framework tends to fuse not just with the tribe but with the immersive environment itself. Notice how your attention span wanes, even if you are trying to read the Bible, when you are constantly aware of notifications and alerts and prompts to chase down another idea, to converse with another person.
The Bible describes the cross-currents of consciousness we are now facing. Note the contrast after the exodus from Egypt between Moses—alone with God on Sinai and receiving from him a written text, the ten words inscribed in stone—and the people left down below.
The people wanted a religious experience characteristic of primary orality. They wanted to fuse with nature, with the power and fertility of the calf constructed with gold. They wanted a totem, not a Torah. And they asked of Aaron that he be not a prophet but a shaman—creating a religious truth at their demand for a sensory, communal, and immediate religious experience.
But the way of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was quite different, demanding not just tribal assent but personal and conscientious obedience (Deut. 30:11–20).
The Silicon Calf
Whatever else evangelical Christianity brings to the rest of the body of Christ, two things are preeminent: an emphasis on the need for personal, internal transformation and an emphasis on the authority of the text of Scripture over tribal or institutional loyalty or identity.
The first is easy to caricature, with eye-rolling at evangelistic presentations that ask, “Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?” but it conserves an essential gospel truth. If all of Israel follows Ahab into Baal worship, there is still an Elijah.
The king and the court prophets may agree on what truth counts as loyalty, but that overlooks how Jeremiah might, in fact, be the one who carries a word from God. One can leave father and mother—as Peter, James, and John did—or one’s identity as a tax collector, as Matthew did, and respond to the call to “follow me.” That call comes not just to categories or institutions but to persons.
The gospel is more than “Me and Jesus,” to be sure, but woe to us if it is ever less than that. To be heard, a person must hear more than just the collective “truth” of the tribe. One must hear, above all, a voice that asks, “But who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15, emphasis added, ESV throughout).
The evangelical emphasis on the Bible is likewise critically important. Can it lead to a kind of “biblicism” that sets out to ignore church history and the wisdom of the ages? Of course. Could the emphasis on personal memorization and meditation on the Bible lead people, wrongly, to conclude that the collective reading of Scripture is unimportant or to curate their reading in a way that lines up with preexisting prejudices? Yes.
But without a personal encounter with the Scriptures, we end up with the kind of tribal loyalties that Jesus says can cause the church to lose the lampstand of his presence. Every generation must heed these words: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev. 3:22).
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy has been used at times by bad actors who sought to prop up their own authority, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Underlying the concept of inerrancy is a claim that is meant, in the long run, to disrupt the pretensions of shamans and bards.
God has spoken—and spoken truthfully—to his people in a Word that stands outside of them, a Word that invites them to hear and to be changed. An evangelical emphasis on the Bible reminds us that the primary question is not “Is this truth convenient?” or “Will this truth get me exiled from my community?” or “Does this truth have a sustainable audience?” but “Thus says the Lord.”
The gospel is not a tool to sustain individualism, but without a certain kind of individualism, we cannot hear the gospel. We can only hear, as the Ephesians did with the temple of Artemis, the truth claim that props up the glory of the group (Acts 19:27). And, as with Artemis, that truth claim is usually propped up by whoever profits from it (v. 25) as well as by whatever mob is incited to rage against anything that would threaten it (v. 28).
Digital orality is no final obstacle to the gospel or to the Bible—nothing is. But if we do not recognize the way it is reshaping us, we will not be able to dissent from the ways it can numb us away from hearing the gospel, from deep reflection in the storyline of Scripture. If what is at stake is literacy, the costs are high—democracy, science, the rule of law—but these costs are not eternal.
What is truly at stake is more even than all of that. If we don’t see and name the pull to digital orality, we will conform to it. We will then trade in the distinctiveness of evangelical witness as an appeal for personal repentance and faith, as a people of the Book, for something even worse than moral therapeutic deism: oral digital totemism.
That will leave it to a future Josiah to call the people to realize what is lost—a Word from the Lord so hidden that it is not even missed, and the bones of the forgotten prophet who warned of what happens when tribal loyalty replaces the Word (2 Kings 22:9–23:20).
We cannot stop the way the medium is the message, as McLuhan warns. We cannot forestall shifts, axial or otherwise, that are much bigger than any of us.
But we can resolve to keep our attention. We can determine, each of us, to cultivate a focus on the written Word of God and on the inner solitude of prayer. We can keep alive that which can still hear, and thus can still say, “You must be born again.”
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
