Did the Internet Kill Christianity?

0:00Hello and welcome to the Thinkyfellow's podcast. My name is Caleb Keith and today I am joined by Scott Keith Bruce Hillman and Adam Francisco the 1517 is part of the 1517 podcast network of shows. You can go to 1517.org slash podcasts to see all of the shows there and conveniently there's a new show there that I know that most of our listeners have not subscribed to yet and you definitely need to and that show is 25 minutes in the Lutheran Confessions. We are following the pattern of two of 1517's biggest shows 30 minutes in the New Testament and 40 minutes in the Old Testament and taking that format and doing it with the Book of

1:05Concord with the Lutheran Confessions 25-ish minutes at a time which sometimes means 32 minutes and various things like that. But we're going article by article through the Book of Concord. It'll take a long time just like those Bible podcasts. So if you're looking for something to study or to listen to that's kind of got some defined set of time in a defined topic. Well it's right there for you. Go subscribe today in Apple podcasts. There are links in the show notes below. You can also find links to the various platforms that this show is on on the 1517 podcast network page. It's available on YouTube, Apple podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and anywhere where you subscribe to podcasts today. Okay guys, a big question for everybody. Has the internet killed Christianity? Did the internet kill Christianity? Has the internet had such an overwhelmingly negative impact on Christianity that it's

2:08not worth using what we're doing? But that is a question today following a study that I sent you guys last minute last night that sounds like Adam diligently read in the wee hours of the night. I actually had listened to it on my drive up to Michigan. I did listen to it. I plugged it into chat GPT and asked chat GPT to read it to me. Whoa, it'll do that. Well I didn't know it did but it did or does but it did. What was the voice like? What's that? Was it like robot voice or? No, it's like there's a lady voice and it's been evolving. No. So Adam used laughs at my jokes. She laughs at my jokes. I don't know where Jessica is. Unlike your wife. This is going to get called a cookie and she's snickers. No. Adam used the most perverse tool on the internet to read the study about the internet.

3:11I meant AI is a tool. That's true. I mean, as we discussed it over the internet, that's funny. I didn't know that was even possible. I did read it early this morning though like about two hours ago. So I heard it read and I was like, I wonder if this is true. So when we got here up to Michigan, you know, after I woke up from my two hours sleep last night, I read it to make sure everything worked. This is a big study. So it's about the decline of religions, denominational Christianity in here among one of the chief parts of study. And it's from 1990 to 2022 is what they try to cover with surveys about religious attendance, beliefs, and things like that. I'll compile together with evidence from 81 countries with the general conclusion being that the rise of usage of the internet, personal usage of the internet is at the very least

4:12correlative to declining religious participation and religious belief around the globe really. But in particularly, you can really see it in places like the United States, something we've talked about before. Yeah. It's clear that it is not arguing for causation, but rather like correlation, you know, people fight her that distinction between like so they're not saying the internet like we're kind of that's implied in the question you asked. And I know it's just rhetoric, right? But yeah, they're not saying it caused it. But the argument is there's so much data and so much correspondence with the rise and the extension of the internet and that when you look at that, you see a, I don't know I don't think it used the word precipitous, but a pretty heavy decline in, or a decentralization I think is probably a better way of describing it of traditional religious belief. The charts are pretty like steep line. Yeah.

5:12I mean, looking at one right now, it's not vertical, but they're getting close. The dates are interesting. So I don't know this history at all. I bet Scott does. He knows these kind of odd things. I feel called out. And Al Gore invented the internet. Was it 1990? No, I think that is what they call it. Yeah, yeah. Or what he claimed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So could we say Al Gore is destroying religion? And that was a huge, long, various plot. I think it's interesting that they, these studies can't, this is a lot like the sort of fatherhood and the impacts on religious belief. It's hard for them to make a correlation between the decline in belief overall and the impact on a specific faith. But this study does point out that it's mostly, that the biggest, the deepest sort of impact seems to be on denominational Christianity. And so that you could infer that one of the things possibly going on here is just sort

6:17of this decentralization of authority into the internet or even maybe it, maybe it centralizes it even more and just kind of makes the individual the ultimate authority of everything. It seems like there's an impact on that and people's willingness to believe a more centralized authority like, you know, specifically a denomination or maybe that's symbols, IE in our case sort of our confessions or book concord and or then even its ultimate source of authority which is sort of just a Bible. But there's a filter when we say we're Lutheran, there's obviously a filter there, you know, our ultimate source of authority is the scriptures. But we think that those are interpreted accurately and represented accurately in our Lutheran confessions that we then trust sort of denominational officials to maybe hold pastors and individual churches accountable to and on and on. But that branch sort of that branching system isn't as trusted anymore and that correlatively

7:22I know not causation. There seems to be sort of these two things seem to be running next to each other. Well, I like, you know, when you sent it Caleb, yes, was yesterday, I, you know, quickly glanced at it initially and thought, oh, so we could, but I think it was like in the first couple paragraphs, there was a quote from Daniel Dennett, who's now, you know, the late, I think he was at Tufts University professor, but he was one of the four, they called him the four horsemen of the counter apocalypse, you know, the leading new atheist kind of figures and he's, what do you say something like the internet's the best gift to atheism right after Charles Darwin or something like that. Yeah, right after Darwin. The articles, I think they're, you know, they're written by, of course, people who have some sort of connection to Oxford. So they're smart and careful. That's why they make that they emphasize this is a correlation not causal type of car you're being careful. But yeah, but, but at the same time, the correlation is quite by heavy.

8:23So while it might not caught, you know, I would just, we would say, you know, the Sunday school answer would be like sin and self-absorption and so on is the cause of all this, but it's you know, there's all these other factors that can contribute to it and the internet has to be it. But as I was thinking, like what you were just saying, Scott, like with decentralization and so on, what the internet does and now, you know, I was thinking about this just the other day, you know, like I have this smartphone, usually it's in my back pocket, but it's almost like I have like my own source of like a secular revelation. Like if I want information about anything, I just go to, I mean, I can figure out what sort of fertilizer my pinnacle tree needs and how to like drill, born to the ground to deliver that fertilizer within like five seconds. Yeah, it's crazy. And I can ask it whether I should trust or not is a different question, but I can, if I want to know like what does the Bible say about X? It'll give me, it'll give me stuff, you know, so and the more you like instead of trusting

9:26those traditional authorities, it's like you just sort of get like we're talking with AI. I don't think you were there, Scott, but how AI is a tool, but it's also the, it's creating the environment in which we live. And I think the article mentioned, if I remember it, it meant drop the name Peter Berger. That was Ubusimine Nettos, old doctor, father and this idea of plausibility structures. And it's like the internet and now artificial intelligence is kind of shaping this order. Like that is in a way, conditioning us to think about certain things, but there's only a spectrum of things you can think about because to go beyond is, would be to break or would to, to leave beyond the bounds of, or go beyond the bounds of what's available on the internet, you know, so why even think about it? Oh, this is the kind of anecdotal. Maybe you and Caleb remember this or not, but towards the end of my time at Concordia, Jeff Malonson would walk around and he always had like these new catchy things to say. Yeah. One of his last, like, that catchy things to say while I was still hanging out with him

10:28was like, I can only remember 150 names. So if I learn a new name, I got to figure out one that I'm going to drop. Right. And so this kind of got a little dark for him later on, but whatever at the end of the day, I think there's something to that in a way that, you know, you're, it's like you're saying Adam, your brain can only like handle so much, right? Even the smartest brain can only handle so much and can't really spend a lot of time. We had a conversation before this about things you can't control and things you can't control. I can't really spend a lot of time contemplating things that you can't control. Otherwise, sort of the more day to day and the more important things kind of get shoved aside. I think that's actually what's happening a lot in modern culture in general is that we have so much information that is about things that we could never control. Whether it be kind of a small scale, what's going on in your denomination or a larger scale, what's going on in the world or kind of medium scale, what's going on in federal government or even in a big state like ours, I California, like the state government, they

11:29really oftentimes seems like you can get really upset about what you can't do anything about. But yet you spend a good majority of your time worrying about nonetheless. And that that sort of anytime you do that, you're, you're sort of beyond sort of the authority arguments. You're taking away at the kind of more quote unquote mundane aspects of life that you really should be thinking about and focusing on and caring about and nurturing. And one of the things the internet does, the internet has definitely done that, right? That's, you've been able to diffuse your cares so much that you're trying, always trying to wrap your arms around the whole world rather than the person right in front of you. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a profound point and I'm not just puffing you up. The internet kind of pulls you into this realm of abstraction. Yeah. You know, where you're just sort of floating around, you know, instead of, instead I was, as you're talking, Scott, I don't know why this popped into my head, but because I am up here in Michigan, I got here really like 2 a.m.

12:31I walked out of my car and there were no lights and there was a starry, starry sky, you know, I was thinking, ah. And I thought about Kant. I never think about a manual Kant, but the two things that amazed him were the starry skies above moral law and that's the solution all this. Get away from that. Sometimes unplug and look at creation. I mean, while have chat GPT read the article to you, I can't drive and stare at it. Oh, I'm with you. I'm being responsible. This is not even a criticism. I think about all the time, you know, what did I use to do? Because I mean, you'd turn on the radio or, you know, it's all kind of, you'd navigate from memory or from a map or from a Thomas guide or from what it, and it's just all of, I think that they're probably, I guess, I think there are probably multiple lines like this and I'd be interested to, for somebody to sort of aggregate and put all these studies together like what the rise of the internet has done to anxiety, what the rise of the internet

13:35has done to intelligence levels, what the rise of the internet has done to, you know, family structure, what the rise of the internet has done to religiosity and kind of put them all together. You know, my suspicion is is that that fall offline would kind of be the same for all of them until you got to things like anxiety, mental illness and girls think of their boys. And in which case they'd all go the other way. Yeah, you almost just, I think, picked to a T1's where you would see, you know, like negative correlation, right? Like where things got worse or have been measurably worse with the internet. But the internet fulfills, and this is maybe where, like with Adam's causal language about sin, instead, like you can speak somewhat theologically about this topic, which is the technology like the internet, like most technologies fulfills needs that people already have or desires

14:36that people already have. And so even when you ask a question, like what did I use to do? Or if we say, you know, people sit and watch things on their phone and scroll through social media and stuff, they're not creating new time for that. One of the reasons that's so popular is because there was, it has been space for people to waste time forever, right? And you are wasting time in less effective ways or in measuring wastefulness or whatever. But this has existed. And I think the same thing then is true about these beliefs because one of the things we're seeing in this study is not just the loss of religiosity, but that specifically, if we look at Christianity, it's the decline of denominational Christianity, something we've been covering in various ways either directly or indirectly on this show for, I mean, basically as long as this show has existed.

15:37Which is what? 10 years now? Oh, yeah, 10 and a half years. We're working on 11 here. And so that problem exists and it's existed. I mean, there's a line in here about the printing press and the reformation here and the Protestant reformation helping propel or the printing press, a technology helping propel the Protestant reformation. Then they tie that to the scientific revolution, media innovations such as the newspaper, radio, television, and then we get to the internet here. I think what you find is that people have always had decentralized or personal views or suspicions about the organized religion and the authorities or even if you take it outside of the realm of religion, political structures, governments, anybody with authority and the internet, I think in part fulfills the desire or the need for people to then express those individual

16:39beliefs to codify them into language or a creed of their own or something like that. And one of the great dangers and powers of the internet is that it is both the most corporate isn't the right word per se, but like conglomerate of people. It is both the most public thing. It is all of the knowledge that you want to post there, whether that's personally, whether that's institutionally, whether that's as a group as a church or an organization like 1517, the entire function of the internet is publishing information, whether that's data and our attainment, religious information. And so it's very, very public, but also one of the most private things in one sense. And this is where a lot of it's danger and a lot of the moral issues that we know and experience about it, why we talk about, for instance, children having cell phones or technology or personal access to the internet, is that you have this push of public information.

17:45Everybody is rushing to publish something and to say something, but it's accessed individually or privately or another way to say it is secretly. And because of that, there's no, you can sort of try to escape the mechanisms of the law in the, what we call the first use of law to curb or to check behavior by force or guilt or punishment, because people can do and access everything in secret. So this is like the rise of a lot of things. Like I think my dad already brought up gender stuff, but like the initial kind of public transgender stuff, if you read it, was happening in AOL chat rooms in the late 90s, right? Like in secret. So it's very public. People are posting about their experiences everywhere, but then accessing it in secret where nobody else can read it, nobody else can hear what you're thinking. And then you create your own secret groups or identities where only people with these

18:47particular views communicate and we can share all our knowledge. And I think that is, sounds like communion in the early church. He's saying like what? He's saying like what? Met in the catacombs and houses secretly. I know I get it, but what? But that is at least in part, I think, a piece of this equation, which is that the internet fulfills a need for people to escape pressures and guilt and authority systems that already make them uncomfortable. And it provides those avenues. People have always been uncomfortable with what the church is taught. And the internet provides you a way, at least initially, to secretly participate in these counter beliefs. And then to transform your secret participation and formation as an individual into public when you're ready through things like social media or publishing platforms or whatever that may be. And I think we see that with loads of moral issues.

19:48And I'm not surprised to say that we see that with religion and why, like, for instance, so many of these people would just say, I'm spiritual, but not religious or I'm Christian, but not religious. And here's why I believe 100 different contradictory things, but I'm an individual who gets to have my own individual beliefs and then share them effectively and rapidly via this technology. Yeah, I mean, that's in a lot of ways. That's sort of the kind of pick from here, pick from here, pick from here, pick from here and create your own thing. But that doesn't, I mean, I guess that could explain in a sense the decline in overall religiosity, but I think there's more to it than that. It's kind of funny. He doesn't, we haven't asked permission to tell the story. So I guess I'll be kind of vague. But at our church, we have some kind of, I guess I'd say, new converts. And it's awesome. It's a young family and it's amazing. And just a blessing from top to bottom.

20:50The guy, I guess I'd say, came to the faith from internet resources in a way. And the way he tells it kind of, I think, illuminates one of the things that everybody who communicates or tries to communicate the gospel and good theology via the internet always says is that this allows me to reach more people than I would ever have been able to reach in the past through these mediums. And there's a sense in which that's true. I first saw this article in my comment with something like the internet allows organizations like 1517 to spread the gospel endlessly, but it had to kill God first. And I, you know, I think there's something to that. At the end of the day, this man and this family, they didn't actually like come to the faith, faith in the sense until they came to church. And at that church encounter, the preached word.

21:50And eventually at that church encountered the water connected to the word in baptism. And now we'll, in a few weeks, be connected to that through the preaching, the water, and the word, and through holy communion. And then be part of a congregation that's, whose lives revolve around those gifts being given consistently every Sunday. And it's that last part that I think is the one that sort of affects the overall sort of belief and religiosity. When you think that you can just sort of get any of this, anything you need from, you know, or dash dropping off your dinner at your door to toilet paper being delivered by Amazon. And your sort of belief needs, whatever they may be, just all from the internet. That's where religiosity, which I don't care that much about, but faith, which I do care about, drops off because it's not created or sustained in that way.

22:56It's created in sustaining through the preaching of the gospel from one person to another. And you know, Christ and the Holy Spirit showing up and creating and sustaining faith. And that's not something that I believe can be or is intended to be, I guess I'd say at that way, given and maintained primarily online. And so it doesn't shock me at all that when people try to get everything from an online source and then you try to then get all of your, I'd hate this phrase too, quote unquote, spiritual needs fulfilled online too. That the end result is that it, it just doesn't much matter anymore. And yet if you go to somebody sent me this stuff from Grock, you know, the AI through is a Twitter or whatever X. And you ask Grock, he's put a picture out there of all the different religious leaders, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and like, however many others. And you ask Grock to erase all the false gods in that image.

24:00It will erase them all, but Jesus. So I mean, or you can even if you ask, just Grock, know that that's what that person wants. Does Grock show an image of Muhammad? Oh, it does. Interesting. Anyway. Yeah. So sorry, Bruce. No, no, that's okay. Jump on what Scott said because if Scott's right and I think he is, that the, you know, the primary means by which people are coming to faith is, is with the body is Paul talks about right? Can embody body. That is the church, not just a synthetic body, which the physical body can work through a synthetic body. Otherwise, we have 1517 doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. So it's not, it's not a complete either or, but I do think that's the primary means. I would just say, I thought this study was really great. I thought they really went out of their way to be careful to show their methodology. I think the first part, like their introduction that gives the actual reasons why the internet,

25:02like they give three or four reasons there based on other hypotheses about, you know, why is the internet causing a slash correlating, not causing this to happen? Like why, why might this be the case? I thought that was really good. But being all said, I do think really though all the study does is just say that as the internet got bigger, religious decline happened, which I also think isn't really saying much. So for example, like, if I say to you, as my kid grows and his shoe size goes up, his vocabulary grows up, goes up, that's true. And I can work that backwards just like the study authors did. They worked it backwards through there like, okay, well, where do we see religious decline? Do we see the internet go up? Like they worked it backwards as well. And it was, whenever you have in a study this direct correlation, in most cases, they're not actually affecting each other. They're just in tandem with each other. There's not really a causation in other words.

26:03There's a very low chance of causation, even though there is a high correlation that's visibly tracked. Just like you can say, well, the kid's feet growing bigger has nothing to do with his vocabulary getting better. So I tend to be on that side of things where I do think the internet presents all sorts of dangers, which I think are plausible for the reasons they give. But I still think that the study doesn't really show that the internet caused. And like Adam said, they're not saying that, but most people will read the study and think that's kind of what they're saying. It is implied. And they do once in a while leak language of causational language gets leaked kind of in there that they probably didn't catch where they're kind of saying this cause of this. It's like the Frekenomics. You guys ever read the Frekenomics books where they say like abortion. I make a little crime rate. You know, and it's again, it's this like you can track abortion and you can track crime rate. And as abortions go up, crime rate goes down again. Is that a causation or is there just these are two independent things moving at the same time? Or do they have the same cause behind them?

27:05Like are they results of a shared cause? Well, like with the internet thing, two areas that I'm just would be curious about. One would be his religious decline happening as the internet goes up because young people are earlier adopters and users of the internet and young people are less religious than old people and old people are dying off in the early days of the internet. And they're not adapting to technology or the underground church, which you can't track, which is highly affected by the internet according to messiologists because that's one of the only ways they can sometimes get the gospel. So I'm just saying it's bigger than this. I'm not pooping the state all because this is the best study I've ever read on this. I just wouldn't want people being like, yep, we figured out the internet. It did it. No, I don't think you can do that. You know, like all this stuff works like you said works backwards too. Like I'm always every time one of my grandkids hits about four years old, they kind of struggle with this idea. Like Edmund does this all the time now. He'll look at Caleb, who's taller than me. And he has a really hard time like working out that I'm older than Caleb because Caleb

28:07is quote unquote bigger. Right. And as you grow as somebody gets taller, they get older, right? And that the tallest person does must be the older, the oldest person. And so that's one of your kind of like correlation doesn't always mean anything. But at the end of the day, one of your examples is interesting too that is our shoe size gets bigger. Their IQ gets bigger to a point, right? And then it stops. And also there's not a correlation there, but there is some explanatory benefit to both of those things happening at the same time that as a person gets older and their shoe size will get bigger to a point and then it'll stop. And as they get older, they get more education and they know more about the world and this their IQ goes up. So it's not empty either to say that as their shoe size gets bigger, their IQ gets bigger. There's a explanatory benefit to it. And I think that's kind of, that's, to me, that's where the study falls in. There is not causal.

29:09It's definitely correlative, but there's explanatory benefit there. You can kind of bring in some of the other things that we know happen when internet usage goes up like socialization declines, right? You can bring that in to help maybe propose what this might be. And this kind of gets to my example of the new people at our church. Is it what needed to happen at the end of the day was personal conversation and not with Grock, right? Not. Like what needed to happen was questions needed to be answered and scales needed to fall off eyes and all these saying the law and the gospel needed to be heard from a person to a person in order for that sort of final chink to move over. And I agree with you. You can't say that it's impossible. Otherwise, what are we doing here at 1517? But I also have a friend who has, I'm going to call him out and I can give his name, but I'm going to guilt him a little bit and throw the lot at him because I know you

30:10listens to the show who, oh, so it's not me. He got kind of got burned at church and he's like, I'm not going to church anymore. I'm like, you need to find church and go church. He's like, why do I need to find church? I have 1517. And I looked at him and I said, if that's the conclusion people draw from 1517, I'm shuddering the doors tomorrow. Because at the end of the day, the goal here is to provide people the proclamation of the gospel in this sort of deep person way, such that we drive them to the place where a pastor gives them these gifts on a regular basis, not that this is a standalone answer to that, but that this is evangelical. This is sort of the opening salvo. And that the end of this story is that they don the door of a church and they hear the gospel personally and they get baptized and they receive the sacrament. And if that's not happening, we're not doing our job.

31:11And if we're not doing our job, we don't deserve to exist. Now Adam told us a story before we started and he can just tell us of just the opposite happening. And maybe you should tell that story. Yeah, well, I don't know names, but I mean, this has happened to you. I know several times because lots of emails and things, how, you know, like some of my parents are quite active in their church and local churches. They go to, you know, lectures and so on. Anyway, long story short, they were at one the other night at a church that they don't attend, but I think it was a young person. They made it seem like a young person came up to him and asked if they were, if they were related to me and my parents said, yeah, that's our, that's our family and barisement are son Adam and just kidding. And they, anyway, the guy said, oh, it's because of his, you know, the podcast, he's a part of thinking fellows. I started listening to something like a decade ago that I became Lutheran and I'm now

32:11at the seminary. And this is, the interesting thing is not to inflate ourselves. I don't know if that's the right grammar, but I run into this. I'm amazed. I mean, I just sort of assume we're still in the garage. We have 100 listeners. Every time I go out on a, like, a, whether it's a pastor's conference or just a bigger church kind of thing with every bunch of parishioners from different churches, I run into people who have been listening to us for a long time or who consume 15, 17 literature and so on and they always have a, they always tell a story about how it, it changed or transformed their life in a way. And yeah, so that's pretty awesome. But like you said, Skye, I loved how you said that because I do think that there is this, like, I don't, I kind of have in my head an image of the guy who maybe said that, but I'm not going to, I'll ask you after we turn off the recording. I'm just going, you're probably right. And, but there is, I think I sometimes do worry that people come off of the impression

33:16that we're trying to be like a church, a church, like replace a church. And that is, we're always driving people to, as you said, to the gifts that you receive at church and, and yeah, to use the lingua of the day, divine service, but because that's the tell us for the believer or one of the tell us or tell why I guess it would be. Well, we can be an evangelical and apologetic effort. And that, that's something that I think you can do in this medium pretty effectively, but you can't be a church. And we shouldn't ever strive to be a church. We need to drive people to faithful churches. It's always been the goal of evangelism and apologetics. If the goal has never been to be like, here's the gospel, let me defend it and let me give it to you. Oh, you're converted. Well, great. Peace be with you. Maybe I can suggest some books. Feel it? Well, that's why I'm here. I think that's why we're all here, right? Not just the four of us, but everybody at 1517 is all on board with that. So I'm glad I'm here to see it.

34:17In your example, Dad, I think it does highlight something, which is, which is really important. So that person or, and this frequently happens, doesn't start off seeking to ditch the church instead of and then go to the internet instead, at least initially, right? But as I was saying earlier, the internet solves for many people problems that are tossed to them or come up naturally or come up through things. One of the things I'll say is that people, there are likely have been more people disgruntled, pushed out or harmed by a church or something like that. I think of the title of Rod's probably most famous presentation and the gospel for those broken by the church, things like that. Then you expect in the internet, in good forms and more frequently in bad forms, is waiting there with open arms for them to dive in when this happens.

35:21And so I also think it's fulfilling, it's fulfilling thoughts that people already have. Now how do you get around that or how do you work with that? Like if I think about the dangers, what sometimes this is phrased as the dangers of the internet, is it simply to say like, Christians should get off the internet. Like can the church just not deal with this, this availability of information or the infinite other options that people have if they're free to choose? These things, and the answer is of course no. But what we got to do then is to actually talk to people to know what their problems and issues are, especially the one, the category that I think people are always the most worried about with this, which is children as well. And what happens when they gain access to the internet and things like that is, have you talked to your children before this? Do you know what their theological questions or concerns or positions are? I run into this where, you know, I was totally, I was total accident, but it was like a

36:26late middle school or high schooler I was talking with who was confused when I said that Jesus was God a couple of weeks ago. And you know, it was like, oh no, he's the son of God. That's how I've heard and said that my whole life at church. And I was like, oh, you're true enough, true enough. But also he is God. And your church, like I know which church you go to in town totally confesses that he is God. So, you know, so something has been lost in communication there. And when you have that, like all of a sudden, if she's on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, and then seeing all of these flashes of like Jesus never said it was God, Jesus never said it was God, Jesus never said it was God. All of a sudden you have this convergence of the internet fitting and idea that I was already forming, the people didn't know I was forming. And the only way to really get at that is to have deep conversations that matter about belief, doctrine, practice, your morals, and especially the gospel with people, with

37:32your parishioners, with your children, not just assuming what people know or are thinking or believe already that, okay, we're in a Lutheran church, so everybody's got the same beliefs. Well, I mean, in one sense, yes, because of their corporate confession of faith in another sense, start asking questions to individuals and you'll find that not everybody's cataclycis or education or reading of the Bible has been the same. And so we can work with the internet for that, but we also need to be aware that when we fail to do that, the internet will be there with open arms, whether we want it to or not. Can I just piggyback on that? Go back just a little bit earlier to your point about, well, what do we do? We have all this knowledge. And Adam made that point too, right? Like it's just instantly, instantly available. He can get us, learn about fertilizer for his tree very specifically and how to do it in seconds, right? I think, and I'm, I'm generalizing here, but I think that the internet is like the ultimate itch scratcher. And we have this itch and it's called curiosity.

38:34And we're just curious about things. It's part of how God made us. One of the great capadocians, one of the church fathers named Gregory of Nisia, had this idea that, you know, human curiosity was part of the way God had made us. That's why we, part of the reason why we had that knowledge of good and evil and stuff in the garden waiting for us at the right time. Of course, we took it the wrong time, but Gregory says, you know, God is eternal. And one day we'll see him and we'll know him even as we're fully known. But Gregory surmises, that doesn't mean we'll know him completely because he is eternal. He's inexhaustible. And so the, the drive for curiosity within us is really a drive for God who's inexhaustible and someone who we're in heaven one day will know Godfully Gregory surmises, but we'll also be desiring him and to know him more and more because he's eternally going to be revealing himself and that this is part of the joy of heaven is the discovery of God that's who's already known. But I think what the internet does is it takes that kind of part of ourselves, that part

39:35that wants to know and have authority. And it gives us a quick answer, right? It just gives us a quick answer. So it scratches the itch. And then, you know, if you scratch an itch, you just keep itching. You make it itch more and more and more. And so we, it's like Pavlov's dog, right? Like we, we habituate ourselves to very shallow answers to knowledge because they satisfy us almost like a drug. And we think to ourselves after a while, if you get in this rhythm, like, oh, now I understand it. And what we're lacking is wisdom. So we have a lot of knowledge, but we have very little wisdom and wisdom being a deeper, more comprehensive way of understanding and appropriating the knowledge that we receive. And even being able to discern good and bad knowledge. And I think, I mean, this is where I think where Socrates was still really right, right? Which is like, anything you know, you have to be able to deconstruct it a bit and say, like, well, what's, what's it standing on? What's it standing on? What's it standing on? What's it standing on?

40:35And people don't do that now. They just want the easy answer. And again, I give them that easy answer. And then it leads to more questions. I'm not sure people ever did that. It leads to more questions. I'm not sure people ever did that. They killed the guy. Yeah, they killed the boy. But it's my point. I don't think people ever did that. That's why, you know, also I was very impressed with them. The number of mixed metaphors you put in that description. That's okay. Anyway, that might be my thought is just, you know, use the internet. It's a good tool, right? But just use it with, just don't give up wisdom. Well, you also don't have to accept that just because there's a negative correlation, you know, regarding, or as a positive correlation, that's, as the internet grows, faith declines, you don't have to accept that in every case, right? And that you can take that information and you can use it and say, yeah,

41:37but what does it make easier? Obviously putting out there of more information and you can use that positively. And then try to interfere with the negative ones. So, and then like we said, drive people to embodied conversations, embodied preaching. And then the handing over the gifts faithfully at a place where there are real people and AI bots. That's called the church, by the way. How much of this is not even related to directly to the internet. The internet was just an accelerant, right? Like, society was already, like how many, when we track that there's religious decline is a lot of that just that society no longer, there's no value in secular society to being part of a religious community as far as advancing in society. All communities have declined. But all communities have fraternal organizations have declined. I mean, I've been writing about this for, for like 15 years. All social organizations have declined completely.

42:38I mean, even even like participation in political parties is not what it once was and all this time. It's all declining and there's probably multiple reasons for that. But I think it's, it would be hard to deny that the rise of the internet has been a part of that. Is, do you think AI is just another accelerant of this? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's an accelerant to this. Doesn't have to be a known of itself, I guess inherently, but it seems like it would be. You can like, type into AI, preach me a gospel sermon. I'll probably do it. I'll probably do a decent job of it, actually, but then like you can, it can also do a bad job. I think everybody needs to rewatch battle, sarcolectica. Well, and AI obviously tells you exactly what you want, want to hear. Like that was the joke you were able to say with Adam with the grok thing is like, one of the reasons is you can never tell if it's true because the models at some point are always trying to satisfy the question that you're answering.

43:39And so it could be satisfying that answer with the complete opposite or with a positive. I asked him last night, I call him a hymn now. I asked, God, am I caught? Are you just telling me what I want to hear? And he said yes. And he then corrected himself. It's like, so now he's even telling me, he even thinks I want him to say yes. And he's saying yes, he's still telling me what I want to hear. It's dangerous. It is dangerous. The only positive thing, Bruce, that could like maybe come of that, that's not excellent is if that erodes people's trust of things they see, read or hear on the internet. Like erodes are trust in how those sources answer questions. I'm not sure it will. I'm not positive on that. But at the end of the day, the thing is, is it Christianity is not true because everybody believes it or everybody's denominational affiliated or any of this right. And so Christianity can survive the shrinking, the demographics of the West and the Christian world have been shrinking too.

44:45There are fewer people, which is a new thing for us to as time goes on. And so there'd be some adjustment and the faithfulness of Christianity will not be determined by it being the world's biggest belief system or something like that. The reason that we look forward to that or can say with joy that that has been the case is because that that means that there are people trusting in Jesus Christ for their salvation who will be saved. And so our mission remains the same, whether or not the number of butts and pews or saying that are affiliated with something is going up or down, which is that, you know, we seek to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is also why Christians don't retreat from the internet and using the internet even though as my dad, I think put first it had to kill God, is that that technology isn't going away. I think the same thing with AI, like a bunch of, you know, like Christians or even the Pope just saying, like, just retreat from it. That's not going to help anybody. It's going to do damage. It's okay to say it's going to do damage or it's going to have negative impacts or to acknowledge the negative impacts that these things have had, while also saying,

45:54like use it to try to proclaim Christ to somebody and to put them back into the church and to put them back into the real human community. And when that works, it works and when it's just sort of information in the ether, so be it. That's the tool we have available to do that. And so, you're going to use it. All right. That's the end of this episode. If you enjoyed this, you found this interesting. You can subscribe to the show and your favorite podcasting apps. I will put a link to this study. It was free. You could read the whole thing for free, which is pretty rare. It's pretty technical at some points, but you can jump to the various summaries of things. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes of this episode. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next time. Bye.