Cultural Critique Column
This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, volume 48, number 03 (2025).
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Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. —Ephesians 4:141
My case against the baleful influence of many social media influencers is more than old-fashioned traditionalism, although being traditional is not a negative thing. Being old-fashioned is neither always good nor always bad. To be old-fashioned about surgery is a terrible idea. Would you want to bite a bullet instead of having anesthesia? Social change demands discernment based on objective standards. Yes, one should avoid being retrograde or reactionary. Some innovations are salutary, especially medical technologies that treat real illnesses.2 Discernment for Christians is easy in some areas. The pornification of American culture, which translates into a multi-billion-dollar industry, is not a moral advance but an indication of moral decline and a disaster for men, women, and children.
In other matters, discernment is harder because the situation is not obviously wrong. This is what we face with online influencers. This style of communication is becoming normal and expected. As long as their content is not irreligious, heretical, or immoral, what could be wrong? Aren’t success, a good heart, and avoidance of heresy sufficient credentials to be an influencer?
Avoiding Technophilia. In assessing cultural change, one should avoid mindless trendiness, especially concerning digital communication technologies. Technophilia is usually defined as enthusiasm for technology, but it has a dark side when it becomes a disordering of the loves, which places love for technology above the love of God and neighbor (usually unconsciously). Technophilia as a vice is an unbridled and unprincipled passion for innovation, stimulation, and power in technologies. We use technology without considering its dark side or its possible abuse. We limit the discussion to communications technologies. If we can use a communications technology — especially a cutting-edge application or technique — for a perceived outcome, then we should use it.
As astute social critic Neil Postman observed in 1995, we can speak of “the god of Technology”
in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it. If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?3
This was written before the vast majority of Americans even had email or the now mind-boggling options of the online world. Like all false gods, the god (idol) of technology must be exposed and renounced. As the Apostle John wrote: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21; see also Exodus 20:4–5). The newness, oddness, and stimulating nature of new media technologies can entice us into accepting them without a second (or even a first) thought. Thus, as we consider the status of online influencers, we must begin with the nature of their medium, which is dominated by the moving image. We start with the primitive technology of television and will then work our way to online communication and the rise of influencers.
Dumbing Us Down. Even apart from the intellectual statements made by media influencers online, consider the media itself and how it is used. The media have their credentials, as it were, their abilities and disabilities in communicating truth or lies. As Postman said, “the medium is the metaphor.” In so doing, he revised Marshall McLuhan’s statement, “the medium is the message.”
A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.4
Postman’s application of this thesis addressed the effects of television qua medium in relation to typography’s nature and effects on people and culture. Using his method, we can examine the Internet as a metaphor that shapes all that happens within it and how that shapes us, individually and as a society.
Postman’s concern was that television’s very nature undermined rational discourse, given its reliance on moving images over fixed words, constituting an argument in print. Convincing personalities are more trusted than knowledgeable scholars. America had moved from a typographic orientation to knowledge toward an image-based orientation to knowledge. Anyone can watch television, but it takes concentration to read, since one is decoding a message that must also be interpreted. As Postman wrote:
[A] language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America tends to be both content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print.
It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one’s responses are isolated, one’s intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.5
Reading requires training; one learns how to read. Reading well requires discipline. One must be discerning. Literacy rates in the US are not impressive, although accurate data is difficult to find. Newsweek reported that “in 2024, 21 percent of adults in the U.S. were found to be illiterate, while 54 percent of adults had a literacy below a sixth-grade level, according to the National Literacy Institute.”6
There are levels of literacy. Some can read nothing at all; others have a low level of comprehension. Some cannot read because of innate disability, but many cannot read or cannot read well because they are not well educated and because our culture, by and large, does not value literacy. Educators are complaining that even if students can read, they often will not read much (especially in book form) and don’t expect to be required to read. In listening to the influencer Matt Walsh’s commentary for a few years (I have mostly given that up, in light of some of his views and general arrogance), I noticed that he almost never referred to any books he had read to back up his ideas.7
I have long held that, “If you do not read, you should not lead,” or “Leaders should be readers.” However, many leaders — or at least influencers — give no indication of reading very much or reading very well. Their influence stems from a media-savvy charisma, not from knowledge or wisdom. This is an extreme view, but consider this post by Andrew Tate, a popular but inarticulate misogynist, pimp, and huckster: “Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. So they try and learn from the life OTHERS have lived. But you never REALLY learn unless you lived it. You must feel it to believe it. Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards.”8 This reeks of egocentric and illiterate idiocy, but captures something of the zeitgeist, even if in hyperbolic form.
The very nature of printed books has aped the fragmentary and superficial nature of television and the Internet. One of my students, some years ago, told me, “I don’t know how to read Shaine Clayborne’s books.” This was not because they were intellectually difficult (see, e.g., J. P. Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity [Baker Academic, 1987]) but because of their nonlinear and image-addled nature. Intellectual impatience and superficiality can be found in the rise of one-sentence paragraphs, popularized years ago by Rob Bell (whose influence has blessedly waned) and more recently by the popular writer John Mark Comer. Samuel James described Comer’s style by parodying the title of a book by Comer called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (WaterBrook, 2019). James titled his article, “The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs,” to describe Comer’s fluffy style.9
If men and women are not shaped by serious reading, they will be shaped by serial viewing on the three basic screens that dominate American life: the laptop (or tablet), the phone, and the big screen. (They may also have screens on their wrists.) The words they hear will not typically be formed into careful arguments relying on sufficient evidence to make clear points. (However, one might watch a learned lecture or an episode of the old television program, Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. [1966–1999]).10
Enter the Internet. Television seems tame compared to the digital spectacles available on the Internet every second of every day. The images available on TV are sedate and sedentary comparatively. Postman complained of the fragmented nature of TV by calling it the “and now this” sensibility. An emotional news story — albeit only three minutes long — about famine in Africa ends and the announcer says, “And now this,” marking a transition to a commercial about toothpaste or vacuum cleaners. Little gravitas remains when topics jump from one to another. Any linear development of thought is lost to fragmentation and oversimplification.
The Internet has been decentralized first through blogs and then through social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and podcasts. Anyone armed with a smartphone, a little tech savvy, and the money can find a platform for their ideas about anything. These “influencers,” as they are called today (some of them in their teens or 20s with millions of followers), are not public intellectuals, a term that harks back to credentialed experts who took their ideas to the general public, rather than leaving them in the academy or rarefied publications for a smaller audience. William F. Buckley Jr. was the quintessential public intellectual of his era, writing books, columns, and hosting a long-running TV show mentioned above, called Firing Line.
Today’s influencers need no intellectual pedigree or even the ability to sustain a train of thought for more than a few minutes or seconds. While some may have their finger on the pulse of culture, their influence largely comes through their carefully curated content, featuring brand collaborations or the creation of their own brand, which is more a style than a set of competencies or a record of intellectual success. A brand is something distinctive about their media personality, not something laudatory about their moral character, their intellect, or their knowledge of a subject matter.
While some influencers, such as historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson, have outstanding credentials, most are, in Daniel Boorstin’s terms, “known for their well-knownness.”11 They are not well known as philosophers or historians or sociologists, or as theologians. Their celebrity attracts. I confess that my media manager takes clips from my lectures and interviews and uses them in Instagram posts. However, the content was taken from longer form material and is rooted in a half century of study and writing. My hope is that these short-form pieces will draw people into my books and lectures online.
To invoke an older term, influencers trade on impression management won through audio and visual techniques. Some of the most popular podcasts may be less than ten minutes long, jump from one image to another, and are set up to entertain with various images taken from pop culture, which are interjected every few seconds. Posts on X are much shorter but may gain millions of likes. No matter the objective quality of these podcasts, X posts, and so on, they can be monetized lucratively. Some long-form podcasts, such as The Joe Rogan Experience, have interviewed noteworthy intellectuals, such as Wes Huff and Stephen C. Meyer, in depth.
All in all, the poet T. S. Eliot’s lament in “Chorus from the Rock” rings true today, long after he wrote it in 1934.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.
Finding Discernment. Where does this leave us culturally concerning the acquisition of knowledge and the identification of truth against error? How can we sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly? The media world — and our minds — are ruined by the uncritical assimilation of influencer culture in which popularity trumps knowledge and brand eclipses credentials. I will list several values and practices to help us restore discernment to our engagement with contemporary media.
- Make significant time in your life to read noteworthy books offline. There is no substitute for the intellectual discipline that this requires for a knowledge-questing soul. Nor can the intellectual joys of deep discovery be matched by cheaper incitements used by those hawking their brands and media savvy production techniques. Reading the right books exposes you to other worlds and ideas you might never know apart from reading them. It thus expands your world rightly through thoughtful engagement of ideas, not through being bombarded by the influencer’s ceaseless images and sounds. Having been born in 1957, I was blessed to be educated and embark on Christian ministry before the rise of the Internet. I did not use the Internet for any of my work through my doctorate or for the writing of my first four books. Thus, I developed the disciplines of solitary reading and writing. Most younger people have not been apprenticed in this way in the world of ideas. But younger people can learn to be discerning when culture makes knowledge harder to find even as information increases. We should be on guard to not be like those Paul warned about who were “always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7).
- If you watch influencers, check their credentials carefully. Don’t be content with how effectively they present an image or spin a brand. Look for substance, intellectually and morally. Don’t be drawn in through visual manipulation.
- Remember that popularity is not identical with knowledge, wisdom, or good character. If an influencer is extremely well known, he or she might need to be monitored in order to be critiqued, given their impact on culture. But that popularity doesn’t translate into their ideas or character being praiseworthy.
- Lead or join study and reading groups that seek knowledge through immersion in texts and unhurried, distraction-free conversation, apart from technological mediation.
Let us conclude with a rebuke given by Holy Scripture to members of the early Christian church. The writer of Hebrews repeatedly warns his hearers against falling away and against slackness in the Christian life. His warning is applicable today to those troubled by the constant distractions and diversions of the influencers of the digital age.
We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:11–14)
Being hungry for truth is necessary for understanding the deep things of God; it is indispensable for understanding anything worth knowing. Love is patient, and the love of truth requires intellectual patience in reading and learning (1 Corinthians 13:4–6). We must train ourselves to be discerning knowers in a world where image-manipulation outpaces truth, and personality replaces reliable witnesses.
Douglas Groothuis, PhD, is Distinguished University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University. He is the author of Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (IVP Academic, 2022) and, most recently, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (IVP Academic, 2024). Visit his website at DouglasGroothuis.com.
NOTES
- All biblical quotations are from the NIV.
- I exclude medical technologies that enable abortion and “gender transitions,” as well as human reproductive aberrations such as surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization.
- Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, n.d.), 38, Kindle edition.
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985; Penguin Publishing Group, n.d.), 10, Kindle edition.
- Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 50.
- “Map Reveals US Adult Literacy Rates by State,” Newsweek, January 6, 2025, https://ift.tt/8NMruUf.
- However, his book, What Is a Woman?: One Man’s Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation (DW Books, 2022), has footnotes and is well documented. See my book review, “Defining the Meaning of Woman: Review of Matt Walsh’s Documentary Film and Book What Is a Woman?,” Christian Research Journal 45, no. 02/03 (2022), https://www.equip.org/articles/defining-the-meaning-of-woman-review-of-matt-walshs-documentary-film-and-book-what-is-a-woman/.
- Andrew Tate, Twitter post, December 13, 2022, https://ift.tt/EwYxqdS. Tate must be glad that his lawyers and doctors read books.
- Samuel D. James, “The Ruthless Elimination of Paragraphs,” Digital Liturgies, February 11, 2025, https://ift.tt/VDNZzO9. There are more problems with Comer than style, however. See Wyatt Graham, “Should We Practice the Way with John Mark Comer?,” Gospel Coalition, November 20, 2024, https://ift.tt/kSAm1Fj.
- Information on Firing Line can be found at the Hoover Institution: “Hoover Institution News Advisory: Hoover Institution Houses Broadcast Archive of William F. Buckley Jr’s. Show Firing Line,” February 27, 2008, https://ift.tt/Hv0wCq6. As of this writing, the link to the database describing the Firing Line programs at the Hoover Institution is broken, but the database is accessible via the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, https://ift.tt/S0drAtE.
- See Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Harper & Row, 1961).
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