This Is Our Time

Everyday Myths in Light of the Gospel

Trevin Wax

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781433648472
• eBook ISBN: 9781433648489
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Uncertain. Confused. Overwhelmed.

Many Christians feel bombarded by the messages they hear and the trends they see in our rapidly changing world.

How can we resist being conformed to the pattern of this world? What will faithfulness to Christ look like in these tumultuous times? How can we be true to the gospel in a world where myths and false visions of the world so often prevail?

In This is Our Time, Trevin Wax provides snapshots of twenty-first-century American Lifein order to help Christians understand the times. By analyzing our common beliefs and practices (smartphone habits, entertainment intake, and our views of shopping, sex, marriage, politics, and life's purpose), Trevin helps us see through the myths of society to the hope of the gospel.

As faithful witnesses to Christ, Trevin writes, we must identify the longing behind society's most cherished myths (what is good, true, beautiful), expose the lie at the heart of these myths (what is false and damaging), and show how the gospel tells a better story – one that exposes the lie but satisfies the deeper longing.

Chapter 1

Your Phone Is a Myth-Teller

Three teenage girls—Ella, Jane, and Julia—have been invited to National Public Radio studio for an interview. This American Life host Ira Glass wants to ask about their experience on social media; he’s curious about life as a teenager with a smartphone in today’s world.

So here they are—three girls hanging out with a famous person in a prestigious studio—and, not surprisingly, they whip out their phones to take pictures of themselves and post them to Instagram.

“No, retake it!” says Jane. “It’s really bad.”

“Jane, calm down,” says Ella.

“It doesn’t matter, okay?” Julia pipes up, a hint of exasperation in her voice. “This is what happens every time.”

Ella wins the argument. “I’m just gonna post it, and we’ll see how quickly everything comes in.”

Done. The picture is up. And now they wait.

The girls tell Ira that they expect two “likes” in the first minute. But who knows? It’s daytime, and nighttime is ideal for getting likes and comments on your pictures. They wait some more.

A minute later the suspense is over. The picture has three likes. Moments later there are a few more. The girls are pleased to see the likes, but they hope some comments will follow—one-word descriptions like “gorgeous,” or “pretty,” “stunning,” or “beautiful.”1

“You Are the Center of the Universe”

Looking in on this scene, you might think, Ah, the teenage years—those torturous times when you are emotionally needy and crave affirmation. Or maybe you think, Look at the lengths today’s kids will go to in order to fish for a compliment! Or maybe you’re familiar with this ritual, having performed it yourself as a teenager or as an adult.

Whatever the case, if you think this activity is all about compliments and affirmation, you’re missing something. There’s more going on here. You’re not watching a group of self-centered girls do whatever it takes to be told they’re pretty; you’re witnessing a complicated social game. Instagram is the field, and the girls are the players. Like any game this one has rules, which is why the girls have expectations.

“It’s definitely a social obligation,” Julia explains, “because you want to let them know, and also let people who are seeing those, that I have a close relationship with this person, so close that I can comment on their pictures, like, ‘This is so cute,’ or, ‘You look so great here.’” Likes play a part in the game. So do comments. The rules change based on how well you know someone, who is in your circle of friends, and how others have responded to your online presence.

A “like” is more than affirmation. A comment is more than a compliment. They are signals of social significance. And the girls who post, like, and comment are focused not on the picture but on the social activity.

Who is commenting where?

What are people saying?

Who is liking whose photos?

What’s more, the absence of a like or comment can send a signal, too. If a girl’s closest friend doesn’t leave a comment, she may wonder if something is wrong.

Is the picture not “good enough”?

Did her friend see the picture and deliberately choose not to like it?

What if someone notices that her popular friend didn’t like the picture?

What if that person starts to think she’s not as close to the popular girl as she made it seem?

Hearing the girls talk about the significance of this social world, Ira Glass breaks in. “This is such a job!” he says, amused and troubled. The girls laugh at his assessment, but they don’t disagree.

“It’s like I’m a brand,” says Julia.

“You’re trying to promote yourself,” says Ella.

“And you’re the product,” Ira adds.

Social media is a game, and in high school you win by being “relevant.” The goal is to promote yourself, gain favor from other (cooler) kids, climb up the social ladder, and cultivate an online presence that other people care about. Through likes and comments and posts, you can unfold the social map of your school and see where everyone stands, or as Jane explains: “who’s with who, who’s hanging out with who, who is best friends with who.”2

This is why teenagers live on their phones, and I suppose it’s one reason so many adults do, too. We want to be relevant, and we play the game to convince others of our significance. But what if the game is rigged? What if the players are phony? What if the rules of the game make winning impossible, but the stakes make stopping unthinkable?

I am a senior citizen of the millennial generation; that is, I’m on the older side of the generation born from 1980 to 2000. Because I went to high school before cell phones were everywhere, I feel like I grew up in a different world from the millennials ten or fifteen years behind me. They’ve never known a time without immediate Internet access.

The “old millennial” in me (“old” is relative here, I still look twenty!) channels the “grumpy old guy” mind-set—the tendency to look down on technological advances as if they always and only lead us astray. I imagine my great-grandfather talking with my great-grandmother about their kids: “Can you believe it, Ollie?” he says, shaking his head. “These kids talk on the telephone way too much. And they’ve got three channels on the television! What is this world coming to?”

To snap out of my grumpiness, I smile and thank God for the new technologies I benefit from every day. There’s the fitness app on my phone that tracks my steps and helps me stay in shape. There’s the weather app that tells me down to the minute when the rain will start and stop. There’s the GPS that saves me the embarrassment of others having to see how directionally challenged I am. There’s the podcast downloader that keeps me informed and entertained. And don’t get me started on the strange joy I find in creating and listening to “playlists” of music on my phone, music that would have taken up space on a whole stack of CDs when I was in high school. (Remember the “mix tape?!”)

So enough with the worries about being “addicted” or “obsessed” with our phones! We’re better off than before, right? There are so many benefits to being so connected, right?

Right?

I can see you now, nodding your head, but slowly because if you’re like me, you love your phone but also sense, deep down, that not everything about it is good for you. For example, the phone’s proximity. Most likely, you are within an arm’s reach from your phone . . . if it’s not actually on your wrist in the form of a watch . . . or in your pocket, where you sometimes feel its phantom vibrations . . . or in your hand because you’re reading this book on it. Yep. In the twenty-first century we keep our friends close and our phones closer.

It’s not just how close our phones are that worries us; it’s how dependent we are on them. We feel the need to constantly check, scroll, text, click, and browse. Why? What is going on?

As a Christian, you may wonder, Does my phone help me or hinder me in my walk with Christ? And if you worry that the hindrances outweigh the helps, then what do you do? How do we live?

It’s impossible to chuck our phones and go back to life in the 1990’s world of Friends, where “I’ll Be There for You” meant sitting on an orange mohair sofa in a coffee shop because there was no Facebook available to help you be “there” by liking posts from “friends” you’ve never even met. No, there’s no going back to another era.

So, what’s the solution? Some Christians, sensing that we need to be careful with new technologies, focus primarily on the phone’s ability to deliver bad and damaging content. They put restrictions, filters, and limits. And rightly so. We ought to be concerned about the accessibility of pornography, or the growing coarseness of our society’s vocabulary, or the proliferation of false ideas that undermine the gospel.

But this way of thinking implies that the phone itself is neutral. The only question is what you do with it, or what kind of content you access on it. That’s a start, but I don’t think it goes far enough. The bigger question is how this technology works on our hearts and minds without our even knowing it. It’s not what you’re looking at on your phone but that you’re always looking at your phone. It’s not what you might access on your phone that is most influential; it’s what your phone accesses in you. It’s not enough to ask, “What am I doing on my phone?” Instead, we’ve got to ask, “What is my phone doing to me?”3

The primary myth the smartphone tells you every day is that you are the center of the universe. If your phone is your world, and if the settings and apps are tailored to you and your interests, then with you at all times is a world that revolves around you. No wonder we like to be on our phones so much! Nothing else has the same effect of putting us at the center of things. Nothing else makes us feel more in control, more Godlike, more knowledgeable, more connected.

To be faithful Christians in this—our time—we need to listen carefully to what our phones are telling us. What are the myths? What story does your phone tell you about who you are and your place in the world?

We’re about to find...

Table of contents

• Foreword by Marvin Olasky
• Introduction: This Is Our Time
• Chapter 1 Your Phone Is a Myth-Teller
• Chapter 2 Hollywood Is After Your Heart
• Chapter 3 The North Pole and the Pursuit of Happiness
• Chapter 4 Shopping for Happiness
• Chapter 5 Never “At Home” in the City of Man
• Chapter 6 Marriage Matters
• Chapter 7 Sex Rebels
• Chapter 8 As the World Wobbles
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes