Yale Divinity School
Benjamin Ball is a third-year M.A.R. student in Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Previously, he studied English at Princeton University. Benjamin is interested in questions concerning democratic culture, grassroots organizing, and the social internet, as well as the potential for theological thought and language to open possibilities for practical democratic life.
In his 1528 work The Obedience of a Christian Man, William Tyndale made a sales pitch that would resonate through Protestant traditions for centuries. His focus on vernacular translation of Scripture had a profoundly anti-social undertone: all you need is your mind, the Book, and God, unmediated access to the Truth. Almost half a millennium later, in 1996, the American computer company Packard Bell made what I take to be an eerily similar sales pitch: all you need is you and your home computer, unmediated access to the Truth, all captured succinctly in their slogan, wouldn’t you rather be at home? If issues concerning the difficulty of marshalling effective democratic action against climate change and ecological catastrophe are so often understood as problems of public trust, then we must first understand what creates the conditions for an ecology of distrust. I propose, in this paper, that the ecology of distrust created by the social Internet is a distinctly Protestant inheritance, with a line of continuity running from the Protestant emphasis on sola Scriptura/vernacular translation to the contemporary innovations of the personal computer and the smartphone, all of which belie a deeply libertarian, atomizing, and individual vision. The social Internet isolates users in three ways: (1) promoting disgust without prompting dissatisfaction (what science communicator Hank Green has dubbed “The Sad Gap”), (2) creating an out-group of dangerous “others,” and (3) turning users’ capacity for self-reflection against them. I use the current TikTok moral panic around “narcissists” as a useful case study. Theologians and religious ethicists within Protestant traditions, particularly those committed to democratic solutions to the existential environmental disasters we face, should pay particular attention to the manner in which the social Internet isolates the user from the larger environment — social, ecclesial, or ecological — for which they ought to care.