Rod Dreher links to an amazing interview

Read Schuchardt on Media, Tech, and Religion

And excerpt to whet your appetite:

Again and again Christian leaders – Protestant and Catholic – have called for the churches to make ever better use of technology to proclaim the Gospel. Is this naive? Unavoidable? Helpful?

Yes. Watch the YouTube video “Contemporvant Growtivation” to see this in action. This makes brilliant satirical fun of the increasing use of technology to transmit the gospel. I think Ellul has it right when he says that the church cannot make use of propaganda (i.e., modern technology and its communication techniques) without becoming a purely sociological institution, and so I think it presents a growing crisis for the church, but I’m in a very small minority with this perception. Ellul says that what is done in the service of Jesus Christ should take its character and effectiveness from Jesus Christ, which to my mind means that we should imitate both the medium and the message of Christ in order to be effective witnesses. Look at the effect of twelve disciples, eleven at the end of the day, who travelled and used the medium of embodied speech to transmit the gospel. Now look at the effect of Joel Osteen, who in a single telecast probably reaches hundreds of thousands more than these eleven did in their entire lifetimes. Which is the more effective? I think contemporary Christianity’s biggest perceptual obstacle is the confusion of numbers with efficacy. It seems like a mindset formed by the market share needs of capitalism, not by the recognition that the salvation of individuals is the key to it all. When you look at Christ’s effect, he primarily affected individual lives, very rarely the group. Even in the feeding of the five thousand, the miracle was that everyone ate, not that they had their lives transformed. The individual encounter with Christ, however, that has always been the key to genuine conversion and transformation.

Explain what McLuhan means when he says the Incarnation is the one time form and content are the same.

“The medium is the message” was McLuhan’s famous dictum, by which he meant the form dictates a lot more of the content than ever previously recognized. But it was never a literal truth, only a helpful metaphor to help the individual perceive how the medium shapes the message. But it WAS literally the case, McLuhan said, in one and only one case: Jesus Christ. In that case, the medium and the message are literally one and the same. This is the key to understanding McLuhan, and his media theory, and is equivalent to Einstein’s C, the one constant in a universe where everything else is relative. Interested readers should consult The Medium and the Light (1999, Stoddart) edited by Eric McLuhan, or see my forthcoming piece in the Renascence journal entitled “The Medium Is the Messiah.”

I’m posting this on our CLC website, having done this interview over the Internet. Is that ironic? Are we hypocrites?

It is ironic indeed. But it’s also fast, cheap, effective, and cool! My hope is that as a result of reading it, readers will be inclined to reverse engineer their engagement with media: by reading a book next, and then by following that up by inviting me to speak — live and in person! – to their campus, group, or church. I’m much funnier in person…

But to be serious: the beginning of a technology’s use does not have to be its end. If your close friend is dying of cancer, and you shoot him a quick e-mail of regret and sorrow before he goes, well then that would be a shame. But if you use e-mail to arrange a time to visit in person, then that’s redeeming the shallowness of e-mail for the purpose of real embodied communication. So the hypocritical use of a medium can always turn into something valuable, just as what man meant for evil God can use for good.

We simply swim in tech nowadays. Most of us couldn’t do our jobs without our computers, at least: word processing, the web as a major source of information, email for communications, et cetera. How does one swim against this tide?

There are two valid options, as I see it. The first is actually the easiest: become Amish. The second is even harder: swim upstream. McLuhan compared it to an Edgar Allen Poe short story called The Maelstrom. By noticing the pattern or effect of the whirlpool, one man in the story saves himself by jumping out of the ship and clinging to a piece of flotsam that is strangely swirling up instead of being sucked down by the whirlpool. So too can we devise a strategy of individual survival by being good at pattern recognition and by paying constant attention to the ways in which new media and technology can pull us down into their unintended side effects. It’s no surprise that the DSM V will have the most entries at the same point in human history as we have the highest number of new technologies to create psychic imbalances in our built environment.

How should Christian leaders – clergy, lay leaders, music ministers, etc. – think about using tech in their ministries?

Very very carefully. My first recommendation is to read Jacques Ellul’s “Effect on Churches” section of Propaganda. My second is to recognize that the church is not competing with Starbucks, the mall, or the movie theater for audiences. I think Henri Nouwen gets it right [in his In the Name of Jesus – ed.] when he says that the leaders of the future will be those who have the courage of being culturally irrelevant, because they will recognize that what the soul in technological society truly craves is the worship of the true and living God, not the temporary two-hour appeasement of the burden of self-consciousness that can be had anywhere else and with higher production values. So recognizing that worship and entertainment are not synonyms, understanding how icons (cultural and religious) work both semiotically and spiritually, knowing that “ecclesia” is the people and not the building, and knowing that value is a function of scarcity (and not repeatability), that is where I would start with teaching clergy how to think about tech use in their ministries. By and large, most people hate church for the same reason they hate meetings run by PowerPoint: if I can get this electronically on my laptop at my own convenience, why am I even here?

Rod's blog is here.