Hypothetically now.
If technology was or is sinful, then it’s redemption to good works becomes an important ontological debate to have. When it’s effectively neutral, though, waiting to be used for evil or good, then this redemption doesn’t matter, though its need certainly does not disappear. The sinfulness of any given tech behaves like sin even when we call it something else. But when it’s ignored in place of a functional neutrality, then we become the agent of redemption in the world. We redeem tech from what it could be used for by using it for what it can be used for. And that is why church YouTube pages effectively counter the pornographic videos also found online. Or do they? They are ostensibly the same kind of thing. One an online video of sin and the other an online video of righteousness. Why does the righteousness not counter the sin. Why is good not winning against evil. There’s not less porn online now than years prior. But there is more Christian content online now than there was before. Why are these two forms of content, on the same technological platform, not affecting one another. Well they are. The porn is winning, if we’re being honest about what kinds of content are effective online. Both forms of content are behaving how the technology allows. It’s just that one type on content doesn't think it’s sinful and the other knows it is to the point of reveling. Porn does not need to worry that it will accidently lapse into righteousness by showing too little of it’s actor’s bodies. But righteous content does. The second pastors clothing is to tight, it becomes porn to those who would use it as porn, funny how that doesn't work the other way. Salt may loose its saltiness, but pepper is always hot. The medium of the internet is its message. And that message is sinful. You can see this by how many pastors have or had used online porn.
Find me a pastor or church leader who hasn’t tangoed with the stuff. Porn that is. You’ll be hard pressed. And you’ll be harder pressed as time marches on, as the Boomer’s and Boomer adjacent, who aren’t as technologically captured as you, retire. Porn for them was a magazine or VHS tape that they could avoid buying. The techno-savvy clergy of the now, can’t not use the internet. It’s how they do virtually all their ministry that they view as important. From the groups pastor using it for right now media, to the micro celebrity senior pastor using it for branding and content proliferation. The youth pastor needs it for registration forms and video game evangelism. The list goes on and on. And with it, a tacit acknowledgement that even though there is also x-rated content on the internet, it doesn’t matter because there’s Christian content on there as well.
And that’s because they’ve convinced themselves that the technology they use is a neutral thing. And not something, that like ourselves, is sinful. It behaves like the sinful thing. The same way a sinful person would behave. Which has no bearing on the evangelical mind who believes everyone is equal and good, and gets there by means of a neutral way. We do not consider ourselves sinners naturally. Even though it is our nature. That takes conviction. And if there’s one thing evangelicals can all agree on it’s that conviction doesn't exist on the internet. That’s why arguing in the comment section is a fruitless endeavour, right? No one ever got saved because of someone trying to prove them wrong online. We all know that.
So, why do the arguments of sin work so well online then? Why are Christian men, who know that they can’t be convinced of something they don’t believe in or ascribe to, still found behind an incognito browser looking at porn. Porn argues that men should be able to have a sexual experience with every person they see, if that’s the way the swing. Just enter your sexual search terms and you get what gets you off. And Christians, particularly men, have been persuaded by that argument since dialup was a thing. I thought that didn’t work and I thought this place was neutral. Why is it behaving as if it’s not?
Because it’s not.
The sinfulness of the internet allows for righteous use of it the same way righteous people can still get married and have godly sex. Porn needs people to have healthy sex drives in order for it to pervert them. The same way harlots need husbands and thieves need hard earned wages. There is not sin without something to corrupt. And the internet. is just as corrupt as the guns that don’t kill people. You can repeat the NRA mantra all the right wing, live long day. That gun’s don’t kill people, and yet. You will never find a gun that can’t kill a person. A gun that won’t.
Find me an internet you couldn’t use for porn and you will have found the neutral internet. The same way if you found a gun that wouldn’t kill a person. You would have found a gun that is only a tool for shooting. not killing. But these things do no exist. You know this. So what does exist?
The absence of these kinds of things points to a very specific thing in and of itself. Something that despite a desire for good, does evil as if it were reading Romans 7 all the same.
“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” Romans 7:19-25 KJV
So what does good technology look like? How do we find it? How does it work?
It works by nailing it to the cross the same way our sins were nailed. and forsaking it because of the love that was demonstrated on that very same cross. It looks like a bible app that knows that if it makes a way to host images on its servers alongside the scriptures it shares online, that sinful images will make their ways onto those servers. So it sacrifices the ability to host those images, the way a righteous man enters heaven without a hand that caused him to sin. (Matt 5:30) The app becomes less popular and less comparatively useable to Pinterest and Instagram. But also becomes Holy.
Once its seen as sinful, technology and it’s users have to contend with what an Almighty God does to sin. And the effects if adopted would radically reimagine what technology use would look like for a modern church. We readily do online church and social media ministry, not because we have any power to redeem the place where envy and apathy have roosted in the modern age, but because like the sin of the technology we use, we are sinners also.
Which is why the most prolifically online ministries, have never been seen by their members where they actually spend the most time on the internet. Where is the salt and light, at or in Pornhub and OnlyFans. Are these not places where gospel of forgiveness from sin is needed most, if not more? And yet these are places where the church has not and likely will never send it’s digital missionaries.
If you do not believe in a Saviour that could one day change the domain name of those sites, because His church brought his gospel to their users, so effectively, that sexual immorality could not even be named among them anymore. Then you don’t actually want to do online ministry, or to use Technology righteously.
You simply want to call something sinful, good. Or for the time being, treat it as neutral.
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