Matthew Lee Anderson is the author of Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith, blogger at Mere Orthodoxy, and has written for Christianity Today. I asked Matt to reflect on the church and social media, and the implications each have for one another in a fragmented world. I have enjoyed reading Matt's blog, will soon be reading and reviewing his book, and hope to continue an online correspondence with him on all matters theological.
What follows are his reflections. Enjoy.
One of the most important challenges of our late modern world is navigating the radical voluntarity that lies beneath most of our social institutions, but which has been exacerbated by the rise of social media.
I have been writing online for over seven years, which actually makes me feel a bit like a dinosaur. In the early days, the radical promise of blogging and social media was that horizons would be expanded and new networks would be joined. But as has been often documented, the promise was a chimera. The reality is that what the internet has truly given us is balkanization and “tribes,” which are entirely formed through volunteer associations. Team CoCo or Team Jay, and all that.
It would be easy to dismiss voluntarity and pine for a return of immobility and a small patch of land with a picket fence. But the promise of localism needs to be tempered by the perils as well. The soil is just as fallen as the pavement, and electing to reject the easy, voluntary associations of our late modern world for the involuntary ones of the local community may offer just as false a hope as the social networks did.
The thing, in fact, is virtue. And while opportunities for virtue’s development are perhaps most obvious in those random, involuntary moments of life—like happening to walk by a person in need while on the way to work—it’s critical to remember that the opportunity for virtue is not the substance, and that the latter can be cultivated, well, in any context.
The paradox of voluntarity is no more clear than in our association in the church.
Consider the young Reformed movement, for instance, which I am currently a part of. On the one hand, an outsider (or an insider!) might suggest that the associations are little more than a club or tribe, where a particular set of doctrines provides the touchstone for peoples’ voluntary membership. But on the other hand, the emphasis on the doctrines that have made the movement unique, namely election and sovereignty, has minimized the voluntariness of the association. Yes, people might come because they choose to. But if the Reformed folks are right, that too is a chimera.
It’s not too much of a surprise, then, that the explosion in Reformed theology has happened hand-in-hand with the rise of what I might call the voluntary culture. Because when it’s all been written, voluntary associations of an arbitrary sort simply do not provide the stability and depth that we need for human flourishing. For that, we must look elsewhere, to God Himself, which is the first movement of the church and the fountainhead of virtue.
Ben Simpson 
