How Facebook Killed the Church
There has been a great deal of hand wringing in the Christian community about the onset of Web 2.0 relationality (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, MMOGs). The concern you often hear is that “virtual” relationships are no replacement for “authentic” relationships.
No doubt this is true. But I’ve done some research in this area and here’s my general conclusion: Facebook friends tend to be our actual friends.
No doubt, the vast majority of the people in a friend list on Facebook are strangers, acquaintances, or old school friends you haven’t seen in years. But no user of Facebook is confused enough to think that she is “in relationship” with any of these people. These are just the penumbra around the core of our Facebook interactions, connecting with people we actually know and are friends with.
In short, Facebook isn’t replacing real world relationality. Rather, Facebook tends to reflect our social world. For example, in a soon to be published study some ACU colleagues and I used Facebook to predict student retention at our school (i.e., which freshmen return for their sophomore year). We found that on-campus Facebook activity was significantly correlated with measures of “real world” relationality. Further, on-campus Facebook activity also predicted who would come back for their sophomore year. For example, if you had a lot of Facebook Wall Posts you felt more socially connected and were more likely to come back to ACU for a second year. Which makes sense. Who would be posting on your Wall day to day? Sure, old friends might give you a shout out from time to time on your Wall. But for the most part Wall posts come from people who you’ll actually see today. Or at least this week, month or year. The point is, you know these people. Talking with them via Facebook is authentic relationality. It’s staying in touch, coordinating plans, offering up encouragement, saying a prayer, working out misunderstandings, and sharing a moment.
Over at my friend Mike’s blog there was a recent discussion about why Millennials (also known as Generation Y) are leaving the church. His question was, why are they leaving? Most of the answers took aim at the church. Churches are too shallow, hypocritical, judgmental, or political. Many surveys have shown these attitudes to be widespread among Millennials. Consider the Barna research summarized in the book unChristian. Young Christians and non-Christians tend to feel that the church is “unChristian.” Too antihomosexual. Too hypocritical. Too political. Too judgmental. That’s how young people see “the church.” And it’s hard to blame them.
But my argument at Mike’s blog was that the church has always been this way. Is the church of 2010 much different from the church of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s? I don’t think so. So, yes, the church is screwed up. Always has been. The church has been a depressing constant over the generations. So the change isn’t with the church. The change is with the Millennials. If so, in what way and how has this change related to the church?
The most obvious change is in mobile and Web 2.0 connectivity. Generation X didn’t have cell phones. Nor did they have Facebook or text messaging. And you can’t tell me that Millennials see the church any differently than Generation X saw it. Look to the right at cell phone subscriptions plotted by decade. Most have Generation X as birth dates between 1961 to 1981. Which has Gen X as college students in the years 1979 to 1999. As you can see, most Gen X’ers didn’t have cellphones. And based on the sociological evidence Gen X was much more cynical and anti-establishment when compared to the Millennials. So you can’t tell me Gen X’ers didn’t see the church as judgmental, hypocritical, or sold-out. They did.
So what happened? Why didn’t Gen X leave the church while the Millennials are leaving in droves?
The difference between Generations X and Y isn’t in their views of the church. It’s about those cellphones. It’s about relationships and connectivity. Most Gen X’ers didn’t have cell phones, text messaging or Facebook. These things were creeping in during their college years but the explosive onset of mobile devices and social computing had yet to truly take off.
So why has mobile social computing affected church attendance? Well, if church has always been kind of lame and irritating why did people go in the first place? Easy, social relationships. Church has always been about social affiliation. You met your friends, discussed your week, talked football, shared information about good schools, talked local politics, got the scoop, and made social plans (“Let’s get together for dinner this week!”). Even if you hated church you could feel lonely without it. Particularly with the loss of “third places” in America.
But Millennials are in a different social situation. They don’t need physical locations for social affiliation. They can make dinner plans via text, cell phone call or Facebook. In short, the thing that kept young people going to church, despite their irritations, has been effectively replaced. You don’t need to go to church to stay connected or in touch. You have an iPhone.
Sure, Millennials will report that the “reason” they are leaving the church is due to its perceived hypocrisy or shallowness. My argument is that while this might be the proximate cause the more distal cause is social computing. Already connected Millennials have the luxury to kick the church to the curb. This is the position of strength that other generations did not have. We fussed about the church but, at the end of the day, you went to stay connected. For us, church was Facebook!
The pushback here will be that all this Millennial social computing, all this Facebooking, isn’t real, authentic relationship. I’d disagree with that assessment. It goes to the point I made earlier: Most of our Facebook interactions are with people we know, love, and are in daily contact with. Facebook isn’t replacing “real” relationships with “virtual” relationships. It’s simply connecting us to our real friends. And if you can do this without getting up early on Sunday morning why go to church? Particularly if the church is hypocritical and shallow? Why mess with it?
Why are Millennials leaving the church? It’s simple. Mobile social computing has replaced the main draw of the traditional church: Social connection and affiliation.
Basically, Facebook killed the church. May it Rest in Peace.
Update 1:
Having made the claim that Facebook (i.e., the advent of cellphones, texting and Web 2.0) killed the church I realized that I could put this thesis to the test.
From the General Social Survey data set I was able to get the percent of Americans who said they attended a weekly church service.
From the NationMaster data set I was able to get mobile phone subscriptions (per capita) data.
I started in 1986 and went to 2005. Below is the scatterplot of the relationship between mobile subscriptions and weekly church attendance plotted for each year from 1986 to 2005 (each dot is a year):
In short, although there is no proof here, the case I made is consistent with the statistical evidence: As mobile communications increased in America weekly church attendance decreased. Of course, there are a host of other explanations for this trend (i.e., the well known “third variable problem”). Regardless, I thought the graph was interesting.
Update 2:In my recent post How Facebook Killed the Church I made the argument that the Millennial Generation is less interested in church attendance because the social affiliation aspects of church have been dramatically replaced with mobile social computing (e.g., texting, Tweeting, Facebook). Not needing the church for social affiliation or networking Millennials are positioned to pose some hard questions to the church: Beyond social affiliation, what is your purpose? And do you live up to that purpose? These questions are hard because if a church claims to create “Christ followers” the Millennials will want to see concrete evidence that the lifestyle and attitudes of these “Christ followers” are qualitatively different from those in the surrounding culture. And more often than not, the Millennials just don’t see that difference.
This argument of mine gets some support from a recent article–Generation Next–in Time by Nancy Gibbs (H/T Mike Cope). Here are some quotes from the article. On the role of mobile social computing in this generation:
Today’s kids aren’t taking up arms against their parents; they’re too busy texting them. The members of the millennial generation, ages 18 to 29, are so close to their parents that college students typically check in about 10 times a week, and they are all Facebook friends. Kids and parents dress alike, listen to the same music and fight less than previous generations, and millennials assert that older people’s moral values are generally superior to their own.Yet even more young people perceive a gap. According to a recently released Pew Research Center report, 79% of millennials say there is a major difference in the point of view of younger and older people today. Young Americans are now more educated, more diverse, more optimistic and less likely to have a job than previous generations. But it is in their use of technology that millennials see the greatest difference, starting perhaps with the fact that 83% of them sleep with their cell phones. Change now comes so strong and fast that it pulls apart even those who wish to hang together–and the future belongs to the strong of thumb.
But we miss the point, warns social historian Neil Howe, if we weigh only how technology shapes a generation and not the other way around. The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance? They are the most likely of any generation to think technology unites people rather than isolates them, that it is primarily a means of connection, not competition.
Importantly for my argument, the Millennials aren’t radically against church as such. As research suggests, in many ways the Millennials are fairly conservative in their values. As Gibbs notes:
…in some respects the millennials emerge as radically conventional. Asked about their life goals, 52% say being a good parent is most important to them, followed by having a successful marriage; 59% think that the trend of more single women having children is bad for society. While more tolerant than older generations, they are still more likely to disapprove of than support the trend of unmarried couples living together.
Further, Millennials appear to be less cynical than Boomers and Gen X:
In any age, young folk tend to be more cheerful than old folk, but the hope gap has never been greater than it is now. Despite two wars and a nasty recession that has hit young people hardest, the Pew survey found that 41% of millennials are satisfied with how things are going, compared with 26% of older people. Less than a third of those with jobs earn enough to lead the kind of life they want–but 88% are confident that they will one day.
And yet, despite their optimism, conventional outlook, and robust interest in faith the Millennials are moving away from church:
[Millennials] are, for example, the least officially religious of any modern generation, and fully 1 in 4 has no religious affiliation at all. On the other hand, they are just as spiritual, just as likely to believe in miracles and hell and angels as earlier generations were. They pray about as much as their elders did when they were young–all of which suggests that they have not lost faith in God, only in the institutions that claim to speak for him.
How do you explain these trends? If Millennials are optimistic, conservative and religious why would they leave the church? It can’t be due their liberalism, cynicism, or irreligiosity. So what is it? My argument hits on what Gibbs notes as the defining characteristic of this generation: mobile social computing. One of the key attractions of the church in past generations–social connection–has been effectively replaced.
Again, Facebook killed the church.
No related posts.
