Truth be told, I am not prone to flashbacks — even though I did come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Anyway, I had a big flashback recently while reading a very interesting New York Times feature that ran with this headline: “Facebook’s Next Target: The Religious Experience.” In this case, the subhead is also crucial: “The company is intensifying formal partnerships with faith groups across the United States and shaping the future of religious experience.”
Whoa. What does “shaping the future of religious experience” mean? I imagine that to learn details, readers would have to hear from some of the participants in this trailblazing online work. But there’s a problem with that. When asked about some specifics, an official with the Atlanta branch of the trendy Hillsong Church couldn’t answer, because “he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Anyway, here’s the passage the stirred up lots of conversation, and my multi-decade flashback, during the recording of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).
A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users, and that nondisclosure agreements were standard process for all partners involved in product development.
Many of Facebook’s partnerships involve asking religious organizations to test or brainstorm new products, and those groups seem undeterred by Facebook’s larger controversies. This year Facebook tested a prayer feature, where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can respond. The creator of YouVersion, the popular Bible app, worked with the company to test it.
Now, combine that mind-spinning information with this passage, which very gently raises the issue that millions of Americans — on the cultural right and left — are convinced that the Facebook gods have lost control of much of the information that is located on their platform:
The company’s effort to court faith groups comes as it is trying to repair its image among Americans who have lost confidence in the platform, especially on issues of privacy. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the country’s growing disinformation crisis and breakdown of societal trust, especially around politics, and regulators have grown concerned about its outsize power.
This brings me to my flashback to a graduate-school class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign that changed my life.
The year was 1981 and I was privileged to take a seminary on the history of mass communications technology with the late, great mass communications professor James W. Carey, who was dean of the Illinois School of Communication at that time. The emphasis was on the impact of the printing press (especially on the Protestant Reformation), but that case study was used as a template for discussing other forms of technology — including the massive digital networks, and early programs used to “browse” on them, that were being developed on that very campus back in those days (consider this earlier salute from Hollywood).
The mantra of the class was one I’ve quoted many times on this weblog: “Technology shapes content.”
In other words, the actual form of a communications technology being used has a way of influencing the look, shape and content of the information communicated on it, for better and for worse. Some forms of media are better than others, for example, in communicating accurate, in-depth information. Some are better at quick and easy rumors. Others are better at story and emotion. Some are easy to twist and hack, when it comes to abusing them.
During the class, I read a long piece in The New Yorker about a man who was beginning to emerge as a leader in evangelical Protestantism — the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The headline on that 1981 “A Reporter At Large” feature was this: “A Disciplined, Charging Army.”
Falwell was a master of niche radio and television, of course. But that feature included this passage that captured my imagination, as I worked on a term paper that, if I remember correctly, I called: “The Digital Tent Revival.”
… Even in fiscal 1979 it cost Falwell only nine million dollars a year to broadcast his daily radio and weekly television programs all over the country. In addition, new computer technology (or the new availability of it) permitted independent evangelists to establish sophisticated “feedback loops” through telephone banks and direct-mail services with “personalized” letters and solicitations. These feedback loops were, in a sense, the key to the evangelists’ operations, for it took relatively few people giving ten or twenty dollars a month to keep the programs on the air.
This led to some sophisticated efforts to make sure that the right listeners received the right kinds of fundraising letters — with contents sure to punch the right buttons in their hearts, minds and souls.
Let’s keep reading. By this point, you may have started to see why I connected these concerns with the Facebook efforts to “help” churches do a better job of reaching the faithful:
Since 1973, [Falwell] has employed an advertising agency and a Massachusetts computer-consulting firm called Epsilon Data Management, both of which have what they call “inputs on the creative side.” The main job of Epsilon Data Management is to help coördinate the mailings. Through this firm, Falwell can make appeals to a variety of different constituencies with a series of computer-printed letters appropriate to each. One set of appeals, for example, stresses patriotism, another missionary work, another the menace of pornography and homosexuality.
The more I read — including material about the work of other broadcasters, such as Jim and Tammy Bakker — the more I began to ask this question: What would happen if there was no wall of privacy between the fundraising professionals and the people running the telephone prayer lines? In other research, I saw that it was more than possible to take the contents of callers’ ultra-private prayer concerns and use them to fine-tune the contents of the “computer-printed letters appropriate to each” that came from the ministry.
Let’s say someone calls and tells the telephone counselor that his or her daughter has run away from home and veered into drug culture. In a traditional counseling session this would be ultra-privileged information, something that a pastor or priest, for example, could not be required to discuss in a courtroom.
But if there are no digital walls separating one part of a computer network from another, it would be easy to take that information and turn it into a fundraising appeal to specific parents asking them to help fund a ministry’s new project to help redeem runaways who are hooked on drugs.
That was a computer privacy issue in the early 1980s. Can you imagine the moral, ethical and even legal issues that could emerge from full-blown partnerships between religious congregations and Facebook?
Remember this piece of an earlier quotation?
This year Facebook tested a prayer feature, where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can respond. The creator of YouVersion, the popular Bible app, worked with the company to test it.
OK, I will end with one other summary quotation from this must-read New York Times piece, which is quite solid, especially considering the questions that reporter Elizabeth Dias appears to have asked, but people could not answer them because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
Virtual religious life is not replacing in-person community anytime soon, and even supporters acknowledge the limits of an exclusively online experience. But many religious groups see new opportunity to spiritually influence even more people on Facebook, the world’s largest and arguably most influential social media company.
The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life.
I’ll say it again: Whoa.
What kind of impact has Facebook had on American political life? Think about that for a minute. Now think about the potential impact on life in religious congregations and other forms of ministry.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
FIRST IMAGE: A graphic used in the Universal Life Church Monastery feature entitled: “Is Facebook the New World Religion?”
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