America and Babel

Welcome to any new subscribers! In this newsletter I share a few things that I think provide a taste of truth, goodness, or beauty. Sharing something doesn't mean I agree with it, just that I think it's worth some of your attention. I love to learn from quite disparate sources, and I'm sure that will come across in what I share. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

boy wearing gray vest and pink dress shirt holding book

This should be encouraging for Christians: a non-Christian writer on the importance of reading the Bible.

Even if the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, the majority of highly educated people today, especially in major cities, aren’t familiar with it. Instead, they spend their time with contemporary writing that has a fraction of the depth you’ll find in the Old and New Testaments.

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

Jonathan Haidt sees the story of Babel as an image that speaks to the fracturing of American society over the last decade. As I've shared before, Haidt is an apt observer of the effects of social media on indiviudals and society.

In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”

In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.

four filled wine glasses and foods on table

Like with Christmas, our culture moves on quickly from Easter. My daughter said to me yesterday, “My teacher said it’s not Easter anymore.” But for Christians, we’re still at the beginning of Eastertide—a 50 day season of feasting! So continue to rejoice in the resurrection with rich food and wine. Relish in that which you have fasted from during Lent. And praise God for opening the gate of everlasting life.

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in the fullness of his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Alan Jacobs offers “a theory of why we’re all going nuts online”:

On January 6, 2021, Samuel Camargo posted a video on Instagram showing him struggling to break through a police barrier to get into the U.S. Capitol building. The next day he wrote on Facebook: “I’m sorry to all the people I’ve disappointed as this is not who I am nor what I stand for.”

A month after the riot, Jacob Chansley, the man widely known as the QAnon Shaman, wrote a letter from his jail cell in Virginia asking Americans to “be patient with me and other peaceful people who, like me, are having a very difficult time piecing together all that happened to us, around us, and by us.”

“This is not who I am,” “all that happened … by us” — it is commonplace to hear such statements as mere evasions of responsibility, and often they are. But what if they reflect genuine puzzlement, genuine difficulty understanding one’s behavior or even seeing it as one’s own, a genuine feeling of being driven, compelled, by something other than one’s own will?

Several accounts of the spread of ideas jostle against one another in our moment: Richard Dawkins’s notion of “memes” — ideas spreading by replication — competes with notions of “virality” and of “social contagion.” There is information theory and disease theory. I prefer demon theory.

In symbolic terms, then, the text of chs. 18–21 does not simply describe a journey into Jerusalem’s courtyard; it describes a journey into Jerusalem’s Temple, where Jesus is to be sacrificed. Jesus’ death is thus framed as an act of atonement, and, like all acts of atonement, its purpose is to avert divine wrath (e.g., Num. 11.33 w. 16.46–50, Psa. 78.38, etc.). Chs. 18’s events are not set in the middle of the day; they are set against the dark skies of the Passover—the night when YHWH long ago unleashed his wrath against Egypt and only those houses where a lamb had been slain were ‘passed over’. In the same way, God’s wrath will be expended on the Lamb of God rather than on his people.

A reflection on The Theology of John’s Passion from James Bejon.

God bless,

Ralph

Want to support this work?

Become a Patron

Buy Me a Coffee

Ralph Roberts

America and Babel

In case you missed it...

The Real Reason Jesus Turned Water Into Wine

Want to support this work?

The Futility and Necessity of Building The Modern University

Christianity and Corn Flakes

Eating Meat, Technology, and Being Human