"If One Member Suffers..."

How the body of Christ can bear one another's burdens in a technological age

Last week in Franklin, TN, I had the great pleasure of addressing a room full of bright, thoughtful young people on the Faustian bargain of technology in modern life. During the Q&A, one New College professor asked me to expound on the moral complexities of IVF. In my meandering, long-winded way, I highlighted the need to recover a theology and practice of patient suffering if we are to ask childless couples to resist the temptation for a technological quick fix to their travails. A student immediately asked a follow-up: “How can the body of Christ be part of that journey of suffering?” That is exactly the question to be asking.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes, “if one member suffers, all suffer together.” But is this true for us anymore? Not at most churches, I’d wager. At your typical evangelical megachurch, people who are suffering are more likely than not just to fly under or fall off the radar. If they suffer a health breakdown or a marriage crisis or a spiritual struggle and just stop coming to church altogether, they’re liable to disappear with barely a ripple. A few acquaintances might ask, “Have you seen Dan and Pam lately?” Others will shrug their shoulders, and that will be the end of it. In a smaller church, they may be lucky enough to end up on the prayer list if their trial is the sort you’re allowed to share publicly, but even then, sparing a few minutes of sympathy for them each week isn’t quite what Paul meant by “suffering together.”

Nowhere is the calling to be the body of Christ more essential than when it comes to children. Hillary Clinton may have forever ruined the maxim “it takes a village to raise a child” for us, but she wasn’t wrong. Traditional churches, like my own, seek to give visible effect to this maxim through the practice of godparents, who stand in for the entire congregation at an infant baptism, signifying that by coming into the church, the new child gains hundreds of new “parents,” and each member of the congregation gains a new son or daughter, brother or sister. One of the many reasons that birth rates keep falling today is that parents feel saddled with the full burden of raising children themselves, something God never intended. The entire body of Christ is meant to suffer and rejoice together alongside the parents in the trials and triumphs of child-rearing.

And there is a flip-side to this. By sharing the burden of child-rearing with the rest of the body, we also share the gift of children even with the childless. Within a properly-functioning church, no couple is truly barren; they are called to share in the rich harvest of children that the congregation bears, serving as honorary aunts and uncles within the family of faith. By this means, we “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).

Of course, this is only part of the picture. Those desperate for children of their own may take some comfort in sharing in the lives of other families, but the pain will remain, and with it the calling to patient suffering if we do not believe IVF is an appropriate remedy. The body of Christ cannot afford to be glib in the face of such pain, but must call on each of its members to model patience in their own lives—including in how each of us relate to technology. As I wrote in my American Compass essay,  

“Patience comes from the Latin meaning ‘to suffer’: suffering the imperfection of the world, the consequences of our own choices, and the frustrated longing for a quick fix. It preaches an unpopular creed of incrementalism and waiting….Instant gratification has become almost the only kind of gratification we can imagine, and the suffering of patience the most unbearable form of suffering.”

If our default posture is to unthinkingly embrace every technology that promises us greater convenience and less waiting, how can we plausibly ask those burdened with the profound suffering of childlessness to just wait indefinitely, rather than availing themselves of a technological escape?

If the body of Christ is to honor its weaker members (1 Cor. 11:21-26), it must consider what this means for its relationship to technology. At one national conference I spoke at last year, the perils of technology were a theme in several of the talks. During the Q&A, a courageous young man came forward to the microphone and explained how he had felt compelled to discard his smartphone for his spiritual health, and asked why the church itself, rather than supporting young people like him in that, had made such technology normative, moving to QR-code bulletins and app-based church participation (the conference organizers themselves shuffled uncomfortably in their seats, having exhorted attendees to respond to polls and ask questions by app).

Although the young man did not say so, one guesses that he, like many of his generation, struggled with pornography addiction. How strange would it be if, in churches full of alcoholics and recovering alcoholics, we expected every member to carry a flask of liquor in their pockets, and to take it out and open it at regular intervals to participate in congregational life? And yet this is precisely how our churches today conduct themselves when it comes to technology. We know that millions in our midst are suffering deeply from such devices, but rather than the whole body suffering together with them, we ask them to suffer silently and privately alone—offering them pastoral counseling perhaps if they are courageous enough to ask for it, but never thinking that we, as the whole body, might not need to change our behaviors to bear their burdens together with them.

Thankfully, there are signs that the body of Christ is at last waking up to this challenge. I was deeply encouraged to see the recent launch of the Hang Ten Movement by my friend Justin Whitmel Earley. Offering “a set of ten technology practices for communities of Christians who want to receive the gifts of technology while fighting against its evils,” Hang Ten calls on the church to lead the way in offering the next generation a healthier relationship to technology than we ourselves have modeled thus far. Do check out their website, which is going to be adding a ton of new resources soon, and add a comment below if you have thoughts on how the body of Christ can learn to suffer together the trials and temptations of our technological age.

Newly Published

• “Freedom, Tradition, and the Digital Age” (Conservative Conversations with ISI): I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom Sarrouf of ISI about my new article on technology and the plight of social conservatism, “iThink Therefore iAm.” It was a fantastic hour-long conversation that gave me the opportunity to lay out my case for how our relationship with technology is rendering basic conservative commitments unintelligible, and to lay out some key building blocks of a conservative tech policy agenda.

• “Not So Smart After All” (WORLD Opinions): In an age of information overload, AI is being sold as another technological solution to technologically-induced epistemic chaos. I may no longer be able to sort fact from fiction, but ChatGPT can. Or can it? In fact, AI bots are helping entrench our turn from a correspondence theory of truth to a coherence theory—where what matters is simply whether something “feels true” and reinforces existing narratives.

• “How to Think About Politics”: The full audio, including Q&A, of the first unit of my course on faithfulness as Christian citizens for Holy Trinity Church Raleigh, was posted last week! The other three units should appear weekly at this link.

Coming down the Pipe

• “Technology and Freedom: The Faustian Bargain of Modern Life”: As mentioned above, I was privileged to deliver the Collegium Lecture at New College Franklin last Thursday, presenting my chapter on technology from my forthcoming book Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. In a delicious irony, our bargain with technology failed, the internet went down, and the livestream did not air. But I’m told the video was captured and will be posted soon. Stay tuned for that link!

• Faithful Citizenship in a Fractured World:

  • I had an absolute blast teaching this course last weekend at St. Andrews Church in Mt. Pleasant, SC! Could not have asked for a more attentive, earnest, thoughtful audience of faithful laypeople. Whole thing was captured in a high-quality video recording, including a 15-minute segment where I have to remove my left-eye contact and gesticulate with it held between my fingers for the rest of the lecture, because I forgot to pack contact fluid. Will post link as soon as it’s live at the Ridley Institute.

  • I’ll be teaching a slightly-condensed version of the course at City Church of Richmond (PCA), September 20-21. Register here.

  • I’ll be teaching a very-condensed version of the course at Christ the King Alexandria (ACNA), October 20.

• I have articles appearing in the upcoming issues of Ad Fontes, Mere Orthodoxy, and National Affairs later this month. Subscribe to the print editions to be among the first to read them!

On the Bookshelf

• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (2009): Two different readers of this Substack have recommended this book to me over the last month, so I decided to make it my next Audible listen (whenever I need a break from the increasingly depressing Sleepwalkers, that is). In this book, McGilchrist argues that the subtle but important differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain lead to different ways of interpreting and framing reality, with profound implications for cultural development. An inversion of the left brain from servant to master has led to the cultural and intellectual impoverishment of the modern age. Sounds like kooky pop psychology mixed with kooky grand narrative historiography, right? That was my first thought too, but it’s clear already a couple hours in that this is a book worth thoughtfully reckoning with.

• D.C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (2017): Tough sledding in places, but very rewarding thus far. For anyone who feels like Patrick Deneen is onto something in his Why Liberalism Failed, but finds it frustratingly vague and broad-brush, this is the book to read.

• Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012): Human beings have a tendency “to assign normative authority to actually-existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, [Jellinek] argues, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists, to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal, and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things. Something broadly analogous happens when we contemplate historical events, especially catastrophic ones like the First World War. Once they occur, they impose on us, or seem to do so, a sense of their necessity.”

• Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023): Finished. Wow, what a ride. Unquestionably one of the most profound and important books I’ve read over the past decade. I underlined significant chunks of every page and will be going back through over the coming weeks to take extensive notes in preparation for a review essay in American Affairs.

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869): It’s not you, Tolstoy, it’s me. You deserve more faithful readers.

Recommended Reads

• “The Way Forward After Dobbs” (Ryan T. Anderson, First Things): Really just one recommended read for this week. An essential, hard-hitting, must-read essay. A few choice quotes:

  “It seems that most Americans, even some who consider themselves pro-life, support four exceptions: rape, incest, life of the mother, and . . . ‘my case.’ Or ‘my daughter’s case,’ or ‘my girlfriend’s case.’ For nearly fifty years, the American people have built their lives around the ready availability of abortion.”

  “So long as nonmarital sex is expected, large numbers of Americans will view abortion as necessary emergency contraception. So long as marriage rates are declining and marriage age is delayed—but the human sex drive persists—abortion rates will remain high. Our primary task isn’t to persuade people of the humanity of the unborn—anyone who has ever seen an ultrasound knows all about that—but to change how people lead their sexual lives."

  "We talk about politics, but we don’t actually do politics. There’s a Club for Growth, but there is not a Club for Virtue. The NRA can whip members into voting to protect gun rights, but nothing comparable to the NRA exists for pro-family policy. Pro-lifers need to engage more, not less, in politics."

  "If the real root causes of abortion are the sexual practices in which Americans have been habituated for generations, then post-Roe America needs institutions to combat the sexual revolution with the same sophistication that the conservative legal movement brought to overturning Roe."

• “I Love the Kids in My Life. And I’m Raising None of Them” (Glynnis MacNicol, NYTimes): This essay is recommended in a very different sense; it’s hard to take quite seriously, but interesting to reflect on in light of the theme of today’s Substack, and in light of Ryan Anderson’s article. In this op-ed, feminist author Glynnis MacNicol argued that the discourse of “childless cat ladies” missed the reality that many childless people are deeply invested in the lives of other people’s children: “Rarely do we talk about the pleasure of these little people, or how transformative it is to have children in your life whom you’re not raising.” Of course, this would have rung rather less hollow if the author had not proudly proclaimed childlessness as a choice or just written a best-selling memoir about her stint of no-strings-attached sex in Paris, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. It is hard not to feel that MacNicol wants the perks of having kids around without the commitment. But she still grasps something important about the communal dimension of child-rearing discussed above.

Get Involved

If you like this Substack, please spread the word with others. For now, this Substack will be totally free, but if you like the work I’m doing, please consider donating to it here by supporting EPPC and mentioning my name in the Comments.

If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.