The Digital Paradox: Why More Connection is Making Us More Alone 📱📉

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian Podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. He called to make a difference in mental health. Columbia International University offers graduate counseling degrees that combine professional excellence with Biblical truth from associates. Through doctoral program, CiU prepares you to bring healing and wholeness to others through a biblically based framework of compassion and care. Whether it's their k CREP accredited Masters in Clinical Counseling or their PhD in counselor Education and Supervision, You'll learn from experience faculty who integrate faith with real world application to cultivate a Kingdom impact through disciples who counsel, teach, and train. Whether you're starting your journey or advancing your career, CiU's counseling programs equip you to serve others both professionally and spiritually. Visit CiU dot edu to learn more about making a difference in mental health through christ centered education. That's CiU dot edu. Hey everyone, welcome back to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again by doctor med Matthew. He is a professor of counselor education at Columbia International University, and we're going to be talking continuing our conversation about faith and mental help, and we're going to talk about going to introduce the idea of a stool here, a three legged stool, and we're going to talk about the social leg today. There's two other legs, the existential leg and the embodied leg. So the social leg really refers to what's going on around us. The existential leg is more like what do we how do we understand what's going on around us sort of this world of symbolic meaning. And then the embodied leg is how how are we actually physically present within the realm of reality in which we exist. So those are the three legs in the stool, and we're going to focus in on the social leg this time. We got into this a little bit in the previous episode, but I think there's definitely more to be said. So when we think about society, we've come out of some really challenging social spaces at this point, and I, well, it's simple to start with COVID. I'll go back one more step. Uh, maybe three or four more steps I remember, uh. And this will be an odd reference. But the first time I ever watched Born on the fourth of July, Tom Cruise, you're movie, yeah, Oliver.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So he's a Vietnam vet that comes back from Vietnam, and you just watch how he's this you know, sort of happy go lucky high school kid who joins the military, ends up getting his legs blown off in Vietnam War, and then comes back and has just a host of problems coming back into society, and you watch how the various people within the society sort of shun him. It's not just about his legs, it's about how society is viewing the people who are coming back from the war. And he has this terrible time just coming back having seen what he's seen and then experiencing what he's experiencing, and it creates this like Vortex that he has a lot of trouble getting out of right. It's I just remember visibly watching that movie and going, wow, that's really difficult. Like what else was this guy supposed to do? Is almost what I left the movie with. And then as you watch some of these other social things going on, we could look at nine to eleven, we could look at COVID, we could look, you know, some of the bigger catastrophes within our society, as well as just some of the technological changes, which I'm sure we'll get into. We can begin to understand and get a picture. Sure, I think through some of those movies right when you sit back and you're like, oh, I get it, society actually does have an effect on our mental sciety and where we are, how we see the world, because it can start to feel like it's all against you. Yeah, so I'll leave it there and let you comment.

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Speaker 2: Then yeah, yeah, I'll take your bar on the furth of July and I'll raise you a Truman Show, because that's whats go through my head as you were saying that, as another movie that I think exemplified exactly what you were talking about, Like and in that context, he has a society, right. He has neighbors, Hey, good morning, good to see. He has a job place, he has family as a wife, he has coworkers, he has all of these things that you would say are needed for human flourishing.

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Speaker 3: And yet something's about, right.

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Speaker 2: Like there's a knowledge that there's this is not the way it's supposed to be. And it was such a powerful film to highlight that we can we can create all the models but not have all the essentials of what we need for human flourishing, right, And there's something about that that I think. I mean, that movie was in itself, both those movies around decades ago, and you look at them now in light of the current contexts that we're in. Yeah, wow, there are somewhat prophetic in terms of some of the things that they were talking about then. And what we're experiencing now is continued isolation in the midst of all of this technology, in the midst of all this community. We're not isolated in that sense, but we're more isolated than we ever have been. And how we've really distorted the ideas of what community means and the implications of that are coming to bear, right. The reaping is coming to bear in light of, at least within my area of mental health, what we're seeing in terms of the rise of anxiety and depression, and I think what we're seeing societ idoly as well, and just the loss of meaning and hope. What we were talking about about in our last episode is that it's not just affecting individual flourishing, it's it's affecting societal flourishing as well.

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Speaker 1: So what is you know? I read Bowling Alone here recently, kind of as we were prepping for these episodes. I've I've always found a book compelling, so I went back to it and just reread it. I reread some of Stanley Hauerwaff's stuff, which he does sort of a narrative based ethic kind of idea, And what what I got out of both of those was just being social, right, having a narrative with other people, a shared understanding of how the world works in a sense that you're in it together. Whatever that together means. It mayn't even have to mean, like, you know, in the same way that I'm in life together with my wife, right, it doesn't have to mean that, right, but it means, you know, maybe we're going to decompress over, you know, you know, go out and golf and we're going to decompress together, right, Like it can be that sort of in it together kind of feel. But it just seems like what you see in the social realm is that you have to have pockets of people who are resonating with you about what's wrong in the world and willing to sort of have a little bit of a gripe session with you. You've also got to have people who are challenging your perspective of the world and saying it's not as bad as you're making it out to be, or it's bad in a different way than you're making it out to be, right, sort of shift your perspective. And then you have to have these folks who are just sort of there, not necessarily providing you with answers, but there to get you through whatever problem comes, whether that's just through being with you or silent or what have you. And so, yeah, as I was reading through that literature and some of the other things, those are the three big categories I came up with sort of the buddy right, yeah, just agree with almost everything you say. It's going to be the perception challenger. And then it's going to be just that sort of central comfort.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: And and interestingly enough, what we do really well in our especially in our technological constructs, because we do the buddy really well, Buddy really well. The buddy is there for you in a heartbeat, right, I mean, the algorithms they know how to work well, and they find us the communities that validate our gripes give us more of a platform to then talk about.

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Speaker 3: Our own gripes.

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Speaker 2: And it just it's the feedback loop, right, And we know that's that's exactly why it works, is because the it's not a free service, that the commodity of our attention is what they're seeking to engage with, right, And it works, and we get that little dopamine hit when we see that little rage bait cantinued to move. The buddy is there, present and all so supportive. It's the others that critique that comforter that I don't have space for. I don't have room for. I don't really want to hear their voice because it just feels good just to be enraged over the ills of society. And we know that's on every side of the political social spectrum, whatever the issue is, and that that's part of I mean, we've talked about this before with someone like Jonathan Height's research. We have essentially raised a whole generation in doing this right. When the rise of both smartphones and social media came, we did two things to our kids. We said, one, we need to keep you safe from the outside. You know, stranger danger, White vans and are looking to give candy to kids like we got to keep you. Even though the research is very clear there's no such thing as stranger danger.

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Speaker 3: The idea of.

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Speaker 2: Kids being kidnapped was more of a publicity on milk cartons than anything else. Say what didn't happen? It did, but the actuality of it happening statistically was so so much less than the reality. So we took kids away from outside, from free play, from engagement with others, those other critiques, those other comforters that are so needed, And we gave them this device and said you have no limits on this. So we're gonna limit you from the outside and we're not gonna give you any limits on this device. And I love your analogia because it removed those critiques, those friends of mine that said, Ben, that's dumb, what are you doing it idiot. Don't don't do that. Like, those are good buddies, friends that I need in my life. And I just kind of developed a whole system, and we've raised the generation that is, as Jonathan hed set, is now the most anxious generation ever. And as we know in research, he's not just making correlational arguments, he's making causal links. Yes, that the decrease of outside engagement and community engagement and the increase of utilization of social media through smartphones has only had a causal effect in terms of the most anxious generation we've ever seen in our society today.

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Speaker 1: I haven't seen a ton of research on this, but I would say two things. Number One, I like Jonathan HiT's research. I think he's really right about something, or at least onto something when it comes to those things. But I wonder if there's a step before it that we haven't really looked at enough, which is the ability to distance ourselves. So again, you know, I sort of think back to my life in a small town, right, and maybe growing up in a city this would be totally different. But in a small town, you know, I grew up in the same church and we would never really have thought about switching churches. You just stayed in that church and it didn't matter who you were having problems with, because dang it, you were Lutheran Church Missouri, syented, and this is the one in town, and that's the one you're going to. Like, you're not going to drive thirty miles to the next church over in another town. You're just not going to do that. And so you you learn to deal with what you have and whatever other problems that emerges. Is not an ideal. I'm not painting in utopia here, right. You know, whatever gossip and backbiting and all that kind of stuff happens, you're ultimately dealing with it. And when someone needs help, you're not celebrating it, right like, oh, finally they got their comeuppins. Right Like, even if you say that, you also go over to their house and help them.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, right, right.

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Speaker 1: There's a deeper community element, whereas now it feels like we not only have the Internet, which allows us to interact with whoever we want, but we've also decoupled ourselves from who we interact with on a more or less regular basis. It's an effort to stay in one place because if you don't like something, you can just roll. And it's very easy for us to you that nobody because in part, I think, because nobody expects you to stay. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And the commercialization right of our communities, if not church, just in general, that works well if I if I go to a restaurant, I get bad service, I get a bad mail, I'm taking my business elsewhere. I think I have every right and responsibility to, as it were, support a capitalistic model. I want the I want the good businesses to earn my dollars.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: But when we kind of transfer that mindset over into something like church life, I really didn't like that sermon. You know music, you know it's not doing it for me, Or I have an issue with this person, I'll just go to the next church down the street. I'll find a church that kind of just settles with my own commodification of what I want.

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Speaker 3: Man. That that works really well with restaurants, not so great with churches.

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Speaker 1: Well there, it just feels like to me, there's a way we denormalize a lot of these things in our lives. So when my wife and I were looking for a house, we were moved down to a follon Alois. We're looking for a house. We went to one of these. It's like a subdivision. I don't know what they'd call it, you know, but they have like your house, and then there's a community gym and there's usually a church in the subdivision, and there's like a store, and there's a little market area. And the whole time I'm sitting there thinking this is some sort of weird cult, right, like what is happening? I don't understand that's why we have all of this stuff here, like like it feels so insular, it feels so you know. I mean, those are the things that were going through my head right now. There were a lot of reasons we didn't move there, none of which had to do with me feeling like it was a cult. And ultimately I was thinking to myself, it's probably not a cult, Like it's recapturing something that's been lost, an attempt to recapture something that's been lost, And I didn't I feel like it's weird now, yeah, like.

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Speaker 2: Right, and we've so normalized it in a way that it's have to go back.

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Speaker 3: To it is like what are these people doing?

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Speaker 1: Right? Like why you want me to interact with my neighbors are supposed to just live in the house, like, right, I don't understand what's happening.

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Speaker 3: No, I fully.

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Speaker 2: I mean that the first house my wife and I got, our our drive our driveway went to the garage in the back, and none of our neighbors had fences because one of those old neighborhoods old houses, Yeah.

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Speaker 3: And none of them had fences.

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Speaker 2: And so every time I came home, I I actually had to see my neighbors before I saw my wife and kids. Yeah, And I remember thinking, like, I'll be honest, that was not intentional on my part. I'd love to say I was some super spiritual person like, oh well, connect with my now, but God impressed upon me, don't waste this opportunity that when I would drive up, I'd see Tom on his back porch, I see, I'd see Miss Connelly over on the side.

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Speaker 3: I'd see Jamie, mister Jamie.

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Speaker 2: And his family over in the other neighborhood, and I'd have to engage with them before I just kind of closed the garage door. I mean it was even a detached garage, so I literally had to like outside, That's just not a reality for most of our neighborhood. It's weird to be able to connect with others. But it's in those communities where and I think this is the myth, maybe particularly to this issue we were talking about before. My identity is not just individually constructed.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 2: We'd like to think I'm my own man, I make my own story, and that's a very maybe enlightened way of thinking, right, the individualistic ability to kind of define myself. But it's identity is is is not just invented internally. It's invented communally and ultimately from God in the context of community, right the imago day. And what that means, I think is so implicated to the to the triune God himself. A God who is community creates humans who of necessity must be in community. The one thing that's not good that man should be alone before the fall, right, And how that then is is a reflection of the communal God is a desire of man that the further we get away from that, actually, I think the further we get away from identity and meaning and purpose, which contributes then to this loss of hope and despair.

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Speaker 3: That we were talking about before.

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Speaker 1: Right. It's it's a good point, I mean, because I think even in an even in a society that highlights self sufficiency, that encourages you to you know, quote unquote be your own man or develop your own personal identity kind of idea. You're always doing that within whether that those structures are more active or more passive, great point, you're always doing it within a context. It's never divorced from what's going on around you in society and culture. And so if I want to be a you know, a hermit and live in my basement and just do zoom meetings and never interact with the outside world, I can do that. But I can only do that because there's somebody out there who's created these platforms that are keeping them up. And so what we tend to forget. I think maybe this is maybe this is one of those differences. You know. I always go back to the little House on the Prairie because I just think it illustrates like community really well. You know, like you're you're sort of dependent on your neighbors for help, Like everybody tends to pitch in and you're not going anywhere, right. Travel is hard, right, so it's not cool, it's not fun to travel. So you're just kind of there with these people, and it doesn't matter whether they're good, bad, ugly, and it doesn't matter. Like, these are your people, right, and there's a you know, you know who's milling the wood, you know who's selling the goods of the mercantile. You know who's going to come out and deliver your baby. Like you know these people, they have faces, they have bodies, like you interact with them. This is your society. When we move into a technological world, those people don't go away. Yeah, they're just distance. They're like a step back mediated and then they become essentially anonymous, Like we're on the riverside right now, you know, unless I trust the website and the wonderful guy that pops up to represent wiver Riverside on the front page. You know, I've never met him. I'm sure he's a wonderful guy. Do I know that he's the one who did all the coding? I don't. Yeah, right, he's These people are anonymous to us, but they're not gone. Yeah, And I think that distance creates a different sort of perception that we can form our identities alone, when the reality is we just simply can't.

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Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's such a good way of saying the perception, right, even though we've become and I think we're going to talk more about this disembodied. The actual physicality of community is part of the importance of community. I can't do that with everyone, And again to underground, thankful that I can have connection with people even when the physicality.

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Speaker 3: Is not there. Right.

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Speaker 2: I remember as a little kid my parents yelling into the phone to make calls to India because they'd have to yell on there and for it to be even hurt as a whisper on their other end. Comparatively to now, my mom picked up her phone and with the press of one button gets high definition four K video of her sister in Malaysia right at any time.

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Speaker 3: It's incredible. I'm so famble.

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Speaker 2: So we're not light heights in thinking that technology is this evil thing that we need to do away with, and yet we also I love the way that you said it creates this perception, this mindset that that we we are individualistic, that because I can't interact with that other person in the totality of who they are, I can see, I can hear you, but not having the physical presence that I think is so part again of what it means to be communally engaged with each other. It's not only do I derive that meaning, but meaning is also that that that dignity of the amalgamay needs recognition, it needs support from the community that is socially affirmed. That it's it's useful, it's respected, it's necessary. That's not impossible in a technological construct, but it's done better in a physical, embodied context. And so I don't want to get rid of this, but I that needs to be the This needs to be the norm. The physical needs to be the norm, not this.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I also think that you bring up a good point about the dignity. One of the things that I find interesting about the dignity of being made in God's image is that number one, it's it's often referenced, like I can remember, just even as far back as Joe Biden referenced, you know, people being made in the image of God, right, And so when we but usually when we reference it, what we're really talking about is in a non religious context, politically and socially, when we reference the dignity that is inherent in the image of God, what we're really saying most of the time is hey live and let live, right, Like this person is deserving of making their own choices, and you should leave them alone so they can do so. Yeah, we've we've individualized, we've adamized of that dignity, right, And I think what we haven't done. The flip side, which I think connects with some of the things that Jonathan Height is talking about, is that for Christians, when we read the Bible and we see that we're made in the image of God, we're not just seeing dignity. We're also seeing obligation. In other words, there's a way for us to dignify others right or strip them of their dignity, and there's a way for us to dignify ourselves and strip ourselves of that dignity. And so it sort of works in this two way fashion. And so when we think about the identity within society, we're in this constant negotiation of when is society trying to strip me of my dignity by affirming it right and saying do whatever you want to do, you be, you go go in your best life whatever it is right and giving no other guidance other than just go live your best life right. Personal office in autonomy, yeah exactly, versus you know, sort of what we often think of is this sort of more oppressive, you know, authoritarianism that says, in order to live your best life, you must boom boom boom boom.

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Speaker 3: Right.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: And it seems to me that it is somewhere here in the middle that we that we come to grips with that that our dignity is expressed best within a set of constraints I believe. I mean, I would say, I know those beliefs come out of scripture, right, and so within that set of constraints, that's where our best life is lived, if we want to phrase it that way. But those are the constraints that we need. It can't just be this sort of openness to say, James become whoever you would like to become, because that's not gonna go well for me.

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Speaker 2: No, And that's such a great point that to the to the has d A. Carson talk about the intolerance of tolerance? Right, The one thing you can't do today is tell anyone that they're wrong.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 2: Tolerance used to mean I disagree with your point, but we're gonna live in harmony with each other. That's not what tolerance means anymore. Tolerance now means you must accept dissenting opinions and to do let's then that labels you as whatever phobia you want to attach to that accordingly, and we in a postmodern epistemology, we've so transformed that that sense of dignity of self right individuality becomes the priority. And yet the whole whole idea is that again, I have to have a community that helps both affirm the good but also challenges those areas that I need to be challenged, that that my own status recognition in of myselfs is faulty. They're called my blind spots because I'm blind to them, right, which is why I need others. I was mentioning this to one of my classes. The other we were looking through Ephesians chapter six. This great passion I remember as a kid, right, the the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteous.

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Speaker 3: As a little kid, we have like all the pieces we'd put on. We're like, yeah, we're gonna fight.

00:25:53
Speaker 2: Right exactly exactly, and obviously there's much to be said about that. And I made reference how I tried to remind the students, Okay, now who's this written to? And someone you could see one of my students like, oh, it's written to the church at Ephesus. It's not written to Fred or Sally at Ephesus. It's written to the church. And the only way that the Armor of God works is if it's done in community. That's not what I grew up with in Sunday school. God blessed my son's school teacher. But I was always told it was such an individualistic fight against the powers of darkness.

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Speaker 3: I'm part of it.

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Speaker 2: But it only works if I mean, even the imagery that Paul is probably pulling from in the ancient earies, the Roman cohorts right of the shields locking together the side and above, it only works when you're with others. To see them just happened just last Thursday, to see them go, oh, we fight together, to hear them articulate that that system that is needed for us to engage in the battle, because you're right, we do live within constraints. I think that's part of Paul's argument. And Ephesians is what the Gospel then defines, how that implicates itself in these communities coming together, and how the powers of Satan and others are going to fight against that. So we fight together because that's what the Gospel did. It gives us this new identity that is not just individual, it's not apart from me, but it's more than just me.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it And I think that's interesting, especially at the end of Ephesians, which arguably talks more than any other book about the Jews and the Gentiles coming together and how those different community things should happen. And you know, if you think about the flow of that book, chapter five begins with that sort of submit to one another. Doesn't begin there, but it has that crescendo in the first section where hey submit to one another. And then you are going through these differing relationships that you have in your life. Yeah, that's been a wife, parent child, master servant. Yea master servant. And so these are relational dynamics, and Paul has things to say to each person within those relationships in order to manage the roles that they're in. And so if your a husband, here's how you're supposed to act towards your wife. If your a wife, here's how you're supposed to act towards your husband, father son, you know, or parent child, like same with master servant. These things happen within a community. Yeah, and I think that, you know, if we broaden this out and we say, well, what the what does it look like for the church to confer this sort of dignity on the people who are coming to it. I think Number one, a lot of churches focused on community, and I think that's an important aspect of this. But I also think that the community sometimes is lacking in identity.

00:28:52
Speaker 3: Now.

00:28:53
Speaker 1: In other words, it's just more of a gathering of folk, right, almost like what might happen if you went to a rock concert or something thing. Right, you might have a casual conversation with a person next to you, but at the end of the day, you're going home by yourself. Right, this is not your new best friend, probably, And so I think there has to be this sort of identity infusion within the community of the church to help members recognize that they are part of the body of Christ. They're members of the body of Christ. And I don't know how to exactly get around that, you know how to get to that, but I think that, to me is where the church can best begin to confer that dignity. In addition to just I'm big on restoring the teaching office. I mean, I went through Catechism, and I thought that was really great, And I think there's something to the church providing the constraints for the way that we read the Word of God and the way we understand it and live it out. That's really crucial. And so I think helping us create appropriate boundaries and understand how to navigate within those bounds, which is also a crucial aspect of what the church could do.

00:30:02
Speaker 3: But no, I love that. Yeah, I.

00:30:07
Speaker 2: Often wear two hats as an educator and clinician. I try to provide space that kind of unpacks the personal narratives experience that provides them. But I've been in enough pastoral ministry and context within the local church. There needs to be a proclamation as well of truth, not just creating a space, which I think is also needed. We need to have community and provide space and accountability for that. There needs to be a as we're thus saith the Lord kind of proclamation of truth that needs to be part of that, so that when we're in those community spaces, we're articulating that there is a as Jude says, right contend earnestly for the faith once delivered. We need to be willing to say that This is actually what helps give meaning and purpose, especially in the despair of that is just so pressing around individually and systemically all around us. We have this, this greater story. This is how Keller talks about it. We need to provide a better story because I mean I talk about my Muslim friends or my Hindu friends. They have community, They have really good communities. They have strong marriages, and they're good parents, and they're the contributing citizens within their community. In that sense, they have all the things they need. And yet they don't have a greater story. They don't have a better story. They have a story. But I think the way that Keller framed it for me that was so helpful. We need to present a better story. It's not just that it helps here, but how does this help holistically those those ways in which we've been disengaged, not just from others in our environment, but ultimately from God. Because my Muslim friends are living their best life, my Hindu friends are having a great time. My atheist friends even can find community. Like you said, they go to a lockouts, are to have a good old time, right, Yeah, they can have that, and yet there's something bigger, There's something better that I think starts with that proclamation that then is lived out in the context of community.

00:32:14
Speaker 3: We need both those realities to be sure.

00:32:17
Speaker 1: I think the last thing I'll just raise and maybe we can talk about it a little more as we get into the next episode, which we'll talk a little bit more about anxiety and then we'll get into the existential leg But there's this interesting theory by a gentleman named Nungian who he talks about value collapse, and it's really pertinent for what we're going through right now. Essentially, what value collapse is, It's like, we value connection with other people, right, and so we say, well, how will we measure our connection with other people? And then you start saying, well, you know what could really, you know, measure this this connection I have with other people is the total number of followers I have on my a TikTok account and the number of likes I get, and I'll know that I'm really impacting them when they share my content. And so you pull these simplified metrics away from connection with people, and now all of a sudden, all you're really focused on is these three simplified metrics, and you forget it becomes the proxy, the representation really, I mean this is a Boudaryard simulator or simulacra and simulation. Right. He talks about the map becoming the terrain, right, so you forget about the ground and you're just so focused on the map. And that's essentially what this does. This value collapse basically says I do value this connection, but I don't really get anything out of this connection. I do get something out of the number of followers I have, the number of likes, I get, the number of shares I get, and something out of that. But this connection, it's too it doesn't pay off as quick yeah, right, And so we start to diss ourselves from substance and start to live in this world of just strict representation, which becomes relatively empty because a lot of times those representations that the things you're getting in that representational mode aren't actual signs that you have real human connections. And so that again, that distance that's created, I think is really crucial here. And it's not that we are more isolated now than we've ever been in the sense that there are less people around us, or we're able to interact with less people. I actually think that value collapse ideas sort of more what's happening to us. We've lived into these representation, these simplified metrics that point to something we really care about, and we've done it for so long that we can't tell now that these metrics aren't actually the thing.

00:34:59
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:34:59
Speaker 1: Wow, we have the representation of it, we don't have the substance of it.

00:35:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when I can see that little number that that that quantitative you have so many views, you have so many likes that then, like, not only does it give me a little dopamine head at the moment, it presents this validation I am being accepted. I am getting something in contrast to this other thing of human connection, where yeah, I might get some of that, but I also got to give into it. Not only do I get, but I got to give into it. And that's just that's a little too much effort when I can just get what I want, this very utilitarian interaction comparatively to this bidirectional connection right as we know. I remember working with a couple one time in premarital counseling and they were saying, well, yeah, you know, we need to get fifty to fifty to the marriage relationship. I'm like, now that that percentage is not nearly good enough. You need to give like one hundred percent to each other, Like there's a constant giving of each other that's expected in the biblical narrative as much as what we see clinically. The research indicates that if you're only looking to get what you can get based on what you give, that utilitarian, pragmatic kind of.

00:36:15
Speaker 3: Construct only works for so long.

00:36:19
Speaker 2: And this is one, I mean, get into some other whole area of Gotman's research when he sees that, when he sees that utilitarian pragmatic construct that's forming the marriage relationship, he says, it's only a matter of time before that marriage dissolves. But yet that's the normative construct that we've utilized in almost every other technologically based relationship that we validate as the norm. Like you said before, we've redefined what normal is at that point. And then to go back to what is good, it's is this a cult? Like why why is this all here? Like this this looks weird, This doesn't this isn't the norm because it's not the norm anymore.

00:36:57
Speaker 3: We we kind of shy away from it.

00:36:59
Speaker 1: According, yeah, well this is good. I think this leads us well into the existential leg. We've kind of touched on some of it during this episode, but I think just to recap our society has a deep influence on who we understand ourselves to be and on what we understand dignity to bee and I do think we need the church to I think we need to reroot ourselves in the church. Stop thinking about it as a voluntary society, something we can or can't go to on a Sunday, something we're willing to sort of set aside. It's actually crucial for us to be there, crucial for us to be participating, and I think that then can become a solution to some of the identity crisis and community issues that we're seeing today. So yeah, that social leg is crucial, and next time we'll talk a little bit more about the existential leg. So thanks, Ben, this is.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: Great, This is great. Appreciate all these conversations, James.

00:37:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, everybody else, thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.