What Would Jesus Like?

In the 1990s, evangelical reflection on morality was a simulacrum of Joseph’s amazing technicolor dreamcoat.  Only, evangelicals sported the psychedelic colors on wrists instead of backs.  For during this time, the first and greatest moral interrogative was “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD).  

The number of parodies to which the WWJD fad has now been subject undoubtedly suggests to some that the turn of the last century represents the nadir of evangelical reflection on morality.  This conclusion, while tempting, would be hasty.  For the social media revolution has unleashed a formative cultural icon that threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral deliberation among evangelicals: the Facebook “Like” button.   

In 1989, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) delighted moviegoers with their Excellent Adventure.  Their academic foolishness notwithstanding, Bill and Ted illustrated a capacity for human(e) reflection by “philosophizing” with Socrates.  Granted, their attempt to offer existential wisdom on the human condition (“Dust…wind…Dude.”) is hardly the stuff of philosophical legend.  But the rudiments of the Socratic dictum (“The unexamined life is not worth living.”) are there nonetheless.  

Almost 25 years later, it is worth wondering.  Were Socrates to come again (in a telephone booth, of course) would he find reason on the earth?  A quick perusal of any social media platform suggests that the prospects look grim.  For the unexamined status statement is apparently worth liking.  

With respect to morality, the danger that the Like button presents rests in its formative effects.  For starters, the Like button reduces everything to which it is attached to consumer preference – an object of appetitive desire.  To “like” something is to signal a preference lower than intellectual assent or moral conviction.  It is to express mere taste or personal preference.  At best, it signals a fleeting allegiance to an unspecified vibe.  

To employ the Like button (as for example, nearly half a million of the over 25 million viewers did for the “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” video on YouTube) forestalls meaningful conversation about moral matters.  Such silence follows from the internal logic of the Like button itself.  If my moral convictions are merely matters of taste (like my preference for Coke over Pepsi), then what I “like” requires neither rational deliberation nor defense.  Why think?  Just click.

Beyond the obstruction of inquiry, the Like button conditions its users to think of moral conviction as a kind of personal accessory – a way of constructing an identity.  In the techno-consumer society we inhabit, we accessorize to say who we are.  By aligning ourselves with moral perspectives expressed in cyberspace, we use morality as a way of expressing our present profile.  And in so doing, we trivialize moral conviction.

Even more worrisome, however, is the fact that treating morality as a mere expression of one’s persona, as the Like button does, fundamentally subverts the relationship between morality and the individual seeking to live a moral life.  Historically, orthodox Christian belief has been committed to a transcendent understanding of morality, construed as a “Way” to which one ought to conform.  This is, for example, the explicit structure of The Didache – one of the earliest Christian documents expressing the shape of the moral life.  And as C.S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man, it is arguably the predominant understanding of morality, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or pagan, before the advent of modernity.  

But the world of the Like button turns this way of thinking on its head.  No longer is morality a transcendent order to which we seek to conform; it is rather a digital drop-down menu from which we select our status.  Instead of seeking pre-existing moral norms that necessarily bind us, we click to create motifs that define us.  And our self-definition has all the contingency of whim.  For we remain attached to particular stances only as long as we continue to feel as though they authentically express who we are at any given moment.  

In a sense, the Like button in social media is the sacrament for the religion that sociologist Christian Smith has identified as defining the present generation: “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  It is a religious stance in which “feeling happy” is the first principle and how one “feels” is the epistemological lens through which everything is assessed.  Of course, Smith’s work does not apply uniquely to evangelicals (rather to U.S. teenagers, generally).  However, as another noteworthy Smith has recently observed, sacraments such as the Like button are embedded in larger, “cultural liturgies” in which the evangelical world is immersed (see James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom and Imagining the Kingdom).  

Evangelicals should take seriously the formative effects of the prevailing cultural liturgies.  For if the foregoing analysis is right, the overwhelming effect of the liturgies of social media is not to the good.  Rather, they threaten to erode the very foundation on which deliberation, conversation, vision, and formation are built – namely, the assumption that the moral fabric of reality is ontologically prior to the volition of the individual.

This is reason enough for thinking that despite its inherent limitations, the WWJD bracelet, when compared with the liturgies of social media, is a step in a salutary direction.  For starters, the interrogative mood, together with the implied dominical authority, suggests a posture of submission that is the beginning of moral formation.  To be sure, the bracelet is an accessory.  But the content it expresses, while truncated, does not accessorize.  For when properly applied, the WWJD bracelet does not permit the wearer to use the fruits of inquiry as a means of self-expression (except perhaps in choosing a neon color).  Rather, what Jesus would do in a given situation becomes a “Way” to which the faithful evangelical must conform.  Philosophically speaking, as morally formative liturgical acts go, snapping on a bracelet seems superior to clicking a mouse.  Perhaps the renewal of evangelical reflection on morality looks more like a rosary than a blog.