REMUS RUNCAN
Facebook and contemporary idolatry
Introduction
One of the most serious sins condemned by the Scriptures is idolatry. Idolatry is when a man or a woman worships anything – another person, animal, plant, object etc. – apart from God. The Second Commandment forbids any kind of artistic representation of the Divine. This can be quite challenging for the man who wishes to explore, in a rational or imaginative way, the entire spectrum of reality.
The word “face” or “the face” appears in the Bible over 1 000 times, most often referring to the face of a man or woman, but sometimes referring to the face of God as well.
Up until the Fall, humans were seeking the face of God, and they could see God face-to-face every day. But after they sinned, they hid from the face of God. Genesis 3:8 says “And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” The word translated presence in this verse is the Hebrew word paniym which also means face. The same word appears in Genesis 4:16, where we read that “Cain went away from the paniym of the LORD, and lived in the land of Nod, on the East of Eden.” Jonah “fled from the paniym of the LORD” (Jonah 1:10). Whenever something goes wrong in the spiritual life of a person, he or she is not seeking the face of God.
When he was on Mount Horeb and encounters the presence of the living God in the burning bush “Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” (Exodus 3:6). Also, after receiving the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, after 40 days in the presence (paniym) of God, Moses is transfigured, his face shining in a remarkable way. For that reason he had to cover his face with a cloth when he came back amongst the people of Israel. (Exodus 34:20-25)
What is Facebook actually?
Facebook is what it says it is, the book of faces. Facebook was inspired by a very common American practice: Universities in the US put together photo albums or catalogues which contain the name of the students and their photographs, so that freshmen and the staff can correlate names with faces. At first, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook “broke into the safety systems of the on-line directories of the campuses to extract from them the photos of the students living there.” (Ulmanu, 2011, 50). For this, he came very close to being expelled. Right after this incident, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, and since then he never had to steal photos because people from across the world started to offer them voluntarily in order to be exhibited on the popular social network website.
At the end of 2013 there were 1.23 billion active Facebook accounts. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics. People tend to spend more and more time on Facebook. Our fellow countrymen login many times a day to admire, post or give their opinion about other people’s faces. “In the lives of many Romanians, Facebook is a daily habit, almost like going to buy bread; actually it is more than that, because you don’t buy bread several times a day and you don’t spend hours chit-chatting at the store.” (Ulmanu 2011, 21).
Lord Jesus said in Matthew 4:4: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Sadly, fewer people everyday feed themselves from God’s Word, and some would happily give up bread as well, just so they could spend a little bit more time on Facebook, YouTube, Skype or other second-hand life websites.
What faces are hiding behind the Facebook mask?
- The new face of hedonism
In hedonism, pleasure becomes life’s purpose, and the desire to obtain it, is what rules behaviour. On Facebook, not at all accidentally, the main driver is the so called Like. If we have a look at what people share and post on their Facebook Walls we will easily notice that most of it has to do with one’s pleasure. Photos are carefully selected with the purpose of bringing the largest number of Likes; texts are written with the same goal in mind; some people post images of good-looking and supposedly tasty food.
Hedonism with its egocentric philosophy of “Eat, drink and be merry!” is alien to Christianity. God’s pleasure is a relational one: “and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’” (Matthew 3:17).
Refusing it and fleeing from suffering is a type of hedonism. Jesus willingly gave His life, that’s why He was loved by God. “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” John 10:17-18.
John Piper writes about the time when he met Richard Wurmbrand “He asked us if we could choose suffering for the sake of Christ”. (Piper, 1996, 213)
Sometimes we mistake pleasure for love. Love is for others, pleasure is for myself. The purpose of God sending Jesus was that “He might be the sacrifice for our sin. This is why this act of sending is called love.” (Piper, 2009, 161).
In today’s society, mostly from Freud onwards, sexual pleasure is highly praised. Almost everything visual is sexualized and this has terrible consequences for the individual and for the family.
- The new faces of sexual immorality and adultery
Sexual immorality and adultery are some of the effects of sin entering our world, so Scripture talks about them. With the rise of the Internet and with the spread of social networks like Facebook, these sins grew at an incredible rate. Some recent studies have shown that 30-40% of unmarried men and 18-20% of married men have sex outside of marriage at least once. (Winderman, 1997, 170).
In this context, where in the last decade the number of users grew to over 2 billion, adultery through social networks and dating websites became a serious challenge. Because these relationships are mediated through computer and dates don’t happen face-to-face, many people engage in extremely intimate conversations. Because the relation is not physical, not everybody thinks of this kind of encounters as sexually immoral. Lord Jesus said that sexual immorality is not an act in itself, but a desire, a problem of the heart. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28).
Online adultery is as dangerous as the one committed offline because the human brain records virtual and physical acts as identical to each other.
Spending more time socializing online than with your spouse, is very risky and can lead to virtual adultery which is just one step away from physical adultery.
Many extramarital or premarital affairs start with online chat, SMS, e-mail, Facebook, or other social media, and all these things happen because people haven’t got the strength to say “NO”.
They start here, and then keep on going on a way that is contrary to God’s purposes, which says that sexual relations should take place in the intimate context of marriage. Quoting the apostle Paul, Bill Rudge says: “Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. Before the situation gets out of control – stop! Think about the consequences and how foolish it would be to proceed. Learn to say NO!” (Rudge, B, 2008, 73).
Idolatry led to sexual immorality those nations which Israel exterminated when they took the land of Canaan, but later brought God’s punishment even on His chosen people. The prophet Ezekiel spoke a great deal about this issue of Israel’s sexual immorality. In Ezekiel 16:17 we read “You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and with them played the whore.” The phrase “images of men” can easily represent the virtual aspect of immorality and nowadays this is done through the medium of Facebook.
- The new face of selfishness
Looking at the personal photos posted on Walls it’s hard not to notice that most of the time people are driven by a “it’s all about me” mentality. I’m the most important subject that shines brighter than the Sun in the middle of the Solar System. There are others around as well, but their sole purpose is to gravitate around me. Because our fallen natures, selfishness stays with us from birth until we get old, and our Facebook accounts function as mirrors that show us how selfish we are and how much we like to admire ourselves. We are no different than Narcis who fell in love with his own reflection. My Facebook account is about me, my family, my interests, my hobbies – you can read about the things that bring me pleasure. It’s about others as well, but they have to be convinced, sometimes even manipulated to like me and my family which, at times, only looks happy. My virtual friends must really Like the places I’ve visited recently.
Conclusions
Idolatry seems to have reached its peak at some point in the distant past, and now it exists only among Amerindian or African tribes, but the truth is that idol worship is incredibly strong in the countries and on continents where statistics say that Christians are a majority. In this regard, Gregory Beale wrote in 2008 his book called: We Become What We Worship. This is true, gradually we do morph into what we worship.
We are in danger if we think we don’t worship anything. Actually that is just an illusion meant to stop you from realizing the true nature of idolatry. Idolatry is when a man or a woman sets something – another thing or person – above God in his or her life.
In 1621, when listing types of idolatry, Arriaga was explaining “the difference between public acts of idol worship and domestic ones, considering the latter as more dangerous and harder to eradicate.” (Bernard, Gruzinski, 1998, 155).
I am of the opinion that in our times this is the most common kind of idolatry: domestic, disguised, private, and therefore dangerous. The enticing idol from behind the screen is smiling at us. This idol is our own characteristic selfishness or the pleasure that enslaves us and determines us to wear a mask in order to be accepted by the rest of the society. Facebook makes this thing possible. From this point-of-view, Facebook is more than just one of the many faces of the types of idolatry, actually it is a new kind of idolatry altogether. It is a mask that shows all our weaknesses; we wear it confidently and without inhibitions or shame, because we are alone. The only thing we have in front of us is a screen of a computer or Smartphone. We seem not to realize that behind this mirrored glass there is a multitude of eyes watching us, most of them not lovingly, but driven by a strange curiosity to find out what’s new in our lives.
Idolatry and sexual immorality are sisters, and if Facebook is the new idolatry in today’s society, that explains why immorality has increased so much that it became something to boast about.
References
Beale, G.K., (2008). We become what we worship. A biblical theology of idolatry, Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.
Bernard, C., Gruzinski, S., (1998). Despre idolatrie. O arheologie a științelor religioase, Timișoara: Editura Amarcord.
Piper, J., (1996). Desiring God, meditation of a Christian Hedonist, Sister, Oregons: Multnomah books.
Piper, J., (2009). În sfârșit viu, ce se întâmplă când suntem născuți din nou, Codlea: Editura Kingstone.
Rudge, B., (2008). Overcoming sexual Immorality, Hermitage, Pennsylvania: Living Truth Publishers.
Ulmanu, A. B., (2011). Cartea fețelor, revoluția facebook în spațiul social, București: Humanitas.
Winderman, M.W., (1997). Sex în afara căsătoriei. Jurnalul de cercetare Sex 34 (2): 167-174.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics
This paper is made and published under the aegis of the Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy as a part of programme co-funded by the European Union within the Operational Sectorial Programme for Human Resources Development through the project for Pluri and interdisciplinary in doctoral and post-doctoral programmes Project Code: POSDRU/159/1.5/S/141086
