In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a not-so-secret world
Essay 8: Babylon
“The fact that our humanity was routed by these tools over the past decade should come as no surprise…We’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods.”
Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Digital Babylon is the term coined by David Kinnaman in his book, Faith for Exiles. Referring back to the Old Testament story of Daniel, Babylon was the city to which the youngest, brightest, most handsome exiles of the Jewish nation were brought. The famous king, Nebuchadnezzar, turned these young men into eunuchs and subjected them to severe training and academics. As the story goes, Daniel and his friends knew well to refuse the treatment, as much as it was up to them to decide. They came to the point of outright refusing to eat the rich fare of the palace, and proved to the king that their way of living was actually superior to the other exiles.
Daniel, in his bold purity, represents the man who stands for God and refutes godless living even in a godless land. He stands, throughout his life, as an example of what a person can prove by not falling into the habits and ways of the majority. A man of character in a culture of personality. A light in a dark world.
Kinnaman says,
“Digital Babylon is not a place. It is the pagan, but spiritual, hyperstimulated, multicultural, imperial crossroads that is the virtual home of every person with wi-fi, a data plan, or for most of us, both.”
We Christians, believers in a God who didn’t spare His Son but put Him to death for our sins, are not to ride the waves of a personality cultural revolution. We aren’t made for the palace fare and fellowship with our phones. We are to remember we are the captives in this story, brought to Babylon against our will and well aware of the dangers of assimilating. Yet we walk right into Digital Babylon and belly up to the bar, thrilled to dine on the food and chat up the crowd. We push in all our chips, like it is some sort of game: we are here to play, and we are here to win.
It doesn’t help that in Digital Babylon, the radio is always turned on.
I remember watching a documentary on North Korea. Each room in every house had a radio speaker which broadcasted, every minute of every day, governmental propaganda. There was no volume button to shut the darn thing off, and so people listened day and night to the words pipe into their kitchens and living rooms.
It sounds awful to be deprived of any sort of solitude, but such is the manner of folks who push propaganda. A constant stream of ideas and words that are not your own, steadily put in your ears until you see no way around it, no way to fight it or disagree.
We subject ourselves to this same droning, never an arm’s length away from our phones or computers. It is the prerogative of the companies that buy and sell our information, cell phones, media platforms–to make us feel important and engaged by asking what’s on your mind? And popping up little red circles and hearts on our screens.
The world will always encourage us to capitalize on our burgeoning popularity–to take our waxed, shiny personalities out for a spin and see who will buy it.
We are welcomed into this culture on constant engagement and begin to perceive it as the realist possibility, the most possible reality. We stoically deny we are strangers in this land. The very pleasure sensors in our brains wait anxiously to light up. We are being noticed, we are being liked. We are addicted. Perhaps we were not captives. Perhaps we have always belonged.
We forget it is a form of slavery to enter these rhythms, to bow before other gods.
We assume we will be fine, dipping our toes in and out of the water, splashing here and there, not quite getting totally wet.
It isn’t that we refuse to acknowledge we live in Babylon–we do. But the believer refuses to align herself with the notion of becoming comfortable there. We refuse to make it our home, because our passport says it is elsewhere.
Paul frequently had to remind his beloved friends of this very notion–we don’t belong here. It is so, so easy to forget:
I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ…
Philippians 3:18-20
John echoes Paul’s urgency:
Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world…the world is passing away, and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God abides forever.
1 John 2:15-17
You and I–we must wash ourselves again and again in this truth, because the world is so persuasive. Even our daily coffee habit seems to testify to our citizenship down here–our stomach, a god in and of itself. No one dares to deny me my morning java, my scrolling text messages at the traffic light, my anxiety over remote learning with kids during Covid. I have every right to express my disgust over politics–
I belong here.
It is the spirit of the world that pulls us into these cycles of lust, materialism, self-indulgence, shameless pride and flattery. The spin we put on Paul’s “becoming all things to all people” might just be a tricky way of justifying our leisure pursuits as Christians into Digital Babylon, if we care to be honest.
Don’t be fooled: if you love anything in this world, the love of the Father is not in you.
Maybe this is why Daniel found himself scooting to his room in Babylon three times a day to pray–it was a lifelong habit–from the time he was a teenager–of removing himself and reminding himself of his true home. He was pleading with God to help him remain devoted, unentangled by propaganda and culture.
Do not love the world. Do not love it, John pleads.
Leave it to the commoners in Babylon. Let them bow down to their idols from the “nerd gods”. Let them think they belong, let them be fools.
Our citizenship is in heaven.
