Facebook and the Theology of Incompetence

 "Senator, we run ads."

So said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Senator Hatch had asked Zuckerberg to comment on how Facebook sustains a business model in which users do not pay for services. It was the first of several questions that called into mind not the business practices of Facebook, nor the social and economic necessity of regulating the tech giants - but the competence of the elected officials tasked with questioning the Facebook CEO.

If there was a clear takeaway from the hearings, which could have and should have been an aggressive grilling of the social behemoth, it would be that the United States government sorely lacks a baseline understanding of the internet, of the collection of user data, and of the business models upholding the internet's largest monopolies. It would be naive to expect these same senators to turn around and shape user privacy protections - let alone antitrust regulation for a digital age. These senators exhibited not just a misunderstanding of the facts - but an inability to contemplate and reflect on the implications of the facts for consumer protection, and for an informed democracy. 

In a 1966 interview with Time Magazine, protestant theologian Karl Barth famously encouraged preachers to “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.” 

One might misread this quote to see Barth as advocating the subservience of social and political facts to religious belief, but this is not what he had in mind. Rather, Barth was suggesting that wise action, perhaps even competence, results from the confluence of both facts and theology. For Barth, understanding emerges when facts and reality are scrutinized through a theological lens, or to put it another way, when facts and reality are held up against purpose and meaning. 

For Barth, the newspaper provides our facts - the scriptures our purpose and our meaning. In this line of reasoning, theology and religious beliefs function primarily as a way to evaluate the facts of the day. 

So what if the 24% to 40% of Americans  who believe that the Bible is the "literal word of God" believed not just that the Bible is "true" in a literal sense, but that the Bible provides an authoritative source of interpretation and evaluation for our world? What if the Bible was seen less as a series of statements to which we must assent, and more as a magnifying glass through which to read the columns of ink in the daily paper. 

Perhaps we would see fewer inter-denominational feuds about the "truth" of scripture, and more reflective thinking about how one might respond to our experiences given the Bible's larger meaning and message. 

But more importantly, we might see a movement away from the type of ideological arm wrestling that breeds ignorance, and ultimately, political incompetence. 

In an interview with David Letterman, Barack Obama lamented that we do not share "a common baseline of facts." But maybe it is not that we lack a common baseline of facts - maybe it is that our interpretive keys have become so expansive, twisted, and grandiose so as to completely push facts out of the American consciousness! 

American elected officials are not foolish because they lack a baseline of facts - they are foolish because they have completely jettisoned the facts and replaced them with the wrong interpretive keys - they have chosen ideology, instead of purpose, propaganda, instead of service. Something has warped their magnifying glasses - rather than seeing the facts through the glass, all they see is the glass itself.

Facebook, with its contributions to the spread of fake news and hate speech, contributes more to our collective incompetence not because it spreads the wrong facts - but because it locks us within echo chambers of our own ideology. The well-documented confirmation biases of the social media platform give us all a pulpit in which we have no access to a newspaper, and to which we bring not the liberating message of the Bible, but only the rigid strictures of our inhabited pole of the political spectrum. 

Taking a step back towards competence requires embracing the facts, while re-examining our interpretive keys. Certainly, Facebook must play a role in prioritizing the objective and un-editorialized on their own platform. 

But this is just as much, if not more so, the work of the individual. It starts with an earnest reflection on what one is willing to utilize as an interpretive key or source of purpose. Biblical teaching and political propaganda are both interpretive frameworks, but there are countless others. We all have a responsibility to understand what it is we truly value. If we do not explicitly discern our own purpose for being, our own interpretive key or magnifying glass, the internet is powerful and insidious enough to provide one for us. 

Once one establishes a commitment to an interpretive key, the next step is the acquisition and scrutinization of the facts. Objectively, the source of these facts matters. But we cannot let the source do the interpretation for us. Individuals in an informed democracy have an obligation to evaluate the facts. The efficacy of such evaluation depends wholly on the selection of our interpretive key. 

So if you are weary of the nation's most powerful officials asking boneheaded questions and acting incompetently, you are not alone - but you have some work to do. Before you step into the pulpit of your social media platform, think about what shapes your proclamation. If you find a way to pair the facts with purpose, you might just dismantle the theology of incompetence. 

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Ryan Panzer is subscriber to the Wisconsin State Journal and frequent reader of the failing New York Times. This theology blog is his attempt to find an interpretive key. Preaching Sunday, April 22nd at Spring Prairie Lutheran Church in Deforest, WI. Follow @ryanpanzer on Twitter. Later on, he will probably regret many of his ideologically tainted tweets.

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