Identity and Baptism in the Digital Age

Lecture given to the 6th form students at Grey Coat Hospital, 29th June 2016

A few questions:

What’s the first thing you do in the morning?
What’s the last thing you do at night?
How many of you have a mobile phone?
How many of you have a mobile phone that’s connected to the Internet?
How many of you are on Snapchat? Instagram? Twitter? Facebook? (Grandma!)
What is the comfort zone for you from this device?

Four main developments of the Internet:

Dial-up, but that was before you were born. 28k per second. If you were lucky.
Broadband, increasing bandwidth
Shift to Web 2.0 greater participation, blogs, social media, myspace -> Facebook, YouTube etc.
Mobile broadband

The smartphone

The ubiquity of the smartphone is symbolic of the degree to which the Internet is part of the everyday. To imagine life without it, even for me at my age, is all but impossible.

‘The Internet is receding into the narrative of everyday life.’ Robin Mansell. The way that electricity has already. In this part of the world, we don’t give electricity a second thought. Apart from when there’s a power cut. Same for the Internet, except when it’s slow or there’s no wifi.
Narrative, the category for understanding who we are, for making sense of who we are. In the absence of a story, very difficult for our identity to have any meaning.
And in case you think this is all unrelated to the Internet and social media, let me remind you that on Snapchat you have your story – last 24 hours, the last 24 hours of your edited highlights.
So often the question is to what degree is the technology shaping us, shaping our self-understanding. Technological determinists.
By contrast, others under technology as social constructed. We shape the technology. And the context of the birth of a technology is vital.
But the reality lies between the two. There is a dialectical relationship between the technology and us. We shape the technology, the technology shapes us. There’s a feedback loop going in both directions.

Checkout funnels as a simple example. Using Google Analytics.

In other words, context is all important.
The context of the birth of the Internet matters.
It isn’t a technology that was developed in a vacuum. It was developed in a certain time and place within a culture that has a specific overarching worldview. It was not developed in the 1960s in Japan.
Its roots lie in the West, primarily in the United States and for the most part, the the original versions of what later became known as the Internet were funded by government (ARPANET and NSFNET)
Then later, in the early 1990s, it was opened up to the market with massive consequences.
As such, because of its cultural location, the Internet can be understood as a cultural, technological manifestation of the worldview that has its own Holy Trinity: Democracy, Capitalism and Individualism. (Mark Lila, American Political Scientist) And these three threads do not always sit easily with each other.

Expressive Individualism

Each of these is undergirded by a baseline cultural narrative and I’m going to focus now on the the one that has to do with identity. Robert Bellah, an America sociologist, referred to this narrative as “expressive individualism”.

And as way to get into what this means, let’s think about your profile picture.

How many of you have joined something like or Instagram or Twitter, a platform where you can change your profile image with everyone automatically being alerted to it and changed your profile picture?
What are you doing when you change your profile picture?
Why do you change it?
You’re expressing yourself. You’re saying to your friends and the world, this is who I am.
And it’s not just profile pictures, it’s also all the content you publish.
The obvious example is selfies but it’s not just that.
All the photos, tweets, status updates snapchats bit by bit, byte by byte, create your online identity.

And this matters because this is where more and more of our time is lived as it interweaves our everyday lives.

It’s all about the content you publish.

And the word publishing is important. Because you are in publishing.
You’re a brand.
You’re selling yourself.
If you post content to Youtube, you’re in broadcasting. You can control the identity that you project. To a degree.
Byte by byte you are creating yourself.

As more and more of our lives are mediated online, this activity becomes more and more unavoidable.

Doubtless you will have been told to be careful about what you post online. Be it university interviewers, be it future employers, will search and research you online. There are companies that are paid to do this work. Digital tattoos. Juan Enriquez, the self-labeled futurist.

Online, you get to choose and create who you are. It’s not pre-defined for you.

You are no longer constrained and defined by others.
You define yourself.
You choose your networks.
You choose your relationships online.
And if a friend is being a real idiot, you can even mute your friend without having to go to the trouble or awkwardness of asking him or her to shut up.
It is all about choice and customisation, where everything is tailored to your needs.

In other words, much of the things that used to define who we are and who we are in relationship with (family, location, religion, work) have been weakened. Gianni Vattimo.

They are no longer as determinative as they once were. Now, you get to choose.
You get to decide.
You are in control.
You get to create the story.
You get to decide what your life’s about.
You perform your identity (Judith Butler)
And you get to decide which parts of your life you’re going to turn into the story by which everyone else gets to know you. That’s how this narrative of expressive individualism works.

Agency:

You are the agent in this story.
The agency lies with you.
When we talk about Active Passive voice.
You get to create yourself.
You tell the story of your lives.
And in that story, you are the protagonist.
You are the hero.
Even when things go wrong, and you overcome adversity in the face of all the odds, you are the saviour. Failcon: ‘a conference for startup founders to learn and prepare for failure so they can iterate and grow fast.’ Celebrate failure because it was a stepping stone to success.
Meanwhile, alongside you sits another person, with his or her story, of which he or she is the protagonist, the key character, the hero in the making, facing adversity, discovering and in the process creating his or her identity and presenting it to the world.

And with this kind of identity shaped and shaping this kind of technology, what kind of character comes forth? What kind of character, and by that I mean the moral qualities that are distinctive to you, what kind of character issues forth?

Before I move on to the second half of my talk, one little thought experiment:

What kind of emotions does your use of social media provoke?
When you’re scrolling through Instagram, for example?
Do you for the most part feel joyful and at peace?
Or do you find yourself getting angry, jealous, envious of the people you see in the images in front of you?
Do you find using social media a stressful yet addictive experience?

Part Two

So, in this context what on earth does it mean to be baptised? What does it mean to be baptised in the name of a very different Trinity: Father, Son & Holy Spirit? Where you identity is shaped by a very different narrative?

[With the Eucharist, Baptism is one of the two core Christian sacraments – which are pace Augustine, ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace’.]

So much of baptism is about identity. Who are you and who are you called to be?

And here is where the crucial difference lies.

Within the narrative of expressive individualism, the agency lies with you. You create yourself. You decide and define your networks of relationships. The responsibility lies with you.

But in baptism the agency is completely different.

Take the moment of baptism.

Think about it. You don’t baptise yourself.
Either as an infant grabbing the scallop shell
or by jumping off Bournemouth pier – I baptise myseeeeeeeeelf! Splosh.
No, the agency is not with you.
You are baptised.
The voice is passive
The priest or the minister does it to you.

You go under the water and you die to you old self and you rise out the water to you new life where your identity is not in yourself but is in Christ.
It is not an identity that you secure for yourself.
It is an identity that you are given. It is an identity that you receive.

In this narrative, you are not the protagonist, the hero.
You are not the creator. You are not saviour.
In this narrative, something has gone seriously awry with creation.
As part of the narrative, things are not understood in the world and in us to be right.
There is personal and societal sin.

In this narrative, you are the creature in need of redemption.
You are understood as not having the necessary resources in and of yourself.
You are in need of saving.
Left to you own devices, the future is not good.
But in baptism you are given a new identity and the gift of the Sprit of God, thereby you no longer have such burdens. As Jesus says, ‘Come to me all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens and I will give you rest’ Jesus says to his disciples (Matt 11)

In this narrative, God the Father is your creator, God the Son is your saviour, and God the Holy Spirit is your sustainer.
The agency is with God the creator, not you the creation.

The underpinning of this narrative is not Democracy, Capitalism or Individualism. It is God’s love for you
This is a non-competitive narrative.
You are not in competition for God’s love. It’s not something that you can persuade God to give you, God loves you freely gives you this identity freely

And with the gift of the Spirit, this new identity issues in a certain type of character,
One which stands in start contrast to what we were talking about a moment ago.
It is an identity which issues forth in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

But because we live with these two narratives, the danger of the first narrative that most of us our living by distorting the narrative underpinning baptism by turning it into something individual and self-centred (I’m alright, I’m off to heaven kind of thing). Which is why I started this section by saying ‘what on earth does it mean’ – Lord’s prayer. On earth. Heaven’s peachy. This is where we desire to see God’s will be done. So you have been blessed to be a blessing. Those who have been baptised have been called to bear witness to the reality of this deeper narrative of God’s steadfast, unending love for all of creation.

In conclusion

So the two narratives that we have been discussing are in deep tension with another another. Let me close with a few questions.

Two Trinities.
Both narratives in which you locate you identity.
In one the primary agency lies with you.
In the other the primary agency lies with God.
In one, you are your creator and saviour; in the other, God is.

For those of you doing religious studies, the theological category for speaking about this is idolatry. Remember the beginning the Ten Commandments: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.’ Ex 20.

Which is the narrative that has greater reality for you?
Which one do you really live by?
Which one narrative shapes your identity more?

This leads on to a second question. Given that no one is seriously saying that Christians should permanently disconnect from the Internet and from social media, what are things that Christians can do both individually and corporately, with other people, that will help you receive your identity in this Trinitarian narrative, the narrative of God the Father, Son & Holy Spirit, help you receive it and remember it as being a gift from the God who loves you rather than in the narrative of expressive individualism that is the underlying base narrative of the broader society?

(What are the practices that you can adopt so that the broader narrative is recognised as being that of God the Father, Son & Holy Spirit, a narrative where the primary and ultimate agency lies with God and not with you?(

For those of us who are Christians, how are our identities as people baptised in the name of the Father, Son & Holy Spirit being shaped by our online mediated interactions? Where is God in all of this?

To bring it back to the questions that I started with.

What’s the first thing you do in the morning?
What’s the last thing you do at night?
If it’s that you reach for your phone, does that mean that you’re reaching for it to check Instagram (or some other platform or site!).
Or is it because you’re going to read the Bible?
And does it matter that you use the same device for both?
Does the convenience help?
Or does it actually blur the narratives?
So that whilst you say you’re living by the one narrative where you receive your identity from God, in reality you’re living by the other narrative where you create it yourself, and your being a Christian (etc.) is simply another act of self-creation?

Thank you very much for listening.