The Wolf in Their Pockets: 13 Ways the Social Internet Threatens the People You Lead

By Chris Martin

The world has changed. And we feel it in our homes, schools, and congregations.

We can hardly remember a time when we didn’t feel the influence of that back pocket device. The average social media user spends about two-and-a-half hours a day using social media. That’s more than enough time to shape our values and desires. Pastors, teachers, and parents feel their influence slipping away. We’re seeing increased loneliness, disunity, and self-absorption. But where do we go from here?

In The Wolf in Their Pockets, Internet expert Chris Martin examines the many ways we are being changed by social media. With a biblically informed voice, Martin both exposes the ways the Internet is distorting our life in Christ and shows us how to faithfully respond. Martin teaches us how to care for people who are obsessed with followers, views, and likes—and how to love those whose online influences have filled them with cynicism and contempt. Martin looks at how the social Internet is changing how we understand sex and beauty—what to do about the epidemic levels of anxiety—and how to redirect our hearts to worship Jesus Christ.

Shepherding and leading people has never been easy, but the social Internet has brought new challenges. We need the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit and a powerful prayer life. Martin provides the biblical wisdom, direction, and hope necessary to combat The Wolf in Their Pockets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Moody Publishers
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780802473585

Chris Martin

CHRIS MARTIN is this very moment endeavoring to become himself, a somemany and tilted thinking animal who sways, hags, loves, trees, lights, listens, and arrives. He is a poet who teaches and learns in mutual measure, as the connective hub of Unrestricted Interest/TILT and the curator of Multiverse, a series of neurodivergent writing from Milkweed Editions. His most recent book of poems is Things to Do in Hell (Coffee House, 2020) and he lives on the edge of Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis, among the bur oaks and mulberries, with Mary Austin Speaker and their two bewildering creatures. 

Book preview

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGES US

Social media likely shapes the people you love and disciple more than you do. What are you going to do about it?

In January 2022, social media management platform Hootsuite reported that the average internet user spends about two-and-a-half hours on social media per day.¹ Over two-thirds of Americans use Facebook, and half of them say they use it several times a day.² Every day a billion hours of video are consumed on YouTube.

I could hit you with pages of stats, but I won’t. I think you get the point.

Social media is not a fad. It’s not going away. And it’s arguably the most pervasive discipleship force in the world right now.

THE WRONG WAYS WE APPROACH SOCIAL MEDIA

I think there are, simply speaking, two wrong ways to approach social media: 1) uncritical embrace and 2) passive ignorance. These are two ends of a spectrum.

First, some of us may be guilty of uncritically embracing various aspects of social media. We give up treasure troves of personal data without batting an eye. We overshare intimate details about our lives that make friends cringe and maybe even hurt our gospel witness. We don’t think about what mindlessly scrolling every night before bed is doing to our hearts and our minds. We get radicalized by YouTube videos or find ourselves down rabbit holes of lust and sexual sin because we never stopped to see how we were being transformed. Social media asks very little of us, and so we ask very few questions of social media and its effects on us. We are wrong if we embrace social media with such uncritical fervor.

Likewise, we are wrong to passively ignore social media and the internet, especially if we are in ministry leadership. If we write off social media as a fad or as some lighthearted icon of popular culture that teens are addicted to, we will grossly underestimate the effect of social media in the lives of the people we love.

So what do we do then? What is the right answer? Between the uncritical embrace and passive ignorance ends of the spectrum, I want to advocate for intentional engagement. If we hope to be wise as we engage with social media and avoid as much sin as possible, either as an onlooker or an average user, we must be intentional. Because of our temptation to sin, flippantly using social media can be dangerous. We ought to be thoughtful and careful about how we handle such a powerful tool. What does this look like practically? It looks like asking questions such as, What is the purpose of Instagram in my life? or In what ways does Twitter shape the way I think about current events?

In addition to being intentional, we ought to be engaged. Now, this doesn’t mean I think everyone needs to be actively using social media. By no means. There are plenty of ways to be engaged with social media without being an active user of it. If you and I are in positions of authority and influence in the lives of our churches, our families, or otherwise, we are responsible for understanding what social media is, how it works, and how it may be impacting the people in our care. This is engagement, even if you don’t have any social media accounts! We are intentionally engaging with social media even as we observe and study platforms on which we do not maintain accounts. For instance, Tinder and Bumble are dating apps and are forms of social media. I am not on these apps because I am a married man, but I study them and engage with them without creating an account. Why? Because I know that people in my community group and broader church community use these apps. If I want to lead as effectively as possible, I ought to know how they are used!

Refrain from uncritically embracing every new social media platform and feature that pops onto the scene. Ask hard questions of these platforms. Reject the temptation to slide into passive ignorance because you don’t want to put in the work to understand these ever-evolving means of communication and entertainment. Find a healthy middle ground of intentional engagement that keeps you above the fray, but not unaware of how social media and the broader internet may affect you and is certainly affecting the people the Lord has given you a responsibility to lead.

THE NEW TOWER OF BABEL

In 2013, I graduated with a biblical literature degree from Taylor University, got married, and began a social media role at Lifeway Christian Resources, one of the largest Christian publishers in the world. A friend remarked to my wife with the best intentions, Are you sure Chris should be getting a job in social media? It seems like a fad that may be gone in a few years. At that time, Facebook boasted about 1.23 billion monthly active users around the world, and 73 percent of internet users were using social media.³ The friend meant well, but social media wasn’t even a fad back then. However, it is understandable why it may have felt that way for some onlookers. Social media did not occupy the same sort of cultural and social prominence that it does today. Some world leaders were using social media as an official line of communication in 2013, but not quite in the same way they do today. Social justice movements were still primarily organized off of social media, not on it. And plenty of social media platforms have been created and dismantled since then.

For good or ill, social media is here to stay. The social internet—all the different ways in which we communicate with others online—is an unprecedented institution of socialization whose only comparable innovation in recorded history is the Tower of Babel.⁴

In Genesis 11, we are told that the whole world shared the same language. With this same language came a form of corrupted cooperation that could only be the natural offspring of the conspiratorial couple banished from the Garden of Eden. What did people do with their shared lexicon? Genesis 11:4–6 tells us:

Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

Yahweh recognizes the tremendous power in this communicative innovation of the people and decides the godhead must descend and confuse the language of the builders. Otherwise they would continue to build their tower and find other ways to pretend they are powerful apart from God.

The people of the world gathered together and deployed their novel communication capabilities to demonstrate their self-sufficiency, independence, and ingenuity.

Sound familiar?

Today on the social internet and through the varieties of media we consume online, we have gathered together with the people of the world and engaged our own novel communication capability. We fiddle with our own frivolities in an attempt to demonstrate our own self-sufficiency, independence, and ingenuity.

The social internet is a tool that, in its earliest days, had a magical feel of unity and progress that created the illusion of impossible innovation and cooperation. In more recent years, God has used our own folly to introduce the same kind of frustration that the Tower of Babel constructors felt. In fact, when Facebook introduced the Like button and Twitter introduced the Retweet, the illusion of a collaborative, Babel-like project began to deconstruct.⁵ But despite growing negative sentiment toward different aspects of the social media experience, many of us are still trying to lay bricks and build our virtual towers. We are so consumed by our relationship with the social internet that it has begun to transform how we think, feel, and believe.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGES HOW WE THINK

The primary way our relationship with social media changes the way we think is by aligning our values with its values. This happens in any relationship, if you think about it. When you get married, or even just when you’re dating someone, what you value is shaped by your significant other.

Perhaps you never really liked Thai food until you met your wife, but because she really likes Thai food and requests your local Thai restaurant for her pick of date night destinations, you’ve come to like Thai food a bit more than you did before. The principle applies to more important areas too. Maybe you never really considered fostering a child until you met your fiancé, who is deeply passionate about caring for foster children and orphans. Now, because of your relationship with your spouse, you plan to explore how you can serve in the foster care system as soon as you get married. Our values are shaped by the people (and things) with whom we spend the most time.

The premise of the social internet is to be a virtual platform for us to socialize with other people. We understand this, but we overlook the relationship we have with the actual platforms themselves. The average user spends about two-and-a-half hours a day on social media, and that’s more than enough time to have our values shaped by what it values.

The triplet cornerstone values of the social internet are entertainment, attention, and identity. These three values are, of course, related. That which is most entertaining is given the most attention, and how much attention one receives has become an important part of one’s identity. That which is given much attention is seen as more valuable than that which is given less attention—we see this in the celebration of virality on morning news programs and afternoon talk shows. I think it is fair to say that attention is the primary currency of the social internet. We post content in hopes of accruing enough attention to buoy our sense of self in a way only recognizing the image of God in us truly can. We pay attention to content that we find entertaining. So if the acquisition of attention is how one becomes wealthy on the social internet, then the question that follows is, How does one acquire as much attention as possible?

What’s the most reliable way to accumulate the most attention and thus the most positive sense of self? Be entertaining—post funny content, fight with people, or do whatever else you need to do in order to acquire the attention of the crowd you hope to attract.

These are the values of the social internet that drive the trends we see on social media. When we spend two-and-a-half hours a day engaging with a form of communications technology that values entertainment and attention above integrity or humility or patience or kindness, our values will begin to reflect the values of the social internet. We will come to think something that is entertaining or viral or otherwise popular is inherently more valuable than that which is gentle and lowly and unknown.

Social media changes what we value and it changes how we think about the world around us. But the formative power of social media doesn’t stop at our brains. It shapes our hearts too.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGES HOW WE FEEL

As social media has aged and more studies have been conducted regarding its effects on mental health, the prognosis is not good. It is difficult to demonstrate any causal relationship between one’s relationship with social media and negative mental health side effects because there are so many variables at play that can affect mental health. But without bombarding you with statistics, know this: there is a correlation between poor mental health and time spent on social media. What that means is that the more time one spends on social media, the more likely one is to experience mental health crises. In fact, people who frequently use social media report greater symptoms of psychopathology.⁶ But concerns abound regarding how social media makes us feel, even beyond the clear mental health dangers.

Our interactions on the social internet have changed how we feel about other people. Engaging with people on the internet often makes us feel antagonistic toward people we don’t know. Socialization mediated by the internet is so disconnected from important aspects of our personhood (like body language or vocal tone) that it is far too easy to see the people with whom we engage online as less than human. We all have either treated others or ourselves been treated as though we are not made in the image of God and inherently valuable creations with souls. At the very least, we have witnessed others be treated in this way.

Our relationship with the social internet can also make us feel like we are never successful, pretty, or interesting enough. This goes back to the cornerstone values of entertainment, attention, and identity that we explored before. Successful, beautiful, and interesting people are the ones who are the most entertaining online and, therefore, get the most attention. This leads to feelings of discouragement and discontentment within our own hearts when we don’t get the attention we feel we deserve. It can make us feel defensive and light the fuse of anger. It can make us feel unworthy of love or perhaps even life itself. This phenomenon is felt most acutely among teen girls.⁷

Social media weds us to its values and warps our hearts in ways that can be discouraging or even destructive, but it doesn’t stop there. Its infiltrating influence seeps deeper, down into our very souls.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGES HOW WE BELIEVE

A young man coming of age in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951 would have had the same general worldview of his neighbors. Given that he wouldn’t have interacted with many people outside of his hometown, he likely saw the world from the same ideological perch as his barber, his parents, and his priest. Any exposure to the outside world would have come from the newspaper or radio reports of the broader world, or maybe the tales of a local war hero or businessman passing through town. Until he went to college, if he went to college, the most formative force on the young man’s worldview would have been his family, friends, and broader community.

A young man coming of age in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2021 is likely to have spent more time talking to people across the globe through the social internet than he has spent talking to his barber, his priest, or even his parents. It is unlikely that his worldview has been stamped by his hometown in the same way that his grandfather’s worldview was shaped by his community seventy years earlier in the same context.

The wide world that has been made available to us via the social internet has exposed us to a diversity of worldviews and perspectives on how the world is supposed to work. Exposure to many different kinds of lived experiences and ideas used to be reserved for the college educated or the world traveler. Today such exposure is held in the hands of children and tucked into the pockets of teenagers. If you are wondering why the Western world is growing more secular, you would be wise to consider this as a major factor in that phenomenon.⁸

I tend to think that being exposed to a diversity of worldviews at a young age is a positive aspect of the social media experiment. In many ways, it is better for a sixteen-year-old boy to question the tenets of faith his parents have instilled in him since childhood and sharpen his understanding of his beliefs in the comfort of his own home, rather than being ambushed by antagonists in his freshman philosophy class on a college campus hundreds of miles away from home.

But those positives aside, social media changes how we believe not simply by challenging truths we have held dear but by slowly and silently deceiving us into believing that the meaning and fulfillment we find in our deeply held faith can be found in the experiences promised by the fountain of fancies we find online.

As a single language deceived the people of the world into believing they could build a tower that would demonstrate their self-sufficiency and power in the face of a scorned God, we are deceived into believing that we can use the social internet to shape the world in ways that only God can. Participating in the social internet makes us feel like we are a part of something bigger than ourselves, supplanting one of the most appealing aspects of participating in the local church and global faith movements. The sad reality is that the social internet’s promise of world-shaping power is more performative than it is transformative.

Likewise, in addition to making us feel like we are a part of an earth-shaking movement, the social internet deceives us into believing we can achieve social intimacy with those with whom we interact online. Intimacy isn’t about romance as much as it is about feeling a close connection with someone. We long for intimacy because we’re made in the image of God, and He embodies intimacy in His trinitarian nature. For a diversity of reasons that will be explored later, we seek intimacy through the social internet. What we find, whether we realize it or not, is that social media isn’t made for intimacy—it’s made for ephemerality, which is the enemy of intimacy. Social media handicaps efforts toward intimacy because it discourages vulnerability and depth. If God is merciful we eventually realize that no accumulation of connection can ever occupy the gap that only intimacy can fill. This affects what and how we believe in profound ways.

What are we to do about the manifold ways we, those we love, and those we lead are molded by our modern Tower of Babel?

FAITHFUL LEADERSHIP IN OUR FRACTURED TIME

I don’t know you. I don’t know if you’re a pastor, a lay leader in a local church, a parent, or someone else entirely. I don’t