If one were to judge from certain corners of social media, the conservative movement is on a triumphant march to take back our culture. Trump will be re-elected in a landslide in 2024, Roe vs. Wade will fall, and even California will soon be deep red. Despite what you might hear about Big Tech censorship, the conservative world is thriving on social media—whether it is homeschool mom Facebook debates or Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and his 1.7 million followers.
Yet despite the crowing of various popular talking heads like Kirk or Steven Crowder, our culture continues to degrade into further and further depths of perversion. Complaining about rigged elections on Facebook and gloating over “Let’s go Brandon” chants has done nothing to stem the tide of our culture of death. Our families are shattered, and our churches are filled with therapeutic nonsense. According to Gallup, gay marriage approval is now up to 70%, compared to only 27% in 1996. The slaughter of unborn infants still continues unchecked across the nation. Our institutions of education, business, and government have been hollowed out by intersectional thought on race and gender. Dying churches bleed more and more members post-COVID. Where are your victories, O Twitter Conservatives? What real cultural ground have you won?
The truth is social media itself is a medium ill-suited for serious conservative thought. Conservatism, as a philosophy, should be firmly grounded in the belief that humans are embodied creatures. We are made of flesh and blood, intimately tied to physical realities. This means we are not isolated brains on a stick, and we need real ties to family, church, and nation. As COVID has taught us, no number of classes on Microsoft Teams, family calls on Facetime, or Zoom church can ever fully replace the embodied reality.
A useful lens to consider this issue comes from Dr. Carl Trueman’s work on the modern self. In some ways, social media has become to modern expressive individualism what the printing press was to the Reformation or birth control to the Sexual Revolution. It allows you to broadcast your inner self to the world, putting on a show to impress others. You identify with a niche group that suits your own personal interests and everything becomes a matter of personal taste. Not only this, but the medium also lends itself to triviality. Consider the idea of the news feed. In this one page, is a juxtaposition of everything from cat videos to news of the latest war crime in Syria. This has a sort of equalizing effect where the weight of the serious is diminished by proximity to the absurd. We thus interact with a disembodied shadow of reality that can be easily discarded if inconvenient or uncomfortable.
This is bad news for any political philosophy that wants serious disciples, but especially so for conservatives interested in family, church, and nation. These institutions require something greater than the autonomous individual and a real sense of love and sacrifice. LGBTQ activism on Twitter, on the other hand, feeds into the expressive individualism and self-gratification already present on social media. This is not to say that there is no place for some conservative presence on social media, but rather that it is already an uphill battle. A successful conservative plea would lead the audience to turn off their computer and take on responsibility in their life. The average LGBTQ activist need only convince the audience to post the rainbow flag on their profile and express whatever sexual proclivities they already have. This requires little interruption to the indulgence of endless dopamine hits and titillation already embedded in the fabric of the internet. The former is doable (see: Jordan Peterson), but it is a much harder sell than the latter.
To make a real impact on others, we need to reject the disembodiment of social media. It is almost impossible to love your neighbor well without being in proximity to him. If we really want to stand against the tide of liquid modernity, it is far better to remove oneself from heavy involvement in social media and engage with the real world. Most of us have very little control over the major political events that we worry about on Facebook, but what we can and are called to do is to be faithful with the little we have before us. Being present in a family, church, and nation requires getting our hands dirty with real, broken human beings.
It is one thing to complain about the breakdown of the family on Twitter, but it is quite another to put in the hard work of starting one yourself. “Let’s go Brandon” will never stop a single abortion, but supporting your local maternity home very well might. Love is hard; it was never meant to be easy. It is time that we repent of obsessing over events out of our control and instead learn to sacrifice for those in front of us.
