Mae Holland, the protagonist in Dave Egger’s terrifying novel The Circle, lands a dream job at the world’s largest innovative tech company. Think Google, Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, and Amazon amalgamated into one mega-corporation. Midway into the novel she turns a device on (the company calls the device SeeChange) that makes her life “transparent” to the rest of the world, live-streaming audio and video of her entire life as it happens.
Mae, who has by this point become a leading spokesperson for the Circle, delivers a a speech (think Steve Jobs or TED Talks) including three mantras developed by the “Three Wise Men,” the CEOs and founders of the Circle.
“Sharing is Caring.”
“Secrets are lies.”
“Privacy is theft.”
These represent their core beliefs, that your life on social media is a way of caring for others. Keeping secrets from others is like lying to them. And keeping your personal, private experiences to yourself is like theft, robbing others of the opportunity to share in your experiences vicariously.
It is terrifying but realistic to think that a successful corporation could twist traditional ethics on their head and call it good. More terrifying is the reality that billions of consumers could and do often buy into these ideologies also, with only a few and increasingly marginalized (even hunted) exceptions.
Eggers novel is a warning, and an important one. That it also has considerable religious overtones is not surprising.
What is more surprising is this: the church is strangely silent on the topic of privacy. Unless I’ve been missing something, the church only talks about privacy if it has to develop privacy guidelines for public institutions like colleges or hospitals, where state and federal laws require it.
Apart from an expensive academic imprint from Ashgate press, Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society (written by Eric Stoddart), there’s basically no published work at the intersection of privacy and faith.
The popular word of the moment is the opposite of private — public. Lots of religious authors are publishing works on the public these days, including authors who frequent the pages of the Christian Century. Public Church by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda. A Public Faith by Miroslav Volf. Public Theology for the 21st Century by William Storrar. A Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness by Jennifer McBride. Faith in the Public Square by Rowan Williams. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, co-written by Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. Apparently “public” is almost as popular a term in religious publishing as “missional,” perhaps because they are kin if not cognates.
Admittedly, there are excellent reasons for the increase in intentional reflection on public faith, public theology, public religion, public church, in North American publishing. In an increasingly diverse society, our religions, cultures, and faiths all intersect in the public sphere. The rise of a public as a bi-product of secularization requires our intentional reflection, that we might make of the public sphere where our various faith meet a place of trust and peace.
All of that being said, it is also the case that when public emerges as a “thing” to be reckoned with, the opposite of public also takes on new dimensions. Our private lives are different now that there exist multiple public(s). Not only have we lost certain kinds of privacy as a result of the intensification of mediating public institutions; the very nature of privacy has itself changed, or we might say the fact that we have privacy at all is itself something new in a secularizing age that distinguishes between public and private.
I imagine the majority of us, even if we are committed to a public faith, practice a considerable portion of our faith in what we would call private settings. We may idealize or prioritize in our public discourse the public nature of our faith, but at the end of the day, we practice most of our faith in private, and the vast majority of us consider our faith to be just about as private as our sex lives or our annual income. We are, with the exception of those brave few who subject their faith completely to the judgment of a magisterium or teaching authority, private discerners of faith.
On the other hand, it may be the monastic community more than any other community of Christians who continues to practice some kind of intentional private faith of the type we are considering. Publics gaze in bemused befuddlement at monastic communities, questioning the value of lives devoted to prayer, limited as they are by vows of stability, poverty, and chastity. Monastic communities boast entire continents of private interior religious life largely uncharted by modernity (think of Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, or Neal Stephenson’s great novel Anathem), but the general decline of monasticism in the West likely illustrates in even greater relief the lack of space public forms of church offer private faith. Monasticism, perhaps the only real faith-based alternative to the rise of the private sphere in secular society, is a form of life so foreign to late modern capitalism as to gather about as much attention as privacy itself in religious discourse.
Furthermore, the rise of a surveillance society, and widespread practices encouraging the sharing of personal information in social media contexts, is contributing to an ever-decreasing space for vital private life. It may be that by and large we don’t know what to do with ourselves in private. This has major social implications, because what we find ourselves doing in private when we don’t know what to do with our private lives is readily apparent. We watch a lot of television. We do drugs. We engage in habits and practices that are secretive and painful. Private lives do not have to be thus, but in a world where the private has become the place for indulging in those things we wouldn’t do in public, the private becomes a stilted and lonely place. When the Atlantic publishes an article on why Facebook is making us lonely, and Sherry Turkle a book titled Alone Together, both of which argue that although new technologies like Facebook or robots offer us a simulacrum of community, in fact they isolate us even while fooling us into believing we are deepening our communal and public involvement. So much of what we do in religious communities is to make the leap immediately from the atomistic self to the public space of church, while cultivating very few practices that equip us to live faith in the primarily private (and increasingly lonely) spaces we inhabit most days.
In which case missional, and really most forms of evangelical Christianity, is failing because it aims to evangelize various publics while not evangelizing the private retreats to which most of us flee out of fear of the complex publics we inhabit. The primary habit private individuals exercise in the life of faith is the habit of prayer. Prayer in many traditions is to a considerable degree private. Jesus famously remarked, “When you pray, go into your room” (Matthew 6:6), and of all his faith practices, it was prayer he most frequently carried out in private settings. In secular society, with the division between public and private seriously reified, many of us simply feel ill-equipped to pray. We know we’re supposed to do it, but we don’t know how to do it well. It may remove some of our guilt to realize that the reason we struggle with private prayer is the same reason we struggle with privacy in general: we don’t know what to do with it.
What might it look like for us to be as intentional in our reflection on the private life of faith as we have been on the public? What might a theology of privacy look like?
Prior to going “transparent,” Mae had taken a long weekend to visi her increasingly alienated parents and ex-boyfriend. On the drive back to the Circle, she stops at a kayaking outfitter and “borrows” a kayak for a covert night-time kayak outing. She finds herself surprised by the compulsion to get out on the bay and the moonlit water, but nevertheless paddles her way to a private island that has made her curious on previous kayaking excursions.
Having reached the island in the dark, she thinks to herself, “It was dark, no one could see her, and no one would ever know she was here. But she would know.” The entirety of the rest of her hike around the island carries this aura. Somehow everything about this trip to the island is made more vital, more numinous, more meaningful precisely by the fact that she is alone doing it, with no devices to record the moment, no networks to share it on.
However, the beauty of the moment is made fleeting by her return to the beach. Unbeknownst to Mae, there are already SeeChange cameras installed at the shoreline, two of which set off an alert to the police about her after hours use of the kayak. When Mae returns to the Circle, what offends people at the Circle more than her possible theft of the kayak is her disinterest is her seeming ignorance of the presence of the SeeChange devices themselves, and her disinterest in making use of them both to keep herself safe on the outing and share her experience with others.
Eamon, one of the founders of SeeChange, believes that if cameras were ubiquitous, humans would always make the right choices because they would know they were watched. At the conclusion of a long conversation with Mae that concludes the episode with the kayak, he says to Mae, “I truly believe that if we have no path but the right path, the best path, then that would present a kind of ultimate and all-encompassing relief. We don’t have to be tempted by darkness anymore. Forgive me for putting it in moral terms. That’s the Midwestern church-goer in me. But I’m a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it” (291).
It would not be accurate to set two options up in polarity from each other and then ask us to choose, but there is a sense in which these are the major moral options before us. In an increasingly surveillance society that emphasizes public life often to the marginalization of private life, what is the value of solitary beauty, of a lonely night-time hike on a private island. No one is an island, but do we need islands at times to be fully human? What are we losing in terms of our interior landscapes in our quest for a panopticon that drives us towards some version of perfection? Are we willing to give up the numinous beauty of a private island and solitary retreats if it establishes a public that provides widespread goods for the many?
Clint Schnekloth is lead pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has blogged for more than a decade as “Lutheran Confessions,” and consults widely on digital social media ministry. His recent book Mediating Faith is featured in the Patheos Book Club here.
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