Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age

Book Review: Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age
Author: Samuel D. James
Publisher: Crossway (2023)

The Problem We Don’t See

We check our phones 96 times per day. How often do we scroll through social media feeds while our children beg for attention? We feel simultaneously hyperconnected and profoundly alone. Samuel D. James opens Digital Liturgies with a deceptively simple observation: we are fish who don’t know we’re swimming in water. The internet isn’t just a tool we use — it’s an environment that’s reshaping how we think, feel, and believe.

Digital Liturgies analogy. The fish swimming in an ocean of social media doesn't know that is swimming in the internet ocean of ideologies. — The fish swimming in an ocean of social media doesn’t know that is swimming in the internet ocean of ideologies. Art via Ideogram.

James’s central argument challenges the prevailing Christian approach to technology. Most evangelical discussions focus on content — avoiding pornography, managing screen time, or choosing edifying material. But James insists we’re missing something more fundamental: the internet’s form (addictive social media) itself is teaching us a way of being that conflicts with biblical wisdom. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan famously argued, is the message.

The book’s first section establishes what James calls “Good Givenness” — the biblical truth that our bodies, our locations, and our limitations aren’t obstacles to transcend but divinely designed realities to embrace. This stands in stark contrast to the internet’s implicit promise: that we can overcome our embodied existence, curate perfect identities, and access everything, everywhere, all at once.

James traces how Silicon Valley pioneers like Steve Jobs (influenced by people like Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog) intentionally designed digital technology as a vehicle for transcendence. The web’s disembodied nature wasn’t an accident — it was the point. This history helps explain why online spaces feel fundamentally at odds with Christian formation, even when we’re consuming “Christian content.”

Drawing on Nicholas Carr’s neuroscience research, James demonstrates that internet use literally rewires our brains. Social media is an “interruption system” that trains us for shallow skimming rather than deep contemplation. The hyperlink-driven, algorithm-powered nature of digital spaces makes sustained attention nearly impossible. Sustained attention is precisely what critical thinking and wisdom requires.

Five Digital Liturgies

The heart of the book identifies five “liturgies”—habitual patterns that shape our desires beneath conscious awareness:

Authenticity (“My Story, My Truth”): The web’s radical democratization collapses expertise and elevates personal narrative as ultimate authority. James connects this to the transgender revolution and cancel culture, showing how the internet’s disembodied nature makes “wrong body” narratives feel plausible and encourages us to reject any external authority over our self-definition.

Outrage: Social media algorithms profit from anger, training us to think in tribal jargon rather than pursuing truth. James draws on C.S. Lewis’s concept of the “Inner Ring” to show how our desire for belonging overwhelms our capacity for careful thought. We become what the algorithm feeds us.

Shame: Without theological categories for grace and atonement, secular culture turns to public humiliation as a purging mechanism. James, drawing on Wilfred McClay’s work, argues that unacknowledged guilt must go somewhere—and in our age, it goes toward scapegoating others online.

Consumption: The internet turns everything—including human persons—into content to be consumed. James links this directly to pornography’s explosion, showing how the web’s architecture of novelty, isolation, and commodification creates the perfect habitat for lust to flourish.

Meaninglessness: Despite unprecedented connectivity, rates of depression and suicide among young people have skyrocketed. James describes the “cacophonous crowd” of digital noise that leaves us feeling simultaneously overstimulated and hollow.

Digital Liturgies – Strengths and Limitations

James excels at synthesis, weaving together insights from media ecology, neuroscience, theology, and cultural criticism into a coherent argument. His analysis of how form shapes us is the book’s most valuable contribution—this isn’t just another “use technology wisely” plea but a deeper interrogation of what the medium itself does to us.

The book also offers genuine pastoral warmth. James admits his own struggles with these technologies, positioning himself as “a fellow traveler” rather than someone who has achieved digital enlightenment. This humility makes his warnings more credible.

However, the book’s practical guidance feels thin. James concludes with general principles: cultivate embodied community, develop habits of resistance, cling to God’s promises. But readers desperate for actionable steps may feel somewhat adrift. The “drowning man teaching swimming” problem he acknowledges becomes most apparent here.

Additionally, while James rightly avoids simplistic anti-technology polemics, some readers may wonder whether his critique goes far enough. If the internet’s form is this fundamentally corrosive to Christian formation, shouldn’t the response be more radical than “use it more deliberately”?

Why This Book Matters

Digital Liturgies succeeds because it names something most of us feel but struggle to articulate. We know something is wrong. We feel the exhaustion, the distraction, the spiritual thinness. James gives us language for the crisis and, more importantly, helps us see that this isn’t primarily a time-management problem or a content-filtering problem. It’s a formation problem.

The book is essential reading for parents, pastors, and anyone who senses that our digital age poses challenges beyond the merely practical. James demonstrates that faithful Christian living in the 21st century requires not just moral discernment about what we consume but theological discernment about the environments we inhabit.

His most penetrating insight may be this: we keep searching the internet for heaven — for belonging, meaning, transcendence — but we’re looking in a realm specifically designed to offer us everything except what our souls actually need. The noise will not relent on its own. We must learn, again, what it means to be human, created in the image of God.

Recommended for: Christians struggling with technology’s grip on their lives; parents raising digital natives; anyone feeling spiritually exhausted by the online age; church leaders seeking to understand cultural formation in a digital world.

Further Reflection: Digital Liturgies vs. Digital Catechism

Question: Why does the author use the phrase “Digital Liturgies” rather than “Digital Catechism” or “Digital Habits”?

This is an excellent question that gets at something theologically significant about James’s framework. James chooses “liturgy” over “catechism” because these terms describe fundamentally different modes of formation:

Catechism is primarily cognitive and propositional. It works through explicit instruction — questions and answers that teach us what to believe. Catechism happens at the conscious level: “What is your only comfort in life and death?” “That I am not my own…”

Liturgy is embodied and habitual. It works through repeated practices that shape our desires and intuitions beneath conscious thought. As James writes, drawing on James K. A. Smith, liturgies are “rhythms and routines and rituals, enacted over and over again, that implant in you a disposition… that you trend toward ‘without thinking about it.'”

The genius of James’s framing is recognizing that the internet’s most powerful effects aren’t propositional. Social media isn’t primarily teaching us explicit doctrines (though it does that too). Instead, it’s training our hearts through:

The practice of endless scrolling → teaching restlessness
The rhythm of checking notifications → teaching addiction to external validation
The ritual of curating our profile → teaching that identity is self-constructed
The habit of consuming content → teaching that human persons are commodities

These patterns don’t require us to consciously believe anything. They work on us pre-cognitively, shaping what feels natural, what seems plausible, what our hearts default toward “without thinking about it.”

The Proof Is in Our Experience

James notes how many people (including himself) are “one way online and a completely different way in person.” We don’t consciously decide to become angrier, more tribal, or more performative online. The liturgy of the platform shapes us that way through repeated practice.

Similarly, his description of reaching for his phone while his children beg for attention isn’t a failure of belief—he knows his kids are more important than Twitter. It’s a failure of formation. The liturgy has trained his reflexes.

Why “Catechism” Language Would Miss the Point

If James had titled this Digital Catechism, it would imply:

The solution is better arguments or information
We just need to learn the right answers
The problem is primarily intellectual

But James’s argument is that our screen-saturated lives are forming us at a deeper level than argument can reach. You can know all the right theology about human dignity while simultaneously treating people online as content to consume. You can affirm that your body is “fearfully and wonderfully made” while your social media habits train you to experience yourself as disembodied.

The Echo of James K. A. Smith

This framing directly echoes Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, which argues that secular “liturgies” (like the shopping mall) shape us through practice, not proposition. Smith writes: “What if…the center of gravity in Christian discipleship is affective and embodied more than cognitive and intellectual?”

James applies this insight to the digital age: the web is a liturgical space that conducts formative practices on us constantly. We can’t think our way out of this. We need counter-liturgies — embodied practices (church gathering, sabbath rest, face-to-face presence) that reshape our loves.

So “Digital Liturgies” isn’t just a catchy title. It’s the thesis: these technologies are re-ordering your desires through ritual practice, and you probably don’t even notice it happening.

A lively video discussion with Samuel D. James about his book, Digital Liturgies.

Published on 4-Feb-2026. Several AI tools were used to edit and improve some content in this article.