The Manipulative Church

Freedom from sin in the contemporary age is the same as from freedom from manipulation. To the extent that the church itself is manipulative it is just another manifestation of sin. 

Sin manifests itself in different ways in different times. In our time the rise science based marketing, large data mining, and artificial intelligence are actively and openly used to manipulate individuals and societies into making decisions for the benefit of corporate and state interests. This manipulation has two specific impacts. It shapes behavior away from freely choosing to serve God, and it seeks to shape identity to conform to the service of idols. In short it is sinful, and in the abstract is Sin itself. 

The church has participated in this sin for a long time. It began when mid 19th century evangelists consciously adapted emotional manipulation to persuade people to commit themselves, usually temporarily, to Christ.  As a 6 year old I attended a Nazarene summer church camp. On the first day we were each given a paper crown, and whenever we brought a guest we got a star. It was a crude form of manipulation of a child’s desire for affirmation, but a sin nonetheless. However well intentioned it made children slaves to coercion and their own selfish desires rather than offering freedom in God’s service. It would turn out to be an on-ramp to the dozens of ways throughout my life that churches (most often United Methodist) would try to incentivize or shame me into bringing in new members, paying more money, or volunteering for more service.

As a pastor I participated in such manipulation because we were taught that it was essential to evangelism, fund raising, and social witness. Learning how to discern God’s Spirit and serve God freely was in the mix to be sure, but I don’t believe the churches really believed that encouraging free rational choice would work without the manipulation of egos, emotions, guilt, or shame. 

 Manipulation of emotions became the mainstay of both evangelistic and social activist preaching by the early 20th century, and emerging media were quickly mastered and deployed for both. 

Christians are no longer asked to listen with their full attention to the calling of God in relation to the world. We are harangued into emotion-laden confessionals, into inviting people to church, into attending political rallies, or into writing our congressman. Efforts to arouse compassion are quickly abandoned for manipulating guilt, or shame, or a shameless appeal to self-interest and ego. Indeed the easiest way to see the Christian progressives are evangelicals under the hood is the ready deployment of guilt and shame to evoke action in a political cause.

In the 2nd machine age churches will be drawn inexorably into an emerging culture in which manipulation is both far more effective than heart wrenching hymns and stars in a paper crown, and far more ubiquitous in social and church life. With the near complete mechanization of so-called contemporary worship around creating a “flow” of emotions the deployment of AI by churches promises endless prospects for increasing the manipulative aspects of multi-media worship experiences. 

Years ago in an early and effective form of such worship I observed how it stimulated one young couple into a more carnal passion, hidden as they were in a darkened sanctuary and up in a balcony. Such crude emotional targeting will be a thing of the past in the future, unless it’s actually desired. In the future the right mix of music, message, and visual effects will be more carefully attuned to manipulate people. This will insure that there is no wasted emotional energy. Whatever rush of emotions is currently confused for worship of God will be fully channeled to whatever behavior suits the needs of the congregational sponsors of an hour or more of adver-tainment.

In the realm of social activism Christians have now fully deployed social media to manipulate their co-religionists into some kind of action, while simultaneously participating in a culture of social media manipulation far more effectively used by anonymous actors deploying machine-generated bots. 

You don’t get the satisfaction of being labeled a “conversation starter” by Facebook when you generate self reflection, knowledge seeking, and politically useful behavior like voting. You get there by generating eyes on the advertisements from which Facebook draws its revenues. So when Christians tag their friends to promote their latest cause or upcoming rally they are both manipulating their friends and being manipulated by Facebook. When they shoot off a hot reply on Twitter because they want to be “part of the conversation” they are both manipulating others and being manipulated by Twitter. 

The freedom for which we have been set free in Christ is nowhere to be found as our causes and our conversations simply become another way to generate revenue for the owners of social media. Indeed Facebook invites us into the revenue driven model of manipulation by using our birthdays to raise money for a worthy cause. Ca-Ching! More eyes on ads for Facebook, with my qualms are allayed by Facebook’s manipulation of my self-righteousness. 

In this manipulation-laden environment the only way for the church to offer the redemption won by Christ against the powers and principalities of the world is to make the church itself a manipulation-free zone. Only when churches eschew all forms of manipulation will they become havens from the omnipresent power of sin in our society. Only then will they become places in which people experience God’s Reign and which thus witnesses in its corporate life to the possibility of redemption. 

In practice this means worship that engages the mind at least as much as the heart; an end to the meaningless and musically vacuous praise choruses organized around emotional flow. It means sermons that invite the hearers into their own study and contemplation of God’s word instead of deploying scripture as a series of slogans or rallying cries for the latest cause. It means that mass worship, in which manipulation is easiest, must be complimented by small group fellowship in which it is most difficult. 

And most of all it recognizes that technology isn’t neutral. All mass media was created for the purpose of manipulation, and only with the greatest of intentionality can it be made to serve the purpose of education. All mass media was created to enslave, and only with the greatest of intentions can it be converted into a force for freedom.