“Why post on Facebook?” The question I’m not sure I’ve answered well
A friend in another city sent me a private message via Facebook ten days ago with a question I haven’t been able to get off my mind.
“What is your purpose in posting articles on social media?”
She assured me she wasn’t being, as she put it, “snarky.” She wasn’t attacking me; she was just trying to deal with all the conflict she sees online. “I feel like not much joy is being shared,” she wrote. “My heart is hurting as I watch so many friends of mine (especially believers) spend time debating on social media, and for what cause?”
I appreciated her note. “Why?” is always a good question. And this time I find it not easy to answer.
Helpful posts
I remember advice in a workshop on social media my daughter led years ago. She said she didn’t post on Facebook unless she could inspire, inform, or entertain. Good standards these. But with wide ways to apply them, maybe they’re not enough, especially in the current atmosphere of attack and divide
“I pray the church will be the light it is called to be,” my friend concluded, “instead of spending countless hours debating things that won’t matter for eternity.”
But the links I’ve shared on Facebook speak to issues that can affect eternity, especially for so many outside the church waiting to see how the church will respond.
For example, if Christians will not stand against lingering, inbred racism, how will they convince those outside the church that God, our God, is love?
And how will those outsiders believe the church is for everyone when they see the church praising a leader without calling him to account for his lies or slander or dehumanization of others?
Can Christians disagree civilly about the best way to reduce abortions, offer gun rights, or handle the flood of illegal immigrants living in our country? If not, if Christians can’t confront complicated questions without assaulting each other with simplistic, black-and-white, accusatory put-downs, a watching world will simply walk away. And statistics tell us that is happening more every year.
Loving posts
Canadian preacher Jim Tune wrote this week, “They will know we are Christians by our love. It might take a long time for the church to convince the world of this . . . a very long time, but if we remain faithful, love wins!”
So how does that standard alone, the standard of spreading and demonstrating the love of Christ, determine what I write on social media—or if I post at all?
How does the standard of spreading and demonstrating the love of Christ
determine what I write on social media—or if I post at all?
I see some issues here.
First is the often-ignored fact that people seldom change their mind about long-held political positions because of anything they read on Facebook. I know that, but I sometimes close my eyes to it, and I’m afraid I know why.
I give in to our natural drive (as one professor described it, our ego-centric predicament) to be important. The need to be seen as important lingers in the background of most human interaction, including most Facebook posts.
We post pictures of our perfect family gatherings, our beautiful vacations, our adorable grandchildren, our new cars, and our abundantly producing gardens to show the world that we’re living an admirable life. We know, we have, we’ve experienced something the rest of you would like in your life, too.
A subset of “I’m important” is “I’m right.” Maybe you haven’t figured this out, so I’m here to set you straight. This drive goes into overdrive when someone challenges something we’ve posted. We must show how very wrong these misguided commenters are. We have facts! We have quotes from experts! We have Bible verses!
But too often these responses devolve into arrogant sarcasm or, worse, mean attacks. The withering assaults in the comments after a couple of my posts have astounded me—all of them from Christians, many of them from Christian leaders who chose to condemn a brother instead of graciously point out why they believe he’s wrong. These are the reactions my friend was decrying when she asked, “What good is all of this?”
Wise posts
Jesus once told his critics, “Wisdom is shown to be right by its results” (Matthew 11:19, NLT). And the result of so much of our social media posting has yielded not wisdom, but rancor. So I understand when I see some friends leaving social media altogether. Fighting advances no Kingdom agenda. And I understand my friend’s concern. I’m making it my concern, too.
But I will stay on Facebook, because it’s a good place to introduce friends to this blog, it’s a good way to store photo memories of fun times with my family and friends, and it’s a good forum for sharing insight about issues important to Christians from better writers and thinkers than I.
At least that’s what I want it to be. But I must admit, I almost never share points-of-view that differ from my own, and the incidence of thoughtful dialogue on social media is almost nil. When I post, am I willing to listen as well as to speak? Am I willing to be wrong? Am I considering readers and responders as better than myself? (Philippians 2:3).
If so, maybe I’m OK to keep posting. I’m going to try. And I’m going to keep thinking about this.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
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