Four Reasons Why the Echo Chamber Is So Dangerous

Image by Naji Habib from Pixabay

When the pandemic first began to change our way of life, I wrote that crisis would reveal things to us about ourselves, things we might not want to know.

I’m not happy about how right I was. What we have learned in those darks times about the Christian witness in the marketplace of ideas is discouraging, if not disturbing. If our social media posts are any indication,

•         we Christians are more anxious than we ought to be

•         we are easily duped

•         we are angry and irritable

•         and we aren’t paying much attention to God’s Word

Why are these things so? Why are so many people who have been bought by the blood of Christ thinking and speaking and acting so much like people who don’t know him?

There are probably many answers to that question, but one answer that readily comes to mind is that too many of us are living in an Echo Chamber, and that toxic environment has warped our view of our culture, our self-image, and our expectations for the future.

There was a time when everyone pretty much lived in the same information bubble. We had three broadcast networks (and therefore three main sources for news). We laughed at the same jokes and shared more or less the same sensibilities. Sure, we had Democrats and Republicans, right-wingers and left-wingers and moderates. But because we shared so much in common, we were able to understand one another more easily, and we didn’t distrust one another so much.

I don’t need to tell you that all of that has changed.

Surveys have shown that liberals and conservatives tend to view one another not just with disdain but with outright contempt. Each camp finds the other incomprehensively _______________ (fill in the blank: corrupt, racist, brutish, etc.) We have devolved into warring tribes whose only common language is mutual outrage; civil debate has become the art of the insult. No shot is too low.

It is one thing to bewail the sorry state of politics and cultural discourse in our country. It’s quite another for Christ-followers to be swept up into the maelstrom as if we didn’t know better, as if our pet economic or political theory is all that matters in this world.

A sobeirngNetflix documentary takes a stab at explaining how this happened. The Social Dilemma is a kind of confessional, where social media insiders take turns talking to the camera, explaining how they inadvertently created a mechanism whereby each user is encouraged to believe with greater certainty what he or she already knows to be true. So the point of view I see on Facebook and Twitter only reflects my own biases and prejudices. The more I hear my own point of view articulated and defended, the more obvious it is to me that my tribe is right and everyone else is not just wrong but dangerously wrong.

In other words, each of us inhabits our own little Echo Chamber where we rarely hear opposing viewpoints, except in caricature. Our views are never challenged, only reinforced.

A national population that gets its news and opinions from the Echo Chamber is not one in which democracy can flourish.

But that is not the worst of our problems. What’s worse is that the people of God have drunk that Kool-Aid and are thinking and behaving as badly and as crudely as everyone else. The Echo Chamber is a dangerous place for a believer to live.

1. The Echo Chamber is dangerous because it warps my perception of reality and unnecessarily heightens anxiety. If I am constantly hearing how bad things are (and they are) and am simultaneously being told that my tribe is the only one that can sort things out, I will be justifiably alarmed at what I see in our culture. What’s worse, when I stoke those anxieties by listening to the voices I already agree with, I will limit my perspective to what I hear on Fox News and my Facebook feed, and I will forget that God is sovereign.

In fact, when I hear only the echoes of my own anxieties, the very idea of the sovereignty of God will seem more and more naïve and irrelevant, the kind of thing we say to children and simple-minded people who can’t possibly understand how things really are.

Anything that diminishes my confidence in the wisdom, love, and power of God is the enemy of God. And cozy with God’s enemies is no place for the people of God.

2. The Echo Chamber is dangerous because it makes it more difficult for me to discern what is true. I certainly can’t remember a time when public trust in news outlets was so low. We realize that there is no such thing as perfectly objective journalism (impossible so long as people – with their own biases and blind-spots – are writing the stories).

So our social media is saturated with accusations of “fake news” and “misinformation.” And we each reason that if we can’t trust the mainstream media, we must turn to a news source more to our liking, more in line with our preconceived notions of the way things are. When I do that, it makes me far more likely to believe wild speculations and dark rumors and hair-raising conspiracy theories. After all, if I heard it from my own trusted news source or from a trustworthy friend, it must be true. Fact-checking is a scheme used by the other side to muddy the waters and make it harder for the truth to get out.

Naïveté and gullibility are not for the people of God.

3. The Echo Chamber is dangerous because it damages relationships. When we get all our information from the Echo Chamber, we see everything in stark black and white. We don’t see controversies as differences in opinion on what is prudent; we see everything in morally catastrophic terms. It’s all about “the survival of democracy” or “the survival of our way of life” or “the moral fabric of the nation.”

And when the stakes are so high it’s hard to have a calm, rational conversation about problems and solutions. And it’s hard to see people who disagree with me as sane, rational people with a different point of view.

This is how we end up with Christians questioning the salvation of other Christians who vote differently or who voice a different point of view on the hot-button issues. This is why we see Christians vilifying others for having a differing opinion on gun control or immigration.

And this is how families are torn apart by political differences.

After hearing for my entire adult life that every presidential election is apocalyptic, I think I’m ready to turn down the dial on that rhetoric, at least in my own thinking and language.

And unnecessarily damaging relationships is not for the people of God.

4. The Echo Chamber is dangerous because it relegates God’s Word to a minor role in my mind. This is the biggest problem. When I feed daily on the newsfeed I get in the Echo Chamber and simultaneously neglect the Word of God, I am creating my own dilemma. We read the Scripture and listen to the sermon and hear the teaching of God’s Word because it is, as CS Lewis once put it, the radio voice from the homeland.

Lewis knew that we are in enemy-occupied territory. We are like the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France. We see around us every day irrefutable evidence that the enemy is supreme and invincible. And if that’s all we see and hear, we are despondent. But when we attend to the Scriptures, we hear another Story, a Story not just from our times but from before time began, when God had already planned to redeem and restore all that is broken. In that Story, the 2020 American presidential election is a mere footnote.

If we neglect to feed on that larger Story, we are tempted to despair.

And being in despair because we have forgotten God is no place for the people of God.

So yes, we need to read our Bible.

But not just because that’s what Christians do. We need to spend more time in God’s Word and less time in the torrent of our newsfeeds so that we won’t be tempted to follow everyone else into outrage and cynicism and despair.

When we listen to God’s Word, we know better than to panic. By drinking in the Psalms, by re-reading the gospel story of Jesus, by hearing the epistles, we recalibrate our expectations and outlook.

Let’s make this a social experiment. Try starting and ending your day by reading one of the Psalms aloud. There’s plenty in the Psalms to reflect our emotional states – outrage, lament, exhilaration, hope, despondency – it’s all there.

As you make psalm-reading a habit, you’ll begin to acquaint yourself with the rhythms and cadences and themes of God’s songbook, the same songbook Jesus used in his own troubled and turbulent times.

See if a week or two of daily psalm-reading doesn’t shift your point of view… from cynicism to hope, from despair to joy.

Let’s feed on God’s Story, and let’s trust Him to manage the chaotic scene we’re in right now.