To be candid: this is what grieves me most about being in the online space. I lament so much of what passes for “Christian” discourse here. If this weren’t part of my calling in this season, I think I’d happily log off and walk away. But since I’m here, I need to say something.
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I recently watched a conversation between Francis Chan and Gavin Ortlund. Whatever you think about where they each land theologically, it’s hard to miss their humility, their affection for one another, and their desire to honour Christ and His church. In our current moment, that alone feels rare enough to celebrate.
Most of their discussion centres on the Eucharist / Lord’s Supper and the broader Protestant / Catholic / Orthodox questions – church history, unity, sacrament. All important.
But that’s not what stuck with me. What grabbed me was their opening reflection on online Christian discourse: the rancour, the constant calling out, the sense that “every man with a podcast is now his own pope,” and the way love for fellow believers seems to be evaporating in certain corners of the internet.
What breaks my heart as someone in this space isn’t disagreement. Disagreement can be healthy. What breaks my heart is the decay of love – especially between Christians.
The way we can speak the name of Christ and yet sound nothing like Him. The way we can shout about “truth” while starving each other of grace. It feels, at times, like there is a famine of love among those who are supposed to feast upon it. Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Christian: do you actually love other Christians? Not just the ones in your tribe, your camp, your denomination – but the awkward ones, the confused ones, the slightly-wrong-on-that-issue ones? How do you show it? Especially online, where it is so easy to hide it?
I think so much of this online degeneration is symptomatic of what postmodern thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord foresaw long ago – a world of simulation and hyperreality. A world where evil isn’t even sincerely believed; it’s performed for clicks. Where outrage becomes content. Where the performance of conviction replaces the presence of love.
It’s the collapse of reality into performance: where the image replaces the thing, where symbols no longer point beyond themselves but just bounce around inside a digital echo chamber, amplified by algorithms that reward attention more than truth. We don’t just see the world anymore; we stage it. We curate our convictions. We edit our outrage. We perform faith instead of living it.
Baudrillard warned that, in such a world, imitation becomes “more real than real.” I think we’re watching that happen in our own theological spaces, as images of righteousness replace righteousness itself.
It’s like the shadow of holiness without the substance of holiness. The performance of being “sound” without the presence of being Christlike. And somehow, even when it’s hollow, these illusions still move us, still provoke emotion, still generate noise, still feed the same darkness they claim to oppose.
Maybe that’s why so much “Christian” discourse online feels intense but thin. Loud but light. Heavy on heat, light on light. It’s not just sin. It’s sin via simulation.
And you can’t fight illusion with more illusion. You can’t heal a performative Christianity with a different performance.
The real antidote is a return to what is real: Souls anchored in the Word. Lives formed in ordinary, local community. Hearts fed by sacrament and prayer. Minds sanctified by a healthy dose of daily silence, the kind of silence where you let God’s voice be louder than whoever online.
If we want our online presence to look like Jesus, we can’t just tweak the performance. We need to go back to the Presence.
