Is There a Place for God in Social Media?

A lot of people are hesitant to enter brick and mortar houses of worship these days. They’re tired of the rigid rules that define one place of worship from other places, and they’re fed up with being told what to think.
The real problem is this: people walk away, still hungry for spirituality.
Until social networks, attending traditional churches, mosques, or synagogues was the only place people could explore their spirituality. But many of us leave these traditional places of worship feeling like:
• It’s a club where everyone thinks, believes, and prays the same thing
• If you don’t agree with the rules of the club, you’re not part of it
• There is no place to talk intelligently about spiritual issues that are important to us
Social media is changing the way we find God and explore our spirituality. Why? It is one of the few places that people can be anonymous and speak freely about their faith—or lack of it. Social media provides safe places where we can engage in real conservations about our doubts, fears, and desires. There is no worry about church, synagogue, or mosque leaders looking over our shoulders and criticizing us because we haven’t interpreted the Holy Book to their liking or listened to their religious teachings.
Social networks provide a place where people can find others who think and feel the same way about important issues in their life. Shouldn’t that also include God?
Shut Down By Their Own Communities
We often do not speak out in the communities in which we live because we’re afraid of being censored by peers or leaders.
As a former FBI counterintelligence agent, my job was to recruit Russian spies trying to steal economic and military secrets from the U.S. I found that one of the biggest obstacles to communicating with the foreign spy was their fear of censor—that somehow their actions would be observed by others and misinterpreted—and then they would be judged, before given the opportunity to explain the situation.
The attraction of using social networks for spiritual conversations is that it doesn’t matter which faith tradition a person comes from, or what area of the world, or background. It provides a forum outside their church, synagogue, or mosque and gives them permission to explore beyond the confines of their own religious experience.

Biblica
Biblica is a large international bible publisher. They recently started a virtual community to read the New Testament during Lent. The group consisted of people around the world, in 5 different time zones, and from 12 different churches. The reason for the virtual meetings was not to discuss the church; it was to discuss how the readings had impacted them and to share these experiences with one another.
Virtual conversations allow people to express their thoughts without being constrained by the groupthink that holds so many of us back in our local communities. A great advantage of social is that it can international, interfaith, cross-cultural, and cross-generational. Face-to-face communities will always be important, but many people feel too intimidated to express opinions or feelings that don’t tow the line within that community. Diversity also exposes people to different ways of observing how the Holy moves in lives.

No Extremists, Please
Meaningful conversations about our spiritual lives do not include extremists who refuse to listen to any brand of religion except their own. There are already enough of those types of websites and they promote hate and intolerance.
Traditional churches, synagogues, and mosques have created on-line chat rooms for their followers in an attempt to modernize. These can be helpful tools. However, religious leaders may fear God showing up in social media because it means they may have less influence over the way we think and view our relationship with the Holy. They could have less control over how we spend our money and time as well.
On-line chats created for—and by—traditional houses of worship miss the real value of social media. Social media introduces us to people in other countries as well as those who live down the street, to people who believe as we do and to those from a completely different faith tradition, to those who look like us and those who look very differently.
What a great conversation!
Thanks to social networks, we can all join the conversation.