Software and the Heart: Internet Filtering and Accountability — Ep. 168

In this episode, we discuss whether internet filtering and accountability works, or if this is just a simple cop-out when the real issue is the human heart.

Myron, uh, Christian groups, both Anabaptist and non-Anabaptist, have developed various tools, software, to fight things like online pornography and other dangers in the internet. Can you just give us a broad stroke, big picture view? What are these tools and what do they do? Yeah, so a lot of people in my line of work, they ask what I do, and I say that I work for an internet filtering company, and a lot of people kind of have a blank look on their face. They don't know what it is.

I like to think of internet filtering, or a way to explain it, maybe in terms that more people can readily understand, is thinking of it like a water filtration system in a house. So you have the water coming in off the street, goes through a water filter, removes dirt and chemicals that you may be looking to get rid of, and then the water that comes out of your tap is cleaner than what came from the street. So an internet filter is really the same concept. You have the internet pipeline coming into your house. Between the internet and your screen, your device screen, there's things being removed, and those can be really simple. Those can be quite complicated or advanced, I should say, as far as software goes.

But basically, the goal of these tools is to remove something that's on the internet, and generally that's undesirable content, pornography, or predatory behavior, things like that. You're the pastor here at our local church. Software can't fix everything. You know, I mean, we're talking about human hearts and bad habits, for example.

Can you speak more from the pastoral side of this when it comes to accountability software and things like that? What's your perspective as a pastor? So I think it highlights a tension that's been under debate for a long time. And what you really have happening is you've got two different pieces where I think we would all agree that bad content should not be consumed. You know, and we recognize bad content is there. And so this really goes beyond the internet, in my mind, to broader ways of just thinking about life. So there are certain safeguards or things that we would do. You just don't eat certain things. You don't drink certain things because they're not good for you.

Similarly, with content, the things we read, the things we consume with our eyes and our minds, it should be kind of that same thing where there's some appropriate discretion that happens there. The question in my mind is how you accomplish that best.

And here's the tension I referred to. Do you require that, or do you have that as voluntary? And I think you can make very solid arguments for both. I think if we only do one or the other, it's problematic. Accountability or required filtering, if it's only that, you end up trying to fit people in a box. If they don't want to go there, they're going to find ways to swiggle out of it. If you go just to the side of it where there's no accountability, no structure, you end up with some casualties that probably could have been prevented by some other helpful guidelines. I think there's a combination of those two things. And so now going pastorally, or in my mind, just as a Christian, what do we want of other believers?

We don't want people following Jesus and doing what's right only because they have to. It needs to stem to where we have people with changed hearts who are being transformed by the power of the Spirit. They're wanting to do what honors the Lord, and they care about what happens to their family. They care about their brothers and sisters around them. And when you begin with that framework, and then you insert some reasonable safeguards, it really doesn't feel like an infringement. It doesn't feel like it's a problem. It feels like, okay, now we're functioning in a healthy way that is caring about my spiritual condition, the spiritual condition of the people around me.

And it goes away from this thing, oh, it's just mandated. Years ago, I wrote an article on, I don't even remember the title of it, but it had to do with that idea of required accountability. And at that stage of my life, what I was seeing was people who were just unwilling to be accountable. And I was coming at it from the perspective of, hey, putting them in a situation where they have to relate actually has some benefits. The downside of that was that they still aren't going to relate what they don't want to, or they will lie or whatever. So I think that we have to have that balance. And for us, we just need to continue having that teaching of love the Lord, do what honors him, and make that the primary focus.

And then we bring all these things, other things into subjection to that.

So this is interesting because we're so we're getting the pastoral side. You're getting more of the technical side, having worked on these tools yourself and helped developing them and so forth. Now let's try to bring these together. So technical tools can't fix the human heart, the accountability issues. And if, yeah, as you were just saying, they're not foolproof. If someone wants to get around it, they could. So what is the point? What is the point of the software to begin with? And why use such tools if really this is maybe more of a hard issue? How do we bring those two together and make it work well? Yeah, it's a very valid question. I think we need both pieces.

I think if I had to pick between accountability or filter software, I think accountability is the right pick if you can only have one. Now I work for a filtering company, so obviously I believe there's some benefit and value there too. Again, drawing maybe a real-life parallel, you have a child who's just getting their learner's permit. They're just starting to drive. They've not had the life experience necessary to go the day after they get their permit and drive on a cross-country road trip. They just don't have the tools and the experience necessary to do that well and to do that safely. And you as a parent wouldn't send them on a cross-country road trip by themselves the day after they get the permit.

Another example with that is thinking of guardrails on a road. Well, if you're a good driver, you don't need guardrails. But they're there in case there's accidents that happen, the road's slippery, it's nighttime, there's rain, whatever. And so I view filtering as guidance, as an assistive tool in addition to accountability. I think accountability should always be there. There should be a relationship between you and a church brotherhood within a family.

There should be healthy community. And these tools do not replace that healthy community. I think too often, especially in the past, our conservative church groups, we've been very much on the abstinence or not very many restrictions at all. We're not very good historically at moderating or moderation of some of these things. You have TV, you don't. You have radio, you don't.

Some of those things. Now you have the internet, which is combining both very valuable business tools and these other entertainment or pop culture or just filthy content that's out there. A filter can give some guidance while people are maybe learning how to drive on the internet.

I don't know. That's a little bit what I'm thinking right now. What are your thoughts? It's like you're just to clarify, I guess you're like using the software as a supplement to what should already be there in your church or in your community, I guess. It's like an addition, almost like an addition to. Is that almost a fair way of saying it, perhaps? Yeah, or sometimes you don't know what you don't know. When you're first getting online, there's a lot of stuff that you just don't know how it works. And so I would say it's probably easier to bump into things and get snagged into things that you really don't want to be exposed to, don't want your children to be exposed to.

So yeah, I see it as an assistive thing. And again, it's not replacing those real-life relationships that should be happening, that accountability that should be happening. Because as you mentioned, these tools can be gotten around. I mean, you can lock a device down really hard. And maybe they can't get around it on that device, but they can buy a second phone. They can walk down the street in the summer. They can go to Walmart to the magazine aisle. I mean, you're not going to fix a heart problem with tools.

But I think they can offer some valuable assistance as well. Yeah, and how would you respond to that, marrying these two together? Yeah, so I like what Myron said there. I think that's helpful. Another way of looking at it is if someone has a particular bent or weakness, you probably would not intentionally expose them to that. So a recovering alcoholic probably should not frequent a bar, even for evangelistic purposes. Now, I'm not saying he couldn't come to a place of health where that could be okay, but in general, I think we get that.

You know, someone a recovering drug addict, you know, going back into that drug environment, it places a lot of pressure there. So I think when two things that I see as helpful, and neither one of these feel mandated to me, they just feel like wisdom. One would be what Myron talked about. You have youthful or lower-knowledge people, you know, whatever, maybe they're not familiar with the internet and how it works. I think that just avoids some accidental casualties that could be prevented with some of these tools in place. It just maybe it wasn't intentional, but I think we could probably find people fairly easily who were snagged by something small somewhere, and it started them on a journey.

And so I think that would be one benefit. The other is when you have the dynamic I was talking about where you have people with a certain weakness. So if someone has a weakness towards pornography or whatever, maybe I should even say if someone has a real weakness towards just wasting time on the internet, maybe it's nothing wrong with content. Maybe it's just infringing on other life values. So some accountability can be helpful there. And so for me, it's shoring up some of those things that improve life and our spiritual health. And it doesn't have to be viewed as something just really restrictive. Let's view the tools as helpful that assist in what we're attempting to accomplish spiritually.

Yeah, that's helpful trying to bring those two together. And it feels like the big takeaway that I'm seeing here is having that strong church or community surrounding you in this journey. Otherwise, it feels like the tools feel they hardly feel like a tool anymore because you don't have the pieces you need to make them work.

And it can be really easy. Okay, church is deciding what should we do with the internet? You know, it's useful for business. There's these other dangers. We have casualties. And how do we navigate this thing that is the internet? And it's easy to say, oh, here's a tool made by somebody else. Throw that on everybody's devices. Problem goes away.

Yeah, real-life relationships are messy. They take time. You know, the thing that you mentioned about forced accountability not working very well, I would agree with that. Then the big question is how do you cultivate this mindset or this culture of organic accountability? That's one of the things that blesses me about our church are various groups of men who are getting together just because they want to. Like they care about being intentional in this area of life and having good relationships with other people. And that blesses me. And I don't know that I have the answers on how to cultivate all of that, but I think it's easy for us to say, here's a tool that will fix it and that just sort of shortcuts and ultimately doesn't address the real underlying need of community.

I would just add to that. I've known some young men who there wasn't a question of whether they wanted to follow Jesus or not, but they were being plagued by pornography or whatever. And it was a struggle to get out of that. So what I would like to see is call to, and for me, this is the real answer we have to keep pushing people towards, is Jesus is the answer. We keep going towards what honors him. And even if someone's struggling in that, that's still the answer. We still keep pushing. When we fail, we go to that forgiveness. And these other tools, to me, every tool we use ought to assist people towards Christ.

Anything that we structure in the church community ought to be to push people closer to Jesus and to following him better.

People who use physical tools, we're very used to the idea of you can use tools in a wrong way. And so I think sometimes these tools get misused. We expect them to do things they weren't meant to do. But in their proper place, they can be very helpful. Yeah, this is really good. Thank you to both of you for sharing these things. And thank you all for watching. We'd love to hear your feedback. We love hearing from our audience. And yeah, we'll catch you in the next episode. Thank you for joining us for this episode. And thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at anabaptistperspectives.org.

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