Why Do Some Mennonites Use Only Half the Internet? — Myron Eby — Ep. 169

In this episode, we discuss digital minimalism and whether we should limit how much the internet has sway over our lives.

So I'm back with Myron and Verlin. We did another episode that hit a few of these things, and we're going to come from a few different angles today. So we had done an episode with Matt Landis, I think it was season one of Antibiotics Perspectives, where he said something to the effect that Mennonites aren't necessarily anti-technology. We just want to be sure we're allowing the right kinds of technology, like some kinds we're fine with.

Anyway, that kind of stuck with me. And then I was reading a book recently called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, which I don't believe is a Christian really, but he's, I don't know, reasonably popular when it comes to how the internet affects our lives and how to use it well. And he talks about the Amish and Mennonites in here. So I'm going to read two pieces from chapter three of this book, and I'd like to hear you all's response to this. Is he onto something? Is he way off? I just found it interesting. He interviewed a bunch of Mennonites for this book. So this is what he says. The Amish, he says, "The Amish, it turns out, do something that's both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism.

They start with the things they value most, then work backwards to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to their values." So that was, and he has a bunch of other stuff, but that was kind of the chunk that summarized his point. And then he goes on to talk about the Mennonites, saying how the Mennonites embrace the biblical principle of be in the world, but not of it, which leads to a similar embrace of simplicity and suspicion of cultural trends that threaten core values of maintaining strong communities and virtuous living.

Then goes on to say that we take, let's see, taking on personal responsibility for making decisions in a way that's consistent with the church's principles. And then he quotes a Mennonite that he interviewed for the book and quotes her as saying, "I don't think I'd ever, that I'd be a good smartphone user. I don't trust myself to just let it be and not think about it. When I leave the house, I don't think about all those distractions."

Is he oversimplifying? Is he missing the point, or does he have something here that might be correct with how we look at technology? So my initial response, I had seen the quote about the Amish, and I thought he was talking about the conservative Anabaptist world in general. And the way he framed that about the Amish may be more true. My experience, including with some Amish groups, is that that probably is oversimplified. So I'll go back to some personal history. I was born in the '60s, and so I remember when VHS videos came into play.

And for the church I grew up in, that technology discussion hadn't happened. The telephone was about the most technologically advanced thing you had for communication. You did have the other music or audio media that was developed, but we didn't, our church didn't allow the television. And so to have something with a visual media was new. Our family ended up with a VCR and was watching some video. We had watched some videos early on that it was out. It hadn't even been addressed by the church. And so the one thing that I've seen happen, not only 40 years ago, 40 years plus, but I also see it happening today with the rapid change in technology. Churches have tended to come from behind and have to play catch up trying to figure out what's acceptable, what's good, what's healthy.

I think that in general, the Amish, with their stand, their perspective has been more of, we park here at whatever cultural norm was however many years ago, and they slowly adapt. And so that probably tends to be more true, but I've seen some of the other tendency as well in some Amish communities where there is more of an underlying acceptance that now they play catch up of how to figure out how do we deal with what's there. So probably not as broad as in the Mennonite world.

So that was my first reaction is, oh, that's a little oversimplified. But is he onto something? Yeah, I think he is. It describes, I think, a couple of ways we as a people have responded. So how should we respond? That's maybe a whole other discussion because it's been over 10 years ago, one of the brothers in our church handed me a newspaper article, and he said, "Verlin, I think we need to think about this. What's happening is the cable companies are going to phones." And this was right when smartphones were coming out. And what this article was portraying in our local newspaper was saying, television programming and the way we interact with audio visual is going to change.

And it did. It's changed majorly. And so even there, we didn't keep up with it. We didn't update that until several years ago in our own church description application of faith. And so I think it's a great discussion. I'd love to hear your input on it, Myron.

I agree. It seems like Cal Newport is oversimplifying it a bit. At the same time, there was a discussion I had several years ago with somebody who was talking about a lot of people's, call them English people or normal American people. Their fascination with the Amish is it seems like such a simple, laid-back lifestyle. It's not as complicated as a normal American's life might be. But this person mentioned to an Amish person, this English person mentioned to an Amish person that your life must be so simple.

And the Amish person's response was that, no, their life is not simple. In many ways, every single thing that they are doing, they're allowing or not allowing to affect them or be part of their culture is an intentional decision. And so where mainstream society is allowing, like, oh, okay, so smartphones came out. Well, that's the next phone we get is a smartphone or this next piece of technology comes out and they just accept it, where the Amish are grappling with each and every one. And I think it's important here to make a distinction between technology as a whole and electronic technology as in phones or cameras or computers or that type of thing, because in many ways, the Amish are very cutting edge when it comes to manufacturing technology or things like that.

And this is not a discussion that's just limited to the Amish, so I don't think we need to dwell on that too long. But I think as Christian communities, as Anabaptist communities, we have placed a pretty high value on making corporate decisions on this type of thing.

And so we do grapple with that a lot because we want to have some unity and uniformity to that. And at the pace technology is going, it's really difficult to do that. But I think there can still be value in grappling with that and coming to a good understanding together of, okay, where do we want to be in acknowledging the things that affect who we are, affect our brotherhood, and what might be a detriment to that. You used a word that I was thinking of that I think describes the way we ought to look at it fairly well, and that was just intentional. And I think Newport would, he would have alluded to that if he didn't say that.

But the idea that whether you do it on the front end, you have a gate here that you just, you're careful what you let through the gate, or it's the other model that I described where it kind of happens, and then after the fact, you have to play catch up to figure out what should be. In either way, I think it's right that we do want to be intentional, and I think we should be. I think that life should be intentional. Life lived haphazardly, well, at least in some areas, not work out so well. And so these kind of issues that are important, we do well for it to be an intentional, thoughtful approach to how do we decide what happens at the gate?

What do we let in? What don't we? I think that part is very valid. And that was the one thing I noticed in that section, and he takes a good chunk of that chapter talking about the Amish and Mennonite, and that was a word he used. He's like, "I'm seeing that they don't just, oh, a new thing came and we're just going to get it."

It's a lot more intentional. Well, does this fit or not? It's like, well, that's really interesting. And him as a researcher from the outside looking in, seeing that and saying, "That's actually really good," which is one of the main premises of his book. And back to the earlier quote I'd had, see if we can find it, how what the Amish and Mennonites are doing is so different from what he says, our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism.

Oh, a new app called, you know what, TikTok or Instagram or whatever comes out, and people just mindlessly get it because that's just what you do. And he is saying, and I think we as Anabaptists say, "No, that's not how we want to do with technology." So now that we've kind of got that, I guess you could say base layer down from that first question, let's transition a bit. Practically speaking, how have you seen churches, individuals, communities, et cetera, discern or decide what kind of technologies they'll allow? And I'm thinking specifically like certain messaging apps or video or what kind of smartphones are allowed. What have you all seen in y'all's experience? In my experience working with a pretty wide variety of church groups on technology needs, I've kind of seen a spectrum of people who don't really want, they want to have as little as possible of the internet, and then others who are, I would say, fairly permissive on what's allowed or leaving it up to the individual.

Or back to an earlier discussion, earlier episode where we talked about accountability versus filtering, making sure they have a strong accountability standpoint in place where, okay, maybe there's not a formal position on a given app or service or the type of things you use, but okay, you're spending five hours on YouTube every day. That's kind of problematic, and we're going to talk about that in our accountability group and address that. So even though there's not a formal rule against video services, that's still something that's on the table to discuss and have brotherhood input on.

It's easier to set hard and fast rules, I think. I'm not sure that's always the healthiest thing either. Some people view the church or community moving slowly to adopt something as a negative. You're always, quote, behind the times. But I think one of the things that's valuable that that offers is it's easy to get enthralled with technology. It's easy to get enthralled with the newest thing.

And I remember when I first got a phone, a smartphone, you go through and you're customizing everything and you're setting your ringtone to be perfect and all of this. And there's kind of that early newness that's there, and you're just really fascinated by what it can do.

And that has since worn off. I don't know when the last time was I have tweaked some of those settings that I would have cared a lot about early on. And so there's the settling in and realizing that it's a practical tool, the novelty is gone.

And I don't know how to overcome that phase where you get something new and it's trivial and novel and it's really exciting. And then after a while, okay, it's a practical tool and this is what it's here for. It's serviceable. It does its purpose.

But I think having some brotherhood input where those who have walked some of that path can give guidance to those who maybe haven't yet walked that path and say, "Hey, we've been there. We've seen what this has a tendency to do. And so from our standpoint and from our experience, it seems best to maybe draw a line over here where we're just not going to go there or accept that." So I think that, quote, slowness to move, moving slower than the pace of technology, I think in a lot of ways can be a good thing. I'm not saying it's always a good thing, but I think there are pros to it. Some of the practical things I've seen people do, and this goes for, it was a very broad spectrum, and you mentioned part of it, it's to where groups accept nothing or they have pretty much just allowed everything.

And so it's kind of been everything in between where you've had ranges of whitelisting where only certain places are allowed. I had a good friend that was from a group that, and this was a number of years ago, fairly early and broad acceptance of internet technology, but fairly large company, and he had the real problem of some of his vendors no longer accepted faxes. You had to order online. That particular church group set up a little committee for him to help with how are they going to address his business needs so that he can continue functioning. And I think they did an acceptable job. He was able to access his bank. He was able to access his vendors.

He was able to conduct business online. But it was limited to that. So it's kind of a whitelist idea where you only go certain places. So you have the whitelist part, then you have the blacklist where you just say, "Okay, there's certain places we don't go." And Myron could probably talk more about those things, but using services that will either assist with that, it draws the line at different places. So it's that technology. And so within the Anabaptist community, we would have several of those, several businesses or service providers that can assist with that. So some of it's happened on that level where people with knowledge and information, they're able to do that and help others.

Some of them, what I've seen is just what people do locally on their own. For us early on, our family adopted a policy. We wanted to have internet filtering. And some of those early filters were kind of a pain to work with, really. They were expensive, but it made us more comfortable with being able to have the internet in our home and to be able to function in what we thought was a good environment there. So it's been a broad range.

You mentioned some of the messaging apps, and you all are probably more familiar with that than I am, but I'd be interested in hearing you all talk about that as well. There are different avenues where people can get information.

Yeah. Do you actually want to mention that? Because I know there's the Telegram app versus the piece of software that runs over top called CloudVale that limits certain things and allows people to use the service in a good way, et cetera. Some kind of interesting and creative solutions, actually, that people have come up with. I don't know if you want to speak into that at all. Yeah, I think there's this desire to harness and take advantage of some of these technologies while also limiting exposure to negative content. So texting doesn't really work very well if I want to message somebody who's in the foreign mission field halfway around the world. It's not feasible to send a normal text message.

A normal phone call doesn't work very well. Well, WhatsApp or Signal or Telegram, those are great voiceover IP type communications that just require an internet connection. They don't require expensive dialing plans and all of that. And so there's advantages and very good use cases, but then apps like Telegram also come with a fair bit of undesirable content that's really not hiding very far under the surface. And so how do you go about taking advantage of the good that's there while also limiting the bad exposure? And that's where something like CloudVale comes in. So yeah, there are a number of groups we work with that use CloudVale. They don't allow some other messaging apps because maybe they have JIF support and JIFFY.

You can find jiffy.com. You can find stuff you don't want there. Their church may take a stance against social media, and so it feels like WhatsApp statuses are social media because people are posting pictures of their lives, and they want to refrain from that. So something like CloudVale is tailor-built to kind of fit that niche of meeting a particular need while also stripping out this other stuff. There's value in that intentionality. Even if I personally don't have a problem with WhatsApp statuses or sending a JIF to you or really have an issue with the Telegram app, having something like CloudVale that offers essentially the same experience as Telegram, but has more guardrails and just completely cuts off this other content that I don't want anyway, why not go to CloudVale?

Just as one example of many areas where people have found a creative solution to taking advantage of harnessing the benefits while also mitigating the concerns. Yeah, I think that's the part that I really like about all of this is that level of intentionality. Instead of passively, I don't know what you would say, letting the internet happen to you, you're actually taking back some of that and saying, "No, these are the things that we stand for and care about," and getting creative and building a solution. I think that's, yeah, I think that's really powerful. If you could boil it down, what would you say is the single most helpful stance towards digital information technology that you all have seen or interacted with?

That's maybe a bit broad, but yeah, I'd love to hear what you think on that. One single best. That's really hard because it feels like there's so many. It probably depends on what area you want to address it. If you're talking about communication and internet access types of things, I would go with what Myron said earlier, where you have some kind of accountability that's more than just software. I'm in favor of accountability software, but where there's real-life interaction with people, people who are real with each other in small groups, and they're honest about, "This is what I'm dealing with," or, "This is where an area of temptation is," anything like that where you can have, for me, that is the very best way to address this.

When I look at the internet in particular, I see a number of different things. It's information, it's commerce, and entertainment, and somewhere mixed in there, you could just say garbage. So some of that is very pertinent, and unless things really change radically in our world, they're not going away. And so for us to just close that part of the world off feels really unrealistic to me. We have to learn how to interact well with it. And I'll come back to the best thing is Jesus changing the human heart, me wanting to honor him more than anything else and caring about my brothers and sisters. And so that's why I'm going to go with the accountability structure as being a primary thing for a follower of Jesus.

I would echo that. It is a hard thing to boil down to just one aspect, but I think we've used the word intentional a number of times. And I think the accountability aspect of it is really just part of being intentional about living in a healthy community and factoring in how does technology affect a healthy community? How does it affect me as a person? Because the brotherhood is made up of each individual. And so how does technology affect me? And in turn, how does that affect my relationship with God or with my fellow brothers? And so being really intentional, and it can be hard work to be intentional. Again, it's messy. It's real-life relationships. We have to get together and say, "Hey, what are we going to do about this thing?

What are we going to decide about this?" It's not easy work, but it's worthwhile work. This has been really good. It feels like we've gotten a nice base layer, but then got pretty practical on top of that. So yeah, thank you all for sharing. Thank you all for watching and listening. We'd love to hear your feedback and your comments. We love hearing from our audience, and 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. You can also leave a comment or review to help more people find our content.