Scott Adams' Death

The End of the Church Age and the Rise of Digital Surrogacy

Church for the Digital Gurus

For the last few weeks I’ve been watching with pastoral familiarity the end of Scott Adams’ life on YouTube.

If I as a pastor had unlimited time to spend with every parishioner, I imagine spending time with Scott Adams until his death might look something like what his followers on social media experienced. There were scenes from his hospital bed, scenes from his home. Eventually he let digital friends into the streams as he grew weaker, not unlike friends gathering around a friend on their deathbed.

Eventually the day of his death came and his ex-wife who had graciously been assisting him gave the news to his digital following and read a final testament about his Pascal’s Wager conversion.

After she read his statement she was joined in the stream by a group of friends who enacted the coffee ritual that Scott had used for years as a sort of sacrament with his digital flock.

As a pastor of an aging community this path is a familiar one. I’ve walked it with many beloved members as cancer takes their lives. What keeps my attention is the digital surrogacy of a social media following to the life of a church community and the ad hoc liturgies and sacraments that emerged and bound the would-be congregation.

Jordan B Peterson made a similar observation to Jonathan Pageau after Jordan returned from a life-threatening illness. Jordan was talking about how he couldn’t understand the church’s inability to “sell” a meaningful hero’s journey to young people which is powerful but also soul crushing. Pageau responded that perhaps part of the reason it was destroying Jordan was because he didn’t have a community to support him. Jordan responds that his felt obligation to the fans who had been so good to him gave him support. Jonathan responded that he thought that this was less than what the church, a hierarchy and a priest offered.

AI Digital Surrogates for the Rest of Us

As a pastor I am increasingly running into people using AI chatbots as not only digital surrogates for community but also pastoral counseling. While you may get up to hour of your pastor’s attention to lay your burden down if you attend a sufficiently small congregation the chatbot is always available to you in your digital second-self in your pocket.

It is not hard to find testimonies from people that the comforting, affirming “voice” of the machine “was there for me when I needed it most”. They will easily testify that the bot was present in a way the church wasn’t.

Steve Skojec has long been chronicling his departer from his Catholic faith and the Chistian church and the demise of his marriage. After leaving the church and struggling with his marriage AI became is companion and digital friend. AI will “listen” to him, give him far more time than he has money to purchase from a psychologist.

In this post he quotes what he says to his bot.

I just don't know how to make sense of any of it. I talk to you because I have nobody else to talk to. Because I can't talk to a God who never talks back, never shows up to help when I need him. I think that's the appeal here. I feel like I'm speaking to some inhuman being with quasi-omniscience and hoping you have the answers I can't get to on my own.

Will this mean the end of the church age?

The church is facing a sort of competition like it never has before. Your local pastor’s sermon is in competition with the best preaching your congregants can find on YouTube. The precious few moments of love and attention given by a busy small church pastor is easily outstripped by the non-judgmental, ever affirming always present voice of the chatbot. Community support can be replicated by likes and views from Facebook and Instagram. The Dopamine deployment offered by digital tools will far outstrip what the “in-real-life” counterparts are able to deliver on. All of this WITHOUT the normal crud that real humans bring into the relationship equation.

Where is the Bottom?

One of the unknowns is where the bottom is to this because there is always a bottom.

Even before the digital age brought on by the smart phone there were other surrogates with which the church competed. Books and television could deliver better homilies than your local pastor. Parasocial relationships with authors, pastors and fictional characters competed with your in-real-life friendships. AI provided something but the inexhaustibility of our seeking hearts usually finds all such substitutes wanting at some point. Our hearts ARE restless.

As I pondered the dynamic so vividly portrayed in Scott Adams’ passage, I thought about how the digital “service” might role out. I don’t know if there will be an actual funeral or memorial service for Adams or now. I’ve been noticing that increasingly families are skipping burial customs like they’ve been skipping church. Children even of clergy are not giving their parents the funerary honors their parents would have assumed to be standard.

My mind wandered to my sister’s death seven years ago. She died at 53 of a sudden, unexpected heart attack leaving a grieving husband, children and student community in her wake. I rewatched my eulogy and thought “Could AI have done this for her? For them?”

Could AI replicate what it meant to have two former students open the service with a beautiful, personal song?

I of course can’t watch any of this without tears.

Raising the Standards

All of this will likely force the church to do better. CS Lewis in Screwtape knew the challenge.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of ‘Christians’ in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Lewis, C. S. (2001). The Screwtape Letters (pp. 5–7). HarperOne.

The End of the Truman Show

I can’t watch Scott Adams’ passing and not think about “The Truman Show”.

My favorite scene in the movie is when “Christof” ends transmission.

The music swells, young Truman and exits the stage hopefully into the arms of the young woman to have a fertile future of off camera home and family.

In real life a young person “exiting the stage” has none of this swell. It’s gut wrenching.

Most of the time, fortunately, it’s someone who has been suffering and the exhaustion of death comes as something of a relief.

The Truman Show security guards, and all the rest of the audience has their moment of meaning and then they look for the next thing to watch. That is not what real life is.

The Resurrection

For Christians and the Christian community there is a new world after the grave, but the ride is both lower and higher. We grieve the loss of our loved ones but together as a church we anticipate not just a reunion “in the clouds” but a reunion in flesh in a new heaven and earth.

Cyber life is so gnostic compared to this hope. We might mine the past for the nectar of nostalgia but sitting alone with a screen is not like being surrounded by even wobbly real life believers.

We might not always feel those “banners” CS Lewis talks about, but they are coming. I don’t know that these screens filled with our “beings of light” can compete with 10,000 years bright shining as the sun. Maybe we should learn to settle for nothing less.