Keep Your Tongue From Evil and Your Lips From Speaking Deceit

I can say with a sense of clarity and certainty that looking back on my years on social media, I have often posted things that in hindsight, I wish I had either taken more time to discern prior to posting or I would like to have had more information about the topic prior to weighing in on it. All of us are guilty from time to time of purporting to be experts on topics that we simply do not know enough about. The social media age has fostered this mindset, though it certainly precedes the dawn of social media. We call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby individuals with limited knowledge about a subject will compensate for their respective ignorance by projecting that they know more about that subject than they actually do. Social media amplifies this by enabling just about anyone to bloviate with almost no resistance and when someone finally does call them out on it, the gloves come off and an ad hominem battle ensues in order to deflect attention away from the original statement.

While I won’t say that I have mastered the art of being fully discerning and knowledgeable about the things I post on social media, I have made a concerted effort to be more deliberate in the things I post, wording things in a manner that conveys genuine curiosity, rather than judgment or proselytizing. I am certainly still judgmental, and one of my favorite lines from the Brendan Gleeson film Calvary is when he, the priest, is accused of being judgmental and he replies “Yes I am! But I try not to be.” So much of what we do as Catholics is rooted in the trying, rather than the succeeding. Sure, we would all like to be successful in the practice of our faith but we’re sinners—all of us, without exception, including me—and so we’re going to miss the mark far more often than not. Maybe this is why I love baseball so much. The greatest players of all time—Hall of Famers—all failed 7 out of 10 times. I don’t know that I’m a .300 hitter when it comes to avoiding sin but I’d like to think that I get the barrel squarely on the ball every now and again. 

Lately, I find myself posting what some might call “bait posts” but I see them more as experiments, rather than bait. While there was a time where I posted things with the intent of creating dumpster fires, I’ve tried to move past that and instead, I try to post things such as quotes that are objectively positive and uplifting, but there’s also the side of me that knows that these posts are going to set off a certain element of my friends on social media and that is unfortunate and troubling. The reason why is that it shows that many of my friends, well-intentioned as they may be, are apt to fall victim to the false deity of “ideology,” something that seems to be a rather endemic these days. I’m not going to point fingers or name names—and I admit that I’ve been in their shoes before, so again, I’m not exempting myself from this—but this is a mindset that is not unique to any one political or partisan side. All sides are guilty of this with plenty of blame to go around. The saddest part about it is how readily and willingly people take the bait by immediately divorcing themselves from culpability in the essence of what the quote is alluding to by immediately pointing out how others are guilty of it. It’s always “them;” it’s never “us” and heaven forbid it should ever be “me.” If you post something critical of politician X, the response is immediately “but politician Y...” If you post something critical of Pope A, it’s immediately “but Pope B...” Why? Have we lost the ability to stay focused for a just a single moment to address the issue at hand without deflecting or feeling like we’re so wrapped up in our “team” or ideology that any criticism of our “team” or ideology is a personal affront that is so deeply wounding that we must lash out against the perceived enemy at all costs? And who is the enemy? If we cannot recognize that the enemy is found, first and foremost, in the mirror, that all sinners are ultimately guilty of something and that it is only through the grace of God that we are redeemed, then we are fooling ourselves in a very dangerous way. When we draw a line between us and “them,” there is a very good chance that Jesus might be standing on the other side of the line from us.

Eradicating this mindset and repenting as a society is not something that can wait. It needs to happen post-haste because we are going off the rails and I’m afraid we’re rapidly approaching a point of no return. I came across a quote by Fr. Vincent Capodanno M.M., a Catholic Navy chaplain known as the “grunt padre” who was killed in battle in Vietnam. Fr. Capodanno exemplified the Christian example of laying one’s life down for his friends and in one of his homilies, he said, “Belief in Christ brings with it a deeply rooted sense in the primacy and urgency of now. Not last year or next year, but now. Each of us has been given talents and ability by almighty God. We should ask ourselves if we are using these to the best of our ability. If we don’t use them here, chances are we’ll not use them elsewhere either. There will always be an excuse.” We cannot afford excuses anymore.

All of us—each and every single one of us—need to take some quiet time to pray, to think about how our words and actions are received by others every single time we open our mouths or take to social media. Can we objectively say that we are living out our Catholic vocations in the things we say and do? Are the snark and sarcasm that come across as objectively lowbrow and uncivilized really becoming of people of God? Have we really become so foolish as to think that we can use Satan’s tools to fight Satan?  Only you can answer these questions for yourself. All I see on social media and on the evening news—regardless of what channel or website, so this is absolutely all-encompassing—is vitriol and anger and animosity. We might expect this from certain factions of our secular society but this is not how people who follow Jesus Christ ought to behave. I’ve been in those shoes and I’m profoundly embarrassed by that. We need to pray. We need to slow down. We need to breathe a little more deeply and collect ourselves. When we partake in the rhetoric that promotes phraseology like “burn it down” and “the only good X is a dead X,” we are making a conscious effort to embrace the ways of Satan and this must stop now. It has to. Or we are all doomed.