If you’ve gone one week without sweets, but you haven’t posted an Instagram story about it, does it count? What does it profit a man to give up watching television if he can’t brag about it daily on Facebook?
The season of Lent provides plenty of opportunities for social media humblebragging, virtue-signaling, or just plain seeking validation. Yet, Scripture would seem to warn against that.
“Take care not to perform righteous deeds so that people may see them,” Jesus told his disciples, “otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.”
“When you give alms,” Jesus said, “do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.”
Perhaps inspired in part by this verse heard by Catholics at Ash Wednesday Mass every year, more and more of the public are giving up the proverbial “trumpet” for Lent.
If you were on Facebook or Twitter on Mardi Gras, you probably saw a handful of friends declaring, “Farewell for 40 days.” One survey in 2019 found that social media was now the thing most given up during Lent, surpassing the longtime leader, alcohol.
That tells us something about people’s relationship with social media. You may think of websites or smartphone apps as tools that make life convenient: One app gets you around town, another tells you the weather, and these others allow you to keep in touch with friends and your community easily. But apparently, many Facebook users see it as a vice to be tamed or an addiction to be overcome, just as drinking.
You mindlessly find yourself typing “F-A-C-E” into your browser bar while your mind wanders, and your browser knows precisely what sort of dopamine hit you’re looking for. Maybe someone left comments on your new profile photo. Maybe somebody liked your Trump joke. It’s a compulsion, and thus, Lent provides a period of detox.
Or maybe you’re drawn to social media less by vanity and more by rhetorical bloodthirst. Increasingly, people come to Twitter or Facebook in search of bad opinions to skewer or to wave high like a bloody flag, calling the masses to mob the infidel.
This last use of social media got special attention from the Roman pontiff. Lent, Pope Francis said in an Ash Wednesday talk, “is a time to give up useless words, gossip, rumors, tittle-tattle and speak to God on a first-name basis.”
“We live in an atmosphere polluted by too much verbal violence, too many offensive and harmful words, which are amplified by the internet,” Francis told the crowds gathered at St. Peter’s Square. “Today, people insult each other as if they were saying ‘Good Day.'”
Maybe this is the year, Francis suggested, to give up trolling for Lent.
