Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You Discipled by the Media? | An Interview with Jeffrey Bilbro

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Does what you pay attention to influence how you think? Does what you read matter? To put it simply, yes. Jeffrey Bilbro, author of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55868921-reading-the-times (Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry Into the News), describes the importance of intentionality in what we give our focus to. Learn more during today's interview with https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Pastor Patrick Miller). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit ourhttps://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ ( website) and follow us onhttps://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks ( Facebook),https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ ( Instagram), andhttps://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast ( Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. References https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31242.Bleak_House (Bleak House) by Charles Dickens https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2260975.Life_Without_Principle (Life Without Principle) by Henry David Thoreau https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/449407.Pens_es (Pensées) by Blaise Pascal Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Also, if you want to connect with us, follow us on Twitter at TMBT Podcast. You can also check out our hashtag, hashtag, AskT, where you can ask us anything, and we'd love to connect with you. Today on the show, we have Dr. Jeffrey Bilbrough. He is going to be teaching at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He's also the editor of the Front Porch Republic. And he's the author of a new book,

Reading the Times, A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News. Now, less to that long title scare you, this is actually one of the most interesting reads I've had recently. As someone who does enjoy reading the news, enjoys talking about politics and cultural trends, this was a breath of fresh air. It challenged me to make sure that I am spending my attention on the right things and avoiding some of the wrong things that can get me distracted. So I'm excited to have Jeffrey on the show today. Jeff, I read your book. Are you telling me that I should get rid of my smartphone?

I'm not telling you that you should do that, but I am trying to make it imaginable. You don't have a smartphone, though? No, I don't. I have a flip phone. And I have many friends and family members who have smartphones who I respect, and I don't think it's a moral black and white issue. But I also think that we just tend to expect that we need a smartphone. And maybe some of us don't.

and maybe we should re-evaluate that. Did you get rid of your smartphone or have you never had one? No, I've never had one. It's actually getting harder and harder to find flip phones when my ones die. But the goodness is that lasts a while. So if you were to make the case, and we'll happen to some of the topics, but why should someone consider getting rid of their smartphone? It's not just the smartphone, right?

It's any technology that we tend to see people around the shoes and think that we all need that thing. So I don't want to fix it on the smartphone as the technology. And I get this from Barry, Wendell Berry, who doesn't own a computer and has famously written an essay about that. And he also has this line in one of his essays where he says that he cuts his firewood with a chainsaw, but he knows a man who uses a crosscut saw and he lets the thought of that man trouble him.

How dare you use a chainsaw? It's so advanced. I think we should all be troubled by the technologies that we talk. take for granted. And we think that we must have. And maybe we don't need them all. So maybe the smartphone, for in my case, that was an easy one for me not to adopt. I don't need it. And it doesn't make my life better to have it, I don't think. But whatever that might be, I think we can unwind some of the technological devices that seem to encroach upon our lives. And maybe that makes us have a bit more mental space. Maybe that gives us some energy and attention that we can devote to things that matter more.

Hold on one second. I got to check my phone. I just got a text message if you can be. I'm just kidding. No, it's so true. I find for myself, I do have a smartphone. I've got an iPhone right here. And I do find it divides up my attention. You know, I want to be present with my children. And yet Twitter always beckons. So I appreciate people like you. Sometimes you read books by people and they'll be like, you need to stop using social media and here's why. And you get on their social media account and they're like using it constantly. Like, well, hold on a second. That's not really fair. You got to live it out. And I appreciate that you're saying, no, we need to be a attentive to what we pay attention to, and that you've really tried to find a practical way to do that, which is not having a smartphone. But let's try to talk a little bit more about what's actually in your book. You're writing to help Christians think about how we read the news. It makes me, for our listeners, ask the question, what's wrong? What's the cost, we might say, of staying up to date on the 24-hour news cycle? There's a cost to being informed all the time. And what good things are we giving up to read this essay or to scroll through the social media feed. And certainly, I think, as you know, I don't recommend not reading the news at all or putting your head in the

sand. So I think sometimes the cost is worth it. And we should read some stories and try to be informed about what's going on in our communities and the world. But there's a point of diminishing returns. And we should also be thoughtful about what we need to know, why we need to know, what we're going to do with this information. And hopefully that makes us more discerning, I guess, about when to say that's enough and what kinds of stories to give the limited attention that we do give, which ones we should choose to read. What do you think it does to us, though, to be constantly immersed in news over and over and over again? You know, we're getting it on the radio, we're getting it on social media. We're getting, and it's not even always the news. It's just content constantly

coming at. You know, I'm on TikTok and I'm watching cat videos. what's the cost? Yeah, well, there's a lot of things. I mean, I think one thing is it tends to fragment our attention so that we're less able to attend to things in depth. One of the things I talked about, this is a term from Charles Dickens, but he talks about telescopic morality, that when we are always attending to distant tragedies and distant events, we tend to overestimate the moral significance of things that happen far away and underestimate the important things that are happening right at our fingertips. He uses that in this great novel, one of his characters is very concerned about orphans in Africa. What's her name again? Mrs. Jelby. And, you know,

we should care about these things, but she cares so much about these orphans in Africa and she dedicates all of her time to sort of social organizing on their behalf. And her own children are de facto orphans in her own household. So, Dickens, you know, he's writing on the cusp of this news explosion that takes place in the wake of the Telegraph and the steam-powered printing press and railroad. How did the Telegraph change anything? That was one of the fascinating things I never even really thought about until you brought it up, you know, because, again, telegraph seems so archaic today, but it was a revolutionary technology and its time. Yeah, and in some ways, it's the first or a first, or the digital technology, right, where all information on Telegraph is just dots and dashes, zeros and ones.

and all of a sudden, instantly, more or less, you can get information from around the world with the transatlantic cable. So, yeah, Thoreau, Dickens, a lot of authors in the 19th century felt like, whoa, this has radically changed the information ecosystem that we inhabit. And we haven't thought carefully enough about what kinds of information we need to transmit and pay attention to because now so much is available. I think with that a lot in my own experience, it's so easy to be. be fixated on the United States federal level politics or large-scale cultural trends. And we miss what's sitting right in front of us, which seemed to be the fear of people like Dickens and Thoreau. There was going to be a real cost if you stay fixated on the big things, you might say, and miss the small things that you actually have a real ability to change

and to impact. We have a lot more responsibility, ability to respond to things that are happening in our local communities, whether it be in city government or, you know, just the cultural and social life of our places. And yet so much of our attention now is drawn to these national or international stories. And you see that with the ways that lots of local papers are struggling to make it economically, but you also see it with the kinds of things that go viral. They tend to be the kinds of stories that you don't really, maybe there's nothing you can do in response. That's worthwhile.

But it's outrageous or emotionally exciting. And so that's what we are naturally drawn to. attend to. Absolutely. You know, I was talking to a friend of mine recently. Here in Missouri, we've got a open U.S. Senate seat that people are now putting in their bids for. And we have a few people that seem a little bit caricatureish. And as we were discussing this, you know, I said, I was like, I've just decided, not that I don't care about it, I do care about it, but I have so little power to impact who our state even elects to the U.S. Senate. And there's things that are sitting here in Columbia that I can care about and have an impact on. So while I'm not indifferent to it entirely, I'm not going to get

fixated on it as a major issue. Because personally, I mean, you know, just little of me, there's not much I can do to change those things. Part of it is the way that a lot of these political stories are reported more and more, it's like a spectator sport. It's like some sort of entertainment race. Which is so funny because politics are boring. In their most fundamental nature, there's nothing interesting about politics, but somehow I've turned it into a sport. And it can be very enthralling, I guess. So people can root for their team or their players. But there's some interesting research that's been done that people who follow the political news most closely are often people who are least involved in actually doing political things in their communities. So there seems to be an inverse relationship between getting all worked up about the political sport and actually being involved in social or civic or political organizations.

Caring for your community. You share this. I should find it to pull up because I found it so interesting. It definitely rings true to my experience that those who tend to be most fixated, and I would say most fixed it in a really almost tribalistic way. It's about my team winning or my team losing do seem to be disengaged from what's happening in their local community, not across the board, but it's definitely a pattern that I've noticed. Another interesting thing that you said in your book is you were talking about the cost of staying up to date on the 24-hour news cycle was what you called

the macadamizing of the mind, which is a funny term, and maybe you could explain it for everybody, no idea with that man, but I was like, oh, this really does describe my experience. Yeah, my editor said it. You sure you want to go with this term? It's kind of a weird term. I'm shocked you got that through. Good for you. Did you offer to arm wrestle? How'd you do it? I had to make the case. Yeah. You know, I get it from Thoreau, and he uses it in this speech he gives. That's now an essay, Life Without Principle. And it's a term that comes from a Scottish guy who engineered roads, a road engineer, John McAdam. And actually, we do use it in terms like tarmac. Tarmac is a McAdam Road that has tar on it. So it's a Mack Road with some tar over it.

Exactly. The gist of the road technology is that roads used to be built with big stones in the bottom and then gradually diminishing sizes and the top was gravel. And then John McCadam discovered that actually roads are more frost resistant if they're just small rocks all the way down. It's all small stuff. So he started building these roads that were basically just gravel. And on the one hand, that improves transportation, so that's great. But Thoreau points out that when our attention is so hyperactive and we attend to just things and little bits at a time, he calls it attending to the trivia, then we actually can turn our minds into gravel thoroughfares that can then offer very little resistance to advertisers or politicians or whoever might be trying

to sell us something or get us to think in certain ways. So it's almost like we have these big attention blocks. And when we start getting distracted, we're paying attention to so many different things, those blocks are ground down into these tiny little fragments. And that's all that's left. Yeah. Recent research by people like Nick Carr and others have shown that, yeah, our brains are plastic is the term, right, neuroplasticity. And that when we attend to tweet size information, our neuro pathways actually change. And we become less able to focus on things for longer durations and depth. So it's a real thing. It's not just a personal experience. And it's really dangerous for our ability to ask critical questions of what we read and think about things.

We just sort of fall into group think. It's funny hearing this because, you know, obviously Thoreau is writing in a different century in the early 19th century. And to me, someone talking about distraction in the 1800s, that just sounds silly. Like distraction, you don't have YouTube, You don't have Facebook. You don't even have television. What are you distracted by? What was worrying him in his time? Distraction and attention.

These are perennial enduring human problems. I mean, Augustine talks about this in confessions, right? People are getting distracted by the games in the Coliseum. It's not a new problem. Each era, I suppose, there's different provocations. For Thoreau, it was kind of yellow journalism and the telegraph. Yellow journalism is the sort of early iteration of tabloid kind of. style journalism that is so prevalent today.

So like 1800s clickbait? Exactly. And the same kind of thing, right? These subscription-based newspapers, they're cheap and they need to sell copies. So they got to be sensational. The particular issues that tap into these human weaknesses might change from era to era. And maybe today, what's different is the amount of money and brainpower dedicated to distracting us and profiting from that distraction.

but humans are always prone to paying attention to the wrong things. We always have to put guardrails in our lives to kind of help us know what and how we should focus on. So that's why I think looking to these people who struggle with these questions in different time periods can sometimes give us the perspective that we need to understand our own time better. And it definitely rings true to, again, my own experience. I find the more that I am paying attention to Twitter, if I had a social media advice, that would be it.

I find Twitter more intoxicating than other formats. So I know it's different for different people. Sometimes it's Instagram, sometimes it's YouTube. But the more I pay attention to it, the more it really does not just divide up my attention, but it limits my ability to think through things critically, right? But now all of a sudden I'm thinking in, you know, a very limited number of characters, which gives you no space to actually parse through real world issues, which are often far more complex if we look into them than we'd like them to be.

They're not simple. They're not black and white. They're not usually clear. And Twitter, it actually maximizes. is simplicity, where we can make things black and white and more clear than they ought to be. But I thought one of the interesting points is so that macadamized idea of taking those big rocks and we're fragmenting our brain down into these tiny little pieces and we can't think in big rocks anymore. But then you make the point that it's not just that we're fragmenting our attention,

which would be sad and of itself. Like don't we all want to be critical thinkers? You make the point that it actually makes it easier for others to take advantage of us. Wendell Berry actually has an essay when he draws on this section from Thoreau. And he talks about how literacy and the ability to think long thoughts and to think with precise, careful language is essential in resisting advertising, in resisting political slogans, and resisting various kinds of group think. If we're, our minds are formed to think in little tweet sized chunks, then we're much more easily taken advantage of by people who have sort of crafted their memes to go viral.

Can you give some practical examples? of that, where you see this actually working out in public life? There's so many issues. And if I pick one, it's dated next week because people have forgotten what the issue last week was. Give them some grace. You know, it might be two or three weeks between when he said this and now. You know, and if we have the McAdamize mine, it might feel like a piece of gravel at the bottom of the pile. But give us some examples of what you think about. To go back to 2020, I think all the coronavirus mask stuff or public health stuff, the ways that those debates so quickly collapse

into like identity signaling. Like if I wear a mask, then I'm following the science. And if I don't wear a mask, and I think the science is bad. Or how one week people are saying, don't wear masks. Fauci and others are saying don't wear masks. They're not useful. Then two weeks later, oh, these are useful. And if you don't read the longer versions of these stories and understand the more

complicated dynamics and the fact that there's odds involved, it's not black and white, right? It's not like an infographic you can boil us down to. then it sort of makes sense. But I think so many people kind of navigated the pandemic through these tribal, rather simplistic categories. And then we think that people who come down, who have different opinions about a vaccine or a mask or whatever are idiots or, you know, they're just irredeemable. Reality is more complicated, like you said earlier.

And the situation is more nuanced. So I think slowing down and trying to get to the bottom of some of these issues, at least as best as we can as amateurs, not experts. It takes practice and it takes the willingness to read through some stuff and not just base our strong convictions on the tweet from somebody that we think is a good person. And I think everybody's had that conversation. In fact, you know what? I think I'm probably guilty of being the one doing this conversation where you're talking to someone and you're like, oh my gosh, I'm speaking to someone who was just parroting this person's Twitter account or this person's short little 600 word op-ed piece. And on the one hand, I think we all probably do,

it more than we want to admit that we're doing it. But on the other hand, it really does squelch thought and conversation because I've already made up my mind before I walk into the room and my mind's been made up not by a lot of deep thinking, but instead by a lot of doom scrolling, you know. And it puts us in a weird place as a culture because we can't talk about things. I get to this later on the book, but I think a lot of this comes back too to how the media shapes are forms of belonging so that what we think about masks or what we think about this cultural issue or this, you know, scandal is formed by which tribe we imagine ourselves belonging to. And that becomes the key factor, not the research we've done or the reading we've done or the

thinking we've done about the issue. One great point you made is that when it comes to any of these issues, our certainty really should be in proportion to our knowledge. It should be in proportion to our research, how much we know. I always joke with people. It's, It's funny. When you do a podcast, you kind of live in constant critique world because you always say something that offends someone. And I always joke, for example, I have a ninth grade science education. I'm like you. I was an English major. Maybe you got farther along in the sciences than I did. And so I'm very reticent to talk as an expert on anything scientific because the simple reality is, like, I'm no better than your high school student. It's the truth of the matter. And that gives me a certain level of humility when I'm talking to people who know more about science to defer to them and say, hey, you've done more research. You know more than I do. And so I can trust you more than I, even trust myself. And that's a very different approach, though, than saying, well, my tribe says X, and so my tribe must be right on this issue. I think it's something that we're missing. Bigger picture here. It seems like in your book, and I think you're making some really interesting points, we're losing, or maybe it's a constant temptation to lose our ability to think

deeply, to think critically. And part of what's grinding up that ability is the 24-hour news cycle, is thinking in terms of tweets and short little articles that keep our attention but don't help us process things deeply, and that over time, that makes us people who are very easy to manipulate, right? Because we're not thinking deeply. We just fall into this tribal chamber, that tribal chamber, and it's like a road. Someone can just easily pass right over the top of it because we've been macadamized. We've been broken down. Now, whenever I talk to people about this, and I say, hey, maybe you need to read less of the 24-hour news cycle. Maybe you need to disengage. I'm going to say it to myself. Maybe you need to disengage a little bit from the Twitter cycle.

it sounds like maybe we're advocating for disengagement. It seems like that's often the option. It's like, well, either I pay attention to the news or I just disengage and don't care anymore. So you're telling me I shouldn't care anymore. And I try to deal with this. I draw from people like Thomas Merton or Blaise Baskill, this idea of kind of wholly indifference or holy apathy that maybe we need to care less about some things so that we can care more profoundly and more redemptively about things that really matter. So if we root our emotional and our sense of self in things like the gospel and the word of God and the concerns of the kingdom of God, then hopefully we will be more attuned to the particular issues of our day that perhaps God is calling us to respond to and to do something about. And recognize that we don't have to know everything about everything.

We don't have to stay up to date on all the drama of the day. But maybe there are a couple of issues that we are called to be. be educated about and to get involved with and work toward seeing how God might use us to participate in his ongoing redemption. Now, I can imagine someone hearing that and saying, well, you're just going to be complicit. That's really easy for you to say, you're a college professor, you've got a pretty comfortable life. And so, yeah, easy for you to say, let's be indifferent to these big things. It's not so easy for other people to say. I have sort of two responses to that. One, I guess, is that a lot of the people who at least perform caring, often in a kind of a virtue signaling kind of

mode, they're oftentimes not the ones who are affected by the events either, right? It's more, this is a way to signal their belonging in a particular tribe that cares about whatever thing. I point to the martyrs, you know, I think as individuals, and you said this earlier regarding the Senate races in your state, as individuals, there's a lot of things that we can't control, and the martyrs are the paradigmatic example of this, right? They, knew they couldn't even control saving their own lives. So they were very faithful, but they ultimately had to give up control over something seemingly as fundamental as their own life. So it's not so much a matter of being complicit or ignoring what's going on as recognizing the limits of who we are and

what we can do and trying to work within those limits and not supersede those limits. One of the lies that I'm so tempted to believe, and it's precisely because of the the 24-hour news cycle because of access to everything around the world is that I am omnipresent. Because I can hear about a famine that's happening in an African country whose name I've never heard until I've heard that famine, all of a sudden I feel like, okay, I need to be responsible for this. I need to fix this. This is my biggest problem. And it's really, really easy to forget I'm not omnipresent. As much as I might really care and wish that that wasn't happening, I actually have very little ability to affect change in that area. I think this idea of whole

indifference is really it's good for me because it takes my attention away from those things and instead focuses me in my immediate sphere of influence you know my community my family my city or church community there's a lot of places here that have a lot of need you know i think about in the u.s. you know we've got some of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world and rather than just focusing on the u.s. as a thing you can look at your own community and say well gosh that means there's probably there's children who are in poverty and my case right here in columbia missouri maybe that's something I could actually care about. I can't fix child poverty in the U.S., but gosh, what if we made our city a place where child poverty was better? I might have friends and connections who can do that.

And so it's not indifference. It's saying, no, let's focus and attend to the right things and to bring goodness and justice and mercy where we're at, as opposed to fixating on bringing in places where we really have no ability to affect anything. Exactly. And I think part of that kind of positive attention that you describe so well is also going to entail ignoring some things that otherwise might consume our emotional bandwidth. Just recognizing that we can't get emotionally worked up about everything. And so it's not a call to ignore everything or to just withdraw, but to be more deliberate about what we attend to and what we care about.

How does having maybe a robust theology of God's sovereignty, that he really is in control, that he really will set the world to right in the end, how does that help you attend to the right things? This is, I think, crucial that we have to remember that God is the one who creates and God is the one who redeems and sets things to write, and we can't do that. And so having an over-realized eschatology, which I guess is just a fancy way of saying, expecting that we can ourselves through human effort, you know, bring about the kingdom and the redemption that God promises, that can contribute to us caring in the wrong ways,

I think, about the events around us. So recognizing that God is in control, I mean, Blaze Pascal puts this quite starkly in a letter to his brother-in-law. He says, you have to remember that God is allowing or maybe even willing the opposition to the issues that you care most about. You know, if you really think, I know, I care about this issue and I know what should happen. We should remember that God allows the issue to exist in the problems that it does. He allows people to oppose you. So if God is allowing this, maybe we should not be too angry about it and maybe have a more chastened sense of our own rightness.

Maybe we're wrong. maybe the ways that we think we should be addressed are wrong. So I think that kind of frees us from the impossible burden of fixing the world and puts God back on the throne. It helps me to remember that the ends, especially the ultimate ends of history and reality, that those are really in God's hands. He's given me some very clear means what it looks like to be faithful to him, what it looks like to live well in this world.

And it's often counter to what, again, the 24-hour news cycle stirs in me. He's taught me to love my enemies to be patient. and kind and me and merciful and humble. And these are not values that people who want to see the world change, whether it's with their vision on the right or the left, they're not values that are valued. And if I can be faithful and live in the way that he's calling me to live and care about the things that he's calling me to care for, I can leave the ends in his hand. And know that history is going to outlive me, that this story is longer than just my life and my moment. If I had a really spicy question for you, I think it would be this. The whole experience of our minds,

being fragmented online, of us getting fixated on news stories and the next big thing that comes up, it's a problem on both the right and the left. It's not on one side or the other. So if you could give a word of encouragement to each side, what would it be? I guess I would just encourage people to take a step back and to remember that drama and the debates that we can get so wrapped up in on our screens, maybe are not the most important ones. I talk in the book about maybe take a walk in your neighborhood and meet some of your neighbors and talk to people, log off for a few days, right? That can kind of restore perspective about what might matter most and what might matter less. And as you say, this is not a problem that's limited to

just one side of the political spectrum. I think it's kind of ratcheted up in recent years. And when we over-prioritize these kind of intractable political debates, we miss opportunities for common ground. I mean, miss opportunities to relate to people as people rather than as voters who happen to vote for one political party or the other or whatever the case might be. I've been challenged by your book to really re-engage in critical thinking and long-form thinking. I love to read, but even as someone who enjoys reading books, it's easy to get distracted by these small things. And the more I think about, the more I realize, it helps me pick God's truth over whatever tribe I feel a sense of alignment to in my life. If I can keep those big

rocks in mind. If I can keep the big arguments, I find that I can come to appreciate the goodness in both sides, even the heart, even if I disagree with one side, I can understand why they believe what they believe and how they've come to their conclusions. And it helps me nuance my views, you know, because I often find the things that I assume to be right are only partially right. And like you said, I'm not God. I can't be omnipotent. I can't be omnipresent. I can't be, have all the knowledge. And that's a good place for me to be as a human is to embrace my finiteness and focus where I'm at and engage with my community as opposed to maybe being fixated on those national things.

So I really appreciate this conversation with you, Jeff. It's been fun talking. We like to ask our guests to pray for our listeners. So if you wouldn't mind just praying for us, maybe helping us to fix our attention on the eternal times, not the New York times, right? Lord, I pray that you would help all of us to be deeply rooted in your word and in your truth. I'm struck always by the image in Psalm 1 of the Blessed Man. as a rooted tree who draws sustenance in life from the Word of God and from your creation.

And I pray that like that man, you would enable us to drink deeply from your word and then to bear fruit that would bless our neighbors and bless our communities and help us to not be blown about like the chaff, but to bear fruit that will last. Amen. Amen. Thanks for being on the show, Jeff. It's been a pleasure talking to you. It's been great. Thanks so much, Patrick. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with?

Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.