Facebook's Religious Conundrum

Facebook is a wonderful social networking tool that creates online communities for millions of people.  Most begin filling out Facebook’s identity questions: name, sex, hometown, birthday, relationship status, and… religion?  With 56% of Americans changing their religion at least once (most before age 24), it presents a difficult challenge for “Facebookers”.

The Washington Post wrote an article about Facebook’s religion conundrum:

Creating a Facebook profile for the first time, Eric Heim hadn’t expected something so serious. Hunched over his laptop, he had whipped through the social network Web site’s questionnaire about his interests, favorite movies and relationship status, typing witty replies wherever possible. But when he reached the little blank box asking for his core beliefs, it stopped him short.

“It’s Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?” said Heim, 27, a college student…. “But a question like that kind of makes you think.”

The Post reports that 150 million out of 250 million users put something in the religion section on a person’s Facebook page.   Some users are hard pressed to find themselves in one religious category:

With space limited to 100 characters, there was simply no room for Heim to go into his childhood experiences with faith — growing up with an agnostic father, an evangelical mother and a fundamentalist grandmother. There was no space to describe the terror he felt after learning of heaven and hell. Or how the hell part weighed especially heavily after he was caught breaking into a neighbor’s home at age 7.  He couldn’t convey the profound faith and forgiveness he found in junior high after hearing the tear-filled sermons of a charismatic Baptist minister. Or the eventual dulling of that faith in college by alcohol. And he couldn’t fully explain the slow reformation of that faith, now that he has abandoned the hollowness of his old party life.

“How the heck do you fit all of that into a box?” asked Heim, who sometimes attends a Lutheran church in Dale City.

So rather than type in a specific denomination or a pithy, amusing answer, Heim entered this non-sequitur: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

It is a phrase written by linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky to demonstrate how a sentence can be grammatically logical and yet have no meaning — how things that seem so right at first can crumble under scrutiny.  “It represents my faith,” Heim said, “how it sometimes makes sense to me and sometimes doesn’t.”

Piotr Bobkowski, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina,  found some interesting results of his religious survey on on MySpace:

a significant portion of privately religious young adults — almost a third in the case of Protestants — avoid identifying themselves by their traditional sects.

Bobkowski’s study, although about MySpace, paints a picture of our reluctance to post our religious preferences.  The Post’s article continues the story by interviewing young people about their secretive religious preferences.   Some Christians use terms like “Matthew 28”, “The Way”, or “JC” to proclaim their faith on their Facebook page.

This illustrates an on going social change in our culture.  We don’t like to be categorized, religiously speaking.  For some reason, people feel that picking a particular religious affiliation brings unwanted judgment or speculation on a person’s lifestyle or views on morality.  We are starting to see the affect of postmodernity on religious users of Facebook.  The reason why “Facebookers” do not display their religion is that they fear what it means in a public arena.  We want to describe our faith on our terms.

For Christians, this can be a problem.  Although we want to describe our faith on our terms, we have to be faithful to scripture, 2,000 years of Church teaching, and reason (some would also add experience). In a “free country”, why do we have to be embarrassed by our faith?  We do not have to shout it from the mountain tops, but why be so scared?