What does Media Literacy Have to Do With Religion & Spirituality? EVERYTHING!

Remember the Dark Ages? That period of European history when the uneducated peasant masses were lorded over by feudal kings and their relationship to God was controlled by the Catholic Church? And remember how the translation of the Bible into German by Martin Luther hastened literacy in the general populace—not only in Germany, but throughout Europe? 

 

In Martin Luther’s day, the written word was an agent of empowerment on two counts: It put people’s spirituality into their own hands, and it helped spread the all-purpose skill of being able to read information for oneself. 

 

Today, literacy is still empowerment. And so is media literacy—the ability to access and analyze messaging and information. But the proliferation of digital media, alongside the marginalization of books and print media, has begun to create a warped reverse motion in many people’s comprehension of information and ideas. There is a mass devolution in literacy of all kinds afoot, one that happens to serve the interests of powers that prefer passive consumers to engaged citizens, feudal peasants to empowered, literate, civil society. We’re going back to the literacy Dark Ages. And, though the crop duster-tracking alien blood cult conspiracist Reiki healers on TikTok might not seem to be a sign that spirituality is helping in all this, a revolution in spirituality is actually one of the main ingredients that can help light the way out of the dark.  

 

In the digital universe, many people simply cannot tell the difference between clickbait and actual stories—which is, of course, what clickbait depends upon. By design, the tragic flaw in the glut of information we are surrounded by is that much of it is designed so that you don’t actually read anything to its end, that your “click” of curiosity serves the advertising overlords first and foremost. Thus, a well-meaning mind can easily click on a link earnestly seeking information, but never find out that behind the inflammatory title swirling up a tornado of controversy, there’s no ‘there’ there. Usually whatever is there is too tangential, too speculative, and too complex, to be rendered into an interesting headline. 

 

This devolution in literacy is also hastened by systematic defunding of education, and the rise of video as the sole source of information for many people. Video - although it is fun, entertaining, and convenient - does not engage critical thinking skills and intensely stimulates the dopamine centers in our brain. Rather than pause to research or suss out if the ideas have any veracity whatsoever, the viewer will instead gravitate to ideas attached to feelings that feel good (including shock and rage, as those feelings build little grooves in the brain just like any “positive” feeling). Then, they are well-poised to simply continue consuming more and more of those feel good, nonsense videos—or maybe even start making some of their own! Feed the beast! 

 

Ironically, many of the people who create the most inflammatory, corrosive content online advise viewers to “do their own research.” Yet should anyone try pressing these folks for citation of the research they have done, good luck. And should one present a verifiable source to such a “content creator,” that comment section will go, as a friend of mine from Texas used to say, cold as a witches’ tit. (I’m a sort of witch, so, I can use that expression.) 

 

So where does spirituality enter into all of this? 

 

First off, the more obvious: Many spiritual practices (like meditation and recovery groups) help steer people away from our dopamine-addicted behaviors. Spiritual practice is simply good for our brains. In particular, knowing how to chill the fuck out, take a mental break, and breathe, can help lessen the obsessive relationship we tend to have with the brain fog-inducing terrain of social media and fear-inducing quantities of nightly news. Spiritual practice also encourages reflection and self-awareness. 

 

Second, let’s think back to that all-important role that having an actual book in your hands played in the spiritual, and eventually political, empowerment of the lower classes in Europe. When a person reads, abstract thinking is required; we cannot depend on someone else’s visuals and sound effects and personality and cool fonts to light up the ideas for us and sell us a preconceived conclusion about them. While reading, our brain has to conceptualize its own rendering of how new and unfamiliar ideas fit together. We have to check those new ideas against our existing framework. Our existing framework might be challenged and stretched by these new ideas—much like you might imagine a medieval peasant’s worldview must have been blown open by being able to have the power of what they understood as the living word of God in their own hands. 

 

The idea of people having their own direct connection to God (or Source, or Goddess, or the way of the Universe, or Mother Nature; pick your potion), is still just as radical today as it was back then. Because although Reformation encouraged literacy centuries ago, different permutations of the church still ultimately interceded in the relationship between the individual and divinity. And that whole approach has stuck. Today, churches of various denominations still play the role of administering spiritual connection for the individual - and the individual often experiences this connection en masse, as part of a large collective that supports (and funds) the church. In such structures, individual thinking, questioning, and challenging of established ideas isn’t exactly encouraged. Not all the time, at least. 

 

This is all partly why many thinking people turn from religion altogether and choose an atheist or agnostic path. We insist on being able to think, and we turn from any authority or entity that tries to do our thinking for us. Once you turn on a human mind with the fuel of whole ideas and original information that needs to be broken down and processed and constellated, it will never want to return to the junk food of preprocessed ideas packaged and stamped with some authority’s branded label on them. 

 

The break between science and religion was a necessary step in beginning to move out of the Dark Ages. But you could also argue that Western society never fully graduated out of the Dark Ages in the first place. In many ways, we are still mid-stride in taking that step – TikTok spiritual influencers leading followers down wildly erroneous paths in the name of “truth seeking” being the easiest illustration. Some astrologers identify this pseudo-spiritual sludge as a symptom of our being in the murky final years of the Age of Pisces. Though the Age of Pisces has its positive aspect in the sacrifice of the individual and the will towards transformation, its relationship to Neptune can also find us in the foggy recesses of addiction, spiritual bypassing, ego inflation in lieu of true transcendence, and simply not being able to use our common sense in matters related to the spiritual. Though the idea of Christ and his sacrifice is humble and transcendent, there's no guarantee this idea can't be usurped by the ego and lassoed into profiteering, colonizing enterprises. And since we don't particularly expect spirituality or faith-based belief systems to be attached to rational thinking, we let it slide. Down the murky drain along with the rest of the psychobabble sludge of the Internet. 

 

But in fact, you might say that the split between religion and rationalism during the Age of Reason in the West was the first shoe to drop in the beginning of the descent of the Piscean Age. Once our the West decided rationalism lives in one area and faith in another, common sense seems to have often taken flight in how we relate to spiritual experience. There is often zero expectation of any rational thinking in spirituality at all. And that is partly why we have an anything goes, whoever-saying-and-doing-whatever spiritual marketplace. 

 

But whether we're looking at rampant, rapacious spiritual materialism or meditation retreats for recovering Catholics or the mindless aggregation of huge amounts of data alongside the liquidation of jobs so that no human beings will actually be able to make sense of all that data - all of it illustrates that, ultimately, you can’t fully divorce people from their spiritual core, or divorce the mind from its need for meaning. The intellect and the spirit are both needed. And in a vacuum of spiritual life, organized religion and its prepackaged ideologies will fill the void. But spiritual seeking, when combined with critical thinking, is a core piece of the introspective, meaning-filled life. It is the ultimate literacy; to seek to understand one’s life and how it connects to the world around oneself, and share meaning with others.

 

Individual thought is both an intellectual and spiritual prerogative. Spirituality, when approached as a journey where an individual has their own personal relationship to the God of their understanding, does the same thing that reading a book does: it engages abstract reasoning and builds new networks in the brain. It forces us to confront the confines of our own minds, and push past them. As we bump up against our internalized frameworks and inherited belief systems and blind spots, bricks in the foundation of how we think start to shift. 

 

Obviously, certain powers prefer people consume the packaged and branded types of ideas—fascism depends on it, in fact. The contemplative openness to sit with complexity and nuance will always have a hard time winning out in an environment of spectacle that is all about big, bright headlines going KAPOW with shock and awe. Today, should one venture into the recesses of the conspiracy-addled interwebs, a lot of what you’ll see feels like the fear-mongering and rumor-spreading one might have encountered in an Inquisition-struck town square in the 1700’s. This gossipy, superstitious part of human nature means that a legitimate questioning of corporate hegemony and political overreach has devolved into paranoid mistrust of every institution, everygovernment official, every news outlet.

 

Nonetheless, we have to become willing to engage with people who have different views. Remember that democracy is like jazz; seemingly dissonant notes finding a way to harmonize. The way to that harmony isn’t through silencing one of those notes for being what it is. It is through meeting the dissonance, challenging it, respecting it as one expression of the variety of human possibilities, and evolving our understanding of harmony altogether. There are higher octaves of organization that make room for all the winding paths of the mind and imagination that humans wander down, and the more we carve those out and remain unafraid of them, the less people might get stuck down them and get lost to conspiracy cults. This insistence on widening our lens on democratic harmony is relevant even when the path folks have wandered down is dark and perhaps delusional or beaten down in nihilistic, disenfranchised despair – especially then, perhaps.

 

When people are trapped away in the recesses of disillusionment and disenfranchisement, they are still telling us something about the human experience. Maybe they are simply demonstrating the need for entertainment run off the rails, or maybe it is about “figuring out” and making sense of what might feel to them like a disordered, chaotic modern reality. Whatever it is, that intellectual permeability has been expertly exploited by Russian and Chinese bots infiltrating American thought on both sides of the political spectrum.

 

When we resuscitate our individual capacity for emotional regulation alongside skill at navigating abstract thought, it isn't just critical thinking. It's an act of resistance. 

 

We need to reinvest ourselves in these tools not only for the improved conditions of our own present day, but so that the people who come after us will have access to these resources, too. Literacy is a resource that we need to reinvest in so that society won’t in fact slide back into an archaic darkness of mind and spirit. Remember, when folks are under-resourced in material ways, such as housing, food, and healthcare, or nonmaterial resources, we set up nonprofits and hit the pavement advocating for them. (Well...we did at one time....) We need to invest the same amount of political energy in ensuring access to resources like non-biased internet, print news sources, literacy, and spiritual freedom. It is our job in a democratic society to go about making sure the resources needed for living healthy lives and being productive citizens are widely available for everyone.

 

What we need at this fragile moment in modern history—not only in America, but the world over, where totalitarianism is spreading rapidly—is a resurgence in all kinds of literacy: media, spiritual, written, and spoken. We need to stop giving in to the anti-democratic forces that want us to spiral into reactionary, fearful alienation from one another. We need to insist on finding ways to dialogue again—which is to say, how to think together. And we can’t think together if we can’t think for ourselves.