Is Nothing Sacred?
A Meditation on the Catholic Confessional and Sin-Professing Posts
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Friends and soon-to-be friends,
To address the above question – no, nothing is sacred in an age where this is what my Reddit feed looks like. Now that we have gotten that out of the way, I think we need to discuss social sin posting (or the Catholic confessional for the masses). Theresa Sauter writes about Facebook posts as a way to assert oneself to oneself as well as others. She writes “Writing is a technique of self – a way to talk about and reveal oneself, to engage with oneself and others and to present and perform oneself to an audience.” The key word to note here is “perform”. At times we feel that expressing our authentic self and any kind of performance is at odds with this. But Sauter asserts that the self is dynamic and influence by expression.
This is an interesting notion in itself but I could not help but want to use it to dive into the comparison that Sauter makes between professing our wrongdoings online and the catholic confessional. She does this in 2014 no less, talk about a prophet amiright? Things have changed since then. By that I mean that things have gotten exponentially worse, and I celebrated getting my screen time down to 5 hours per day last week.
RPReplay_Final1648219921.movSaunter says that “Christians wrote to ensure their abidance by externally determined divine moral standards.” The Christians have a good reason for exposing themselves, so what excuse does the swaths of people that tweet about fare evasion have? In a continent where the number of atheists have nearly doubled in the last decade, are we looking for something to fill the void of good ole fear of god? If so, what does that say about the power dynamics that we are well on our way to cementing? Who has replaced God as the one that we must confess to for saving? Since its online, is it each other? Or since we often don’t expect a response, is it the confession being consumed by the void of 1s and 0s that we are hailing? Or is it even still God but you don’t need to go to a church to reach Him? What is this a performance of and who are we performing to?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I can absolutely speak to what compels us to do this. I think Sauter us right and that the “self” is something crafted and affirmed and then recrafted around the affirmations. And social media is just an oh-so-easy way to fill in the gaps of what falls in between the cracks of our daily life. Maybe fare evasion doesn’t tend to come up in conversation much. But online I can start my own conversation and get live feedback on-demand. It’s especially appealing because I get to carefully craft my words and choose just the right tone so that if I get it wrong and this sin gets me excommunicated, I get to say that I was joking. It is absolutely catharis to confess wrongdoings and be redeemed, this is one of the key strengths of the Catholic confessional. It feels good to be told that you have been naughty but at your core you were built nice. This reaffirms the “self” in a succinct and elegant way that confessing your achievements never will. Moving the cloaked booth to your phone has made this feeling so accessible.
But Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have something that God never will – the enthusiastic consent to tie your confessions directly to your public profile. Your sins go right beside a picture of your dog and your review of the latest Marvel movie. Your catharsis was always directly tied to your personal sense of self and social capital, but now you have the "agency" to blast it to the world at a whim. The whole world is a stage and perform indeed.
XOXO,
Be!!aTheSwannn.com
P.S This will be my last post and I have managed to not mention Mainstream (movie on Netflix starring Andrew Garfield). Check it out if you are interested in the psychological effects of virality mixed with religious imagery and not-so-interested in quality writing - seemed relevant to this specific post.
P.S This will be my last post and I have managed to not mention Mainstream (movie on Netflix starring Andrew Garfield). Check it out if you are interested in the psychological effects of virality mixed with religious imagery and not-so-interested in quality writing - seemed relevant to this specific post.
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