The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

It was nearly 25 years ago that my son Jonathan and I watched the movie The Matrix.  (I actually needed to watch it several times to grasp the complexities and underlying messages of the movie.)  Meir Soloveichik, Director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, zeroes in on the key scene of the movie:  “A man named Morpheus sits across from another man named Neo and informs him that his entire notion of reality is a lie. If Neo wishes to know the truth of human existence, Morpheus says, all he has to do is choose one of two pills. ‘You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill . . . and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes’ . . . Of course, Neo chooses the red pill and learns the terrible truth that the advent of artificial intelligence allowed machines to take over the Earth. He believes it is 1999, but in fact it is 2199, and all human beings are perpetually asleep in vats, exploited by their AI masters as a source of energy. The world they think they experience is actually a virtual reality known as The Matrix.”

Soloveichik goes on:  “But in a strange way, the film has become more relevant today than it was in 1999. With the rise of the smartphone and social media, genuine human interaction has dropped precipitously. Today many people . . .  would rather spend their time in the imaginary realms offered by technology than engage in a genuine relationship with other human beings . . . Indeed, not long after The Matrix premiered, humanity hooked itself up to a matrix of its own. There is no denying that our lives have become better in many ways thanks to the internet and smartphones. But the epidemic of loneliness and depression that has swept society reveals that many of us are now walled off from one another in vats of our own making.”

Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, makes this observation about our technologically saturated world and what it has done to our understanding of humanity: “When human beings are reduced to wills, when bodies are problems to be overcome, and when human relationships are reduced to manipulative power relations to be transcended through technology, all those things that make us human—dependencies, obligations, and those things that flow from them, like kindness, gratitude, altruism—disappear too.”  Furthermore, consider these observations from Fred Greco, Senior Pastor of Christ Church in Katy, Texas:  “I never would have dreamed, even thought my children were born in the days of the ubiquitous home computer, that grade-school children would walk around with a device that would give them access to virtually everything (good and bad) without their parents’ knowledge . . . There is no denying it—social media in its various forms has taken over our society.  Real, physical friendships are cast into the background as ‘virtual’ relationships take center stage.  Most of the children in America get their information, opinions, and eve values from TikTok and Instagram . . . Viral videos, memes, and pictures shape the way that children view the world . . . Social media is filled with sexual images, messages of hatred and cruelty, and calls to rebel against authority.  It is no longer necessary for children to wander out into a hostile world to come under attack—the world floods into our homes every day.”

In his new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, James Davison Hunter delineates the impact this technological revolution has had on our culture, and especially our political culture:  “The techno-utopians at the dawn of social media and the internet . . . believed that the new information technologies would prove a singular benefit to democracy by giving a voice to all.  With no one controlling access, there would be no censorship. No one would be sidelined; all would be recognized.  As a marketplace for ideas and information, it would be impossible for even the most powerful to foist a distortion or lie upon a credulous public.  But as it turned out, the new social media created the perfect conditions for what has become something akin to epistemic anarchy—and with it, the proliferation of misinformation and worse.”  Hunter makes these additional observations:

• “The root of the problem begins from the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information—the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’—and the bewildering number of choices it imposes upon all us.  Information, no less than numerical data, is no self-interpreting . . . From psychology, we know that when confronted with a range of information sources, people as a rule do not choose rationally according to some independent criteria, but rather act out of their preconceptions, biases, and feelings; choosing the information that validates their prejudices and avoiding what does not . . . The tendencies toward confirmation bias are well known: they work to predispose people to sift the evidence that supports their views from anything that challenges it.”
• “The entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate, then, render truth and reality beside the point.  It is not that public officials lost the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, but rather they became indifferent to the distinction under the pretext that effectiveness mattered more.”
• “On the receiving side, it is not that ordinary citizens have become more stupid or more gullible than in times past but rather, as Christopher Lasch put it, that they have no real institutional alternative to the consumption of hyperbole, spin, distortion, and lies.  For the average person navigating this baffling symbolic landscape, what gets filtered tends to be information that reinforces their own understanding of the world, an understanding shared with anonymous others in a simulated community.  For political actors, the incentive is simply to generate momentum around stories irrespective of the quality of information, thoughtfulness of opinion, or subtlety and balance of argument.  These qualities are all absent.  What ultimately matters, as Lasch observes, is ‘the particular version of unreality the American public could be induced to accept.’”
• “This is an arena in which manipulation, duplicity, and bigotry face little to no obstruction.  Indeed, a large study of Twitter users showed that false stories circulated at a rate much faster and more widely than true stories . . . In the end, though, the line between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, real and unreal has become nebulous at best.  That between one-half and two-thirds of adults in America now regularly get their news through social media means that the problem will remain entrenched for as long as this media environment exists.”

Chris Larson is certainly correct when he argues that “There is plenty of suspicious and even outright evil activity surrounding technology and how centralized activity by sinful humans pridefully seeks to make themselves gods, enslaving others into their hell-bent ambitions.  Knowledge, when in the hands of corrupt sinners, is prone to unintended consequences, corruption, and idolatry.  We need only look at the early pages of Genesis to see humanity’s depravity in using tools to usurp God and harm neighbor.”

The increasing volume of disinformation generated through social media and AI technology makes the discernment between truth and falsehood increasingly difficult.  Eventually, this could lead to more social chaos and further disintegration of institutionalized authority.  Therefore, we must remember that Christians are called upon by God to discern and know truth (e.g., Proverbs 2:2; John 8:32).  For that reason alone, knowledge of God’s Word is even more important.  And, to that end, I am reminded of how important our minds are to God:  Mark 12:30-31 declares that we are to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength.  The challenge for the believer is what theologians call the noetic effect of sin:  2 Corinthians 4:4 affirms the depths of sin’s effect on our minds.  For that reason, one of the weighty commands of the New Testament is to “renew our minds” (e.g., Romans 12:1-2; Ephesians 4:23).  Colossians 3:2 commands: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”  In 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul speaks of taking “every thought captive to obey Christ.”

As 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 explains, God’s Word is the key to mind renewal.  The Holy Spirit, who searches the deep things of God, indwells us and enables us to renew our minds and hearts through God’s Word.  As this process ensues in the believer’s life, Paul declares, we have “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).  We begin to see and understand things as Christ does.  For that reason, believers must exercise the stewardship responsibility of regulating what we let into our minds (see Philippians 4:8).  Mind renewal is a stewardship responsibility of the believer and is thereby eternally significant in this world of disinformation, hyperbole, spin and intentional duplicity.

See Meir Soloveichik in the Wall Street Journal (23-24 March 2024); Carl Trueman in First Things (25 July 2025); Fred Greco in Tabletalk (July 2024), pp. 70-71; James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, pp. 304-308; Chris Larson in Tabletalk (November 2023), p. 6.