The Church in Techno-Global Times
how christian localism can defeat loneliness
By: Jacob Brogdon
This article is part of the Claritas spring 2025 issue, Connection. Read the full print release here.
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In my hometown, the best place for a casual meeting or afternoon reading is the Panera Bread down the road. Many vestiges of pandemic era precautions linger, upheld in the name of convenience, cost-effectiveness, or public health. Several have great merit, but I resist phone-based ordering. Today, however, there is a special deal on the app, so I get a 99-cent coffee set on the counter and a push notification sent to my phone.
The interpersonal friction of ordering from an employee, beyond being an opportunity for kindness, is like a pair of heavy, uncomfortable boots bringing our feet to the ground—a specific ground we share with others. Sadly, though, even many local cafes and restaurants now depend on personal technology.
Much has been written in recent years about loneliness. In 2023, the Surgeon General declared social isolation an “epidemic” due to its well-documented harm to physical and mental health. [1] In January 2025, Derek Thompson argued in The Atlantic that the decline in social interaction following the pandemic should be treated as a cultural shift rather than a hiccup. He points to a stubborn decline in time spent with others, decreased coupling rates, and reliance on technology to argue that we are willfully making ourselves incredibly alone. [2] You should read it. It will convince you of the severity of the problem better than I can.
Like all complex social phenomena, a monocausal explanation (of which many have been attempted) will never be fully accurate. Still, a nearly universally accepted contributor to this problem is use of screens. I add that screens exacerbate another contributor: the death of the local.
The World, Flattened
There is something profoundly (and sadly) ironic about most communication technologies. While they promise to bring us closer to those far away, they often destroy connection with those in our immediate physical proximity.
The digital world we so often inhabit (willfully or coerced) is almost global in scope. Our media intake and social circles are broader than when we used landlines, carrier pigeons, or, oldest of all, face-to-face conversations. The human attention that was once focused on a small village has been dispersed and divided among the entire population of the world. We are inundated with tragic and triumphant headlines from across the world, and we are pressured to give each person one-eight-billionth of our care.
The other impact of global connection is that “we,” as individuals, become totally unnecessary. As we lose touch with our local communities, we lose the bonds through which we understand ourselves. The flattened, widened digital world does push us to figure out exactly what our differentiated “profile” should look like, but the only person who needs your “profile” is you. No one needs another’s self-actualization to eat lunch or feel secure. Small, deeply interconnected human communities, however, instantiate bonds of neededness that are complex, hard, and the lifeblood of resilient happiness.
Our physical environment has undergone a parallel transformation toward global indistinction and efficiency which exacerbates the harm of screens. Technological advancements like the invention of the car have tricked us into thinking that we can be separated from the character of our environment. We were then more comfortable filling our land with seas of utilitarian concrete. Our affinity for the place we spend our lives and the people with whom we share a place are not enhanced by this type of physical infrastructure. Policy change in zoning, planning, and public infrastructure is good, and many individuals and local government workers are on that mission, but there is a deeper solution with spiritual infrastructure.
Local Churchness
Despite their universal claim that Jesus is Lord, individual churches have always respected and valued their smallness and particularities. This is possible because of the universal nature of the sacraments binding the Church together across other differences. [3] A powerful example is seen when, during Pentecost, all were baptized, but, instead of tuning everyone’s ears to the same language, the Gospel was proclaimed by the Holy Spirit in every language necessary, that all might understand. [4] Valuing smallness in the way that the Church has may provide an answer to our specific time’s trouble with loneliness.
The Church often develops formal doctrine from scriptural principles to more clearly speak to the troubles of the day. In the wake of the French Revolution, a time when social upheaval was repudiating the authority of any institution but the nation-state, the doctrine of subsidiarity was outlined—originally by the Roman Catholic Church. [5]
Subsidiarity acknowledges the goodness of a wide array of social structures (like city, church, and family) and orders them according to their size. The Church believed these institutions were nested—the smaller within the larger—and that issues should be addressed at the lowest reasonable level, by the people most familiar with their particularities. Larger institutions, in this view, exist to support smaller institutions as needed. Subsidiarity is a recognition that humans are designed to function on a human scale. Smaller orders are not inherently better at all functions, but smaller orders exist.
In the 21st century, the globalized world of internet connection has taken a seat in the hierarchy of social structures. Our job is to ensure that it does not impede the ability of lower orders—our families, our churches, and our neighborhoods—to fruitfully accomplish their purposes. A global, flattened world deadens human connection, and so we must resist flatness and resurrect localness in its place.
Localism also empowers. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist characterizes a typical response when people encounter a seemingly insurmountable problem like societal loneliness. “I am so small, and it is so big. What impact could I have?” But McGilchrist’s answer is not resignation. “You can have an enormous impact,” he says, “if you look locally.” [6] Attending to our smaller social units, rather than the larger units that lay beyond our control, provides great agency and refutes fatalism.
Local churches are the most comprehensive and practical places to honor subsidiarity and resurrect localness. They—and their empowered parishioners—are able to live with particularities and foster deep human connection. The churchness of these communities is not only facilitatory of human bonds but deeply connected to the transcendentals. The communion wine stays in the chalice because gravity works on the weight of the beautiful. The soup kitchen apron is held down by the weight of the good. The pews are sitting because of the weight of the true.
When I go to church I am not pulled into flatness. I walk in and take my paper bulletin. I am there. And I find, more so than sitting in front of my laptop on campus, that there are other people there, too. The best way to connect to your co-pilgrims might be to put on some heavy boots.
Sources
[1] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Washington, DC: Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, 2023.
[2] Thompson, Derek. “The Anti-Social Century,” The Atlantic, 8 January 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/
[3] Prusak, Bernard P. “The Theology of the Local Church in Historical Development.” In Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America Annual Convention, vol. 35, 297. Bronx, NY, 1980.
[4] Acts 2
[5] Brennan, Patrick McKinley, “Subsidiarity in the Tradition of Catholic Social Doctrine” Working Paper Series. 173, 2012. https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/wps/art173
[6] McGilchrist, Iain. “Lecture One: The Sovereignty of Truth” The Future of Humanity, 2024.