This morning I woke up to learn that Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old conservative Christian activist and commentator, had been fatally shot. (1) This should provoke horror and grief from all, whatever your political and theological leanings. A few days ago I read the below:
One thing Turkle pointed out is that empathy is a complex emotion, unlike anger and fear, which are primal emotions that come from lower down in the brain and are triggered immediately. Empathy is something you learn how to feel, and it requires attentiveness to other people — trying to get inside their heads and understand them. One thing that online life steals from us is attention. Because we’re constantly overloaded with new messages, new information, we simply don't have time to back away from the flow and say, “Let me think about whether this is important. Let me just pay attention to this person”.
When you are constantly distracted, constantly shifting your attention rather than focusing it, not only do your thoughts become more shallow — because deep intellectual thinking requires concentration and focus — and not only does it affect your intellect. I think it affects your emotional capabilities too. You start to lose those deep, difficult, complex emotions that take time and attentiveness, and you revert to instinctive emotions like anger, fear, and belligerence. (2)
I think most of us are familiar with the warnings that Carr is surfacing. Maybe we are not worried enough. Many of us now view the world through our screens. Those who post things online know that what captures our eyeballs and attention are subjects that cause anger and fear. And so we are fed daily with posts that are unable to capture the nuances and complexities of difficult situations. The algorithms soon capture your biases; you will see more and more posts that reinforce your beliefs and that heighten your anger and/or fear. Fear and anger make a lethal combination, and increasingly more of us are fearful and angry. It’s a fear and anger that mutes the fruit of the Spirit. How then should we live? How then should we process social media?
Perhaps we need to identify social media gatekeepers among us, those wise and rooted in the Scriptures who will do the hard work of stepping back, acquiring relevant information, and coming to measured interpretations of situations. Perhaps they are out there already. For now, I fear that many of us are quick to decide who is right and wrong, who deserves to live, who should die. And I recall the words of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings:
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (3)
And, yes, that is a quote from a book.
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(1) https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-dies-shooting-utah-turning-point-usa/.
(2) Nicholas Carr, “Guest Appearances”, in CHRISTIANITY TODAY July/August 2025, 23–24.
(3) London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978, 69.