For the last couple of years, there has been an important campaign asking people to think before they give up social media for Lent. Put forward particularly by the Disability and Jesus group, this campaign rightly reminds people that there are many disabled people for whom social media provides a much needed connection with the Church, and that to give up social media is to leave these people with a diminished connection to the Church.
While I think that this perspective is important, and that it is always right to consider the impact of our Lenten disciplines on others, it is also important that this does not becomes an unquestioned orthodoxy: “If you give up social media for Lent, you are giving up on/not paying enough attention to disabled people.”
I gave up social media last year because it was damaging my mental and spiritual health. Social media, as a created thing, is essentially neutral, and can be either good and bad. For me, and I’m sure for others, the constant setting up of unhelpful binaries and the desire to score points by demonstrating that you are more woke/trad than someone else is exhausting. This is because of my mental illness – but it is no less real for that.
Those of us who have mental illnesses or other conditions which make social media a difficult place to be, despite their positive features, not only can but should spend less time in these spaces. Similarly, people for whom the constant cut and thrust of digital argument on Christian Twitter is an occasion for sin. I also count myself in this group – pride and anger are both easily roused by spaces which are set up around debate, and being aware of that makes it important to limit engagement.Of course, the same factors apply in other areas and to other created things and spaces. And it is not just OK but good to avoid or limit access to spaces which exacerbate illness or provide an occasion for sin.
This isn’t just about me – I’ve spoken to others who have felt strongly that giving up social media is something that they should do for the good of their relationship with God, who have felt pressured to go against their own consciences for fear of being thought a ‘bad person’. This kind of thing is unhelpful, as it turns fasting or not fasting into a work of public performance, rather than a vehicle for growth in the love of God.
So if your social media fast stems from an over-inflated sense of your own importance, or from a lack of anything better to do, then think again, and consider that your presence in online spaces is actually important for those disabled people who rely on that input.
If you are constantly involved in Twitter arguments, think that you could make Twitter a safer space for people with mental health issues by tempering your rhetoric.
And if you have discerned, either through personal prayer or discussion with a Spiritual Director, that fasting from social media would provide spiritual benefit, reduce your tendency towards sin, and improve your mental health and wellbeing, this is also OK.
Justice, Peace, Joy 