The Catechetic Converter

We are in the midst of a wave of what is now known as enshittification, which is a term coined by Canadian author Cory Doctorow on his blog, Pluaralistic. It’s a phrase that has taken parts of the internet by storm, a perfect word to describe how seemingly everything has gotten worse. (Apologies to anyone who is bothered by a priest using the word “shit,” by the way. I get that some Christians are offended by swearing, but Saint Paul pretty much uses the word “shit” in Philippians 3:8 when he considers his life before Christ as skybala, so make of that what you will.)

“Enshittification” is marked by four things, according to Doctorow:

first, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Notice that those four markers are not exclusive to technology, where the term “platform” could be used for just about any institution.

Including the Church.

Just think back to the 15th and 16th Centuries. The Church had been good. It managed to change the direction of the Roman Empire and even managed to preserve elements of culture and society after the fall of that empire. It was nimble and adaptive to the needs of people in the agrarian days of the early Medieval period and managed to counterbalance the worst impulses of kings and lords (for the most part) because kings and lords were seen as subservient to the lordship of Christ Jesus and His Church, which wielded the power of excommunication as a way to keep things in check. But then, kings and lords wanted more from the Church, an institution they were largely funding. Further, many of the bishops had been welcomed into the halls of wealth and power and now saw themselves largely in political terms rather than spiritual. So the laity began to be exploited through practices like the selling of indulgences (used to fund wars and, later, the construction of Saint Peter’s at the Vatican). Then, the bishops began to exploit the lords and kings to get what they wanted (just consider the story of Henry IV traveling in the snow to get the pope to reverse an excommunication). Then, we get the Reformation Era (which gave birth to my branch of the Church, known as Anglicanism).

Now, we see the same things happening in regards to Protestant Christianity, particularly the Evangelical side of things. Pro Publica is running an article about one of the several Evangelical pastors that are leveraging their spiritual influence in the service of political power. And the question is why? Why would any organization that calls itself Christian engage in this sort of thing?

Why would the Church ever return, like “a dog to its vomit,” to the well of enshittification?

It’s because Christians seem to forget what their religion is all about, largely because Christianity is a pretty inconvenient thing. We want to change the world, we rightly recognize that Jesus calls us to change the world. But the lure of doing such things quickly and conveniently is very very strong. Which I feel like we’ve heard something similar before...

Oh. Right.

I’m beginning to think more and more that “inconvenience” is a Christian virtue, a thing we need to embrace, cultivate, and value (I’ve plans to write more on this in the future). When we consider that the ancient rabbinical interpretation of the Fall was the result of the serpent telling Eve and Adam that they could short-cut their way to god-like-ness that the Holy One was moving them toward by eating that piece of fruit, we see that “convenience” or “expedience” becomes a very alluring temptation. Further, in a prophecy about Jesus found in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom (frequently called The Wisdom of Solomon) we read:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. (Wisdom 2:12-15, NRSV)

So, even the Bible itself acknowledges that the ways of Jesus are inconvenient, while also exposing the short-comings and even wickedness that come from a life of convenience. And those things result in Jesus being crucified. Which is all to say that convenience is powerful and can come with a dark side if we’re not attentive to it.

Christians, as with anyone else, are sinners. We know this, we confess this, we (are supposed to) try and overcome this. But, nevertheless, we live in a sinful world and it is very hard to successfully resist every day. (But this is why we also believe in grace—which is another topic for another time!) The allure of a short-cut to what we think we want is too strong. And so we make a concession here, another there, and then in time we have Rube-Goldberg-machined our way into abandoning our faith and/or calling a heresy or idolatry “Christian.”

Christians have an uneasy relationship with the so-called “separation of church and state.” Our faith demands that we be public and call on the public to repent and follow Jesus. This fact was not lost on some of our most ancient thinkers, most notable being Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great sage of Western (scholastic) Christianity. His mountainous masterpiece, The City of God, deals with the questions of Christians in political leadership. What he effectively argues is that Christians are baptized into a world affected by sin and so all things we humans develop are going to be marked by that fact in some way. But because we confess that sin and confess that Jesus has freed us from sin having lasting, defining power over us, we are able to see past the marks of sin and into a new way of being. So Augustine argues that the Church must make use of the systems of this world, but in such a way to move past the sin-defined flaws of those systems. Judicial punishment, for instance, is supposed to be understood by Christians as a tool that leads to people being restored into the community and not a means of punishment for the sake of punishment. Augustine understood that the guilt of the knowledge of the sin itself is more punishment than the law could ever apply, and so mechanisms of “punishment” are only to help an offender realize the sinfulness of their actions, so that they could come to a place of confession—which is the catalyst for repentance and restoration to the community.

In short, Saint Augustine argues that the Church make use of governmental systems in order to persuade people of what they ought to do, rather than coerce them. In effect, this subverts the systems of government, sinful as they are, in the aims of hopefully working them out of a job.

But, as we all know, persuasion is inconvenient. It takes time. Think of how hard it is to convince people to leave Facebook or Instagram in favor of the far superior experience of decentralized social media like Mastodon and Pixelfed. Wouldn’t it be easier, more convenient, to just force people to leave?

Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just vote the right people into office and get them to make people behave the way we think they should?

Such a view is deeply heretical, from a Christian perspective, because it attempts to supplant the work of God and put it into the hands of us people. Like the Marvel villain, The High Evolutionary, we convince ourselves that we can do it all faster and better because God is not behaving the way we think He ought.

The only way out of the cycle of enshittification is to properly repent and then continue to resist the lure of convenience.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

header image by J Dean, via unsplash.com. The image of the Temptation of Christ is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain

Years ago, I had pink hair as part of a ploy to get the youth of my parish to invite friends to church. See, I would let the one who brought the most visitors to church decide what color my hair would be on our summer mission trip. Pink won. The young woman who decided that pink would be my color eventually became an artist and drew the above photo of me as part of a gift when I was called away from that church. She included the line “it’s all good, I’m a priest” (which I think is something I said on the trip).

As a priest, there’s a sense that I’m supposed to have more answers than the rest of you. That, by virtue of my vocation, I’m closer to God and, therefore, the Truth. The reality is that people like me wind up following a call to ordained ministry as the result of chasing questions that wind up becoming other questions. If we’re any closer to Truth it’s only by way of asking deeper questions. That’s what this blog is about.

I’m a priest in the Episcopal Church. I live in Hawai’i, on the island of O’ahu, serving a congregation in downtown Honolulu. Before all of that I was a Southern Baptist growing up in Orlando, then an Evangelical in university in West Palm Beach, then an Episcopal seminarian in Alexandria, Virginia, then back to West Palm in my first parish, followed by six years served as both rector and school chaplain in Boca Raton. My faith has been built and broken down a number of times, refined and challenged, growing me ever closer to the Lord Jesus. Along the way my beliefs have evolved and I wanted to develop a place to share that evolution, in the hope that it might help you come closer to the Truth.

I no longer have pink hair. But in my priesthood I do continue to believe that it’s all good. And I hope you’ll find it to be so as well.

I’m calling this blog The Catechetic Converter not only as a pun, but as a reflection of my sense of my own Christianity: I believe in evangelism (which involves conversion) but in a way that embraces the ancient and Apostolic faith (which means it involves “catechesis”). So, I see myself as one who aims to convert, but from a cathechetical place.

Enjoy. Oh, and feel free to Discuss...

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

I’m probably going to be “that guy” to some of you. That guy who discovers something new to him and then integrates it into his personality and won’t shut up about it until something else comes along to take it’s place. I’ve been that guy kind of all my life, to be honest (ask my friends). My current “that guy” thing is the Linux distribution (I restrained myself from saying “distro”) known as Ubuntu and it has, in a small way, changed my life.

So here’s the deal. I’ve been an Apple guy since at least 2006, after an obsession with Sony products (and the building of a PC just after high school). My first ever Apple product was an iPod, the one with the touch wheel. I was so enamored with the design (as I was with the late-90s clear Macs) that I decided to finally purchase a Mac computer for myself. After my beloved Sony Vaio laptop was stolen from my apartment in college, I went almost a year without a computer (living fearfully and carefully with my entire life on a thumb drive that traveled with me everywhere—this was well before cloud storage). With money bequeathed to me from my grandmother after her funeral, I purchased that ubiquitous white plastic Apple iMac laptop that everyone had (except for the kids who had the black pro model). And I used it all through the rest of college and my seminary education. It was chipped and scratched by the time I got a good deal on a 27-inch iMac with an Intel processor, thanks to a friend who worked at the Apple Store. This was during my first year of marriage, before kids and when my wife had a very well-paying accounting job for a major firm (while I worked as the lowest-paid priest in my diocese). In addition to that, I was fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem: iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches. I read Steve Jobs’ biography (which still sits on my shelf and I pick up to read on occasion even nowadays). I was maybe “that guy” about Apple for a time.

What I love(d) about Apple is the seriousness they took with regards to design. They aimed to make beautiful products. And not only were they beautiful, they simply worked.

I hate Windows. I pretty much hate everything Microsoft. But I really hate Windows. I especially hated that Windows lied to me. Like when I went to delete software, just sending it to the recycle bin was not enough. You had to track down stuff in the registry after running an uninstaller, just to make sure it was all gone. What blew my mind with my first Mac was that deleting software was as simple as moving it to “trash.” Then emptying that trash. Then there was the refinement. Pages offered crisp-looking documents with a range of beautiful fonts. The icons for minimizing and closing windows in MacOS looked like candied jewels. The physical hardware of the machines were minimalist works of art. No company aside from Braun or Dyson seemed to be focused on the connection between function and form quite like Apple. And that philosophy carried over into the software side as well. Jobs was correct in recognizing that personal computing was only going to take off if things were designed with an eye toward intuition. He hung around with guys like Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, guys who viewed computers in a vein similar to HAM radios. But Jobs knew that he’d have to remove personal computers from the realm of hobbyists and offer a product that seemed “finished” if people were going to shell out loads of money in order to use that product. And the proof is right in front of us: the Macintosh played an instrumental role in the adoption of personal computers and Apple sits as the most valuable company in the world.

Reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs reveals something many many people have noted: Apple struggles without Steve Jobs. When Apple fired Jobs, they floundered as a company and got too spread-out, offering products that no one seemed interested in purchasing. Jobs’ return brought with it the foundation of success that the company rides today, but looking at Apple these days and you can see that they’ve not really been able to overcome Jobs’ death (compounded by the losing of Jony Ive from the design side of things as well). Jobs’ philosophy of ensuring that these consumer products simply “work” has morphed instead into an approach of spoon-feeding applications and gradually locking people into the Apple ecosystem, seemingly more to keep them from leaving than any real benefit to remaining.

Take my beloved Pages, for instance. Every time I’ve updated that program (which has gradually become more and more like a mobile app than a proper word processor) I’ve lost fonts that I used and certain settings are gone or buried for reasons that don’t make a whole lot of sense to anyone but the engineers at Apple. Then there’s the planned obsolescence. Which, I get. Maintaining old hardware and software requires people and thus incurs costs on diminishing returns and all of that. But Apple continues to have their hardware and software locked up, which results in these beautiful products becoming seen as disposable, discardable, and furthering an ugly and environmentally catastrophic sense of consumerism.

Jobs seemed to hold the view that a computer should not insist upon itself. The computer, for him, is a tool toward a different end, not an end in itself. Increasingly, Apple feels like they’re making products for the sake of the product, and making changes to those products that feel insistent and not like the catalyst for liberation that Jobs envisioned in his dad’s garage all those years ago.

Which brings me, finally, to Ubuntu.

So that mid-2011 Mac I spoke about? I still have it and use it as my “home” computer. When I was called to be the priest of Saint Mary’s in Honolulu, the private school I had been chaplain to gave Saint Mary’s two refurbished Macs as a gift. Both of them the same year and model of my home computer. That was in March of 2020. One of the machines I appropriated for use as my office computer (because I didn’t have one at the church when I arrived). Shortly after the move, I started noticing that my home machine was running slow. I had a ton of stuff on there, so it wasn’t that unexpected. Then the office machine started chugging and I kept getting notices that my OS was no longer able to receive security updates, etc. It was becoming clear that I needed to buy a new computer—or two.

My parish is not big. I do not make a ton of money. So the idea of asking the parish to purchase me a new computer felt selfish. I was not about to keep apologizing to folks about the leaky roof while logging onto a brand new iMac (I really liked the mint green one). Plus there was the added element of what I’d said above about Apple, that the newer Macs were harder to repair and treated as more “disposable” (they glued the motherboard to the screen!). Conventional wisdom (that I picked up when I was working at EB Games in 2000 and part of the “PC Master Race”) was that a Windows machine should last about five years and a Mac between seven and ten, depending on use-level. These machines were hitting fourteen years of age, so old that I could not AirDrop from my iOS devices on them. So, it was time.

Then, Trump happened. Again. And suddenly all the big tech stuff changed in my eyes. Beating big tech felt like both a Christian responsibility and a patriotic need. I thought back to the early chapters of Steve Jobs’ biography and how he articulated the role tech can play in personal liberation. So I decided that I needed to learn Linux. I actually checked out Linux For Dummies from the library. In the course of my reading I learned that not only does Linux run really great on older Macs, but Ubuntu in particular.

This all means that I found myself in a position to try something new, something that would maybe inject new life into my computers—as well as me and my relationship with technology. I dug out an old external drive and got to work on creating a bootable USB drive for experimenting with Ubuntu on Mac. It was a bit more complicated than I expected. One computer basically forgot that it was able to access a WiFi network and so I had to create the drive on a separate same model Mac. I couldn’t use Etcher to get things going (the Mac was too old), so I had to learn to use the Terminal on Mac (which I’ve ever only used extremely sparingly; reminded me of DOS back in the day, which helped when I built my own PC, or when I had to do stuff with BIOS). I had two machines going, plus my iPad for instructions. I felt like I was hacking the Gibson. Once I got the bootable drive set up, I plugged it into the relevant machine, restarted it in order to boot from the drive, and was blown away at how refined and pretty Ubuntu looked—while feeling a deep sense of satisfaction that I got it to work at all. I fell in love almost immediately and so I wiped the memory of the machine and installed Ubuntu as the operating system, running it like it was a fresh computer.

I’m writing this on that machine, using LibreOffice. I love it so much that I get excited to come to work just to use this computer.

Running Ubuntu on this Mac has had an immense impact on my relationship with computers in just the few weeks I’ve had it. Not only does it feel like I’m using a completely brand new computer, it feels rebellious, like I’m in some sort of special club. When I check out apps online and I see that it has Linux support, I feel like I’m part of an inside joke that only cool people get.

Linux feels rebellious to me. I’m sure there are folks who run servers that do not feel this way. But for someone that lives among the normies, to whom it’s either Windows or MacOS, Android or iPhone, this feels counter-cultural. And it feels empowering, like I get to decide when my technology is out of date. I mean, I’m writing this on a nearly fifteen year old machine (which still looks beautiful), using a twenty-five year old Pro Keyboard (the one with the midnight blue clear plastic buttons—the peak of personal computing design—I got it for like ten bucks at a thrift store). There’s plenty of life left in these things and they do not deserve to be relegated to trash heaps. Indeed, the aesthetic beauty of these products is enduring and Linux ensures that they are still functionally useful.

There’s also a spiritual dimension to this as well. In not letting a mega-corporation or three make my technology decisions for me, I am asserting my own self-worth. I am also experiencing a sort of revival, what Saint Paul refers to as the transforming of one’s mind, in opposition to being “conformed to the ways of this world.” The tools and the knowledge to use them is out there. It just takes a little time and effort to acquire it. It doesn’t need to be doled out to me from on high. Rather, it’s all around us and among us, even within us. And this fact is utterly liberating to know.

It’s weird to say, I guess, but this little operating system has had a huge impact on me. Linux changes lives.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.