Pope Francis, Social Media, and Identity

A recent online article in the hippity-happenin' Christian magazine Relevant celebrated an entire year of Papal Tweeting, as we move into year two of our collective celebrity Pope crush.

Or perhaps that should be #popecrush.

Yeah, I think a #hashtag is in order here.

What struck me in reading the long list of tweets offered up by Pope Francis over the last year were two things.  First, how simple, kind and gracious they all were.  This is how Christianity should sound.  It just is.

Second, how utterly different the tone of those tweets were than the tweets to be found on Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio's twitter feed just one year ago, back when he was George and not Frank.

Twelve months ago, I'd followed the churning social media frenzy around the selection of the new pope.  It was fascinating, particularly watching the reactions on the hyper-instant neural feed that twitter provides.

When the smoke finally puffed out of that little chimney, and the name was announced, I did the natural thing in a social media era.  I went to this new pope's twitter feed, to see what he was sharing with the world.  Who is this guy?  What does he have to say?

I found Cardinal Bergoglio's verified Twitter feed, and scanned back for a year.  I blanched, and sitting in my church office, I said to myself, "Lord have mercy, this guy is going to be the Pope?  God help us."

If what we say represents what matters to us, what mattered to Cardinal Bergoglio was stopping gays and lesbians from adopting children in Argentina.  The feed was almost monomaniacal on the subject.

That was his primary issue as a Cardinal, his defining contribution to the broader conversation on faith.  It was pretty consistent, shrill, and more than just a little bit horrible, to the point where I received the news of his ascension to the Papacy with slightly clenched teeth.

Reserve judgement, I said, a year ago.  Tempting as it was, I would not allow myself to believe that these cruel, Pharisaic tweets represented the wholeness of this person.  Let him prove that he knows what is important.  Do not yield to the desire to attack now.  Give him a chance.

Because I know that social media can do strange things to our identities as persons.  To make a name for ourselves, we need to claim a platform.  We become something other than the complex being we are.  We seek conflict, and places where we can make a name for ourselves.  We can take a stand that makes us stand out, shouting louder and louder that we are signal, dammit, not noise.

It can cause us to surface our darkness, to linger in places of conflict and brokenness, to deepen wounds and hurts.  Social media does not need to be that thing.  But we have made it so.

I'm glad, over the last year, that Pope Francis has proven that he gets that there is a better way.

That year should remind us, thems of us who spend time on social media, to listen to our tone, and know that it matters.

Pope Twitter the First

Yesterday was satisfyingly busy.  Meeting followed conversation followed meeting, with working and thinking and sermon-cogitation woven in and around all of it.

And in the thick of it all, Twitter hummed away behind one tab of my browser.  My wanderings through the twitterness have continued over this month, and yesterday, I found myself experiencing yet another world event through this peculiar medium.

It really is like being in a scene from the Incredible Journey, sitting there in your tiny little nanosub and watching the neurons in the vast cortex around you light up and flash and blort out transmitters around you.

No, wait, Incredible Journey was the one with the dogs.  Um...what's that film again...um...you know, the futuristic one with Raquel Welch playing the Helpless-Eye-Candy-"Girl"-Who-Will-Eventually-Need-Rescuing?  Um.  Amazing...um...something.  No, not that one.  Oh, right.  The Fantastic Voyage.

As there are many, many co-religionists populating my corner of the global brain, yesterday was an endless blorting yarp of Papal tweets.  Some were earnest prayer-tweets from Catholics.  Many were goofy metacommentary, as the addled popcorn brain of our social macroorganism nattered on about smokestacks, cannabis, and some random seagull.

It trended and trended hard, to the point where even tweeting teens who use Twitter to let the world know about their every self-absorbed moment noticed.  "What the [Freak] is all this [flipping] Pope [poop]?  OMG I dunt care abt disss [excrement]!!! #whocares"

When the selection came, though, what my Twitter feed almost instantaneously let me know was the name of the Pope, the name he had chosen, and that as a Cardinal he had his very own Twitter account.  Surely, surely that's a first.

What is this human being like, I wondered.  Traditional media outlets were talking Jesuit, and waxing on about St. Francis of Assisi, and talking about "care for the poor," and "spartan lifestyle."  It sounded promising.

But Twitter means he'll be talking about himself and what was important to him, so of course, I clicked and went there.  I'll admit that Twitter's not the very best medium for really knowing someone, but you can get a hint.  That I'm a slightly goofy pastor who's into quantum physics and theology would become quickly apparent, for example.

What I found were two tweets about his becoming Pope, and then a lot of prior tweets with hashtags en Espanol.  They consistently read things that would translate like #nogayadoptionever and #whygaysshouldn'tbeallowedtoadopt.   Oh Lordy, thought I.  Is this what matters to him?  It certainly seemed to be, as the peculiarly warped mirror of that social media presented Bergoglio to the world.

Couldn't it have been #behumble, or #loveyourneighbor, or #jesuslovesyou or #careforthepoor?   As the old hymn goes, They will know we are Christians by our #hashtags, by our #hashtags....

Sigh.

But I didn't give in to the temptation to tweet about it, because I don't really know Francis yet.  Wisdom holds it's tongue, and watches until it is sure.  Best to think, to stand back, to observe, and not to give in to the 24 second news cycle.  Human beings are complex creatures, not easily reduced to #hashtags or their most extreme perspectives.

A social media platform's got to know its limitations.