Dear Twitter, I’m Leaving You for My Wife

I might have to walk this decision back, but for now, I’m leaving Twitter.
And Facebook.
And Instagram.  

The latter two accounts were killed more as collateral damage than being directly engaged as enemy combatants.

I suppose it’s probably more accurate to say I’m simply inducing a coma for my social media accounts than it is to say that I’m leaving them or even killing them—but death sounds more dramatic, and dramatic seems to get more attention, so let’s just say I killed them.

I’ll tell you a few of the reasons why I’m quitting Twitter, even though I won’t presume that one guy’s reasons for abandoning Twitter have any interest to you.

Basically, I joined and remained on Twitter for only a handful of reasons. I liked seeing what my friends from around the world were up to, most of whom are fellow pastors. And I liked seeing what my Christian heroes were up to—again, mostly pastors and authors. I also liked having a vague sense of what was going on more broadly in Christianity. Finally, I supposed that being on Twitter helped me share my books and articles. All of these—the friends, the heroes, the news-worthy events, the writing—were beneficial to me, even sources of joy.

But I started to realize that the underbelly of “Christian Pastor Twitter”—you know, all the snark, all the trolling, all the assuming-the-worst, all the myopic nitpicking—might not be the underbelly. The worst part of Twitter might actually be the whole pig—the head, the body, the arms, the legs, the snout, the curly tail, and not just the underbelly. The exception had become the rule. In fairness, Twitter has probably been this way for a good while, but my experience with Twitter had, at least until recently, remained primarily positive.

But then in the middle of March came a string of, what I can only call, insanity.

There was that lousy review of the book Gentle and Lowly. If you missed this, you are better for it. A book reviewer managed to misread an excellent book written by a hero of mine, and the review got people worked up, including me.

Then there was the shooting at the massage parlors in Atlanta, which seemed to cause several social commentators to offer bizarre and irresponsible hot takes. For example, within days of the shootings, some suggested that Christian teaching about sex caused the shooting because the shooter was a member of a church. An article in the New York Times spun it this way. One of my former seminary professors even took the opportunity to slander a thoughtful, biblical organization, saying that the organization had “radicalized” the shooter. That accusation is absurd—and again, slanderous. I know I shouldn’t care as much as I do, but I write for the organization that he slandered, and that organization has blessed me and our church in a thousand tangible ways. It seems wildly reckless to connect with a thick, straight line the worst version of Christian teaching about sex—teaching that would be better labeled as un-Christian teaching—and say that it is because of Christian teaching that women are dead. This connection, at best, is a thin correlation and certainly not causation.

That same week another hero of mine, Collin Hansen, tweeted about what a rough week it had been on social media and included a link to the new book he cowrote about hope. I’m so glad he wrote the book. What person couldn’t use more hope in our anxious age? But when I clicked to see the comments underneath Hansen’s tweet—it seemed to me—people salivated at the opportunity to tear him down. It was like Hansen and The Gospel Coalition, where he works, are the source of all the world’s problems. One person likened Hansen to an arsonist who feigns confusion of a burning house. In other words, you caused the terrible week on social media, so don’t be so perplexed.

Speaking of culpability, I should insert a note here I haven’t mentioned yet. I know that I am culpable for my Twitter feed. The specifics of all the social media algorithms may remain opaque, but the principle is readily known: the more you click, the more you get. And I certainly got. For every doofus Twitter comment I clicked, I got ten more comments in my feed. My eyes were reaping the seeds I had sown with my thumbs. Forgive me, Lord.

This reaping led to more and more reaping. Controversies I didn’t know existed were foisted upon me. And the “news” I had tried to remain vaguely aware of started to become the headlines I’d rather be completely unaware of.  “Beth Moore Leaves the SBC.” “James White Said Something Provocative and Made People Mad.” “Somewhere Someone with White Skin Said Something Racist.”

As an evangelical pastor, I began to feel like each time I opened Twitter, I stood trial for all the dumb things fringe evangelicals had done. To open Twitter was to be prosecuted by the mob. And mobs don’t do nuance well.

It’s not that I don’t care about Beth Moore and the like, but I am a pastor of a church with plenty of our own problems, and all of our church problems I care about far more than the problems I didn’t start and I can’t fix. Indeed, one day I will be held accountable to God, not for whether I engaged in the latest Twitter storm, but whether I loved the sheep of my flock. And while we’re on the subject of divine accountability and moral imperatives, I also have a large family, and they are my first pastoral priority. Each time I turn around, my children grow an inch or two and seem to be one step closer to walking out our front door and onto a college campus. Time flies when you have toddlers and teenagers in the same house.

Rod Dreher argues in his popular book The Benedict Option that Christians should retreat to the places where we can have meaningful influence, to—in a sense—become Benedictine monks on Noah’s ark. Conservative Christians, he would say, must become those who actually have something to conserve (re: godliness) and spend our time conserving it. I read the book a few months ago and found it insightful even if I don’t take his conclusions to be the only, or even the best, option for Christians. But perhaps Dreher’s arguments worked on me more subtly than I realized. Today, I feel content to let the Twitter dumpster fire burn while I retreat to play with my kids and love my wife and pastor my church.

This gets to the real issue. In addition to all the drama, Twitter had become an all-consuming time drain, devouring every bit of my mental rest and human interaction. Do I really need to open Twitter while I walk upstairs to grab my running shoes? Do I need to recheck when I walk down the stairs to see what I missed during the 30 seconds it took to find my shoes? Do I need to check Twitter with one hand and brush my teeth and comb my hair with the other? Do I need to check Twitter as I walk from my car to the office in the morning and then again while I warm my coffee in the office microwave? No, no, no, and no. And more importantly, do I need to multitask when I talk with my wife? Same answer.

When I tweeted that I was leaving Twitter, I wrote that “If you want to reach out to me, send me a text message.” A few days later I checked the comments, and someone had asked, “Do you mean a direct message?” Actually, no. I did mean text message. If you have my cell phone, let’s keep in touch.

So, Dear Twitter, for all these reasons, I’m leaving you for my wife. And for my family. And for my joy. Your tidal wave of trash and the general social media sea of cesspool finally rose so high and crashed so hard on my little island oasis of joy where I visited with my friends and heroes that I’m going to float away.

Maybe one day the violent waters will recede, I’ll get off my ark, and we can be friends again.

* Photo by Jean-Pierre Brungs on Unsplash