The Fare Forward Interview with Andy Crouch
Andy Crouch is a Partner for Theology and Culture at Praxis. He is the author of The Life We’re Looking For (2022), The Tech-Wise Family (2017), Strong and Weak (2016), Playing God (2013), and Culture Making (2008). Andy was executive editor of Christianity Today from 2012 to 2016. His work and writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Andy studied classics at Cornell University and received an MDiv from Boston University School of Theology. He lives in Swarthmore, PA.
Interview Conducted by Will Bryant
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Fare Forward: You’ve written in the past about a distinction between technology as a “device” and technology as an “instrument.” Could you explain this concept and where it came from?
Andy Crouch: Yes. I borrow the term “device” from the philosopher Albert Borgman. What made his understanding of technology unique was what he called the “device paradigm,” which supposes that technology will deliver us the goods that we seek without burdening us with engagement with the world. He says that devices “disburden” us. Devices are all technological implements or patterns that relieve us from having to engage with the world. Devices are always technological because, before technology, there was no way to get something done in the world without engaging with the world. All work before the Industrial Revolution was done by bodies—both human and animal—at the speed of digestion, with rare exceptions like wind or water mill power.
Suddenly, first in factories and eventually with consumer technology in our homes (long before digital technology), we start to have this way of getting things done without having to do anything ourselves. So, that’s devices. Devices extend and make real something that was always a dream in human history, which was doing magic. The dream of getting something done merely with a wish or a will or a word.
But there’s this other story that goes back as long or perhaps longer than magic, which is the story of tools, which were the original way that human beings got things done in the world. Tools extended humans’ capabilities without disburdening them or disengaging them. And that story has continued into the modern world through what we sometimes call instruments.
If you think about scientific instruments, medical instruments, or musical instruments, an instrument can be very high tech. My wife Catherine has a PhD in experimental physics, and in her lab, it’s all technology. There’s hardly anything there that’s not technological, but it does not disengage her or her fellow researchers from their work. They must be fully engaged as they use these instruments. Even when the instruments are recording data, the data is not self-interpreting. A human being must be very involved in building the instrument, evaluating it, having hunches about it, and so forth. Similarly, medical instruments are very high tech, but a surgeon and many others are still fully engaged during surgery. I can’t think of anyone more engaged than a surgeon in the midst of surgery, even though certain things are made a little easier for them by the technology.
So this is the distinction. Either we can pursue this ancient dream of magic, which now sort-of comes true with smartphones, or we can keep the story of tools going into the modern era by pursuing instruments which keep us fully engaged with the world.
FF: I am curious about how this distinction plays out for young people when they are first learning how to use a technology. The initial excitement of learning something simple can feel like magic, even if, with more time and maturity, the magic fades. How can we preserve this innocent magic without falling prey to the magic of the device?
AC: This gets to the idea that there are two somewhat intertwined senses of magic. One produces a feeling of power and pride (in the capital-P sense of the cardinal sin), and the other produces a feeling of wonder and humility: the sense that the world is magical, that the world has these properties and possibilities that leave us in awe and give us a sense of delight. There’s a very healthy side to that. The magic that I have in mind when I talk about devices is a corrupted dream: the ability to exert my will without having to become something. It’s power without formation, the magic of “pressing play.”
The cardinal example as it relates to childhood is the difference between pressing “play” on a music player and learning to play an instrument. When you choose a violin piece on Spotify, you hear the music with no effort, but learning to play the violin involves a long, difficult process. Even as a child, when they first pick up an instrument, there’s a sense of magic when they produce sound, but anyone who’s accompanied children through learning an instrument knows that the initial sound is far from magical to others. I think it’s partly because children have such open imaginations that even very imperfect playing of the instrument is delightful.
What’s ahead is a long process of becoming, formation, and apprenticeship. The real magic of learning the violin—the magic that feels magical to others—emerges after years of hard work.
The main problem with consumer technology in childhood is that it makes things too easy.
FF: Could you elaborate on how these two senses of magic apply to technologies like the iPhone or iPad that dominate childhood today? What makes those technologies lean into the prideful sense of magic rather than the other?
AC: The main problem with consumer technology in childhood is that it makes things too easy. When people exclaim to me that their two-year-old can use an iPad, I’m not impressed. It’s designed to be that easy, it’s designed to be so easy a two-year-old can do it. There’s nothing impressive about it. Tying your shoelaces is way more impressive than using an iPhone. These devices appeal to two-year-olds and 52-year-olds and 92-year-olds alike because they give such instant results.
But the problem is that childhood is a time of when you have an incredibly fertile imagination, and you can find magic in anything. You can find magic in the sounds of a poorly played violin, as long as it’s yourself and not your little sister playing. Instead of keeping room for this experience of the boundless possibilities of the world, adults often hand children a device to solve problems, usually for the convenience of the adults. Young children tend to want the screens to be put away, so that adults will pay attention to them. It’s only when there’s an outburst or a tantrum that the parents hand their child a screen to solve the problem. We, as adults, tend to give children screens to address our own problems. And the child encounters an environment that feels incredibly easy and responsive, far more so than the real world. This experience begins to shape the child’s imagination, just as it shapes an adult’s. The child starts to wonder, “What’s the fastest way I can feel satisfied?” And inevitably, it leads them back to the magic of the screen. The screen is quick and responsive, unlike the recalcitrant, complex, and bumbling experience of being a human being in the world. Honestly, I have almost as much concern about giving a two-year-old access to a light switch as I would about handing them an iPad, because both have this instant, magical quality.
What do we miss when we have light switches, for example, in our bedrooms? We miss the natural progression of dawn, the gradual change from darkness to light. We also miss dusk, the gradual transition from light to dark, which actually helps prepare us for sleep. When children can simply flip on a light, they’re not experiencing that natural shift. Instead, they’re learning that the world is made up of buttons—buttons that just need to be figured out. This is a kind of capital-M magic, a mechanistic view of the world, where there’s always a button to press or a trick to find. Now, there’s something not entirely wrong with this view, but it’s incomplete. The true work of childhood isn’t about finding buttons or tricks; it’s about stumbling through the process of discovering what it means to be human on the way toward the true magic at the heart of the world—the true enchantment that exists, rather than the facsimiles of magic we can find in devices.
FF: So far, our conversation has taken a negative view towards technology as it’s described by the “device” paradigm. Could you expand on any potential benefits of technology?
AC: I only take a negative view of technology in formative environments and during formative stages of life: the places where we are meant to do the hard and beautiful work of becoming fully human. But for those who have already had formative experiences and are looking to use technology in other settings, I am all for it.
If we were dependent on digital media alone to shape us, we would be in trouble. But if we’ve had experiences that are not mediated or defined by technology—experiences that give us insight not only into what we might say about technology, but also into what we want to say about being human—then we can show up as fully formed adults and use technology in very fruitful ways.
So, I’m definitely in favor of using technology for productivity. Another major area where I’m wholeheartedly in favor of technology is safety. Technology takes absurd risks off the table for human beings. For example, if you get into a car and it’s involved in a high-speed crash, an airbag will magically appear and very possibly save your life. I am 100 percent in favor of that. There are so many ways in which technology has removed unnecessary and meaningless risks for those who have access to it, and I completely support that.
Magic is always a risk in every formative environment, especially in religious contexts.
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FF: Are there opportunities for other kinds of “technologies”—think books or religious services—to form young people? How does this formation differ from that of digital technology?
AC: I have a few thoughts on this, and I think there are three primary formative environments: home, school, and church. Church, or another kind of religious community, is one of these environments. And a worship service, for example, could be considered a form of technology. I want to set aside books for a moment because they’re more complicated.
Rituals can sometimes take on a device-like quality and begin to be seen as magical. The reason I’m particularly sensitive to this idea is because I’m a Protestant Christian, and part of the Protestant critique of late medieval Catholicism was that people had started relying on rituals as a sort of magic, without the internal formation into Christlikeness that is at the heart of the matter. This critique applied back then, and it still applies today.
In fact, this happens even in Protestant worship contexts now. Protestant worship has become highly technologized. There’s sound reinforcement, screens, bands, and all sorts of other accoutrements, which have created the “Coldplay-plus-TED-Talk” model of contemporary worship. Now, this might not be the official account of what’s happening, but it’s definitely how many people perceive it. And even if no digital or electronic devices are involved, the experience can still function in that magical way.
I would argue that this is a mistake. Legalism, the idea that spiritual formation can be achieved through following external rules or codes without deep internal change, might be the earliest form of technologizing Christian or spiritual formation. Legalism, whether in Christian or Jewish contexts, has always involved the idea that, by activating the right “codes” or behaviors, people can get the desired results from God, without undergoing true transformation. Jesus, in his life and teachings, disrupted this idea and provoked a lot of opposition as a result.
Though rituals can sometimes behave like technologies, I do want to restrict the use of the word. To be sure, “magic” is everywhere. It keeps showing up throughout the human story as a fundamental temptation. It goes all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve, where the fruit is promised to give them the magical ability to be like God and to avoid death.
I want to reserve the term “technology” specifically for the deployment of autonomous, self-regulating, device-like systems. In that sense, the liturgy in any church, Protestant or Catholic, doesn’t really count as technology—at least not in the strictest sense. However, much contemporary Protestant worship, which is mostly music, does have technological elements. There’s this app called MultiTracks, which churches can use to play all the instrumental tracks they need for the worship service. If the church is missing a particular instrument, they can simply play a track for it. That’s a clear example of technological worship.
But if we think about traditional rituals or liturgies, where people are actively participating in specific roles, I wouldn’t consider that technology because it’s not driven by an autonomous, self-regulating system. There are people—priests or leaders—who are performing specific functions, even if we, as the congregation, are passively observing or participating vicariously. Magic is always a risk in every formative environment, especially in religious contexts. But at their best, rituals amplify our humanity and form us into better humans.
Jesus of Nazareth, despite living in a world that relied heavily on these primal technologies, used neither of them himself.
FF: How would this thinking apply to the technology of the book, and to Scripture in particular?
AC: The book is a particularly tricky subject because, I would argue, the two primordial technologies that precede the digital revolution are money and writing. These two technologies, especially in their early forms, were understood to be profoundly magical. So, what does it mean that, as Christians in particular, we depend on writing? For me, the starting point is the fascinating reality that Jesus of Nazareth, despite living in a world that relied heavily on these primal technologies, used neither of them himself.
Of course, we have every reason to assume that Jesus was literate—he would have learned to read the Hebrew Scriptures as a boy. His disciples also had money with them, though it seems that it was entrusted to Judas, implying that Jesus himself wasn’t particularly concerned about how well things went with the disciples’ finances. But as far as we can tell from the Gospels, Jesus didn’t carry money himself, nor did he write anything down.
Then, when his disciples began writing what would become sacred Scripture, you find them saying things like, “I’m writing to you because I can’t be there in person; this is second best.” John, for example, says something like this in his second epistle. More interestingly, the letters which became many of the books of the New Testament were sent to their audiences with people. For example, Paul hands the Letter to the Romans to Phoebe, who carried the letter from Corinth to Rome. For many of the letters in the New Testament, we have direct evidence of who carried them.
In the ancient world, there were ways to send letters through a rudimentary postal system, so that you didn’t need to send it with a person. The wealthy might send a slave to deliver it, but the middle class, if they had the means, would find a ship going in the right direction and pay the captain to ensure it reached its destination. The early church, though, did not follow that model. Instead, they always sent letters with people. Even though the early church was generally not aristocratic or wealthy, they still chose to send the letter with a person.
Similarly, when Paul collected money for the church in Jerusalem, he didn’t just send it through some impersonal means. He took the money himself to Jerusalem, at great personal risk, not allowing it to become decoupled from personal relationships. This is an important point—the early church made sure that the written word and the collection of money were both tied to personal connection and relationships, rather than becoming impersonal transactions.
Then there is the final mystery: “the Word became flesh.” The word is not some detachable idea floating through time or history or consciousness. When communication between God and humanity is finally established, it comes in the form of a person. So, how should we approach the written word with this in mind? I think we should take our cue from the first Christians and always bring the written word back into the circle of the community—bring it into a personal context, rather than treating it as an isolated or impersonal tool. The extreme example of this misuse would be to read the Bible as if it were a device—like some people have been tempted to do over the centuries, to treat it like a random number generator: opening it up and seeing what it says to you at that moment. That’s not a very biblical way to read the Bible. The biblical way to read the Bible is in community with others, and I would say that, more than we often appreciate, the Bible should be read aloud. Reading it aloud, in addition to reading it with our literacy, is an important way to truly engage with it.
FF: By way of conclusion, could you recommend a spiritually formative book for young people?
AC: The book that helped me understand growing up, just at the moment I was exiting childhood at age eleven or twelve, was Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. It was the first book that broke my heart. It also helped me to begin to understand what childhood had been, as I was exiting it. It also showed me what I was called to grow up into.
