The Bible App Tells Me So
What if in fixating on the risk technology poses to our faith, we risk overlooking its potential to strengthen our faith?
By Allison MacLeod
The YouVersion Bible App has been installed on over 975 million devices across the globe. It is consistently a top-ranked reference app on the Apple App Store, often second only to Google Translate (though interestingly, at the time of this writing, it has been pushed to third by an app called Bible Chat that offers an AI chatbot for answering spiritual questions). By packaging the Bible into a format for digital consumption, the Bible App mediates spiritual discipline, particularly scripture reading and prayer. Scripture is the content, and the app is the medium. The Bible App is hardly the only way in which our experience with God is mediated — think of Biblical studies and commentaries, devotional guides, and even the people we talk to about God — but the rise of digital media has unique consequences that affect many of our now-digitized daily activities and are especially worth considering when we are mediating something as significant as our spirituality.
In their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, professors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that digital applications convey content not only through mediation, but through “remediation,” that is, the “representation of one medium in another.” While remediation is not unique to the digital (the Bible App remediates the printed text of the Bible, but so does a Rembrandt painting of a Bible story), it is, they argue, a defining characteristic and tension of the digital. Bolter and Grusin identify in remediation a double logic: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation,” they write. “Ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” To understand what this double logic means, think of a virtual reality game that lets you explore your dream destinations. To have the immersive experience of feeling like you’re “really right there” at the Louvre in Paris or an iceberg in Antarctica, you don a clunky headset and look through a set of lenses to view 3D computer-generated graphics on a display screen inches in front of your face. The goal is a sense of immediacy, that “really right there” feeling, but the sensation is only possible through hypermediacy: the existence and awareness of many instances of remediation. It seems contradictory, but so much of our digital consumption is shaped by this contradiction, which is amplified further as technology evolves to create more opportunities for both immediacy and hypermediacy.
YouVersion, the digital ministry arm of Oklahoma-based Life.Church, states that their mission is “to encourage and challenge people to seek intimacy with God every day.” Intimacy. Connection. Relationship. To feel like you’re “really right there” with God. To move users toward intimacy with God, YouVersion designs and provides remediated experiences that encourage spiritual discipline, such as a Verse of the Day, a guided prayer and devotional experience, and a variety of study tools. Yes, the Bible App provides immediate access to scripture in the palm of my hand, but not without a multiplicity of features to remediate and direct engagement with scripture and spiritual discipline.
These features imitate many of the same aesthetics and mechanics that social media apps like Instagram use to remediate connection. It is not just a Verse of the Day; it is a “streak” game mechanic counting how many days in a row you have used the Bible App. It is not just a guided prayer and devotional experience; it is a collection of content, often including a video recording from a Christian social media personality, that I can tap through much like I would tap through a series of Instagram Stories. It not just a suite of study tools like highlighting and note taking; it is a tool to share Bible verses via major messaging and social media apps.
Suddenly the Word of God is constrained by what I am able to read, tap, and swipe on a six-inch screen, and it is fighting for attention against the other apps on my phone.
The Bible App experience is further remediated by the design of the smartphone itself. To be packaged as an app, to exist as a little square on my phone screen amidst all the other little squares, is to be reduced to a standard form. Suddenly the Word of God is constrained by what I am able to read, tap, and swipe on a six-inch screen, and it is fighting for attention against the other apps on my phone. When I get a push notification from the Bible App reminding me to spend time in scripture, it gets slotted into a list of other ignored notifications in the Notification Center: an Uber Eats promotion for 15% off my next order, a Duolingo nudge to practice my French again today, and a slew of unanswered messages across a variety of platforms.
The particularities of digital media present new challenges compared to legacy media: the volume of instances of remediation, the proliferation of social media’s persuasive design practices, and a cultural environment where attention is currency. A digital product like the Bible App is more than access to information—it is a cultivated experience that employs the design patterns popularized by other major apps. The nudges and notifications that we have grown accustomed to in digital experiences may provide some sense of immediacy, but they seem opposed to attentive and meaningful engagement with God. When a spiritual experience is designed to mirror the social media experience, it risks encouraging users to translate their worst social media habits into their faith lives, distractedly clicking and scrolling just to watch the daily streak counter tick up.
But what if in fixating on the risk technology poses to our faith, we risk overlooking its potential to strengthen our faith?
We are all being spiritually formed by the environment around us, whether or not we are intentional about it.
At 7:04 this morning, I got a notification from the YouVersion Bible App announcing that today’s Verse of the Day is 2 Peter 1:3. I turned on notifications for the Verse of the Day for the first time about a year ago. Why 7:04 a.m.? I wanted to be notified shortly before I leave my apartment to take the train to work. I was also convinced that 7:04 felt more organic than 7:00 sharp or 7:05, which was exactly the kind of irrational narrative I needed to assuage my fear that turning on Bible App notifications would dilute my spiritual life into robotic repetition.
Second Peter 1:3 reads, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.” My daily Bible App streak ticks up to 114 days (my previous best, according to the app, was 191). Today’s devotional video features Sadie Robertson Huff, Christian speaker and influencer originally of Duck Dynasty fame.
For the next 45 minutes, it is just me and God—and my phone and the other commuters in this train car as supporting players. This is what my time spent with God and his Word looks like, not like the ideal I had in my head: an image of cozy solitude at sunrise with a leather-bound Bible in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other (I do not even drink coffee). Nor does it look like it used to when I was in college, running from one Bible study to the next thanks to the convenience of living within walking distance of all my friends. I have grown into new routines, phone in hand.
For me, embracing technology’s role in practicing spiritual discipline was an act of surrender. It was an admission that I needed God’s help to follow him and that my own strength and willpower were insufficient to establish routines of spiritual discipline. Rather than fear the power that my phone and its applications had to spiritually shape me, I chose to explore how that power could be leveraged to live a life more aligned with God’s purpose for me. We are all being spiritually formed by the environment around us, whether or not we are intentional about it. Knowing that my phone is inevitably one of the things that forms me, since it is always on my person, I have decided that I want to use it well—as a tool that shapes me into someone more and more like Jesus.
As it turns out, the same features of the medium that I feared would dilute my spiritual experience have in practice strengthened it. The Verse of the Day notifications and gamified reading streak have increased the consistency with which I turn my attention to God. The guided prayer and devotional experience that felt eerily similar to Instagram Stories has prompted me to consider daily practical application of the scripture I am reading. The ability to highlight, bookmark, and share verses has enabled me to more easily find and send scripture to friends when they need encouragement. I changed my phone’s lock screen to a verse that I want to memorize and keep top of mind. I turned on a second set of Bible App notifications for my daily Old Testament reading plan. I made a new worship music playlist to listen to when I am getting ready for work in the morning. These are small steps to make God a more immediate priority in my daily life, but he has used them to draw me closer to him. I cannot count the number of times a Verse of the Day or a worship song on shuffle has been exactly the message I needed to hear.
I choose to keep engaging technology in my spiritual discipline routines because I see the ways that God is using it for my good even amid its other distractions and distortions.
In his book The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, author Andy Crouch defines technology that encourages human flourishing as one that focuses on “involving us more and more deeply as persons rather than diminishing and sidelining us.” He labels these more human-centered technologies as “instruments” that equip us, in opposition to “devices” that replace us. In building his instrument vs. device paradigm, Crouch measures four effects of technology: expanded capabilities, reduced burdens, restricted capabilities, and enforced burdens. Consider audiobooks as an example: they may expand a user’s ability to consume books while on the go and reduce the burden of making time for reading, but over time they may also diminish a user’s ability to concentrate on written text and may enforce the burden of paying a monthly audio streaming subscription. Crouch suggests that an instrument focuses on the first measure of providing extended capabilities, with minimal restricted capabilities or enforced burdens. He proposes the telescope as an ideal example: it expands our ability to understand the universe without diminishing our ability to simply look out and admire the stars on a clear night. In fact, a telescope might even increase the awe of that experience by increasing our understanding of the complexity at which we are gazing. In my experience, the Bible App functions similarly, expanding my ability to engage with scripture without limiting my other interactions with God.
Whether the technology we use expands or restricts our capability to build a rich life is influenced by how that technology is designed. The design is often entangled in the goals of many stakeholders, from the end user of the technology to the company that stands to profit from it and consequently, the result is not always a technology that is optimized for our good. But Crouch urges us to “hold out for what [was] promised and not let go until we have it.” In choosing how we interact with technology, we can co-create a vision for a future in which technology is optimized for our good.
I choose to keep engaging technology in my spiritual discipline routines because I see the ways that God is using it for my good even amid its other distractions and distortions. At times, I do catch myself falling into the patterns of surface-level engagement that I feared the Bible App would cause. There are days when I open the app, read the Verse of the Day, and close the app as quickly as possible just to check it off my to-do list. I am not resistant to the effects of the medium. But rather than view my faith as too sacred and important to integrate with my digital life, I view my faith as too sacred and important not to integrate with my digital life.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark
from photos by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash, Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash, Priscilla du Preez on Unsplash, Jessica Mangano on Unsplash, & Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash
Allison MacLeod is a Boston-based business strategist who finds people and technology equally fascinating. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Anthropology and Human-Centered Design.
