Meditations on Pinterest Faith

Despite all the ways I’ve curtailed internet use in my life, Pinterest perseveres.

I crochet and craft; I often come to Pinterest for patterns or inspiration.  And, I’ve found, the Pinterest algorithm knows me well: it tosses up humorous images I find amusing, or beautifully framed quotations.  Once, it threw up a Bible verse I found moving, so I liked it.

And then the game was afoot.

Oh, Pinterest realized.  She liked one Bible verse.  More, perhaps?  More verses?  Yes? 

Yes, I said, enthusiastically.  Some I let pass; others I noticed, because they mirrored my Scripture reading or served as an encouragement or day-brightener.  I liked those too.

Yes!  Pinterest said.  A Christian!  Homeschooling, right?  Do you like homeschooling?  Do you homeschool your children?  Do you love pregnancies and babies and children?

I ignored those.

To its credit, Pinterest abandoned this line of inquiry.  Unfortunately, it took up another.  Christian? Politics!  Here are some politicians that Christians definitely all enjoy!

I found the option that said Do Not Show Me This Again and selected it.

Since then, the algorithm has been mixed.  It has shown me Beth Moore and Philip Yancey and J.S. Park quotes.  It has offered me up “trad wife” material that I had to weed out; crafts focused on faith practices like Bible journaling and prayer closets; litanies and prayers I have enjoyed; and color-your-own Bible story pages.

What this has accomplished, primarily, is to make me think how authentic Christian faith defies easy categorization.

Americans live in an identity-first culture.  That’s not a critique so much as an observation.  While some cultures prioritize collective and collaborative approaches, America has always valued the idea of The Individual.  In the current moment, individual identity is all that matters.  We are the group with whom we identify.

And we do, of course, all identify with groups.  I’m a woman; I crochet; I’m a scholar; I’m a gamer; I’m a writer.  Identifying with any group means, to some extent, identifying ourselves with a loose set of characteristics and expressions of that identity within that group. 

Pinterest wants to do this with the Christian faith, too.

And so it tries.  Confronted with the mystery of what “being Christian” means, the Pinterest algorithm spits out a slew of behaviors and identities that it thinks fits the bill, with wildly mixed accuracy: to be a Christian is to pray and read the Bible.  To be a Christian is to love bread.  (I wasn’t clear on this one either, unless it was a strange algorithmic burp related to communion.) To be a Christian is to follow [insert politician here] or to advocate for [insert political issue here].  To be a Christian is, if you’re a woman, to make bread and homeschool children.  To be a Christian is to ask for material blessing.  To be a Christian is to love children.  To be a Christian is to love [insert author or speaker or celebrity here].

Certainly, Christians have many things in common.  Christians follow Christ.  They do read their Bibles and pray.  They go to church.  They worship.  While they differ in interpretation and level of priority on various Scriptural issues and exhortations, they orbit in common agreement around critical components of doctrine. 

This is in part because Christianity is an identity we assume—I am a Christian, we say—but also because Christianity is the faith we follow, the God we worship, the way we live.  It is identity but more than identity.  It is the recognition of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, and life lived in commitment to Christ in acknowledgement of that redemption.  It is belonging to the body of Christ and serving in the unique way we have each been tasked.

And that can look beautifully, wildly different from person to person.

It can look like my mother: a traditional, complementarian-to-the-bone stay-at-home wife and Mom who devoted her life to good works at the church and in the domestic sphere.  It can look like my beloved college professor, a Lutheran minister, who performed John Donne sonnets for his classes so they could feel Donne’s relationship with God.  It can look like my husband and I: a married couple in their forties, both with careers, no children.  It can look like my believing friends with political values across the spectrum; it can look like a believer in a board room or serving in Guatemala.  It can look like my deeply devoted Catholic friends who speak so movingly of the Eucharist it brings me to tears; it can look like my non-denominational evangelical brothers and sisters dancing before God at the altar.

Look, I’m not so naïve to think that our differences don’t matter.  I know they do.

But Pinterest’s desperate efforts to give me “Christian” content reminded me of how easy it can be to fall into a rut and to gravitate only to believers who are exactly like me: who perform their faith the way I do, who have lives similar to mine, who care about the things I care about.  I can sketch out a careful bubble of “Christian identity” and shut the door, leave all variations outside.

Or I can open it.

And when I think of the benefits of this, I think of two things.  One is of my Muslim friend, with whom I have frank conversations about faith.  She makes thoughtful observations on Christianity that would never have occurred to me having been a Christian for so long—and recently, she said: “You know what is amazing about Christians?  There are all of you doing so many different kinds of things!  All kinds of churches…denominations.  But you are worshipping the same Christ!  It’s wonderful.”  She grinned. “And it must be so messy.”

It is messy.  She’s right.  But the sheer diversity of the body of Christ is, also, wonderful.

The second story is one I have written about before: during the pandemic, when all the churches were closed, I started escaping to the local Catholic adoration chapel to pray.  Before I went for the first time, I emailed the parish in a panic.  Hi, I began, I don’t want to offend, but…

I don’t know what I thought would happen.    Maybe that they’d slap a big No Protestants Allowed sign on the door and tell me to go elsewhere.  Instead, I got the kindest email in reply.  And what was kindest about it was that it did not elide differences.  Instead, the individual writing took care and time to explain the Eucharist, and the point and purpose of the adoration chapel—how Catholics engaged it, and how I was welcome to engage it and be respectful while I was there.

What Pinterest can’t capture is this complexity.  To open your heart to another believer and to say “I know we may not agree on the hows of living out our faith, but I also know we agree on the who, so let us begin there” is both art and craft.  To let people bring themselves to us as they are, and to allow God to work in the spaces between us, is where love really begins.  To acknowledge differences without forcing similarity, to love even across that difference, can enrich us more than we might possibly imagine.

I want my life to be full of believers who are not all like me.