Facebook is Catholic and Twitter is Protestant, according to a Catholic priest and moral theologian.
Writing in this week’s Catholic Herald, Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith says that for “a digital illustration of respective theological worldviews, look at the two giants of social media.”
In the article, he likens Twitter to Protestantism, saying: “Twitter is a wonderful tool for those who wish to preach to their ‘followers’. The most famous tweeters have heaps of followers, and thus no real way of judging their audience or gauging its reaction. This disparate horde does not form a true community.”
He cites Professor Richard Dawkins, for example, who with his 1.17m followers “mounts the Twitter pulpit to hand down lapidary truths”.
Fr Lucie-Smith, a Catholic Herald consulting editor and blogger, also echoes Umberto Eco’s famous remark that the Mac is Catholic and the PC is Protestant, because the former is “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory” and “tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed”, while the latter is “Protestant, or even Calvinistic” because it “allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation.”
Fr Lucie-Smith adds: “The polemicists of Twitter remind me of Martin Luther who, protected by the power of the German princes, hurled foul insults at the Pope. Many tweeters are anonymous, which allows them to indulge in relentless bullying.
“The noisiest people on Twitter hark back to the very worst of what Protestantism has to offer: protest, not reason; polemic, not dialogue; slogans rather than a theology that appeals to the careful balance between faith and reason should reign in every human heart.”
Facebook, in contrast, is “a congregation, a community – and that, in my opinion, makes Facebook Catholic”.
