KANSAS CITY - Tara Houx has given up social media, as best she can, for Lent.
It’s harder than she thought. Her 35th birthday came and went without friends knowing how to reach Houx. A friend’s son passed away and there was no easy place for her to find and share information.
For many Lent-observing Christians, the notion of abstaining from online social networks or other tech temptations gained some buzz several years back. Yet just in that time the world has changed, making 40 days without Twitter, Facebook and Instagram a sacrifice too great for most to bear.
Houx, of Olathe, Kan., is soldiering on, having removed the social media apps from her phone when Lent started Feb. 18.
“It’s nice to have the time back,” she said.
The mother of two is replacing her allegiance to Facebook, where a quick check would swell to 30 or 40 minutes, with time spent pondering a devotion and reading her Bible.
(On Sundays until Easter weekend, she will visit the sites to catch up. Houx said that’s OK under Sunday exceptions to Lenten practices that she confirmed online.)
A poll by the church market researcher Barna Group found that among Christians who last year practiced a form of abstinence for Lent, 31 percent chose to sacrifice some aspect of technology - with social media and smartphones heading the list.
Perhaps the most surprising finding was that slightly more Americans went on a tech diet than abstained from chocolate, a perennial favorite for Lent observers to forgo.
Especially for young believers, a break from technology can be a smart and spiritually fulfilling act, said Barna Group’s Roxanne Stone: “For them it’s about making the ancient practices of Christian faith more applicable to the modern age in which they’re living.”
But does the modern age make a strict tech diet even possible?
At the Lenten dinner recently at Calvary Lutheran Church in Kansas City, smartphones were at the ready next to plates of spaghetti and garlic toast.
Jim Sowders, the church’s building manager, was among a few trying to curb social media time at home. But should his phone light up with a Facebook alert from someone trying to reach him, absolutely he’s going to check it.
His work depends on social media, Sowders said. He needs to know and tell others when icy weather shuts down the church’s day care center. If a stove needs fixing, social networks help Sowders find parts in a hurry.
“Five or six years ago, it would have been a lot easier to slide all the social media, the Web and even my cellphone off to the side,” at least from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, he said.
“But times have changed. I had a landline then. I don’t now.”
Calvary member Scott Edwards helps run a marketing company that built the church’s website, which has a link to its Twitter page. Edwards isn’t quitting Twitter and the rest of social media for Lent, but could he?
“Yeah, I could do it,” he said, “so long as texting isn’t social media.”
Many say it’s all becoming one in the same.
Texts, after all, often include links to social media platforms. And a variety of phone apps may be bundled in a Facebook account, something you need to have if, for example, you wish to post a comment on an article you just read.
Seventy-one percent of U.S. adults who use the Web now have Facebook pages and more than half of us toggle between two or more social networks, according to the Pew Research Center. Nearly 300 million people around the globe rely on LinkedIn for professional networking and to explore job opportunities.
So short of separating from humankind and wandering the desert, some area Christians are sacrificing just a sliver of social media.
“I’ve given up Instagram for Lent,” said John Stokman, a marketing major at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan.
It took a little while for him to adjust.
When presidential aspirant Rick Santorum recently gave a talk at Benedictine, Stokman instinctively snapped a picture of the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania to share through Instagram, where the student has 250 followers.
“Then I realized, ‘Oh wait, I can’t,’” said Stokman. He had removed the Instagram app from his phone.
He would rather forgo the picture-sharing site than sacrifice other social media, he said. Posting articles, comments and pictures on Facebook helps him hone his marketing skills and potentially impress future employers.
Another Benedictine student, senior Ashlyn Frederick, made the mistake of swearing off texting last Lenten season. She couldn’t stick to it.
“I felt I had no means of communication,” she said.
Frederick would call people and leave voice messages.
“They’d never call back,” she discovered. “Some people just don’t check their voice messages.”
The tech dependent, and today that’s most Americans, are learning that few can really go cold turkey through Lent.
Still, Kansas City marketing professional Brooke Beason is taking another shot at abstaining from Facebook, as she first did two years ago.
That’s only at home. Beason’s job as “supervisor of digital influence” at Meers Advertising requires her to spend her workdays steeped in the social media whirl. She isn’t quite starving, cyberwise.
But when she rises from bed to go to work, she must resist the muscle memory that tempts her to punch the Facebook app on her mobile device nearby.
“It’s just habitual,” Beason said.
As Lent nears spring, however, she begins to feel her mind and body calm.
“From a mental health perspective, it’s surprising how beneficial it can be” to unplug a bit, she said. “It helps you reset.”
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