Fear At Our Doorstep

Have you noticed when you’re scrolling on your phone that the ads have become part of the content?

Maybe you click them or move quickly past them, but it feels like these unsolicited headlines are geared towards my interests. Whether I click them or not, most of the information I’d find would be specific to my demographic and my interests.

Many of those ads are generated because of previous interests. The algorithm that feeds material to me knows I like Minnesota sports and ministry geared towards social justice.

But there’s a deeper and darker side that we are aware of.

Sometimes ads pop up for things I’m not interested in at all. Or things somebody else is interested in that we were just talking about. Or something I did a google search for. Or that’s steering me to something I might be susceptible to watching or reading.

If I end up ignoring content, eventually that stuff evolves into something else because, at the end of the day, the goal for the companies feeding the algorithm is to get us to keep scrolling. To keep plugged in. To give us something we’ll want to consume.

It’s not a surprise that this has become more radicalized. The most extreme point of view might not be where we started looking, but it’s more exciting. We are more susceptible to the headline that goes just beyond our line of believability. Now, we’re consuming information that sounds like it “might” be possible.

I often hear, “you can’t trust mainstream media anymore.” Why is that? Or, maybe a better question is, what is mainstream media anymore?

I grew up watching the nightly news on the major networks. Now, I don’t have regular television. Is our distrust of media actually a distrust of the media that our neighbor is consuming? Is it a distrust of the unvetted and intentionally distorted propaganda that gets generated for our 24-7 cravings?  

This distrust leads to fear. The growing frustrations and tensions in our country are bubbling out from all sides and it makes even more content that tells us to fear one another.

Earlier this month, one man acted upon his radicalization and assassinated Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and attempted to kill Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. He went to other homes with the intention of inflicting violence.

As our state and country mourns this tragedy, we can’t retreat into the cocoons of our phones and fall deeper into fear-based beliefs. With uncertainties over our relationship with Iran, more fear is at our doorstep.     

Where is our faith in this? Our faith should be nudging us to care for others and to point out when someone becomes susceptible to misinformation. Our faith needs to guide our human-to-human relationships into places of health and hope instead of deeper despair.

We don’t need to be afraid of each other if we take the time to pull our faces out of our phones and experience life.

The presence of artificial intelligence in almost every aspect of our lives is no longer the plot to a futuristic science fiction movie.  We are in that moment now.

But we are not robots. We are beautifully created beings. Lean into our collective, shared humanity. We need each other now more than ever.

Pastor John Klawiter is the senior pastor of Faith Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in Forest Lake. For more information, email him at