It’s common to observe that digital technology has undermined the assumption that institutions are trustworthy. Some people lament it, and others celebrate it, but everybody sees it. Thanks to the Internet, institutions have lost much of their authority to shape common knowledge. This certainly includes institutions of higher education, Christian and otherwise.
It’s less common to observe that digital technology also undermines the more fundamental assumption that institutions are actually necessary. This is not about whether a particular institution like education, medicine, religion, or government can be trusted. It’s about the growing sense that we can now learn, heal, worship, and govern ourselves without the help of those institutions. If you can hop online and go to class, get a prescription, make a confession, and draw up an enforceable contract without old-fashioned schools, hospitals, churches, or governments, what is the point of schools, hospitals, churches, and governments?
The question here is whether the purpose of higher education – assuming we agree about what that is – could be pursued just as well without the institution of higher education. And, if we believe that there is something unique about the purpose of Christian higher education, the further question is whether that uniquely Christian purpose could be pursued just as well or better without an institution.
In the end, my answer will be “no.” But there’s a Christian anarchist inside my soul that first shouts “yes!” I think institutional structures often get in the way of what they’re supposed to help you do. This is nothing new. Institutions often feel like giant Rube Goldberg machines. There’s a famous scene in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon’s working-class protagonist tells a snooty Harvard grad student that “you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a[n] . . . education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”
Of course, the public library is also an institution. Damon’s point is that one institution does cheaply and simply what another does with a great waste of time and money. My point is that the Internet now does it all for free, without any institutional claptrap. Online, you can take any class and find any book. There are no hoops to jump through; you don’t even need a library card. If the library makes the university a farce, the Internet makes a farce of the library. Nothing will make all this clearer to you than spending a few minutes in a university library, where everybody is staring at a smartphone. Why are we still pretending this building is important? In 2025, Damon’s jibe sounds less like a blistering insight than a statement of the obvious.
But my inner anarchist leads me astray here. While digital technology does make a lot of institutional activity superfluous (or makes its superfluity apparent), digital technology is also nothing if not a collection of hoops. The frequent observation that Silicon Valley has made things too “frictionless” is absolutely right, but it is only half right. Amazon makes it easy to buy anything with one-click, TikTok makes it easy to chug brain-rot by the gallon, Tinder makes it easy to find a hookup, and the smartphone makes it easy for a ten-year-old to access an infinite supply of hardcore pornography without passing through any the “institutions” that once mediated such transactions (do triple-x theaters still exist?).
In these cases we rightly regret the elimination of “friction” that made it harder to bankrupt our souls (which puts us in the awkward position of also regretting the elimination of triple-x theaters), and which also made even bad things better than what has replaced them (hooking up with a stranger you met at the bar required people to be more fully human than swiping left until the algorithm supplies a suitable match). But if the digital has eliminated some kinds of friction (the kind that make it harder to consume, or make consumption less passive), it has also added new kinds of friction to our lives. We all know this viscerally. In Mo Willem’s children’s book Welcome, the narrator tells his newborn baby about what to expect from the world she is entering. “Thankfully,” he reassures her at one point, “you do not need any login codes yet.” But you will.
It’s helpful to realize that the Internet itself is an institution. For one thing, it’s built and maintained by “analog” institutions, mainly corporations and government. The “cloud” is actually a bunch of undersea cables and aquifer-draining server farms. But even the Internet we see on the screen is an institution in the fundamental sense of the word: what we encounter when we go online is a set of rules that organize human activity in pursuit of a certain purpose. We do not face the demise of an old world run by institutions and the birth of a new one without institutions; we face the replacement of one set of institutions with another. So the question is not, “do we still need institutions?” but “do we still need analog institutions once we have digital ones?”
I think we do. I think we especially need analog institutions of higher education, and I think Christian universities have a special need to remain primarily analog – in-person and face-to-face. I think this for several reasons, but here I want to focus on just one. It has to do with what is perhaps the essential difference between analog and digital institutions.
The philosopher of technology L. M. Sacasas distinguishes “Narratives” from “Databases.” Both capital-n Narratives and capital-d Databases are ways of making sense out of an infinite number of facts. But Narratives make sense by selecting facts that are understood to matter (which means disregarding other facts) and arranging them in a particular sequence that gives them a particular meaning. The result is called a “story.” By contrast, Databases make sense by collecting facts indiscriminately, and making it possible for database users to arrange them in an infinite number of plausible sequences – to tell any story they want. Sacasas argues that the rise of the digital is producing “Narrative collapse”: when everyone has digital access to a practically infinite number of facts, every Narrative that tries to make those facts meaningful is immediately reduced to one more fact, one more entry in the database. “The Database tolerates, indeed encourages narratives, but it cannot sustain and actively discourages Narratives.”
I think the difference between analog and digital institutions is that analog institutions sustain and are sustained by Narratives, while digital institutions sustain and are sustained by Databases. Digital institutions are threats to analog institutions because they are threats to Narratives, in the way that Sacasas lays out. If analog institutions are still necessary, it is therefore because Narratives are still necessary. And if any one particular analog institution is still necessary – if schools, hospitals, churches, and governments are still needed – it is because Narrative is somehow vital to teaching, healing, worshiping, and governing.
But of course it is. The same argument could be made for each of those practices, but the focus here is on teaching. Education simply is the selection and sequencing of material into a narrative called “curriculum” in pursuit of a purpose. That purpose itself makes sense only in light of a larger Narrative that selects certain facts about human beings in order to tell a story in which being educated is an important part of being human. In the case of Christian institutions of higher education, the Narrative is explicit, even if it is open to interpretation.
However, all of that is compatible with an entirely digitized education. If there is something about Narrative that requires analog rather than digital institutions, then Narrative must be something more than the words we use to explicate a curriculum or an anthropology. It must involve something that only analog institutions can provide. That something is simple: a brick-and-mortar context for face-to-face interaction between flesh-and-blood persons. Capital-n Narrative in Sacasas’ sense is not just a story in our heads; if it were, then the digital might still be able to provide it, so long as we made sure to stay in our echo chambers (which is no doubt why most of us stay in our echo chambers).
What keeps a Narrative from collapsing into a Database of small-n narratives is that it is embodied in common practices. But it is institutions – analog institutions – which keep Narratives embodied in common life. Analog institutions still matter because Narrative still matters, and because Narrative must be embodied in a way that is not only unnecessary for participation in digital institutions, but inimical to their smooth operation: embodiment is the friction that digital institutions aim to eliminate.
I’m suggesting that any Narrative must remain embodied to remain a Narrative, and that analog institutions are part of keeping them embodied. But in the case of the Christian Narrative this is doubly true, since the Christian Narrative not only must be embodied but is about embodiment. To be a Christian is to embody the faith that in light of the Incarnation, flesh-and-blood are not necessary evils which become unnecessary as soon as it is possible to do without them. They are necessary goods.
As we enter the digital “bottleneck,” keeping this faith means doubling down on our commitments to building and sustaining strong analog institutions, even if we also take the challenges posed by the digital as a new opportunity to radically critique and reimagine them. Analog institutions do not become unnecessary as soon as digital institutions can perform some of their functions. They become more necessary than ever.
