We’re in the final stretch of the Camp Crystal Lakewood series! If you’re just now joining in, start with Part One at this link.
So far, small clusters of John and Charles’ youth group have been split up and targeted by some pretty scary Christian villains. First, the popular kids were enticed by a Jason Vorhees-like figure showcasing para-church ministries with a Calvinist bent. Next, two youths were pursued by a Michael Myers figure pushing Christian Nationalism. Finally, the remaining crew got caught up on social media from a powerful Christian influencer mixing capitalism with gospel so seamlessly it was, well…scary!
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Channeling the power of Vecna (Stranger Things season 4), today we find our teens helpless to the otherworldly influence of their phone screens. At this point, anyone with a phone and social media knows what it feels like to lose track of time swiping from one reel to the next, the vacancy of eyes and mind as idea after idea swirls quickly in front of your face. On the final panel of today’s page, we see the Influencer has now got a grip on the influenced, and they float upwards, mesmerized, out of reach of the helping hand of their friends and leaders. This is a real fear I have as a youth pastor, as a father of two teens, and as a Christian in a world where powerful negative influence is just an App away.
This entire series is designed to address some of the fears of Mainline Protestants at this moment of history in American Christianity. This page marks that last page focusing on the fears, and next week, we’ll start to unpack what we do with those fears. There’s about 3-4 pages left of this comic series, so I hope you’ll come back to see what happens next!
In the meantime, I encourage you to think about your own relationship to social media. How do you practice discernment about what is real and what is AI generated? How do you decide what reels to linger on and which to ignore? How do you test the ideas and theologies coming from Christian influencers online? Is something worth listening to just because someone said it, or do words mean more than that?