Have you ever been thinking about something for a long time, but it’s all jumbled in your head, and then someone comes along and expresses exactly what you’ve been thinking about, but says it much better than you ever could? That just happened to me. 

I’ve known about Professor John C. Lennox for a while now—Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Oxford—coming across him on YouTube debates with atheists and those who think science and religion are incompatible (chuckle). His ever calm demeanor and faint smile always complemented the truth issuing from his lips. He was never stumped, never caught off guard, never at a loss, never stuttered to find a solid answer. And now this.

The title of a very recent talk of his grabbed my attention, not so much because of the title, the subject of which is replicated in one form or another everywhere these days, but because the never-frivolous or click-baiting Professor Lennox was addressing it. I was hooked. 

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The title is: “The Mark of the Beast is Not a Microchip. It’s Something Far More Dangerous.” How’s that for mysterious (and scary)? And in the middle of the talk, he basically contends that the mark of the beast, which is not just a beast but a system, is, in some ways, already here. Please consider Professor Lennox’s (much abbreviated) manifesto:

Lennox contends that the Book of Revelation (especially Revelation 13) is not primarily about technology (e.g., a microchip implanted in the body), but about allegiance and worship. From all his Scripture studies, he believes the mark on the forehead or hand signifies what we think and do. In antiquity, these marks were concepts of ownership, loyalty and complete devotion. But even more than that: total orientation either to or away from something, e..g., God. Lennox is trying to shift our focus away from the technological means that may very well be used to enslave us someday, to our own interior lives where we already are free or not free, where we already are or are not worshipping God.

He goes on to talk about studies of the diminishing human attention span over the years, which report a wholesale nosedive after mass adoption of smartphones. Although folks have what seems to be long attention spans for staring at their phones, there is a constant swiping, scrolling, switching of apps, being interrupted by texts, pings, notifications, etc., and the dividing up of one’s attention to actual reality and those around us while still engrossed in “eye candy.” 

 “Every great spiritual tradition in history has understood that prayer, contemplation, the encounter with the transcendent requires the ability to be still, to focus, to resist distraction. And we are living in a civilization that has systematically dismantled that capacity,” the great Dr. Lennox says.

By “systematically,” he’s referring to Big Tech spending millions in research to dominate “the attention economy.” Whatever will cause dopamine hits was purposely engineered into digital hardware and software. And what are billions of minds and hands being oriented toward? A system. One that tracks location, purchases, travels, relationships, correspondence, opinions, privately shared thoughts, emotions, desires and fears. 

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It’s a system that “curates your reality” to you. A system that makes you totally trust the answers it gives you, the news it presents to you, its indispensability to every aspect of your life. 

“We are raising a generation whose inner lives are being colonized, whose capacity for solitude…the very capacity that makes us capable of knowing God, is being methodically destroyed” Lennox says. “The soul’s encounter with God requires the cultivation of interior silence. And we are living in a world that has declared war on interior silence.”

The remedy? The talk suggests we recover the disciplines that form and protect the interior life: 1) prayer 2) solitude 3) Sabbath 4) deep reading 5) face-to-face community. 

Lennox also offers the antidote from Revelation itself: “Follow the Lamb wherever he goes…keep the commandments of God (and) “hold fast to the testimony of Jesus.” He goes on: “The deepest danger is never external. It is always the danger of misplaced worship. The danger is giving the throne of the self to something that is not God.”

Who do you love? (apologies to Bo Diddley and George Thorogood) is a good soul-searching question, but perhaps a much deeper question is: To whom do you belong? 

Sr. Helena Raphael Burns, fsp, is a Daughter of St. Paul. She holds a Masters in Media Literacy Education and studied screenwriting at UCLA. HellBurns.com  X/Twitter: @srhelenaburns  #medianuns MediaApostle.com  Instagram: @medianunscanada

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