The Algorithm Knows Your Loneliness Better Than Your Church Does
The market has always offered a competing liturgy. What’s new is how precisely it has learned to read you.
Somewhere in the last decade, the technology platforms got better at knowing us than the people we worship alongside.
This is not a metaphor. The algorithm that determines what you see when you open Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube has processed more data about your habits, your anxieties, your unmet longings, and your moments of weakness than most of your closest friends possess. It knows when you scroll at 2 a.m. It knows which images make you linger. It knows the gap between the life you present and the life you actually live — not because it understands you, but because it has measured you with a precision that understanding rarely achieves.
And it uses that knowledge not to free you from your longings but to hold you within them. That is the design. Engagement, not resolution. Return, not rest. The platform that provides connection also monetizes loneliness. The one that surfaces charitable giving also harvests your data. The one that shows you the suffering of the world also sells you the products that buffer you from it.
This is the newest form of what the Christian tradition has always called a competing liturgy. And the Church, which has been navigating competing liturgies for seventeen centuries, has rarely faced one this precisely calibrated to the interior of the individual soul.
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The idea that the market functions as a kind of religion is not new. Max Weber traced the way certain Protestant traditions produced disciplined, industrious selves whose habits of life became the cultural foundation of capitalism. Eugene McCarraher, in his sweeping history The Enchantments of Mammon, argues that the market did not replace religious enchantment but became a competing enchantment — one that shapes desire, structures meaning, and offers its own account of what a good life looks like.
James K. A. Smith’s work on cultural liturgies makes the practical implication concrete: you are what you love, and you love what you repeatedly practice. The rhythms of market participation — the daily checking of prices and accounts, the quarterly evaluation of performance, the annual calculation of return — are not merely economic routines. They are formative practices that shape what you notice, what you worry about, what you hope for, and what you measure your life against. They are, in the most precise sense, liturgical.
The Church has always understood that it was competing with other formative systems for the allegiance of its members. What it has been slower to grasp is how dramatically the competitive landscape has shifted in the past decade. The algorithm is not a passive medium through which content flows. It is an active formation system, operating continuously, with access to behavioral data that no spiritual director, no pastor, no small group leader possesses. It is shaping desire and structuring attention at a scale and with a precision that the Church’s own formative practices were not designed to counter.
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For the Christian who takes economic inequality seriously as a theological problem — and the tradition has always insisted it is one — the algorithm presents a specific and underappreciated danger.
The platform economy does not make us indifferent to suffering. It makes us feel adjacent to it. We see the images of the unhoused, the food-insecure, the elderly isolated in care facilities that cannot afford adequate staffing. We share the posts. We click the donate buttons. We feel, briefly and genuinely, the pull of obligation. And then the algorithm surfaces the next thing, and the next, and the engagement continues, and the longing is partially addressed but not resolved, and we return tomorrow because the partial address is precisely what the design requires.
This is not cynicism about charitable impulses. Those impulses are real, and the giving they generate does real good. But there is a difference between the kind of moral encounter that generates genuine disruption — that presses on the whole structure of life and demands reordering — and the kind that generates engagement. The algorithm is extraordinarily good at producing the second while systematically preventing the first. It keeps the moral temperature high enough to sustain participation and low enough to prevent the kind of disruption that would reduce the time you spend on the platform.
The Christian tradition has a word for the condition this produces. In a previous post [link: The Word We’ve Been Avoiding], I wrote about the Hebrew word Śānēʼ — typically translated as “hate” but meaning something more precise and more uncomfortable: to love less. To withhold the fullness of regard, attention, and obligation that love requires. The person who scrolls past the appeal from the unhoused neighbor — moved, even, by what they see, clicking the donate button before moving on — does not hate the unhoused. They love them less. The algorithm has optimized that love-less-ness into a sustainable, monetizable, infinitely renewable resource.
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The platform economy has also accelerated a related distortion that the Church has been slower to name: the moral authority of the extraordinarily compensated.
We have built a culture that pays exorbitant sums to athletes, entertainers, and chief executives, and then treats their compensation as a verdict rather than a question. The hedge fund manager who earns more in an afternoon than a hospice aide earns in a year is not, in the market’s moral imagination, the subject of an ethical problem. He is the subject of a success story. His compensation is what the market determined his contribution was worth, and the market’s determinations, within the logic of the system, are not obviously subject to appeal.
The platforms amplify this. They are built to surface and celebrate the extraordinarily compensated — their lives, their opinions, their consumption, their philanthropy. They become the role models, in the literal sense: the people whose lives model what a life can be. And when the people modeling what a life can be are those whose worth has been certified by the market at the highest levels, the tradition’s most basic claim — that human worth is not established by the market’s verdict — is not argued against. It is simply rendered invisible by the weight of what the culture has decided to celebrate.
The Church does not need to hate the wealthy to name this clearly. It needs to recover the confidence to say, in its own formative spaces, that the market’s verdict is not the tradition’s verdict, and that the lives worth emulating are not necessarily the lives the algorithm surfaces most readily.
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The algorithm knows your loneliness better than your church does. But it cannot do what the Church can do, and that asymmetry matters.
The algorithm can identify your unmet longing with precision. It cannot sit with you in it. It can surface images of suffering that move you. It cannot require you to remain in the presence of a specific suffering person until the encounter changes you. It can facilitate a transaction — the donation, the share, the comment of solidarity. It cannot form you into a person for whom the neighbor’s need is a direct and unavoidable claim rather than one input among many in the continuous flow of content.
The Christian tradition, at its most demanding, has always insisted on presence before transaction. Basil of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, did not describe the obligation of surplus as a matter of finding the right giving platform. He described it as restitution — the return of what was never rightfully kept, to the person in whose face you can see the claim. Dorothy Day did not run a digital advocacy campaign. She opened the door and kept it open, every day, to whoever showed up. Mother Teresa, near the end of her life, saw what institutional scale had done to the original act of bending over a dying man in a Calcutta gutter — and moved to dissolve the corporate structure to recover the founding act.
The founding act, in every case, requires presence. And presence is the one thing the algorithm cannot optimize, because presence is not scalable, not monetizable, and not particularly good for engagement metrics. It is, however, the condition under which the neighbor’s need becomes a direct moral claim rather than a content category.
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The Church does not need to become more technologically sophisticated to respond to this challenge. It needs to become more deliberately countercultural in the practices it forms its members in — and more honest about the competition it is facing.
That means taking seriously that the algorithm is a formation system, not merely a communication platform, and that its formation runs counter to the tradition’s most demanding claims about economic life and obligation to the neighbor. It means building formative practices that are specifically designed to cultivate the kind of sustained, disruptive moral encounter that the algorithm is designed to prevent — practices of presence, of direct service, of remaining in relationship with specific people whose need presses on the whole structure of life rather than on the donate button.
It means recovering the confidence to say that Śānēʼ — structural love-less-ness, the withholding of the fullness of regard and obligation that love requires — is the condition the platform economy is optimized to produce and sustain. And that the tradition has always had a name for the response to Śānēʼ: not better engagement metrics, but metanoia. The full renewal of the moral imagination. The reordering of what we love, in what measure, and toward whom.
The algorithm will keep learning. It will get better at knowing your loneliness. The question is whether the Church will recover the confidence to offer something the algorithm cannot — not content, not engagement, not the partial address of the unmet longing, but the presence that transforms the longing by introducing it to the neighbor it was always, at its deepest level, reaching toward.
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Peter Hamm served as Chief Clerk of the Committee on Rules of the United States House of Representatives and spent twenty years in corporate leadership. He is pursuing a Master of Christian Leadership at Leland Theological Seminary, with a vocational horizon in hospice chaplaincy and care ministry. He is completing a book, The Moral Hinge, on the history of Christian economic accommodation.