Optimizing for Holiness: App Culture and Catholic Spirituality

Over the last ten years, lifestyle apps have come to play a major role in our culture. Fitness apps, the ubiquitous diet app Noom, meditation and mindfulness apps such as Calm and Headspace, and general-purpose habit-building apps (Fabulous, Streaks, and many others) are used by millions, and the thinking that underlies them can be heard from writers and influencers across numerous media. More recently, Catholics have gotten into the game, building lifestyle apps aimed at helping users pray, build virtue, and grow in their spiritual lives. While such apps can look like content-delivery mechanisms, their form shapes users’ understanding and experience in subtle ways. The apps are here to stay, and they genuinely help overstimulated users to regain control over their lives. The danger, I will argue, occurs when control reaches its limit as a goal for spiritual life.

Cognitive Wellness Culture and the Spiritual Life

Catholic lifestyle apps resemble their secular counterparts in design and structure. They usually feature smooth and relaxing cartoon-style images, rounded edges, and pleasing sans-serif fonts. Most apps enable users to organize their day around the devotions that they choose: recorded morning and evening devotionals, Bible readings, psalms, rosaries, and other prayers. Just as a fitness app will remind users periodically to stretch and take a short walk, a spiritual app will remind them to pause from work, recall God’s presence, and recite a psalm. Around this core, most apps build faith formation and enrichment content. Hallow, a general-purpose Catholic devotional app, features Fr. Mike Schmitz’s popular “Bible in a Year” podcast and educational courses on elements of Christian devotion. Amen, another app, offers audio dramas on the lives of the saints. Exodus 90, a popular app aimed at men, puts its titular devotion at the center: a 90-day sequence of prayer and penance that combines patristic-inspired theology with ideas drawn from contemporary fitness and habit-building sources.

Catholic lifestyle apps participate in what I call “cognitive wellness culture” (CWC)—a broad constellation of books, podcasts, apps, and other media that applies contemporary psychology to help users build good habits and establish order in their lives. Hallow, for example, draws on the concept of “habit stacking”—the principle that humans build habits most easily when we tie them into existing routines. If you want to begin praying each morning, you might tie your morning prayer to brushing your teeth by setting a Bible next to your bathroom sink and placing a bookmark at the psalm where you left off. When you go to the sink each morning, you will see your Bible and be reminded to pray; if you do so, you will begin to associate brushing your teeth with praying your psalm. Once that connection is established, you might link another habit—say, praying a rosary—to the psalm. Like many lifestyle apps, Hallow encourages users to habit-stack by organizing content into clusters called “routines,” scheduling them for particular times of day, and receiving reminders to complete them.

CWC: Neuroscience Meets Virtue Ethics

In its habit-centered account of happiness, CWC combines recent research with a vision of human goodness drawn from classical virtue ethics. Like Aristotle, CWC understands happiness as the development of habits that orient an individual toward rational goals. In a cultural moment full of powerful distractions, millions of people feel as though they are losing control of their own lives—often due to social media algorithms that rewire their own brains. CWC, including spiritual apps, offers a way to regain control.

Secular lifestyle apps depart from classical virtue ethics by invoking an individualist teleology. Although lifestyle apps assume fairly wide agreement about the kinds of lives people want to live, they refrain from identifying a telos, or goal, for human life. Instead, CWC encourages each user to “find your why”: to identify a personal goal that will motivate you to make sacrifices as you build good habits. In much of CWC, that goal can be almost anything. A person might want to scuba dive with whales; she vividly imagines what it will feel like to reach out and touch a humpback whale as it gently sidles up to her in the open sea. To achieve that goal, she must get in shape; she uses the “why” as motivation, picturing it vividly when she feels reluctant to exercise. Thus, CWC puts the user in control of his or her vision of the good: I define for myself the vision of flourishing that I will pursue.

Psychologically, the great advantage of the “why” is that it is personal. When a user chooses a goal that matters deeply to her, she taps into reservoirs of her existence. But the individualism of the “why” sits uneasily with Christianity, which provides a clear telos: blessed life with God. Exodus 90 resolves these tensions ingeniously by framing one’s “why” within a Christian understanding of the human good. When a user begins Exodus 90, the app prompts him to answer four questions:

1.     Name a dependency or attachment that you hope to be free from.
2.     Name a person you love that you want to be free for
3.     Explain how your freedom will be at the service of those you have named.
4.     State how the freedom you desire will aid you in living out God’s plan for your life.

Answering these questions results in a telos that is both individual and self-giving: the user digs deep to find the people he loves enough to change, then envisions how his new virtues will enable him to do God’s will by loving them better.

Speaking for myself, I love CWC apps. I have long struggled with personal order and discipline (including ADHD, undiagnosed until only a few years ago), and CWC apps have helped me to build habits and to understand why building them was so hard. Exodus 90’s use of the “why” is particularly fruitful, turning a powerful but potentially self-centered aspect of psychology into a means of loving others. Apps like these can help users to build virtue and grow closer to God. But even with a transformed “why,” there is a tension between the Christian spiritual life and the user-centered framework built into the form of a lifestyle app, because the app offers a vision of happiness as gradually increasing control over one’s life. It is no wonder that this vision is attractive to young people who might spend hours scrolling social media, only to ask, “Why did I do that?” The difficulty arises from those parts of the spiritual life in which the only way forward is to lose control.

God and Control

In the chapter “The Lee Shore” in Moby-Dick, Ishmael reflects on the dangerous opportunities of the sea. Many sailors long for the shore, but there are times when the ship must avoid it at all costs. “The port would fain give succor,” Ishmael reflects; “the port is pitiful, in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but grace the keel, would make her shudder through and through.” In the novel’s extended metaphor, the ship at sea represents the human spirit setting out to discover reality and understand itself. The “treacherous, slavish shore” represents a conventional life driven by money and status. There come times when you cannot accept the comfort and safety of the shore without losing yourself: “all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea.” Herman Melville was no orthodox Christian, but his image reflects well those moments in the spiritual life when safety is a danger. There come times when we need to take a risk, to trust God, and to set out onto a storm-wracked sea. To be sure, beginning a project of spiritual growth—including through an app—can be such a time. Growing in virtue is hard, scary, and takes daring. Lifestyle apps can even, in some ways, prepare us for failure by offering good advice for getting back on track and recognizing the importance of failure in spiritual growth. Nevertheless, the use of an app is a choice, and it presents the Christian life as an extension of control over our lives; failure is a loss of control, a sinful action that breaks the habits by which one grows in freedom. 

What these apps cannot prepare us for is the unexpected—the moments when God reaches into our lives to challenge us in ways we could not have imagined. Exodus 90 is inspired by the Book of Exodus, and our understanding of Exodus is shaped by its end: we know that God will lead the Israelites to the promised land. But the Israelites did not know this, and our familiarity with the book can lead us to overlook how deeply invested it is in God’s surprises. Repetition dulls the weirdness of the burning bush, the dread of the river turned to blood, the despair of the Israelites on the shore before God parts the sea to save them. We live our spiritual lives through the mystery that Exodus records, and so much of Christian spiritual life entails responding when God does something wildly unexpected.

The spiritual life is more than a habit; it is a relationship with a Person who teaches us through loss of control as much as through order and regularity. We can see the importance of unpredictability in the spiritual life especially keenly when God teaches us through people whom we don’t normally consider authorities. I have a friend who regularly hosts large open-house gatherings in which a rotating cast of two or three dozen get together for dinner, conversation, children playing outside, and general restorative chaos. My friend’s three-year-old son has Down Syndrome; while you’re sitting on the couch at these gatherings, he will often walk up to you with an enormous smile and arms wide open, hug you around the legs, and then climb up onto your lap. He’ll sit there for a moment, grinning, before climbing down and seeking out the next person. This boy doesn’t need to know the person he climbs on; even the first time that you attend he approaches you with utmost confidence that you will love him and accept him. And he is right. When he climbs on your lap, you feel restored by his trust, and you want to be worthy of it.

That boy taught me that God wants us to approach Him with the confidence that he brings to everyone he meets. It was an important realization for me, and it illustrates a paradox of Christian life: that because God has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, we are constantly taught by people who, in a worldly sense, we would not expect to learn from. Christianity does not oppose authority or expertise, but it undercuts it; in the Christian tradition, the humblest person can teach the wise, and a wise person is humble enough to learn from such a teacher. Apps can be included among the teachers, as long as we are wise enough to surrender the control that they encourage.

Image by zatletic and licensed via Adobe Stock.