Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
The internet and social media
A library that became an environment: embraced as infrastructure by every tradition’s teachers, and governed — by placement rules, communications ethics, or platform law — wherever its formation of persons is taken seriously. The full register entry
Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish
Regulated
Smartphones are governed by placement and purpose in the stricter districts — business use at the shop or the shanty, no home internet in Old Order districts — while progressive Anabaptist bodies adopt the tools and argue about formation. The judgment is the Ordnung’s standard one: what the device does to attention, courtship, and the settlement’s boundary.
- Donald B. Kraybill et al., The Amish (2013)
Catholic
Regulated
The Church built into the network early (the Vatican’s site, 1995; the first papal tweet, 2012) and regulates its own use by communications ethics — truthfulness, dignity, the refusal of outrage economics — restated for the platform era in the Dicastery for Communication’s Towards a Full Presence (2023).
- Dicastery for Communication, Towards a Full Presence (2023)
Secular and naturalist
Contested within the tradition
Secular argument divides between the network as the enlightenment’s infrastructure and as an attention-extraction industry; the regulatory turn of the 2020s (platform liability, age gates, algorithmic transparency) is the argument becoming law, unfinished.
- EU Digital Services Act (2022)