Published January 31, 2025
On Wednesday, more than two dozen eminent conservative leaders signed a statement: “The Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right.” The statement, and the broader movement it represents, signals a new era of conservative thinking about the technologies that shape our lives and the public policies that must govern them. Until now, conservatism has had an ambiguous relationship to technology.
On the one hand, many of the conservative crusades in defense of “family values” over the decades have targeted technology: unwholesome television shows in the 1980s, video gambling in the 1990s, online pornography in the 2000s and beyond, “woke” influencers in the 2010s, and social media censors most recently. But these efforts have generally focused on the content flowing from our screens rather than the screens themselves. Conservatives have rarely heeded Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “The medium is the message.”
However, it has become increasingly clear that the form of our technologies shapes us just as much as the content. Digital media fosters a sense of disconnection from our own bodies and physical communities, a sense of independence and autonomy that has helped to radically undermine traditional mores. But digital technology’s threats to the family are hardly new. For quite some time now, technological innovation has tended to disrupt communities (the car), gender roles (household appliances), and sexuality (the pill and in vitro fertilization). Inasmuch as automation and artificial intelligence threaten massive job replacement in some industries, they are liable to further weaken the ability of many men to earn a family wage.
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Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.