I’m many years past parenting, but we used to warn our children about peer pressure. “Just because your classmates are doing it, doesn’t mean you have to do it.” Impressionable adolescents in high school, then off to college to live on their own, oh, peer pressure was a real worry for parents.
Do adults worry about peer pressure anymore? Isn’t much of social media a high-tech form of peer pressure? Aren’t so many TV channels telling us how to act? Aren’t partisan news sources pulling us into what we want to hear? The array of religious channels lets you seek out peers who preach what you like. I don’t know what an algorithm is, but I do know that it personalizes what pops up on the screen by catering to my preferences. Are there any grown-ups scared by all this?
I’m deep into the study of 1 Peter, and that old document offers insight. “As children of obedience, not conforming yourselves to the former passions of your ignorance, but…” Today people read that and think of gross sins, and while that wasn’t out of Peter’s mind, he’s laying down a deeper principle. You are what you take in. Whatever you uncritically let into your eyes and ears shapes who you are. Peter, writing to Christians living in an overwhelmingly non-Christian society, said you are shaped either by influences surrounding you or by the will of God who calls you to be holy in life. “Not conforming yourselves to the former passions of your ignorance, but, as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct” (1 Peter 1:14-15).
Many Christians think of the Bible as a religious guidebook, instructions for holy living. If that’s all it is, you’re easy prey for the high-tech ways our culture can get into your being. The Word of God gets into your being too, but unlike media’s unholy peer pressure, the Word gives you new birth and shapes you for living as a child of God. Peter says you were “born again through the living and abiding Word of God” and “as newborn babies, desire pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow into salvation” (1:23; 2:2).
“Whoever would save his life will lose it” Jesus said in yesterday’s Gospel lesson (Mark 8:35). Peer pressure has grown up and become an adult problem.