The Algorithm Knew Before I Did

Look into the mirror of your social media feed

There was a stretch of years where I had trained my social media feeds to show me almost nothing religious. I was good at it. Every time something faith-adjacent surfaced — a verse graphic, a sermon clip, a church account — I scrolled past fast, tapped not interested, starved it of attention until the algorithm got the message. And the algorithm, ever obedient, gave me what I’d asked for. Cooking videos, mostly. Gardening. Fishing. A clean, quiet feed with God carefully edited out of it.

Why was a mystery then, but now I know:

It wasn’t faith I was running from. Looking back, I can see that clearly now, even if I couldn’t then. What I couldn’t stand was the cruelty. The people who could type something genuinely vicious online — wishing harm on a stranger, celebrating someone’s suffering, reaching for the worst possible thing to say to a person they’d never met — and then, in the very same breath, call themselves followers of Christ. Christ. The one who said love your enemies. The one who said whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.

The keyboard warrior in a cross necklace. That’s what irked me. That’s what I was scrolling past.

And here’s the trouble: back then I couldn’t separate the cruelty from the faith. They came bundled together in my feed, indistinguishable, and so I threw out the whole category to escape the part that hurt. If religious content meant those people, then I didn’t want religious content. I tuned it all out and went back to watching someone debone a fish.

Look at my feed now.

It’s still cooking. Still gardening. Still fishing — I am who I am. But it is also, now, dramatically religious. Somewhere in the last couple of years the same algorithm that once scrubbed God out of my life started handing God back to me, because I’d started looking. And what it shows me now is not what I was running from before.

It shows me Br Jack Gillespie+, LC. Janette Parker Platter. Elizabeth Kaeton.

And so many more I’ve met through writing here — people who give me a daily dose of reality and a daily dose of faith. That’s the part that matters. They don’t offer me a sanitized gospel where everything is fine and God fixes it all if you just believe hard enough. They hold both at once: the world as it actually is, hard and often heartbreaking, and faith lived through it anyway. Love. Patience. Awareness. The resolve to keep on keeping on even when it’s hard, even when it feels impossible.

That’s the real thing. It was there the whole time. I just hadn’t gone looking for it, because I’d let the worst examples convince me the whole category was poison.

Now, I’m allergic to tidy redemption stories and I won’t try to sell you one.

The cruelty did not disappear. It’s still out there. Look at the state of the world right now — you don’t need me to point at it; you can feel it without my help. The keyboard warriors still drive me absolutely insane. People still wish death on strangers and reach for their faith as the justification. That hasn’t changed and I haven’t softened toward it. If anything I see it more clearly now, because I have something real to hold it up against.

What changed isn’t that the bad got quieter. What changed is that I learned to tell the difference.

That’s the whole thing, really. The younger me couldn’t separate the people weaponizing faith from the people living it, so she blocked all of it. The me writing this can tell them apart in about half a second. One of these makes my skin crawl. The other makes me want to be better — kinder, more patient, more willing to keep going when it’s hard.

There’s a word for the skill of telling those apart. Discernment. It happens to be a very Episcopal word that I’ve been hearing a lot lately. We use it constantly — for vocations, for decisions, for figuring out where God might actually be in the noise. I didn’t know I’d been practicing it for years before I ever walked into St. Luke’s. Every time I scrolled past the cruelty, I was clumsily reaching for it. I just didn’t have the tradition or the language yet to do it well.

The strange part — the part I keep turning over — is that my feed didn’t really change. I changed, and the feed just followed me. The algorithm is a mirror. It showed me a Godless, faith-free life because that’s what I’d told it I wanted. Now it shows me omurice and gardens and water and grace all tangled up together, because that’s who I’ve become.

I didn’t fix the algorithm. The algorithm knew before I did.

It just kept showing me, day after day, exactly who I was turning into — until one day I looked at my own feed and recognized her.