Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery — No Facebook, Says Reverend

The Reverend Cedric Miller of the Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune, New Jersey, made national headlines in November 2010 when he ordered about 50 married church officials to delete their Facebook accounts or resign their leadership positions. His reason, delivered from the pulpit: Facebook had become, in his words, a "portal to infidelity." Miller said he had spent the previous year and a half counseling couples whose marriages were buckling after a spouse reconnected with an old flame on the social network — 20 couples, by his count, in the last six months alone.

The pattern he described was specific: "What happens is someone from yesterday surfaces, it leads to conversations and there have been physical meet-ups. The temptation is just too great." The platform was not creating the desire — the vulnerabilities predated Facebook. It was compressing a process that used to take months or years into weeks.

The sermon hit a nerve well beyond the religious press because it named, in blunter language than most people were using, a concern that therapists were already raising in their practices: people had not developed adequate social norms for managing the access that digital platforms gave them to their pasts, or the intimacy that text communication could generate far faster than face-to-face interaction.

Days later came the twist that turned the story from a curiosity into a national punchline. The Asbury Park Press reported that in 2003 court testimony, Miller had acknowledged participating in a three-way sexual relationship involving his wife and a male church assistant. Miller confirmed it and offered to resign; his board of elders kept him on, and the Facebook edict for church officials stayed in place.

The episode ended up saying at least as much about the preacher as about the platform. But the problem he named was real — and it was still there long after the headlines moved on.