Posted on October 17, 2024 by Rev. Jonathan Conner
Mental Health
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In part one of this article I was brutally honest about the adverse effects of high social media usage [1], comparing it to the negative effects of wallowing in manure. Manure, like social media, has its place and its benefits, but neither does good things for those who wallow in them. If you didn’t read part one, it’s available here.
In part two we’re charting a path forward for you, as an individual and as a family. I’ll be just as direct as I was last month for the same reason I was in part one: I want to communicate the urgency of the situation and the need we all have to push back against the cultural tide, which will easily sweep us downstream if we don’t make intentional and concerted efforts to stand together against it and even to redirect the flow.
But this is not just a matter of culture. This involves spiritual realities, realities so significant that even Jonathan Haidt, atheist researcher and author of the incisive book on the effects of social media The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, sees it. He writes, “The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us” (199).
He then adds,
A phone-based life generally pulls people downward. It changes the way we think, feel, judge, and relate to others. It is incompatible with many of the behaviors that religious and spiritual communities practice… (216).
These are incredibly insightful observations based on extensive research and data and they’re coming from an atheist. Process what’s happening: An atheist is telling us (Christians) that a phone-based life leads to spiritual degradation and is incompatible with what religion endorses. We Christians are being schooled by an atheist who sees the negative impact of a phone-based life on us and our faith better than we do. This shouldn’t be. We need to wise up and make a concerted effort to save our kids and ourselves. This article is about how, about the physical things you should do to resist the cultural tide and to experience the joys of embodied living that God intends for your children and you.
Modern digital media have reduced human persons and relationships to pixels, to tiny dots of light on two-dimensional screens, but ask yourself, Can the human person, can I, be reduced to light dots? Can emojis replace embodied human emotions? Can profile images and avatars replace human faces? Obviously not. The human person is an embodied soul (or an ensouled body). The human person exists in three dimensions that cannot be reduced to two-dimensional light dots.
This reality should force us to rethink the way we interact with digital media. It will have its place, but it must not dominate.[2] In order to keep digital media in its place and to appreciate the embodied nature of the human person (and thereby begin pushing back against the cultural tide headed toward the ocean of disordered minds, fractured relationships, disembodied conceptualizations of the human person, and listless lives), we need to focus on the unpixelated, three-dimensional life. Or, to be a bit more concise: Live 3D.
How do you live 3D? We start with God’s 3D promises. Through the called pastor, God brings the Gospel. Through the waters of Baptism, God brings new life. Through the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, God brings forgiveness. These gifts come to us in person, in 3D. God makes promises in 3D.[3] Because this is true, we need to be where the promises are. Because the promises are given in person, we need to be present in person.[4]
Our weekly in-person worship is an essential piece of living 3D lives. In fact, this in-person weekly gathering of the gathered (i.e., those God has gathered by the gospel) around God’s 3D means of grace establishes the unmoving, three-dimensional center of our lives. This unmoving center is a necessity. It is the thing around which everything else will move. This is a critical point to appreciate. Everyone has something around which everything else in their life moves, something to which everything else must adjust. Maybe it’s dance, travel sports, farming, a hobby, or a person.
Each of these may be good in its own right, but none of them should be the unmovable thing. What should the unmovable center be? Christ’s Church. The unmovable center should be the 3D gathering of the gathered around the 3D promises of Jesus. This must be our unmovable center.
Why? I’ll answer with a question: To what has Jesus attached His promise of permanency? Jesus boldly declared this about His church: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). Did He attach any similar promise to dance or travel sports or farming or any of our hobbies or any person? No. Here’s what this means: If we make any of them the unmovable thing in our lives, time, chance, or death will one day move them. This is not a hypothetical. This is reality.
Because this is true, wouldn’t it be foolish to make any one of them the unmovable thing around which everything else must move? Of course it would. Wouldn’t it be supremely wise to make Christ’s church, to which He has attached His promise of permanency, the unmovable thing in our lives? Obviously.
To return to our earlier point, our first stand against the cultural flow will be gathering in person with the gathered where God has placed His 3D promises. We will be where the promises are. We will gather in three dimensions to receive God’s gifts in three dimensions because God makes promises in 3D.
With lives centered in three dimensions, we will be equipped to live meaningfully in our vocations in three dimensions. We will be equipped to see how digital media, while having a place in our lives, radically undermines our call to live unpixelated three-dimensional lives. As such, we will be intentional about prioritizing faces over screens. In other words, we will pursue more face-to-face conversations than the disembodied conversations and the infinite scroll of the social internet.
Many of these conversations must happen at the family table (or at a friend’s table) in the sharing of meals (and during fellowship time after worship, discipling events, etc.). Jonathan Haidt again insightfully observes, “Perhaps the most important embodied activity that binds people together is eating” (205).[5] Our gatherings around our familial or friend tables in our homes must be reclaimed and re-appreciated for the embodied event/fellowship that happens there. Individualized screens that destroy conversation by sucking individuals into an atomized virtual world detached from the embodied people at the table or background-noise big screens that distract us from the people around the table must be banished from this embodied event. They threaten to disembody the whole experience, to flatten it into a two-dimensional event devoid of the meaning and depth we stand to gain through sharing food and conversation, essentially leaving us with nourished bodies and famished souls.
Let’s turn now from your family/friend table to your living space, to your family or living room. What is given priority in it? In other words, what’s the focal point? What is everything gathered around? Toward what does the furniture face? What activities are being encouraged by the way you have arranged your furniture? Many of our shared spaces look like modern-day high places with the big screen TV as the raised altar that claims the attention of all gathered in the room. When the screen comes on, conversation goes off. The pixelated light dots imprison our eyes and lock our lips so that meaningful conversation becomes nearly impossible. This does very bad things for family cohesiveness and identity.
If you wanted to live an unpixelated, three-dimensional life, what would you change? My family took the drastic step of removing our TV altogether. We then turned our furniture so that people face each other. This has allowed us to emphasize conversation and reading books aloud as a family. If you’re not prepared to remove your TV, could you put the remote in a different room so that turning it on doesn’t become a reflex? Could you unplug it or place a movable wall hanging in front or over it so that turning it on requires intentionality? What can you do to resist the constant glow of the two-dimensional light dots and to live 3D?
This should go without saying, but screens shouldn’t live in bedrooms. This includes TVs, phones, and devices. They not only fracture families, destroying conversation between husband and wife and drawing family members into separate virtual worlds in separate rooms, but they present untold opportunities for Satan and sin to hide and destroy. Or maybe we should describe these devices as open portals to unchecked human desire. Discerning Christians should shiver at this because we know the moral bentness of the human heart.
Jonathan Haidt shares the words of one 14-year-old girl that should sober up anyone who isn’t yet convinced:
I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on [unnamed website], which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily. She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends (68).
Phones and devices, especially for children, should have their own “bedroom” where they are off and docked overnight. Children don’t need to be accessible all night. They don’t need to play games late into the night. They don’t need phones for their alarm. Alarm clocks function perfectly well without doubling as a portal to depravity and an entry point for malevolent actors and predators to access children. Fill bedrooms with meaningful books (including Bibles). Have these be the things you and your family falls asleep thinking about, not the upsetting post or disturbing image you or they saw online.
The human soul needs to experience awe and wonderment. Philosophers have sometimes called this the small-self effect. It happens when we encounter something majestic, something beautiful, something with magnitude or gravitas outside us that humbles us (makes us small) and fills us with awe and wonderment. Perhaps it’s the breathtaking grandeur of a cascading mountain cataract or a sublime appoggiatura [6] in a moving melody or a great teacher of profound wisdom or insight or a delicate, dew-drenched flower petal glistening in the morning’s early light. It doesn’t have to be physically big to make us feel small, it just has to move us to self-forgetting and wonder.
The seventeenth century Lutheran pastor and hymn writer Paul Gerhardt captures the small-self idea in this verse from our hymn “Now Rest Beneath Night’s Shadow,”
Now all the heav’nly splendor
Breaks forth in starlight tender
From myriad worlds unknown;
And we, this marvel seeing,
Forget our selfish being
For joy of beauty not our own.
Looking up at the starry heavens moved him to great wonder, to a self-forgetting as he delighted in a beauty outside himself. The same small-self wonderment moved King David when he considered God’s heavens:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him. (Psalm 8:3-4)
And 19th century English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning experienced the small-self effect in the wonder of a common bush:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
Space prevents a full appreciation of her poem and its allusions to the burning bush of Exodus 3. For our purposes, she’s helping us find wonder in the ordinary things we commonly overlook or take for granted. Even there, for those with eyes to see, for those attuned to the splendors in creation, is opportunity for awe and self-forgetting. And this is good for the human soul because it calls us to realties beyond ourselves. It awakens us to longings for something transcendent, longings that ultimately find their fulfillment in our Creator. Ultimately, it minimizes us and magnifies the marvels of our Creator.
But by trafficking in the self, in self-presentation, self-gratification, self-promotion, and self-obsession, social media prevents this. The two-dimensional, disembodied light dots divert our eyes from the splendors beyond ourselves, robbing us of awe, wonderment, and even gratitude, and preventing us from experiencing the joy of self-forgetting and the power of transcendent longing. We end up with very small worlds (no bigger than the screens in our hands) and disenchanted, lonely, and enlarged selves (devoid of awe or any sense of grandeur). It’s no wonder high social media use results in loneliness and a general flattening of human happiness.
In many ways, nothing I’ve shared requires radical changes: 1) Go to church consistently, 2) Eat meals with family/friends, 3) Move your furniture, 4) De-screen your bedrooms, and 5) Notice the splendors around you. These aren’t exceptional. Everyone can do them. You can do them. They are clear, tangible, and concrete actions.
In other ways, what I’ve shared requires exceedingly difficult life changes because they require altering your habits:
If you want to avoid being swept down the cultural river toward the ocean of disordered minds, fractured relationships, disembodied conceptualizations of the human person, and listless lives, these are the significant life changes you need to do. If you want richly meaningful lives defined by a mature spirituality, robust relationships, and profound wonder and gratitude, these are the changes you must make.
And the good news is that you can do it. They are clear, straightforward, and achievable. You can do them. Lutheran Family Service can help. Let’s chart the course together. – Pastor Conner
If you’d like to talk or if you would like Lutheran Family Service to present on this topic to your group or congregation, we have counselors and speakers available. Contact us today for scheduling.
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