|
Dear Church,
Wednesday reminded me just how tied I am to my phone. While I was visiting the hospital, Verizon service went out. I couldn’t enter notes from the visits. I couldn’t make calls. I couldn’t look up the address for the home-visit I was about to make. I couldn’t google what was going on. I couldn’t even ask ChatGPT what I thought about it.
That last line is a joke, but everything else is true. It shows how much my life has changed since smartphones entered it. In so many ways, my phone is an extraordinary gift. I can call church members and access our directory in seconds. As someone who is directionally challenged, GPS is always at hand. If I want something to read or listen to, it’s immediately available. So much of my work and daily life is genuinely helped by this technology.
And yet, Wednesday also reminded me how dependent I have become—and how quietly addictive some of these tools can be.
Beginning this Sunday, a short-term Sunday School class will meet in the Fellowship Hall to study the effects smartphones and social media are having on our children and adolescents. The class, led by Rev. Link and Rev. Brannan, will be using Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. Drawing on extensive research, Haidt argues that smartphones and social media have quietly but rapidly reshaped childhood. They have replaced real-world play, resilience, and face-to-face relationships with constant comparison, distraction, and surveillance. The result is a generation that is more anxious, more fragile, and more alone.
Haidt identifies adolescent girls as those most at risk. Teenaged girls tend to use smartphones primarily for social connection rather than for information or gaming. That means their emotional lives become tightly bound to online feedback. Approval becomes addictive. Rejection feels constant. Self-worth becomes fragile. And they are especially vulnerable to bullying.
While young people may be most at risk, we would be mistaken to think adults are immune. I see plenty of online bullying among grown adults, as well. Attacking people we know becomes easier online. Attacking people we don’t know becomes easier still. If someone is in the news and we want to dismiss them, social media, public figures—and now even AI—can instantly supply material—much of it false—that feeds contempt while breaking the commandment against false witness.
So, I hope we, as Christian adults, will commit ourselves to modeling something better.
- That we refrain from passing along information we have not checked.
- That we refuse to reduce people to caricatures or attack their character to dismiss their ideas.
- That we remain alert to the way social media can pull us into closed worlds that dim both the light of Christ in the world and the light within our own souls.
Technology is a gift.
But gifts require wisdom.
And wisdom begins with knowing what shapes our hearts.
Mindful of False Idols,
Geo. Anderson
| 
