The startling moment when former president Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on live television reveals in a clear and dramatic way how deeply divided we have become in the U.S. This division is also sweeping across Europe as France experienced violent riots during their recent elections and still has not formed a new government. Our culture is collapsing because we have chosen to live like our culture rather than as devout disciples of Jesus Christ.
One of the ways—I have struggled with this too—is that we ceded too much of our lives to a virtual world that so often leads us away from God and away from reality itself. We gave our children over to technology without considering the consequences. Whether it is depression and suicide or increasingly more hostile and violent riots, the damage phone and technology-based childhoods has done is now coming to the forefront.
The current generation of young people, all the way to my generation born in the early 1980s, has lived through the most dramatic technological shift in human history. This has been coupled with a complete abandonment of previous cultural, spiritual, and ethical mores. For well over a decade, we have been told repeatedly that human connection is meant to be found online. We are “more connected” in a virtual world.
Beginning around 2010, parents started giving their children and teens smartphones with access to social media at very high rates. Jonathan Haidt explains how depression, anxiety, and suicide rates then began to climb at alarming rates in his book, The Anxious Generation:
“Soon after teens got iPhones, they started getting more depressed. The heaviest users were also the most depressed, while those who spent more time in face-to-face activities, such as on sports teams and in religious communities, were the healthiest.”
The book provides a deep dive into countless studies that reveal the disturbing impact smartphone and social media use has had on young people.
Notice that “face-to-face” activities led to healthier kids. In my daughter’s current evangelical Christian school, she is one of two kids in the middle school and high school that does not have a smartphone. In the Catholic school she attended across the state, she was the only student in middle school not to have a phone.
Most of the kids, regardless of Christian denomination, had almost free reign on those phones, except for a few parents not allowing social media until high school. In those same schools, she came across kids who were anxious, depressed, and even suicidal, or who would say things like “I would die without my iPad, smartphone, etc.”
Living in the virtual reality of social media, 24/7 news cycles, binge watching, pornography, and other forms of Internet-based entertainment is having a profound impact on all of us, but the Church has spent too much time trying to be part of that virtual reality and little to no time discerning whether all of this is good for us.
For starters, many of our nation’s children are miserable (and this is not exclusive to our nation). They have been taught since childhood that relationships take place on a screen and that their self-worth is tied to a “Like” button. This divorces them from their human nature by separating the mind and the body. It also subordinates their God-given worth to strangers’ opinions of them.
Social media and smart phone technologies are in fact systems that are founded on principles of dualism. Our bodies no longer matter. Our physical presence no longer matters, which means our senses do not matter. All of this is extremely dangerous and destructive because our senses help us decipher reality, which is why AI will cause so many problems in the future.
As Christians, we know that we are both body and soul, which means our relationships require some form of presence to deepen. This is especially true in how we learn how to love. Children and teens who have been taught that their relationships can be lived primarily on their smartphone are being given the path to a loveless life. The reality is, we cannot fully love through a screen. We are not dying-to-self by liking a photo or sharing a quick comment on a post. To truly love, we need to know how to be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually present to another person.
Love requires sacrifice and willing the good of the other. Since these children, teens, and young adults, live primarily in a virtual world of their own making, they do not have to sacrifice in relationships, and they can cancel people at will. This deeply damages their ability to form deeper and more fulfilling relationships. It makes it impossible to build healthy communities with disagreement because the starting point in everything is themselves. In fact, their ability to love and be loved is being stunted.
Even more concerning is the growing indifference, hostility, and even violent attitudes that are arising from these virtual worlds they are living in. How many videos have been posted now of violent acts taking place while people film and nobody helps? This leads to a very dark future. In a world where people do not know how to love, selfishness reigns supreme.
It is now well known that countless children, teens, and adults are terribly lonely. They are not experiencing love directly or at all. In fact, they have been taught a counterfeit, which leaves them lonely and isolated. Only countless hours of scrolling keep their minds off of that loneliness.
This virtual living is also creating violent divisions in nations across the Western world that are led in large part by young people. Thanks to the obvious use of propaganda (on all sides of the political spectrum) in social and news media, young people especially are more prone to violence and more vulnerable to the lies fed to them. The recent university riots reveal this reality, as does the attempted assassination of a former president. Political violence in many forms is increasing in the Western world, and social media is used to stoke the fires of rage and destruction.
Catholics should be taking serious stock of how smartphones and social media are impacting our families, parishes, surrounding communities, and nations. We must stop jumping on every new bandwagon when another technology arises. If there is one virtue we as a Church have not exercised enough in the face of new technologies, it is prudence. I am just as guilty of this as everyone else. It took me 12 years to understand what social media and smartphone addiction was doing to me and my family.
There are countless wounded kids, teens, and adults in our communities who are deeply lonely, depressed, anxious, and even suicidal. There are many who are trapped in cycles of fear perpetuated by the politicization of everything to such a point that they cannot see reality—this is on both sides—and are lashing out violently. They are sitting in our pews, and many are sitting alone in their homes longing for true human connection.
We should be asking ourselves if virtual reality is what the Lord wants us to live in or if part of the way we live the Gospel in this age is by helping people to untether themselves, teaching them how to live in actual reality with all its messiness, periods of boredom, and suffering.
By God’s given nature we are social creatures, but this ultimately means building communities that are physically, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally present to one another. This is the only way we can fully love. We have to reclaim the calling of the Cross. Love is sacrificial. It is not on our own terms. It is self-emptying. Social media and smartphone over-reliance are counterfeits to real love and connection. As a Church, we should be finding ways to build authentic communities on the love of Christ, rather than virtual counterfeits that are making us lonelier, more divided, and unfortunately, violent.
Photo by Stella Jacob on Unsplash
