How Are Screens Influencing Us?

The digital revolution that we're living through is reshaping how all of us are being discipled.

Mark Matlock says that's especially true for teenagers and young adults. You know, when we look at the typical screen time that a 15- to 23-year-old is experiencing, it's about 2,767 hours a year. Now, we ask them, you know, and try to look at how much spiritual content they're taking in. The average teenager is taking about 153 hours of spiritual content.

When we look at the typical church goer, it's a little under 300 hours. So, now if somebody else has discipled him, my job is I have to unpack all of that. And what we need to understand as parents is that just because we see our kids doing some of the same things that we did—attending church, raising your hands in worship, going to summer camp, participating in mission trips—what's going on in the inside, the interior world, can be really different because they've got this screen relationship that they're able to have somewhere else. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com.

How do we as parents train up our children in the way they should go when their screens have started doing that job for us? We're going to talk more about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. Everywhere we go and we talk to moms and dads, I think it is the question that comes to the surface more than any other question, concern about their kids, whether they're in high school or adult kids, not hanging with the faith, not going to church, starting to fade away or fall away. Well, it was your question as well, wasn't it, Bob? When your kids were little and growing up, it was like, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, how are we going to help them be followers of Christ when they're 18, 28, 38? I feel like it's more so today, though. You're right, Bob. I think there's a fear that people feel because they do see people leaving the church.

And we're hearing the statistics about, you know, the 75 percent of kids who are active in their youth group who are no longer involved in church five or ten years later, and we wonder, do they come back when they have kids and all of that? You heard a presentation, this was a few months ago, and you said, we need to talk to these guys and help moms and dads understand. And it might have been the first time you ever listened to me, Bob. You're like, we're going to bring these guys in. It was not the first time. I don't know, I'm kidding. It was the third time.

But I was passionate about the research and the understanding of what God's doing in the next generation. I said, let's get these guys in here and let's do this. And they're here. So, introduce these guys.

They're here. Mark Matalock, David Kinnaman. In fact, Kinnaman got me in big trouble back in the days when he wrote the book on Christian with what, Gabe Lyons? That's right.

Yeah, back in the day. I don't know if I ever told you this, but when that came out, you know, the study, which was fascinating, I read it thinking, oh, what's he know? You're going to go out and interview non-church people and find out what they think of the church and believers. And then as I read that, I'm like, all of these signs that they saw are true. So, I go to our staff and say, we've got to read this, and I think we should do a series at our church and say, we're sorry. And we did. We called the series We're Sorry for the things that you put in the book that the unchurch had said they felt from the church.

And I identified, like, I think we've done that. So, here's a long intro, but I end up on WJR, the biggest radio station in Detroit, because they heard, you're doing, a church is apologizing? This is a mainstream, not a Christian station. No, this is, yeah, this is like a Mitch Albom, and it's very well regarded.

Millions of people listen to this. They call us up and say, hey, can you come on just for five minutes and say, why would a church apologize? So, I go on this thing, I'm in a meeting, literally, come out, say the thing, and as I'm getting ready to get off the interview, the host goes, hey, could you hang on for some calls? You know, we'll take some calls. Some questions. Okay, so I think we're going to get a couple calls.

They go to break, he comes back, he goes, oh, this place is lit up. We've got all these people want to talk to you. And you know what the calls were? They were church people yelling at me for doing a series where we apologize. And I was like, this is exactly what the book says we would do. But no, seriously, David, that book and that research and this book, Faith for Exiles, that you've just recently written with Which is really the third in a trilogy of books. They are powerful understandings of our culture and our church and our kids.

And so that's why we need to talk about it. We should say David is joining us remotely from his home in Southern California. Mark Matlock is in the studio with us. You guys collaborated on this work. And Mark, you've been involved in pastoral ministry, youth ministry for a long time. You've been observing as a churchman some of the trends that you're talking about here in the book. Yeah, I've been actually a volunteer in my church's youth ministry for quite a long time.

And then ordained minister. But primarily my work has been in the nonprofit serving other churches, serving other youth pastors and youth specialties. And then some large format discipleship conferences that we used to run. So I've had a real kind of boots on the ground watching this transition take place over the arc of 25, 30 years. As well as joining David and doing data across the country. David, the underlying thesis of the book Faith for Exiles is that we live in a new day and we need to understand the new day if we're going to continue to be effective in evangelizing and discipleship, right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so I've spent the better part of, I've been here at the company, Barna Group, for 25 years. And started straight out of college, started working with George Barn, an amazing researcher, and cares so much about the health and vitality of the church. And so I started focusing in on millennials and Generation Z when I started working on the book UnChristian, working with Gabe Lyons.

And it's been almost 15 years now of the 25 years that I've been here where I'm spending a lot of time thinking about interviewing, trying to explore the ways to build resilient faith in the next generation. And as you said, the thesis of this book, Faith for Exiles, is that the disruptions of our current context of digital life, of sort of the secularization of our society, of the distractions that we deal with, the chaos and anxiety that this generation feels, that it's a very different place to try to disciple. And whether we're raising kids who are teenagers or young adults or younger, that all of us are facing a brand new landscape in which we're trying to work out how to pass on our faith in a meaningful way. If we had been alive during the time of the Gutenberg press, we probably would not have recognized, oh, this is a revolution that's happening around us because when you're living in a revolution, you don't necessarily recognize it's a revolution. A hundred years from now, should the Lord carry people will look back on this period of time, the digital revolution that's taking place and say that was a culture changer.

I absolutely believe that's right. And I think we don't really understand the depth of that change. And we've come up with this phrase, we call it digital Babylon, that what's happening for this generation is that they're being raised and growing up in a new kind of Babylon. In scripture, we see over and over this concept of Babylon right from the very beginning, the Tower of Babel. And then Daniel is in actual Babylon. And then all the way in the Book of Revelation, John is writing about Babylon. And even First Peter, he talks about the current Babylon. So this idea of Babylon is a very biblical concept. And I think the idea that we're living in a new kind of digital context, access to pornography, the sort of the gospel according to YouTube, the plausibility of Christian belief. All these things are changing the nature of how young people grow up and the authority of a local church, the authority of the Bible, the authority of parents and grandparents who believe this their whole life.

It doesn't have the same weight as it once did. And not only have you guys researched the data, but you also have kids in this age group. How old are your kids?

You're both married. Mark, how old are your kids? Yeah, so mine are 23 and 21. And David?

20, 18 and 15. So, yeah, we were both in our mid 40s, early 50s, 46, I think, Mark, you're 50. And, you know, we feel this weight of trying to help youth pastors and parents and others who are interested in it because we've we've seen it in our kids' lives, the pressures that they're facing, all the good intentions that we have had as dads.

Our kids are amazing kids, you know, they're asking deep questions, but seeing their lives and their friends' lives, it's much more than just an academic sort of big study for us, even though we interviewed thousands upon thousands of young people to understand the bigger trends than just our own, you know, kids' stories, but we see it in the lives of our kids as well. In fact, as we were writing the book, I was preparing to drop my daughter off in New York City in Manhattan to go to school in the arts. David was getting ready to drop his daughter, was dropping his daughter off at UC Berkeley, going into kind of the sciences, two fields not traditionally known to be, you know, embraced by Christendom.

And two cities that are not the evangelical meccas in America. Correct. And what did you feel? For me, and I'll let David speak to his experience, but it was kind of that feeling of just, wow, OK, we're living this work that we're doing, you know, in 360 degrees in our life.

It's personal. And yeah, and the real concern of just we're going to see what happens, right? We think we've done these things right.

We think we've listened. And, you know, I hate putting that pressure on my children that somehow they have to prove my experiment as a parent. But this idea of just realizing, boy, so many of the rules changed. My daughter is going into her identity forming years as smartphones are being released.

We didn't have any, there was no books on how to parent with technology or anything. Everything that we did was kind of trying to figure this disruption out, this digital Babylon out, and trying to figure out how this is going to play out in their lives. And every parent who has ever dropped a child off at college drops them off with fear and trepidation, knowing that it's as likely, maybe it's more likely that at the end of four years, they're going to have wandered from their faith than have stuck with their faith.

And we're all praying and hoping, in fact, there are parents who are saying, I'm not sending my child to college because that's the outcome for so many parents, and I can't even bear the thought of that potential outcome. So, Mark, explain for a listener who's maybe not, maybe they haven't read the book of Daniel in a while, Babylon versus Jerusalem, right? Those are the two parallels. One is a city where God reigns, and the other is a pagan city with pagan deities.

Correct. In so many ways, I think this describes the tension that a lot of older generations are experiencing in the church right now, this idea that things are shifting, and they don't completely understand why, and they're not comfortable. And this move toward nationalism that we're experiencing in the United States, it's not just a U.S. phenomenon, it's happening globally.

If you travel, even in India, I got in this big Twitter war with some Hindu nationalists that were basically saying, you know, make India great again. And it made me realize, well, this is a global phenomenon that this change is happening because while we've always been diverse people in our world, we're encountering that diversity more often with greater frequency and in greater depth than we've ever had to deal with it. And that's causing us some disruption in the way we normally go about our lives, and how we disciple in that context is very different than how we disciple in Jerusalem. So, diversity versus homogeny, that's one characteristic. We're moving from a more homogeneous culture to a more diverse culture.

What are some of the other characteristics that differentiate the old way, the Jerusalem way, from the new Babylonian culture we live in? I think another big factor that we see in the research is that the gap between Christians and non-Christians in our society is growing. And another way to think about that is while most of society among the boomer and older generations sort of understood and at least respected a Christian or biblical worldview, that's no longer the case with younger non-Christians. So, young Christians today face a much larger chasm to translate their faith into their public schools, into their lives.

I mean, we have so many facts that could prove that to be the case. I know boomers and elders who hear that and they think, no, you didn't live through the sixties, you don't know what it was like. And I just promise from a social point of view, the attitudes of most Americans were relatively homogeneous.

They believed the same kinds of things and those things were based on a different kind of social ethic and basically on a biblical ethic. And so I think that's one of the big things that this generation is facing. We did a big study recently where younger Christians, about half of millennial practicing Christians, said it was wrong to evangelize. And yet at the very same time, they said that the best thing a person could do, nine out of ten said that the best thing a person could do would be to commit their lives to Christ and to follow Jesus. And so there's this great paradox and I think that if you understood that paradox in light of the experience they have, that most of their friends don't want to be proselytized, they don't want to become Christians or talked into it from a sales perspective, they feel that gap. Young non-Christians are trying to close that chasm.

Yeah, another thing is where self-righteousness was maybe the false idol of Jerusalem, in this Babylon it's this idea of keeping up, this fear of missing out. I've got to be in the know. And so you see everybody weighing in on everything. I'm a constitutional scholar on Facebook one day and I'm a coronavirus expert the next day. And everybody's got an opinion on all of this because we feel like we have to and for a generation that's growing up and probably one of the best times to be alive as a young person, they are experiencing more stress and anxiety and a lot of that is because they have more options available. So the things that we would look at is you're more secure, there's better education, there's better jobs available, all these things. But the number of options and paths that they have available causes a lot of stress. And as much as they're connected, they're isolated and they feel loneliness too. Yeah, and I wanted to touch on that because the loneliness epidemic is something that cannot be minimized. They're more connected to their friends than ever before through social media, through texting, through the constant connectivity of a cell phone. And yet they are lonelier and more isolated than maybe they've ever been.

And suicidal ideation is higher than it's been in a long time. Help parents understand why is that? Well, you know, my son asked me a question the other day. He said, Dad, when you were growing up, did you ever feel safe?

And I said, what do you mean by that, son? And he goes, when I go to school, I never feel safe. I always feel like I have to watch over my shoulder and all of that. Is he talking about physical safety? Physical safety.

Wow. And I realized, you know what, I even had an incident in high school where we had an active shooter on our campus and that still didn't make me feel unsafe. But they live with a narrative because of the 24-7 news cycle. They're aware of every, even though we know like child abductions are lower than they've ever been, our experience of that information has increased and our awareness of all that. So we actually think things are less safe. And for a generation that's grown up forming their identity in this kind of a cycle, they have no way of being able to balance that and put it in any kind of context. So it creates a lot of insecurity. And as we know, the fear is in our hand.

It's digital. It's constantly bombarding us. When we went to school, if there was an incident, you'd hear about it on the news maybe that night, maybe read it in the paper.

Remember those things? Maybe you'd never hear it. Yeah. You may not know.

More likely. You may not hear about it. It was far away and you didn't experience it. But today, because there's instant video of everything that's happened, it's like it's happening right around the corner from you and you feel like you've been there with it. And I think in addition to that, one of the crazy things about screens is the immediacy of young people's experience of that anxiety. And so in the past, if you saw something happen around you, like I remember being a student in college, and the only thing I can remember happening outside of my experience at Christian College was the Oklahoma City bombing.

That was enough to break through the bubble that we had around us as college students. But today, if you compare that, young people are experiencing things in an immediate way. So anxiety, there's so much social research that's out today showing how much the levels of anxiety are increasing for this generation.

And I think we as Christians have a couple of responses. One is to just recognize and acknowledge that's a true experience. Screens are increasing our sense of exposure to things around us.

That's actually a good thing in some fashion, the level of exposure. But number two, it also means that we have a responsibility to help this generation root themselves in something that's deeper than the moment-to-moment realities. That Jesus' words about be anxious for nothing, let tomorrow's worries be enough for tomorrow and just enjoy God's goodness today. These deep scriptural truths are so important, and they've never been more important than now as we raise this generation. Here's what's at the heart of what you guys have written in the book Faith for Exiles. It is that if we can recognize the times in which we live and the cultural landscape in which we live, we can do what Daniel and Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego did, and that is we can live faithfully for God. We can train our kids to live faithfully for God.

They just need to understand it's a different day, and we have to approach it differently than we did when we were coming up. Yeah, so let's talk about that, this idea of the weight of digital Babylon, just to get some perspective. You know, when we look at the typical screen time that a 15- to 23-year-old's experiencing, it's about 2,767 hours a year that they're taking in in screen time. Now, we ask them, you know, and try to look at how much spiritual content they're taking in, the average teenager is taking about 153 hours of spiritual content.

When we look at the typical church goers, it's a little under 300 hours. So, proportionally, there's a lot more content coming in via these screens, and that led David and I to type two really powerful words onto the screen, which were just simply screens disciple. And this idea that the church has been disrupted in that we have screens, we don't even realize it. So, I'm sitting there with a teenager, and we're in a small group situation. He's a senior in high school.

I've been at my church for about 29 years, so I've literally seen this kid born, brought to church in a carrier, and now he's sitting in my circle getting ready to go off to college. And he's debating with me about the existence of God. Now, because I've seen this kid grow up, I know he's not smart enough for the arguments that he's making to me, right? Like, he's arguing way above his cognitive abilities. So, I know he's gotten this from somewhere, and so I asked him, I said, or I wrote down a couple phrases that he used.

I put them into Google, and sure enough, this website popped up that basically said, you know, how to debate a theist. He had internalized all this so much so that he could use it back in a conversation. Now, in the past, what would have happened had a teenager come to me because they were having doubts. He said, Mark, I'm doubting my faith. You know, is God real?

How do I know? I would have sat down with him, and not just given him biblical reasonings, but I talked to him about his prayer life. I talked to him about reading scripture. We'd spend some time really getting in touch with Jesus as a person in his life and building that relationship. We'd also look at the evidence of scripture for why we can trust and believe that the word of God is true and that these claims, it's rational to believe all of this.

But now I'm not having that opportunity. Somebody else has discipled him, and now my job is I have to unpack all of that. And what we need to understand as parents is that just because we see our kids doing some of the same things that we did, attending church, raising your hands in worship, going to summer camp, participating in mission trips, what's going on in the inside, the interior world, can be really different because they've got this screen relationship that they're able to have somewhere else. They have access with their doubts and with their questions. They have access to voices that we never would have had access to before.

Absolutely. And this idea that their screens are discipling them, this is a profound realization. And I'm hearing the parents who go, that's it. We're cutting off the internet at our house and nobody has a cell phone anymore. That's how we're going to solve this problem. That is the right answer.

No, I'm kidding. I'm not anti-tech, so I think that's really important. I am the most tech-oriented parent. I love my kids having access to all of it.

It wouldn't work anyway, would it? Well, yeah, so what do we do as parents? Because every parent is hearing that and thinking, what do I do? First, there are wise ways for us to use technology as parents, and we're huge proponents of technology but using it in the proper place. And so there's nothing wrong with limiting screen time. There's nothing wrong with thinking about how it is that our kids are going to be using technology, at what age is, in fact, I think the more wise and intentional we can be about that, the better.

But we'll have listeners today that are across the full spectrum, from young, young kids to teenagers to even parents whose kids are young adults. Just to recognize this was part of the reason why we called it Faith for Exiles and why we think about life in digital Babylon is that God actually does call us to be in the world but not of the world. And so what are the practices that we can put in place?

What are these deeper perspectives? And that's where the research led us to interview the 10% of young Christians who are the most resilient in their faith. And rather than just what Mark and I have done right or not done right in raising our own kids, the principles that we might pursue just personally, we try to learn from the research about what might make the young people the most resilient.

And so we learn there's these five principles that we can put in place. Okay, hang on. And I'm going to have to leave that as a cliffhanger. And I know every parent's going, no, give me that. Okay, we'll give you that.

You can get a copy of the book Faith for Exiles because the five principles are in there. Or you can keep listing this week and we're going to continue the conversation. I'd say do both.

Yeah, absolutely do both. Go to our website. Go to familylifetoday.com.

Get a copy of David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock's book Faith for Exiles, Five Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon. You can order online at familylifetoday.com or call to order 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the website familylifetoday.com. The number to call to get your copy of the book Faith for Exiles by David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. Now, if you've listened to Family Life Today for any length of time, if you're a regular listener, you know in addition to talking about passing on a legacy of spiritual vitality to the next generation, we often talk about your marriage, about how you can take your marriage from good to great. And we've got resources in place to help with that. In fact, right now online, there's the Take Your Marriage From Good to Great resource that's available that includes a couple of online video courses, audio messages from Paul David Tripp and Bodhi Bakham and Julie Slattery, Dr. Gary Chapman.

There's also a downloadable e-book. All of this is available for free because we're committed to helping you strengthen your marriage relationship. And anybody who downloads the content, as we mentioned before, you become instantly eligible to win a trip to Family Life.

Sit in on a Family Life Today recording session, have dinner that night with Dave and Ann Wilson. We'll cover the cost of your travel here. We'll put you up in a hotel. We'll give you some spending money.

We'll take care of you. There's no purchase necessary. The contest ends August 14th. Restrictions apply and official rules can be found at familylife.com slash good contest. And this month, we want to make available to you a copy of my new book, Love Like You Mean It. This is a book that's all about how the Bible defines love, what we read about it in 1 Corinthians 13 and how that applies to our marriage relationship. Your copy of the book Love Like You Mean It is our thank you gift when you make a donation during the month of August. And you can do that today.

Go to familylifetoday.com, make an online donation, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate over the phone. Again, ask for your copy of my new book, Love Like You Mean It. It's our thank you gift to you when you donate to support the ongoing ministry of family life today. And thanks for your support. We could not do what we do without you. And on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of listeners who benefit every day from your support, thank you for being a part of the team. And we hope you can be back with us again tomorrow when we're going to dive into the five practices that contribute to resilience in the faith of young people. Our guests tomorrow, Mark Matlock and David Kinnaman, they'll be back with us again. Hope you can be back with us as well. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.