Would Jesus Be on TikTok?

Brett McCracken

We have the opportunity, as the local church, to to be something different, to be something that people actually are going to be hungry for, which is embodied relationships, community that gets you outside of that self referential narcissist orientation of the smartphone, where you just become exhausted with the self. You become weary of the self, right? And a Church takes you outside of yourself, your attention, your gaze, goes to God, to the vertical to horizontal, to the brothers and sisters you’re with who are very different from you, who are not not what the algorithm would pick for you, necessarily.

Collin Hansen

Not long ago, I was speaking at Liberty University to a large group of undergraduates. The topic was cultural apologetics, and I explained our strategy at the gospel coalition. I said, we are happy to meet you online, then we tell you to go touch grass. It was my only applause line in about an hour that I spent on stage that did tell me something about Gen Z. They may be the group that breaks the stranglehold of smartphones and social media. No doubt we hope to aid in that effort through a new book, scrolling ourselves to death, reclaiming life in a digital age, published by the gospel coalition with crossway. The editors of this book are my good friends and longtime colleagues, Brett McCracken and Ivan mesa. In this book, we’re building on the previous work of Neil Postman in amusing ourselves to death, published 40 years ago, that book focused on television. Our situation has changed through the though the underlying problems remain, or in many ways, have even grown. Brett writes this in the book, from the rising of the sun to its going down, we scroll our way through the day. We scroll our way through life, and we are scrolling ourselves to death. Now, humanity used to suffer from too little information. Now we have too much. The world changes in years, if not months. When you consider the pace of AI iterations in the past, you might have 1000 years of the pharaohs in Egypt with substantial continuity. We need help working through these changes as the pace has accelerated so much in our own time. And Brett and Ivan have compiled in this book An excellent list of contributors. One of them is Patrick Miller, who writes often for the gospel coalition. He describes our phone as a digital syringe, and he describes our situation as, quote, institutional, relational and formational in terms of a crisis for the church. Probably my favorite chapter was written by Reed Mercer shukar from Wheaton College. He says, quote, you were not created to be a predictably programmed series of increasingly addicted responses to the stimuli of digital dopamine delivery systems. And that was a mouthful, but it’s a power packed sentence. There he goes on to say, we were created for realities, not vibes. We were created to be participants in life, but have become spectators of other people’s lives. So you know from that introduction, we’re going to cover a lot in this interview. I love the book. I’m honored that Brett and Ivan would include me as a contributor on my chapter on preaching and are joining me now on gospel bound Brett and Ivan, thanks for joining

Ivan Mesa

me. Thank you. Colin. Colin, long time listener, first time caller, so happy to be here.

Collin Hansen

Long overdue. My friend. All right, let’s start with you. Could you identify a chapter that stood out for you in the editing process? You

Ivan Mesa

mean other than your chapter? Because you’re my boss, have to have to say that. Get that out of the way. Yeah, I would say Nathan Finn’s chapter on history. So the title is unfit to remember the theological crisis of digital age memory loss. So another mouthful there. But I think what stood out to me, as someone who loves history, Christian, non Christian alike, I love church history, just the reality that so much of this conversation pertains to what we do with the past. And so Neil Postman talked often about TV as a medium that really emphasized the present. And so as Christians, we know a thing about that. We are often told in Scripture, like Psalm, 7711, I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. And just even thinking of the New Testament, Peter in Second Peter one, the opening chapter talks about, I’m reminding you. Reminder happens again and again. So so much of the Christian life is a question of, do you remember well, do you remember vertically, well, the Lord and do you remember horizontally, those relationships? So just editing that chapter just stood out to me, because again, I love history, and even for me, I am so prone to forget the Lord’s faithfulness in the past, what he’s doing in the present and what he will do in the future. And so there’s so much more to be said about this topic, but I think the angle of history is just super encouraging to. Consider how, yeah, technology, social media, the internet, goes against the grain of what God has created us for to remember his his works in the past and to just hold on to that in the present, into the future.

Collin Hansen

I love that Nathan was not somebody I expected to see pop up in this book. He’s one of my favorite writers, and he can cover so many different topics, but it was really pleasing to see him appear in the book. And Ivan, you’re also adding to the long list of PhD holders in history who have joined this podcast as well. We definitely have a type around here. But Brett, let’s turn to you now. What chapter stood out to you in the editing?

Brett McCracken

I would probably say the one that you mentioned in your intro, Colin by Reed Mercer shukar, who is a professor of Communication at Wheaton, but he has a unique qualification to contribute to this book, because he knew Neil Postman. He studied with postman at NYU, so it was cool to kind of secure him as a contributor with that personal connection. But when I read his chapter, when it when the draft came in, it was, it was just such a like, jeremiad, honestly, it was such a like, power, powerful, passionate, like, almost like, I had to tame it down a little bit because it came off so

Collin Hansen

strong. This is the tame down the version that we have for the book. So that’s saying

Brett McCracken

something. But he just likes things for the fences. And it’s a really potent essay that I think ties together a lot of the threads that we’re trying to weave in the book, just about, kind of the importance of embodied life, and not just going through life scrolling, kind of being this passive spectator, but embracing the tangible mission of what we’re called to do and be as Christians, in our families, in our communities, in real, you know, tangible life. So it’s just, it’s a great one. It’s powerful, it’s convicting, and I think readers will orderly enjoy it.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, it comes about two thirds, three fourths of the way through the book. But yeah, definitely packs a punch. Let’s talk a little bit more about postman. Postman is the occasion for this book. That’s how this came up. Originally, Brett explain what postman meant. I think this is something that people can relate to and can recognize, but he actually gave a description of it. He gave it a name, and that is the information to action, or information action ratio. Explain what that is.

Brett McCracken

Yeah, it’s something that he talks about in amusing ourselves to death, which, again, is the kind of inspiration for this book 40 years later. It came out in 1985 and it’s just one of those things that I feel like has gotten more relevant as the years have gone on and in the in the internet age, what he was talking about is just, we all just feel this. And essentially it’s the idea that, you know, humans are created to have a pretty even ratio of information that comes into your brain and action that you can then take as a result, right? So for most of human history, people only knew about things that happens locally in their village and their family. Maybe you know, in the few circles out from their village, they would hear news, but most of that information, they could actually do something about. If there was a neighboring farm that was having a crisis, they could walk over and help. If there was something in the next parish over that needed assistance, they could go help. But now what he was talking about, in amusing ourselves to death, is that all changed with the introduction of mass communication. So starting with the telegraph and then television, and then radio, and then now the internet, suddenly we’re flooded with all of this information from far flung corners of the world every day. And in the scrolling age, it’s like literally all day, throughout your day, you’re just bombarded with information, most of which you can’t take meaningful action about, right? You we are so aware of all the goings on of the world, much of which, you know, are disheartening. They’re, you know, they, they get a rise in us emotionally, because it’s some injustice, it’s some calamity, it’s something awful that’s going on. And we naturally, as humans, we want to do something. We it’s a good impulse to want to take action when you have troubling information that comes across your mind, but But it becomes a problem when there’s an imbalanced information action ratio, right? When so much of the information that you’re bombarded with, you just you can’t do anything other than be aware of it. And so that’s what I talked about in my chapter in the book, which is all about the information action ratio. I really think, honestly, I think it’s part of the mental health crisis that we’re facing in the digital age. It’s because we weren’t meant to bear this mental burden of UN actionable information, which is so much of our lives, is just like all this information that we’re really just aware of and we get emotional about and angry about, but we can’t tangibly act in most cases, and that’s a problem. That’s not how humans were created to be. Yeah.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, in that chapter, Brett, you described yourself as, in a former iteration, an over informed news junkie, yeah, when did that stop for you, and how did that relate to the role you played working for me all those years on social media,

Unknown Speaker

yeah? Fashion time,

Brett McCracken

yeah. I was an, I was an over informed news junkie, in part by necessity, because I As fate would have it, I’ve worked as a social media manager now for two organizations, Biola University, first, and then the gospel coalition. And you kind of have to be, you know, unfortunately, very aware of everything that’s going on. I would say the shift for me happened probably 2017 ish when I was first starting to think about the wisdom pyramid, which was a book that I wrote. But that concept of, like, wait a second, we’re we’re more informed than ever before, but we’re less wise and that, and why is that? And what can we do to change our intakes, to be kind of healthier and to have a better grasp on truth in this kind of overstimulated world. So 2016 I think, you know, we that’s a year that changed everything in our culture. And one of the things that it changed was epistemology and the idea of like truth. It became a post truth era. That was the word of the year in 2016 was post truth. And I think that was the moment where the information flood became more of a liability than an asset. And if you look back to COVID, which happened a few years after that, 2020 I feel like that was the nail in the coffin. Like that was when collectively, as a society, we realized that actually being over informed is is bad for us. If you were, if in April of 2020, you were an over informed news junkie. Looking back now, I think we can all say that was you were worse for that, right? You 100% of the information that you were getting was flawed, faulty, insufficient. It was politically motivated. And so I think COVID and the pandemic really accelerated our distrust of information and media. And so now I and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I feel like being highly attuned to the news and being kind of a junkie of what’s happening now is worse for my overall kind of grasp on reality than it would be if I had much less intake of that. So that’s the shift. You

Collin Hansen

guys know my chapter. I look back on my senior year of high school in 1999 and then fast forward about 25 years today to just see all the differences. And as an aspiring journalist, back in 1999 I would have thought about watching television news and reading newspapers and reading weekly magazines and monthly magazines and things like that would have been an important part of my job, and it would have made me a well informed good citizen to contribute to my to my neighbors, my my culture. If I heard of somebody today who spent all their time watching TV news and listening to news and reading all that stuff, I would probably see it as a sign of unhealth today and even a even a likelihood of their not having a good grasp of our world, in our situation. And I know you guys, we’ve talked about this many times, but in some part, this podcast is overhearing a lot of the conversations that we have on our staff as editors. I remember Joe Carter, one of our other longtime colleagues, talking about this with me at one point about just laughing about conspiracy theories and things like that, and we started thinking about all these different conspiracy theories that had turned out to be true, and this was in that post truth era, and we started thinking, Uh oh, I don’t really know what to think about these things anymore, and I’m not really sure where to go. That is a scary thing, but social media has contributed to that. It’s accelerated that, and it’s not doing much, certainly right now to be able to mitigate that. Ivan, like Brett, worked on TGC social media for years. How did that experience shape and ultimately change you? So

Ivan Mesa

it seems like this is like a confession time for all of us. I think Brett and I, over the years, in trading back and forth social media, we would talk about it being like the Lord of the Rings, ring of power that we held, and it had a corrosive effect.

Unknown Speaker

I don’t know which one,

Ivan Mesa

yeah, which one I’ll be sign wise who picked you up. So I think, yeah, over time I saw the effects of that, just professionally speaking, that it was just not good for my soul. And so thankfully, that’s not me these days at TGC, somebody else has to carry that ring. But I think even as the two of you are talking, I can recall 1520, years ago, just having the temptation or the desire to consume everything. Like whether it was just intellectual curiosity or equating spirituality with knowing things, or just that human temptation to just want to be omniscient, basically wanting to be like God. And I remember even in seminary, just the desire to read every single academic journal, not read word by word, but just be aware of every conversation that was happening, everything that was published, see every tweet, read every book. And to this day, I there’s, there’s a part of me that has that same temptation to just be in the know and read everything. Just part of that is, I’m sure, just normal common grace, curiosity, the way the Lord has wired me. But I think there’s a temptation that all of us have have to Yeah, a vain desire to be aware of everything. And what ends up happening is that it really robs us of what the Lord has called us to in our individual churches and families and relationships, to be present to those who know and love us. And so I think there’s subtle temptations that are there that, yes, it is good to know certain things, but sometimes that’s not good for your spiritual health. And Colin, you and I, we’ve gone back and forth on this over the years, right? I mean, we talked about just even from the journalistic angle, like you have to read every single thing, because this makes an informed citizenry in this country. And I think over the last maybe five years, I’ve been disabused of that idea that knowledge equals wisdom or actionable information that makes me a better fill in the blank, whatever it might be, you know,

Collin Hansen

yeah. And so one of the things that we’ve done at TGC to work against this and to push back this. We talk about this all the time in our training and our ongoing development. We talk about the relationship between books and people, especially old books. I mean, we have a pretty intense reading culture our staff, we’re still editors. We’re writing books. We’re reading books, things like that. So it’s not about reading, per se, but it’s really about the effects of social media and smartphone and what they do not about not just the time that they take up, but also the way that they deform you and your ability to read and retain information. Of course, one of the most famous contributors on that front is Nicholas Carr, who did an interview earlier this year along similar lines. You know, one of the things about postman’s musing ourselves to death is that, you know, a book has been influential when the ideas are ubiquitous, but nobody can even remember where they came from. And I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about the comparison between the mid century, mid 20th century dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. And I assume this must have been in postman, where this originally came from, 40 years ago, but postman said that Huxley was more likely to predict the direction of Western society toward the end of the 20th century. I’m going to leave it to you, Brett, to explain the differences in their visions and those implications. Yeah,

Brett McCracken

it’s one of the more memorable parts of postman’s amusing ourselves to death is the way he opens with that kind of comparing dystopias. And essentially, you know, he would say Orwell’s 1984 dystopia is a bit more of a top down kind of controlling people by means of surveillance and speech codes and whatnot, whereas Huxley’s dystopian vision and Brave New World was a little more driven by controlling people via pleasure and giving them kind of these addictive experiences. Soma, you know, was the thing that everyone was hooked to in Brave New World. And smartphones are kind of the soma of our day, right? People are everywhere. People are just glued to their phones in a very brave new world, dystopian way. So postman’s big idea was that dystopia in an over informed, kind of over stimulated, over mediated world will come via amusement, amusing ourselves to death. We will opt in to this right. We will sign the terms and conditions willingly so that we can be entertained, so that we can have this never ending stream of content that fills, fills our mind. And that’s where we’re at. And I think he was right now I would, I would nuance it a little bit, because I think that there are elements of 1984 and kind of the Orwell Orwellian dystopia that do exist in the internet age. We’ve seen with social media in recent years how there really is kind of Orwellian speech codes and things that you can’t say and that you are allowed to say. So there are elements of Orwell’s dystopia, but I think postman was right in general, in predicting that kind of dystopia by way of inflicting pleasure on people rather than pain.

Collin Hansen

One of the conversations that the three of us had in light of all of these concerns, was about developing a Tiktok account for the gospel coalition we have one. It’s not tended to very much. We don’t produce, as far as I know, any original content for it. Brett, maybe peel back the curtain here. Explain more of why we didn’t do more to develop a Tiktok account for TGC,

Brett McCracken

yeah. I mean, I think when, when, when I was overseeing social media with Ivan as someone who’s, you know, a postman fan and McLuhan, generally, tech skeptical, I would say I was very conflicted with the whole thing in terms of, like, each social media platform, and I would constantly be having this like, internal wrestle, like, are we just adding to the problem by, like, throwing all this content on these different platforms that are very addictive, and maybe, in general, not great for society. But with Tiktok in particular, we really wrestled with that. Because I think Tiktok, most people would agree, is kind of like the, you know, platonic ideal of social media. It’s like the extreme version of social media. It’s the most addictive. It’s, you know, it’s like this crack for you know, social media least text focused. It’s the least text focused people, just like, literally, will scroll through Tiktok for hours and forget what they were doing and get lost down that rabbit hole. So part of why we ended up not doing Tiktok is just like, if that conflict already existed for us, in terms of, like, are we just adding to the problem of social media addiction? You know, maybe throwing stuff on Tiktok is a net loss, like, Whatever, whatever potential gain there would be, which, no doubt there would be, we would probably reach some teenagers with good content if we were more active on Tiktok. I personally feel like the net loss is greater in terms of just perpetuating bad habits. But it was funny because I remember being in like we did, like a focus group with campus ministers, Ivan. I don’t know if you were on that or not, but it was probably like four or five years ago, and we asked them this question, Should TGC be active on Tiktok, and we’ve got pretty much evenly split responses. Some, some of the people were basically like, yes, absolutely. If you have any hope of reaching the next generation, that’s the only platform they’re on, so you have to be on Tiktok. But then we got just as many responses that were the opposite, where it was basically like the ick, you know, like, ew, like, TGC on Tiktok. Like, nobody wants that. Like, you guys should not be on Tiktok. That’s a different thing than what you are. Like, TGC should be the opposite of what Tiktok is, they said. And so we ended up siding with that side and basically saying, like, you know, maybe we’re missing out on a few teenagers out there who don’t know about TGC, and might never know about TGC because we’re not active on Tiktok. But personally, my hope is that for that teenager like there’s going to come a day when they have a spiritual question that they just instinctively know is not going to be sufficiently answered on Tiktok, and so they go searching on the internet for like, a substantial answer, and they find their way to TGC that way. So I’d rather us kind of err on the side of providing a substantial answer to a question, rather than trying to adapt it to the medium of Tiktok, which I don’t think, generally is conducive to the, you know, meaty, kind of substantive ideas that we’re going for. So, yeah, long answer, but it was a big wrestle for several years, you know, should we be on Tiktok? Should we not be on Tiktok? So, yeah,

Collin Hansen

yeah. And I got the feedback as well from a group at covenant College. This was three, four years ago, something like that. And I was wrestling just with you guys and all this stuff. I brought this up to them, and the students very instinctively said, No, I couldn’t understand why, because of the reasons that you mentioned the first group, if you’re going to reach Gen Z, you have to have to be on tick tock. That’s maybe not even just their first platform, but their only platform that they hang out on. And it’s obviously so powerful that you have a Congress that passed a law banning Tiktok and nobody has the will to enforce it because it’s so dominant, which is also interesting. I just saw recently that people who are influenced by Tiktok were much more likely to vote for President Trump than they were for Harris this last presidential election, which is also interesting in terms of upending people’s expectations of social media and expectations of those platforms. But I was asking these students about about it. Their response was, it just won’t work for you guys. I pushed them hard. It’s like, I don’t understand what you mean. All these people are doing deconstruction on Tiktok. Why can’t I do some evangelism apologetics? They said the medium won’t allow it, not only the algorithm, but there’s a sense that if you’re trying to push something, evangelism was going to come across as a sales pitch. And I said, Well, wait a minute, all these deconstructionists are making tons of money. They’re like, yeah, essentially, there’s an anti institution. Anti historical bias that’s just built into the whole thing, and that was that went into our decision making process there as well. Now on Tiktok, you think about the actual name and what it means. Well, the clock itself is a big part of postman’s book. Ivan, you and I have discussed working on a book about technological artifacts and the way they shape culture, including theology and the church. Shout out. If anybody’s out there watching or listening they think they want to hear from more from us on that subject, let us know. But here’s what postman wrote 40 years ago in this book, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. End quote, Ivan, how has postman’s book that we’re of course, engaging with and responding to 40 years later? How’s postman shaped your own views of cultural change?

Ivan Mesa

Yeah, well, we’ve been talking about this for years. Colin, so Yeah, put put it down in the comments if you want to see this book. Two thumbs up, exactly. Yeah, I think, you know, postman was relying a lot on Marshall McLuhan stuff that he had engaged with, and I think on the clock itself. I mean, his argument was that it just, it is a perfect cultural, technological artifact that creates the plausibility for a just imminent frame. This is just a godless world, this enlightenment philosophy that this is all that we know. Everything’s quantifiable. Everything’s quantitative, and so it made God less plausible. So I think I’m sure people would disagree on or quibble with whether the clock itself is that but I think a big emphasis for postman and McLuhan is that technology is never neutral. It both brings positive and negative effects on society. And so yeah, some of the conversations that you and I have had at Colin over the years include, I mean, the chapter from Carl Truman in the book that you edited years ago on Charles Taylor, how the advent of the Yeah, how the advent of the vehicle created more plausibility for someone who was being church disciplined in one context to just pick up and go somewhere else. And so before that, given the locality of an individual is just harder. You’re just stuck. And so you have so technology, it’s like the water that we swim in as fish in society. So it’s, it’s hard for many of us to think at a meta level about technology and how, what are the ways that technology is influencing us for the good and the and the negative? But I think yeah, McLuhan would talk about in the in the oral age, that emphasized the tribal, the participatory, and then with the print culture, it emphasized more the individual, more linear thinking. And then I think you were talking about the electronic age, where, even today, I mean, you see the effect that we process information now in a very fragmented fashion. There’s no linear, sequential argumentation. You are scrolling on Tiktok or whatever. I mean, I heard someone recently talk about being on a flight for six hours next to someone who was just for the whole duration of the six hour flight, just scrolling through Tiktok the entire six hours. So if that’s emblematic of the culture that we live in and that we’re trying to reach with the gospel, I think for better, for worse, we just need to come to grips with that that is our mission field. And how do we reach that mission field, that process information in a fragmentary way? And so yeah, I think we can take any cultural artifact, any any tech artifact, and just as a thought experiment, think through what are the ways that this technology has influenced our culture for better or for worse. And we’re not Luddites at TGC. We’re not saying we need to, you know, return the genie, back to the bottle. We need to return to the 18th century or to the second century, necessarily. But I think we need to just be honest about some of the ways that this has influenced the the ministry that we we have at TGC.

Collin Hansen

Let’s make this really personal and direct. Another thing that you got that we all talk about all the time. Our kids are very similar in ages. So like me, you guys have several young children. Ivan, let’s start with you. How’s your work at TGC in this book? How’s it shaped you as a parent? This might also help people who are thinking about the book know what’s the payoff for me in reading this book?

Ivan Mesa

Well, last night, I was just talking to my wife. We had really good conversation to think through as a married couple and as parents of young children, because this is not just for parenting. I mean, it starts with the parents us as individuals. How do we allow technology, for better, for worse, to shape our view of the world, the world that God has made the relationships? We have. So I think this is good for married couples. I would also say, when you think about parenting, yeah, maybe a decade ago, Andy Crouch had this book the tech wise family, and I remember reading that book and immediately taking that TV and putting in the basement of our house. His encouragement was to not have TVs until your children are there in their double digits. And there’s still part of me that is really sympathetic toward that perspective. I’ve kind of loosened up a little bit in my parenting over the years. We kind of carve out a few days a week where the children watch TV. But I think just practically speaking, I mean, again, if, if technology and the algorithm and these social media companies, their whole profit incentive is to take and monetize our attention. Then imagine what it’s like for our teenage or children, whether they be teenagers or young children with YouTube or whatever they’re watching. There’s this this irresistible pool that our children are going to face. And so part of being a faithful parent is not being legalistic about this, not being heavy handed in your parenting, but being intentional, being thoughtful, being a wise person to think what this looks like. And so I mean, I’m sure Brett has a number of ideas that come to mind, but I think for the Mesa household, one practical thing is we enjoy a meal around a table a mesa, literally in Spanish. And we just enjoy conversation. We share our highs and lows for the day. And you know, for me, growing up, I was reared in a family where you would have food in front of a TV. There was no conversation. It was just get the food put in the microwave, get it out and just watch the evening news or Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy or whatever TV show was on at that time, some Spanish soap operas. So I think that’s one area where I think parents, hopefully reading this book, will think through maybe talk to their spouses of ways they can be more thoughtful about this.

Collin Hansen

That’s great. Ivan Brett, of course, you mentioned the wisdom pyramid earlier, something you’ve been thinking about a lot. All of us have learned from Andy Crouch. The book was 2017, yeah, eight years ago, and him with older kids, kids are really in the bull’s eye. The worst of the effects of the smartphone era, kind of pre Jonathan height Gene twangies work. But Brett, how does, how does this work affect you?

Brett McCracken

Yeah, I mean, I would say this, this book and wisdom pyramid, were absolutely hugely motivated by me being a parent and just having a heart for this generation, the, you know, the the growing up in a screen saturated scrolling world that wasn’t my upbringing. You know, I’m an older millennial, and I fully kind of came of age before this generation, and the problems and the challenges that I had are similar, but also very different from what my kids and this kind of Gen Z, Gen alpha will have. And so it’s on my mind and heart just constantly, not only with my kids, but with, you know, college students these days, teenagers. I really want to help them navigate this and and so, yeah, this book definitely is something parents will find helpful. And one thing that’s true in all of this is your kids pick up what you do, right? It’s so much is caught, not taught. And so if you yourself are addicted to your phone and constantly scrolling, it’s you can say all you want to them, you know, go outside or do something other than scrolling, but they’re going to do what they see their parents do. And so I’m preaching to myself, you know, in this book and the Wisdom pyramid, more than anyone else, because I want to model for the next generation a healthier way to live. And you know, to go back to Reed’s chapter on not being digital spectators, but being tangible participants in life, that’s what I want from my kids, like I so want them to not live in this virtual, kind of surreal world where they’re just observing other people’s lives and watching influencers, you know, and aspiring to be an influencer themselves, like I want them to, like be getting their hands dirty in the reality of life and building things and not just kind of observing other things. That’s what every parent wants for their kids, and the technology today works against that. And so just getting them in that mindset of like, yes, like, participating in the stuff of life in tangible ways, in local ways, is so much more compelling and interesting than all the scrolling you could do. You know, no matter how compelling it is, whatever you’re you’re looking at on your phone,

Ivan Mesa

and one antithesis would be just nature. I mean, Brett has written a lot about this in his wisdom pyramid. Brett is that is Richard Louv, the author, lost child, or Last Child in the Woods. Last Child in the Woods. Yes. I mean, that book is super helpful when it comes to just encouraging children to be out. There’s one. Book, I think, called three screens, something like that, where basically our children are containerized from, you know, a high chair to a TV, TV to just a car, vehicle, just the windshield. And so so much of our lives, and including our children, is just behind some sort of screen, and I think just encouraging children go out, get hurt, break a bone, sometimes, all these things are good for children as part of their natural development, and also for adults. And so Brett and I mean, we’ve gone back and forth over the years of just kind of one upping each other on different trips. I even had Brett recommend a trip to Moab, Utah, and that was fantastic to be out in Arches National Park and enjoy God’s creation. And I think to the degree that we are sucked into the vortex of social media technology, it just robs us of one of God’s many good gifts that He gives us to enjoy Him and to really be present with those around us. Yeah,

Brett McCracken

I’ve been, we’ve been talking, I’ve been talking to Ivan about this. You know, if you can picture the like evolution, the evolution of man from the ape to the standing upright, that you can you picture that image like the new image after the standing upright man is the like, hunch down looking at your phone, like, that’s where we are now as a society. And it’s so tragic to me. It’s it’s tragic to me when I’m in public, in almost any public place, honestly, coffee shop, a college campus, walking down the street, everyone I look at is in this new humanoid posture of like, looking down at their phone. And what strikes me that’s so sad about that is when you’re doing that, you’re not looking you’re not looking up at God, and so you’re not looking to the Divine and to your Creator. You’re not looking horizontally at your fellow man. So the two most important postures in life the vertical to God and the horizontal to our relationships, we’re not doing because our heads are down looking at this kind of narcissistic, you know, the mirror of narcissists, right? It’s just, it’s a, it’s an inward, curved, kind of Augustinian picture of sin. We’re just everything we’re doing when we’re looking at our devices self referential, it’s the algorithms feeding our pleasures back to ourselves. And it’s just so sad, right? We’re not fully human. We’re not flourishing in our humanity if we’re not looking outward and upward.

Collin Hansen

Amen. Now, got a few more questions here with Brett Ivan. Book is scrolling ourselves to death, reclaiming life in a digital age, published by the gospel coalition and crossway. Hans Medway May, another previous gospel bound guest, writes this in a post truth, epistemology, popularity is sexier than truth. Well, Brett, good thing. That’s only a problem on the left, right,

Brett McCracken

right? Yeah. It’s only only the left that struggles with that. Yeah, no, it’s that is a problem on the left, on the right, on every side. It’s, it’s this weird kind of, it’s this dynamic where the pursuit of truth, discourse that in theory is pursuing truth has now been merged with kind of high school era dynamics of peer pressure and social pressure, and it’s social media basically makes it so that you’re never really, truly pursuing the truth, quote, unquote, you’re pursuing what your audience wants to you to say. And so we’re at this point where, like saying the right thing to your particular audience that you want to reach, or the audience whose approval you’re desiring, that has become more important than saying the right thing, period, right the right thing for this audience or that audience. And we all struggle with that. I struggle with that. It’s the like the social nature of information is potent and powerful because we are social creatures. We’re we’re relational creatures. And so when when discourse moves into this socialized space which it has, we can’t help but be motivated in powerful ways by our human desire for approval, for applause, for affirmation. And so everything we say on social media is loaded with those dynamics, like, is this going to come off correctly? Like, are people going to like me or not like me for saying this? And that just creates a world of problems, right? Because you get this kind of fear of saying what you know is true, because if you say it, you might alienate some people in your tribe right, because truth is not tribal at the end of the day, like it stands above that. And sometimes certain tribes are right about the truth, but not always. And so James Wood, you know, wrote this article. Uh, for TGC that I thought was so helpful. But one sentence from that article stood out to me. He said, the pressure to keep up and step in line by committing to a tribe and its established set of acceptable takes means you become a less serious thinker. And I think that’s what it boils down to like, if you want to be a serious thinker, you have to kind of rid yourself of that social pressure to to think in public in ways that are seeking approval rather than seeking the truth. And that’s a hard thing. That’s a costly thing. You’re probably not going to have a huge platform if you’re if that’s honestly what you want to do, to seek the truth rather than tribal approval. But yeah, it’s something we all struggle with. I think

Collin Hansen

I mentioned this in my COVID five year anniversary commentary, but I’ve had to learn through social media and news that you’re more likely to find somebody telling the truth when it goes against their self interest. It’s not a guarantee, but that’s often an indicator. And so I hope we’re offering a model of that in this book and also in this conversation. I do actually think that podcasts are one of the more conducive edifying media as a medium. I think it allows you to have deeper, more thoughtful conversations that in some ways, is a reversal of what happened in television that postman was warning about, and even what had happened on radio as well. But generally speaking, you’re talking to three people whose livelihoods depend to a certain extent, on social media, and trying to recognize that we, in some ways, have been more exposed. It’s like my friend that I went to college with who works at Facebook, and that’s the guy I want to talk to about what he does with social media and and iPads, which, by the way, you know, he doesn’t do much. Put it that way, very restrictive. It’s exactly the people who are so immersed in it were the ones that you should be listening to if they’re speaking contrary. That’s

Ivan Mesa

all. That’s all the leaders of Silicon Valley, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg, like they they don’t want their children on social media.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, yeah. In tech, in tech, free schools, yeah. The more likely you are to find the folks in Los Angeles and San Francisco or at the high levels there. You more likely to find them in private schools that are very restrictive on technology. You know, going back to one thing you guys had said earlier, my wife and I, having experienced and read and participated in all the stuff that we’re talking about, here is one thing that led us to move we didn’t move very far. We moved into a neighborhood where you could range and roam for miles, and there was no no phones, no gizmos, no watches, anything like that, but just roaming with friends. Now there’s an environment of trust within that neighborhood as well, but it’s exactly in light of what we’re talking about here is just giving them that freedom to explore, to build relationships, to to get hurt and to have to deal with it. That’s part of the maturation process and has been so stunted with a lot of the tech focus that’s intervened. Ivan, let’s turn to the church now. Jake. Jake, Kim, he’s done a lot for us over the years at TGC, various books and various essays. He identifies a commitment problem in the church today, and he points out that meaningful connection, it’s always inconvenient but beautiful, but meaningful community, it always demands a high commitment. I know, Ivan, you guys, your dedication to your church is really significant to you and your church is very intentional about how, how you do things. What do you and your church do to address this commitment problem that these internet technologies exacerbate?

Ivan Mesa

Yeah, I’m so glad you bring up the church, because I think I mean the one of the primary reasons that Brett and I did this book is to encourage church leaders, and so we specifically wanted discussion questions at the end of each chapter to encourage you know, elder boards, pastors, small group leaders, youth workers. So if you’re listening to this and you’re one of one of those groups categories, I would encourage you, buy this in bulk, distribute and maybe read with others and ask each other the questions that we have there at the end of each chapter. And think specifically how would this translate into my church context? And so, yeah, I’d be curious to hear, to hear what you Colin and Brett would would add to this. But I think, yeah, that this is the heartbeat of why we did this. It’s not just to have an abstract ivory tower conversation about technology and social media, but to really think how the rubber meets the road with how it affects Christian discipleship, church ministry, and so I mean personally, in my context, I think let me just start personally, I would just say we often treat church as a consumable, good. Um. I mean, Brent has written so much about this with his book uncomfortable. Colin, you wrote a whole book with Jonathan Lehman, Rediscover church, and so I’m just here preaching to the choir. But I think is just the mindset shift of we need to be treating church, not as a in a consumeristic fashion, but coming to commit ourselves. And I think in our church context, that practically means we actually commit. We are a member of a church. Now different churches might kind of skin that cat in different ways. What does membership look like but just an understanding that we belong to this church? We’re not church hopping, we’re not indifferent, we’re not dating the church. We are committed to one local assembly of believers. And not quite like marriage, but similar to marriage, we are covenanting with other believers. And one of the things I really love about my church is that in each of our members meetings, we read aloud the church covenant, and it basically is rehearsing so many of the exhortations in the New Testament of watching over one another, forgiving one another, loving one another, serving each other, committing to, you know, the relief of the poor and sending out missionaries to the nations. And so that is a good liturgical way that we remind ourselves, individually and corporately, of this commitment that I think you’re you’re asking about. So, yeah, I think there are just so many ways that, if you’re a church pastor, church leader, just in terms of even practically speaking the liturgy of a service, you are coming together and rehearsing what God has done in Christ, in the Gospel. And so the very shape of the liturgy in a church setting communicates that we are here not based on common preferences, common tastes, common, you know, socio economic interests or background, but we’re coming committed to the Lord and to each other because of our common holding fast to the gospel, to Christ Himself. And so I think those are just some practical ways at an individual level and a corporate level, that we can just encourage that sort of commitment.

Collin Hansen

That’s really good. Ivan Brett, I mean, considerably all of us have been really involved lay leaders in our churches. How about you?

Brett McCracken

Yeah. I mean, I think the subtitle of the book scrolling ourselves today is reclaiming life in a digital age, and I really think the church is a huge part of that reclaiming life, and we have the opportunity, as the local church, to to be something different, to be something that people actually are going to be hungry for, which is embodied relationships, community that gets you outside of that self referential narcissist orientation of the smartphone, where You just become exhausted with the self. You become weary of the self, right? And a Church takes you outside of yourself. You go to church, and it’s not a lowercase i world anymore. It’s God’s world that your attention, your gaze, goes to God, to the vertical to horizontal, to the brothers and sisters you’re with who are very different from you, who are not not what that algorithm would pick for you, necessarily. And that’s a beautiful thing. And and I think the tangible, like embodied nature of the local church, which is what Jay Kim wrote about in his chapter, is going to become increasingly desirable and beautiful for people. And just in my own life, I go to a hyper local, local church. It’s literally two blocks from me, so we walk to church. Several of our key leaders, elders, live in my neighborhood, and I I walk down to their church sometimes to just be prayed for if I’m having a hard time with something that’s something the internet can’t offer me. The Internet can’t hug me and pray for me when I’m going through a hard time, like tomorrow morning, one of the guys in my church, who lives two blocks away is going to come over and watch our kids, because Kira and I have to take an early fight. That’s something the internet can’t provide for me, like the local church does, though, for me, and I go to church, and it’s this radically different experience than scrolling on my smartphone. And so there’s a real counter cultural, counter formational value to the church. And so I hope that to Ivan’s point, church leaders, church staffs, will read this book together and really think creatively about not how we can throw away all our phones and be kind of Luddites, although the Amish do show up repeatedly in this book, they do so some people, some chapters like legitimately just say the Amish are doing something right, which they are. But we’re not arguing that technology as a whole is bad. It’s just the church can be the leader in a culture that is increasingly sickly because of these dynamics. And we need to be the leaders. We need to be the ones offering refuge and better ways of living for these increasingly weary people in the scrolling age. So I hope church leaders take up that challenge, and I hope this book is a resource for them.

Collin Hansen

This book helps to clarify one of the misconceptions. Options about the Amish. We associate the Amish with simply being anti technology. That is not true. The Amish use any number of different technologies and disagree among themselves about which technologies to adopt. Think critically about they think critically about what adopting a certain technology will add but also subtract. That’s what we’re trying to commend in this book. Is for evangelicals especially, to be a lot more thoughtful as individuals, as families, as churches, neighborhoods, communities, be a lot more intentional about considering, what is this technology bringing but also taking away? Can I

Ivan Mesa

just turn the tables on you? Can I ask you a question? So you said, in particular evangelicals, we have this inherent pragmatism. We’re quick to just embrace anything for the sake of the gospel, and there might be something noble about that, but what we’re trying to advocate for here is not this pure pragmatism. So I’m just curious, what is it about evangelicalism? Evangelicals in in large part that there’s that temptation to just use whatever means without thinking critically about it in Amish like fashion.

Collin Hansen

A couple things. One is that we, we have a conception of the gospel that tends to be fairly abstract and spiritual without connection to the physical and to the incarnational. In some ways, that comes to be we don’t tend to value church buildings. We don’t tend to value the sacraments or the ordinances as much. So in some ways, what it means to be Protestant is to just be the opposite of Catholic. It’s not actually true, but that’s somehow sometimes how we practice it. So part of it’s just the fact that we tend to be fairly disembodied. Just don’t attend properly to the physical in relationship to the spiritual. The second is that we we have a conception of the gospel as well that is hyper individualistic. Now, I don’t think that’s the way evangelicalism has to be or should be as the proper inheritance of the Reformation. I don’t think that’s true at all. But the way it’s adopted in a modern American context, in particular, and to a certain extent, more more western approach is a highly pietistic, individualistic appropriation. You combine those two things. And then to Brett’s point about the turn toward the inward, that our kind of, our Gospel, is leaning in that direction, and to a sense of this world is is like we don’t put a lot of emphasis on the physical. Well, we might be more prone than anybody else to being to to these addictions that we’re talking about and these problems in there. So I think one of the most effective pushbacks, I mean, you guys are really nailing so many of the different things, but one reason in this book that we’re focusing on the church is because properly understood that covenanted church membership with a sense for the physical, the neighborhood, the parish, the one another is all of that that is well within our Protestant inheritance for us to adopt. Not only that, our evangelical inheritance, ultimately our biblical inheritance. So in many ways this, this is a call for us to truly live out the fullness of the biblical call, as opposed to some of the ways that American evangelicalism expresses itself. It really all the way from the 19, 18/18, century through to today. But merely the internet draws out some of these things. But I think, you know, Nathan chapter touches on some of this, but we could talk about it more broadly, but evangelicals are typically at the forefront. I mentioned in my chapter that if you see a church that’s adopted a lot of new media technology, you never think that it’s Orthodox, like Eastern Orthodox. You never think it’s Catholic. It’s almost always evangelical. That’s a good and a bad thing. We’re always seeking better ways to spread the gospel, but we’re very we’re not in tune with what it’s taken away because we don’t have a properly physical sense of our religion. On that note, Ivan, let’s, let’s close with you. On this one, this goes back to the chapter we’ve referred to many times from read Mercer shoe card. He speculates about, and I need to be clear, it’s a speculation. He speculates about how Jesus would spend his time today. Would it look like what we see in the Bible, effectively, just hanging out with primarily 12 guys and and a few others there, or would it look more today like a Tiktok account, a YouTube channel, a podcast. Even, I don’t think I’d ever really thought about that question before. Ivan, is that something you’d given thought to, and how do you kind of read along the lines of shoe cart in that chapter?

Ivan Mesa

Yeah, throw me a curve ball there at the end. Yeah. I love the counterfactual. Colin. Mean, you and I have talked ad nauseum about just history, whether it’s World War Two or church history, like, what if you know something else had happened? So I love just considering as a thought experiment, what would it look like if Jesus was born in the 21st century as opposed to the first century? I do think the argument he’s making is very much likely. I mean Jesus embodied experience His ministry, the touch his hands, just the the embodied nature of his ministry, the locality of it, geographically. It was just all contained and constrained in many ways. So I do

Brett McCracken

anonymous at times, right, to

Collin Hansen

not Yeah, to withdraw from the crowds

Ivan Mesa

age of smart Yeah. So even in the first century, Jesus could have utilized more ways to expand his ministry beyond the confines of, you know, Caesarea or Jerusalem, to to the outer parts of the Roman Empire. And of course, in the ministry of Paul and the apostles there that did come to fruition in different ways, but in just thinking through this conversation, one of the passages that often comes to mind is Galatians four four. And there’s this little phrase in Galatians four four that it seems like in passing, but I think there’s a lot there that pertains to this conversation. So Galatians 44 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And the phrase, when the fullness of time had come, I think it’s just so crucial. And this is the part where, in my own imagination. It just It boggles it, and it overwhelms it. Sometimes, when you think of the sovereignty of God, the providential care of God, from creation to the fall to the calling of Abraham to Moses and David and Israel, and all that that we know from scripture, but that Christ would come in a certain time frame, in the first century, with the Roman Empire and a shared culture and shared language and all that within the larger framework. It’s just, it’s fascinating to think that despite all the counterfactual conversations we might have at the end of the day, God chose to come in this particular time when there was no Tiktok account, there was no YouTube account, and so, yeah, I think different Christians might go in different directions. I’d be curious to know what you all think. But to me, at the end of the day, I just stand amazed at the wisdom of God to come in the manner that he did, in the way that he did, and I think that bears a lot of implications for the way, the ways that you and I do ministry. Yes, some things might change, but at the end of the day, the things that don’t change are the sorts of things that that characterize Jesus life and ministry, of caring, of preaching the gospel, of calling sinners to repentance. And this is kind of the way that that I end the book with the Epilog. In these conversations, it’s so interesting to to focus on the things that have not changed. Sorry, the things that have changed over the centuries, but at the end of the day, the ministry that you and I are called to pretty much has not changed. We will still preach the same gospel. We will still call sinners to repentance and and that is the the thing that brings all of us in this meeting, this as we read this book, joy in our ministry.

Collin Hansen

Amen. Any anything out there? Brent,

Brett McCracken

no. I mean, just, I think about the fullness of time, verse in Galatians a lot as well. And one thing I think about is, you know, there weren’t, there weren’t like digital technologies, obviously, when Christ was walking the earth, but there were technologies there, like Roman roads. That’s a form of technology, Papyrus.

Collin Hansen

Papyrus is a technology. God obviously

Brett McCracken

used those technologies for his purposes to, you know, expand the spread of the gospel. And so in every era of history, there’s technologies, and I believe God uses and works through, you know, almost all of them, right? Like even Tiktok. We’ve been knocking Tiktok, but I’m sure there’s people he’s, you know, reached through Tiktok. And so we’re not, it’s not, it’s not our prerogative to say how God or whether he can use technologies. It’s it’s for us to just think carefully about how we use it and how we form community to use or not use certain technologies, using the best wisdom we have right at our disposal to make those decisions. But in God’s sovereignty, he certainly uses technologies and in certain areas of history. As a history major in college, I love history. I think it’s absolutely fascinating to look at how God to look back and see how he used certain new technologies in powerful ways, the printing press, the Reformation, like is another one. And the internet, I have no doubt that. It in 100 years. You know, should the Lord Terry historians will look back on the digital age and maybe notice things like the gospel coalition and similar ministries that really leveraged this new technology to advance the gospel. And so that’s wonderful, and that’s great, but I think you can believe that and at the same time approach it with care and and kind of wisdom, knowing that God can use something for good purposes and it can simultaneously be used in negative purposes, which is just the sort of nuance we’re trying to get at in the book

Collin Hansen

new technology for timeless truth, such as the importance of physical relationships and embodied ministry in there. Now I’m going to do something a little bit different here. I’m going to say thank you to you guys here, because I want to close on a couple different quotes. So my guests here, my good friends and colleagues, longtime colleagues, Ivan Mesa, Brett McCracken, their book is scrolling ourselves to death, reclaiming life in a digital age, published by crossway along with the gospel coalition. So really appreciate you guys joining me, and I’m going to close on a couple different quotes. First one here is from Brett from The Book, the church mustn’t stand by as scores of people scroll their way into oblivion, distracting themselves to death and clicking their way to corruption. We must step in and speak truth that gives life, redirecting glazed over eyes and lifting hunched down faces to behold the one who is infinitely more satisfying than whatever fleeting amusements flash across our screens. Thanks. Brett, this last one here is from Reed Mercer shoe card. Life is not a popularity contest. That’s your worst High School nightmare. Life is a constant invitation to accept the challenge of being the presence of the kingdom here and now. For those around you, Christ changed one life at a time. Christianity grew by believers following this model go and do likewise the people who need the Christ within you are within earshot. You can probably see them from where you’re sitting.