Interview Transcript

Mike Andrews, hello and thank you for the invitation to appear on The Narrative Podcast, from the Center for Christian Virtue, by recording. My name is Tony Reinke, a nonprofit journalist and teacher based in Phoenix. I have sought to serve the church by writing on tech and media for a decade now. I serve as a senior teacher at desiringGod.org, and have the honor to be the producer and host of John Piper’s podcast, Ask Pastor John.

You sent three really good questions. I’ll work through them one by one.

Digital Journeys

Question 1: What are some biblical principles — boundaries, disciplines, etc. — that can be applied to smartphone use that Christian parents should model and discuss with their children before giving them their own device?

Exactly right. Modeling is key. This is not a teenager problem. Grandma’s on Facebook too much. Mom’s on Instagram too much. So back in 2015, I set aside a full year to get my own heart right with my smartphone habits. I was spending too much time in social media. I was being stupid with my time. Foolish with my heart and my attention. I subtly began to think social media networks would fulfill me.

Of course, they never could. Instead, they distracted me from what was most important. I used social media all the time for ministry. It was my job. But I also used these platforms idolatrously — as idols of security and self-affirmation. Maybe you’ve been there.

So I took several digital detoxes in 2015, time offline and away from social media. Deleted apps, turned my phone off — those sorts of things. And I used the season to confess to the Lord what he was showing me about what was inside of me. I invested more time into prayer and Bible reading and meditation on God’s truth. More time reading great books. More time with the family — intentional time with them, on trips that I had planned out. Things like that. I reprioritized the local church. I spent more time dreaming about ministry possibilities in the future.

It was a painful season of self-scrutiny, but necessary. And it was fruitful, one fruit of it being my 2017 book, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. That book each of my teens had to read before getting an iPhone.

Attention Overload

That process of honest discovery with myself about social media led me to further consider life inside the attention economy, inside the Hollywood media age. How can we thrive as Christians in this age of these massive, compelling digital spectacles that are all around us, every image and video clamoring for our eyes? How do we live by faith in such an eye-dominant culture? And where do we turn so that our lives are not inundated with viral, digital, ephemeral pointless things that don’t matter?

And that question led me to a second book, a meditation I published in 2019, called Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age. And these two books, the book on smartphones and the book on spectacles, work in tandem as warnings to show biases at work in the world, and how our media pushes us toward digital spectacles and hollows out our lives from what is eternally important.

There’s a social dilemma at play. Our attention is monetized, and we need limits and restrictions and legislations, yes. But there’s also a spiritual dilemma at play. And it’s this: our smartphones simply give us what we most want. This is what our kids need to know — what we all need to know: I am not a victim of my phone.

My phone, my social media platforms, are simply delivering to me what I most want. We have affections and desires, and those are misdirected, and then those misdirected desires get solidified into social media algorithms that feed those desires more and more. Algorithms don’t tell you what to desire. Algorithms feed you what you most want. The tailored algorithm is basically a digital decipher of what we most want.

Pixilated Desires

Another way to say it is the smartphone screen is a black mirror to reflect back to our eyes what your heart most desires in pixilated form. If our true heart is narcissistic, that’s what you’ll find online — you’ll search for things that bolster your self-image. If in your heart you harbor disdain for certain people, what you see on social media will stoke that disdain even further. If your heart is driven by unquenchable desire for sexual lust, porn will be the thing you see on your screen. The phone discloses what your heart most wants.

You can tell yourself that you’re a nice person, morally good, don’t hurt others. But there’s a Kafka-like nightmare awakening ahead of us all when we look into our phone screen, and we stare directly into our own heart’s desire. It’s right there on our screen. And if the Spirit is at work in your life, at some point, deep down, this exposé will drive you to your knees. And you’re not going to hear this in the cultural criticism. We’re not simply victims of Silicon Valley tricksters; we are sinners led by desires and impulses inside us that must be crucified.

So we continue to proclaim that rhetorical interrogation of Isaiah 55:2 and apply it to our hearts and our screens: “Why do you spend your attention on that which is not bread, and gaze at a screen for something that will never satisfy you?” That’s the spiritual dilemma we all face — mom, dad, teen. We can model this in our homes.

Wisdom Meets Gratitude

What I realized after these painful pruning seasons was that my whole take on technology changed. It matured. It deepened. For a long time I had been an early adopter of gadgets, a lot of it naively so. At the end of this process, I found myself less naive about tech, more aware of its biases. But also — at the same time — I became a lot more aware of God’s generosity in the technologies that adorn my daily life.

That resulted in my meditations on the generosity of God in all of the science and medicine and computers and smartphones and cars and homes that we enjoy, technologies that adorn my life every day. I’m cautious of the tools we have, and I’m also totally amazed that I get to live in this age, and not one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago.

My gratitude for all my tech culminated in a third book: God, Technology, and the Christian Life. It’s the capstone now of a decade-long process from seeing my sin exposed by smartphone misuse, to now seeing God’s glory and his generosity in my smartphone.

Tech Dangers and Opportunities

Question 2: Smartphones have been around for almost two decades. What are some dangers, especially spiritual, regarding phone and technology use that Christians still are either not aware of, or perhaps not fighting against as actively as we should?

In 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, I think all twelve ways are still underappreciated. Much is on the line. I think we are still learning how to balance our digital tools and integrate them into our flourishing and not our self-destruction. That’s life as technology-makers and -users. We make tools, we adopt tools, and then we spend years and decades trying to adapt those tools to our flourishing. That’s the process we are in now.

Four Stages to Flourishing

Here’s what I discovered over that decade of writing about tech and media. The tech conversation needs to progress up in four stages, and those stages get harder (and rarer) as you climb the ladder. Here’s how I put it.

Stage 1

We identify tech problems externally. This is a view of tech in which we conclude, “The app made me do it.” This is The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix. “The algorithm made me do it. Big tech is ruining our lives.” We externalize sin, leaving it to regulations and legislation.

That’s not wrong entirely, because big tech does code biases into their algorithms and apps and gadgets. They do. No question. But our concern is incomplete if that’s the extent of it. And I think it is the extent that most Christians ever reach. And so if you think holiness is about not having a smartphone, you’re in for a shocker. So we need to go further.

Stage 2

We identify tech problems internally. Aware of biases in tech (real biases in how our apps and platforms are made, absolutely — ones we must be aware of), I must next become aware of the sinful inclinations living inside of me. Because tech biases (on the outside of me) are pushing and pulling on native, sinful inclinations within my own heart that must be dealt with.

Again, that’s why I wrote 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You and Competing Spectacles. Social media, smartphones, the attention economy — at their worst, they all appeal to something lurid inside of me. So what is that? That sin in me has got to be addressed. That’s stage 2 — identifying tech problems internally, not simply externally.

Stage 3

We voice gratitude to God for our tech. Biases acknowledged (in stage 1), sin patterns identified and confessed and dealt with (in stage 2), now I have eyes beginning to open to see the generosity and brilliance of the Creator in the tens of thousands of innovations I use every single day. I see God’s generosity in all of it. I see his generosity in all the things I’m using right now for me to record my voice for you in my studio and for you to hear me later. All of it, a divine gift.

“Christ crucified is the hinge of history, where all human spectacles meet one unsurpassed, cosmic, divine Spectacle.”

I aspire to help my kids to see this, by the power of the Spirit. Silicon Valley is not just humans doing human things. These tools are gifts from God to be stewarded for his glory. If you miss this stage, you have no foundation for stewardship. The whole tech conversation operates in the realm of godlessness. He’s a nonfactor.

This is huge, and required a whole book of its own, one I wrote titled God, Technology, and the Christian Life. As God prepared his people to enter the promised land with its milk and honey flowing, he was also preparing them to enter a land of iron and copper.

And God warns them: When you make a technological society that is wealthy and comfortable and if you fail to glorify God for all his generosity in everything you make, you are an idolater. For whatever reason, God’s people are shortsighted and blind to his generosity when they hold shiny metal things that they made. That’s the story of Deuteronomy 8:9–20.

So when we pull lithium from the ground, and aluminum, iron, silicon, cobalt, nickel — and we refine those elements into a new iPhone, that iPhone is a gift from the Creator, one he coded into his creation, for which we can now praise him. Most Christians are not here. When most Christians think of the iPhone, God is irrelevant. And our kids pick up on that real quick. But why is stage three important? That’s because, finally . . .

Stage 4

We are called to live out our tech-stewardship. Aware of the biases in tech (step 1), aware of the sin inclinations inside of me (step 2), and now beholding God’s generosity in his material gifts in his creation (step 3), technology in my life can now conform to my calling and inform how I use tech and how I parent tech-stewardship in the home.

This is the hardest part of the tech conversation. We are called to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Our tech gifts can help us to do that. I’ve dedicated my life to online ministry for this reason. I want to employ my tech gifts to love others. I believe electricity and data coding and the digital age and computer chips and smartphones and laptops and the internet were all God’s idea, inherent within the creation that he gave us to cultivate and develop.

Hung Up on ‘No’

But again, we tend to get stuck at stage 1. And it’s the spiritual danger almost no Christian appreciates — “the algorithm made me do it.” And so our parenting, for example, sounds a lot like, “No, you can’t have that gadget!” “No, you cannot use that app!” “No, you should never do that thing, look at that thing, online!” No, no, no. It never gets into the yes and amens of stewardship, of a vision of life for how to glorify God and to serve others. This fourth stage has huge implications for pastors and parents, and for anyone trying to figure out tech-ethics.

But, again, it’s just really hard to get there, because our tech-ethics are really lagging behind. We settle on being tech-dismissive and just remain there. It’s just easier to settle into stage-1 or maybe into stage-2 ethics and never move into stage-3 gratitude or stage-4 stewardship. In fact, I’d be willing to say that most Christians stagnate at stage 1 (“the app made me do it”) and never even get into stage 2 (doing the hard work of heart-work).

So when it comes to stages 3 and 4, I’m hoping Christians will learn this over the years and decades ahead. It’s not something you can add fast. It takes years to learn and appropriate these things into our lives. But without that basis for stewardship, we are lost and have no way forward but to dismiss the tech-age as Babel-like and godless. We can only diss on tech, as we hold our iPhone in hand. Our kids pick up on that dishonesty pretty quickly.

Our Phones, Our Hearts, Our Gospel

Question 3: What are some diagnostic questions or practices Christian parents or teens should regularly ask in order to keep smartphone usage within healthy and appropriate margins? And if you don’t mind me cheating a bit and asking the other side of this question, too — how can we apply the gospel to our own lives, or preach it to our kids, when our smartphone usage drifts outside of those healthy and appropriate margins?

There’s a lot we can do as far as practices. An iPhone contract is useful to set out expectations for a teen. All devices charged at night in Mom and Dad’s room, or some neutral place, never left in a teen’s room. Sundays offline. Things like those are helpful, but none of them distinctly Christian. We get Christian when we ask the right diagnostic questions. That’s exactly the right approach. Here are eight you can use with yourself, and then your teens:

1. How much of my media is for escape? And what am I escaping?
2. Does my screen time leave me more recharged or more depleted?
3. Is my media diet enriching my time with Christ or eroding it?
4. How consistent is my personal devotional life?
5. What does my prayer life look like?
6. Is my communion with God drab and boring? Or is it alive?
7. How do Christ-centered sermons and songs affect me? And what does this say about how I protect my heart for Sunday worship?
8. Are my digital desires serving my God-given duties, or are they distracting me from them?

Insatiable Eyes

Those eight questions cut to the heart of the matter in “the age of the spectacle,” as it has been called. The Bible says, “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Proverbs 27:20). The graveyard is never full of coffins because Sheol is an open mouth, always consuming — day and night. So too are our eyes. Vivid. Like a cemetery, our eyes are insatiable — always roving, never satisfied by anything in this world. Fallen eyes endlessly consume death.

So I love the resolve in Psalm 101:3: “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless.” On whatever will not profit my soul, I will not focus my eyes. That’s incredible. Later the psalmist echoes this same challenge, but in the form of a desperate prayer, in Psalm 119:37. There he prays, “[God,] turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways.” And that’s how resolves work. It doesn’t take long before we’re desperately crying out to God to make the resolve happen!

Which means our great enemy is not the external seducers nor the spectacle-makers. Our great enemy is our own insatiable eye-appetite that is death. Again, that’s absolutely frightening. And so in Numbers 15:39, God tells Moses to say to the people of Israel to follow the will of God in his word and to not “follow after your own heart and your own eyes.” If you fill your eyes with the spectacles of this world, you will grow deaf to the voice of God (Numbers 15:39).

And so when the psalmist cries out to God in Psalm 119:37, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways,” he’s saying the fullness of life is not fullness of eyes. And that is the competition we feel, because we can fill our eyes with endless spectacles in every direction, and in the end it’s a feeding on death, a feeding on what cannot give you life.

One Great, All-Satisfying Spectacle

So how does the gospel come in here? This is absolutely huge. I’m so glad you asked. Because into the spectacle-loving world, with all of its spectacle-makers and spectacle-making industries, came the grandest Spectacle ever devised in the mind of God and brought about in world history — the cross of Christ.

Christ crucified is the hinge of history, the point of contact between BC and AD, where all time collides, where all human spectacles meet one unsurpassed, cosmic, divine Spectacle. From this moment on, God intends for all human gaze to center on this climactic moment. In the cross God says to us, “This is my beloved Son, crucified for you, a Spectacle to capture your heart forever!”

In his account of the cross, Luke tells us in Luke 23:48 that the crucifixion was a physical spectacle for crowds to see. But the cross is not merely a physical spectacle for the eye. Its greater glory is in serving as a spectacle for the ear of faith. So in Colossians 2:15, Paul tells us that what you could not see with your eyes was the spiritual spectacle of victory it represents — victory over all sin and evil, over that evil inside of us, even.

The cross is huge, so huge, that in Galatians 3:1 Paul says the preaching of the cross is the re-celebration of the spectacle of the cross, as if it were portrayed on a prominent city billboard. That’s what “preaching Christ” means. In pulpits across the world, every week, God says to us again and again, “This is my beloved Son, crucified for you, a Spectacle to capture your hearts forever!” Preaching re-proclaims that over and over.

Faith-Driven Tech-Users

So by divine design, Christians are pro-spectacle, and we give our entire lives to this great Spectacle, now historically past and presently invisible. The driving spectacle at the center of the Christian life is an invisible spectacle. Only by faith can we see it. I have now been crucified to the world, and the world has been crucified to me, as the apostle Paul says (Galatians 6:14). Our response to the ultimate spectacle of the cross of Christ defines us.

Christ died for my sins of escapism, for my disdain for people, for my lust, for my vanity, for filling my eyes with worthless things. Christ died for the lurid desires and sins of my heart manifested on my screen. He came and died as a spectacle to the universe in order to forgive my guilt and then to free me from the power of my sins.

That doesn’t mean we parents are perfect users of the iPhone and tech. We aren’t. And when we fail here, when digital media takes too much of our attention, when we are distracted by worthlessness, our families will know it. And we can openly confess our need for Christ to forgive me — Dad — as I demonstrate in confession the beauty of the cross before my spouse and teens once again.

Now, it took me about a decade to put all four stages together. It’s complex. But I hope it helps other Christians and pastors and parents and teens to see a way forward in this age of technology. I am grateful for this opportunity to share what I have learned, Mike. Thank you for asking.