A Pastoral Note on Politics and Phones

Today I have decided to publish a lengthy pastoral note that I wrote to the parents of teens in my church. I wanted to remind myself that no matter what takes place on the earth, the Lord is King and that there are no political circumstances down here that change heavenly reality in the slightest. Anyway, it's all explained below.

Dear parents,

Bad news on the Internet

Earlier this afternoon I sat through our pastoral team meeting distracted and only somewhat listening as I obsessively switched browser tabs back and forth from the meeting minutes to the infamous New York Times U.S. Election forecast. As it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump will once again be elected President of the United States, I felt a pit of anxiety grow deep in my stomach. I was bracing, and not at all ready for another four years of emotionally exhausting political discourse, circus headlines, deeply divided culture, and what my friend described as “watching a car crash online every single day”. 

Eight years ago, I was 29 years old when Donald Trump was first elected president. I was younger and rasher. I lacked the perspective that I have today. I was still on Facebook and Instagram and occasionally Twitter at the time. I spent way more of my time online than I do today. I kept up with everything my friends and friends of friends shared on social media. I was vocal and opinionated myself on social media. I was far more emotionally invested back then in the culture wars and society as it was presented through the Internet.

I can still remember in my heart how angry and helpless I felt in those years. How personally I took every bit of bad news.  

Today I am a changed and chastened man. I know now that the online world only bears a passing resemblance to the real world. I also know now that it didn’t make me a better person to get angry whenever I read online about people being racist or dishonest or rude. It just made me a somewhat self-righteous twit. I am now aware of the destructive, reality-altering power of social media and the insidious allure that it has, the way it pollutes our minds and poisons our emotions, and its exceptional influence over young men and women who are unseasoned by real life experience. 

And I’m writing this to you now because I thought about how stupid I was even eight years ago and I remembered that since that time, the Internet has only grown more all-encompassing, less tethered to reality, more toxic, less helpful, and more predatory, especially for young people. And earlier today as I was driving home my thoughts went to you and all of your kids. And it occurred to me that if I could be that taken in by the Internet then how much more vulnerable are your children.

Over the last several months I have been having more and more conversations with the parents of teenagers in our church and one common theme has emerged: We need to do better to protect our children from screens, social media, and the Internet. We need to be more aware and less complacent about how destructive it is to the mental health of our young people, and how even a little bit of it can be poisonous. The truth is, more research is showing that even a little bit of it in regular amounts can profoundly alter the worldview of a teenager. 

We have moved from anxiety to anger to hopelessness

You should know that the spirit of our times has changed quite a bit from what it was even a few years ago. Things move very fast in our hyperconnected age. Eight years ago the general feeling around the Internet was that of anger. Mark Sayers, pastor and cultural analyst from Melbourne described a shift from anxiety to anger as everyday people felt that the world was getting worse in every way, our leaders had let us down, and the “bad guys were winning”. 

But the ethos is once again shifting. Anger is an exhausting emotion and you can only keep it up for so long before you burn yourself out. Our is now slouching into what some people are calling “ironic detachment”. This new attitude can be described as the feeling that, “the world is irreparably broken, everything sucks now, there is no hope, and the only thing I can do about it is be numb. It’s nihilism for a new generation. If I were to describe the average feeling of a young person online these days, it would be hopelessness. The only sensible response we can take towards this hopelessness is self preservation. Stop caring about anything, stop taking anything seriously, and stop trying at anything. What’s the point of getting good grades when billionaires steal everything for themselves? What’s the point of trying to be a better person when our political leaders are immoral and corrupt? 

This attitude is both silly and menacing when we see it reflected in our young people. It is silly because, let’s face it, who can take a 14 year old seriously when they say something like, “the world sucks”? I remember listening to a school counselor of a Christian school that my sister-in-law teaches at describe what it’s like when she greets her students in the morning. 

“Oh Ms! Life sucks! I just want to die” 

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I was going to wake up at 7am this morning, but I woke up at 6am instead and couldn’t fall back asleep and now I’m tired!”

This seems silly, but our young people are being fed an endless stream of bad news through the Internet that they are not emotionally equipped to process. They can’t separate the external bad news from their own negative emotions. They don’t have the capacity to understand the inherent bias of their newsfeeds and to put what they’re reading into perspective. They don’t know that social media is not a source of neutral information and that it is highly engineered to manufacture negative emotions in a way that is profitable. They haven’t yet fully formed their sense of self and that means that they will take everything personally. When you or I read something like, “Racist people in another country are being racist” we have the sense to know that it has nothing to do with us, but teens aren’t able to separate the sense of injustice they feel from their core identity. The bad news and hopelessness that they ingest fuses with their selfhood and they become convinced that they live in a crap world with no light or life or love. And then depression and anxiety manifests. 

Our young people are being discipled by the Internet-enabled supercomputer that they each have in their pockets. 

Our world is not hopeless

If there is one thing that defines a young person it is naivete. They lack perspective because they haven’t lived long enough to earn it. If they had any sense of history at all they would know that this time we live in isn’t even the worst, most hopeless time in the last century, let alone of all time. But youth engage the world with an all-or-nothing outlook. I still spend enough time on the Internet to keep up with what Gen Z and Alpha are thinking, and it is not an exaggeration to say that a lot of them truly believe that things have NEVER been worse for the human race. 

I am worried that no matter how hard you try, your kids will still get some of the splashback of this profoundly brainless worldview. It’s the kind of thing that their peers are thinking and saying all the time. It’s the kind of view that’s pushed out by TikTok and other short form video content. They will absorb a lot of the negativity and hopelessness because it’s just the water that we’re all swimming in right now. And to be fair, there is some truth to that. Geopolitically our world is going through some seismic changes as we move out of the Post-Post Cold War era into a new, uncertain world order. Technological development is increasing at a seemingly exponential rate and it is making it virtually impossible to experience stability in life.

But as Christians we are not bound by our place and time the way that the rest of the world is. We are passing pilgrims on our way to a truer, brighter future and a realer, less shadowy land. The kingdoms of this earth are nothing compared to the eternal kingdom to which we belong. 

Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket;

    they are regarded as dust on the scales;

    he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust. - Isaiah 40.15

Furthermore, EVEN if the world really us that bad, the Bible tells us that Christians are uniquely built to thrive in the worst societies during the worst times in history. In fact that is the whole point of the letter of 1 Peter. We absolutely do NOT live in a worse time than the Christians under the rule of the mad Roman emperor Nero, but even if we did, these words are still for us:

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. - 1 Peter 4.12-13

What your children need is a steady presence, consistent community, and gentle, patient teaching. They need you to steadfastly counteract the doom and gloom of the Internet with reality checks. They need you to be the unchanging rock that they can stand on even as they feel all this raging turmoil within themselves and they become vertigo’d by the endless stream of changes that the world around them is going through. You need to be their anchor when they feel like they are being tossed about by the tempestuous waves of an unforgiving ocean. You need to point them upwards as they get dizzy and nauseous looking down at the world around them. You need to remind them that the Lord sits enthroned in heaven, unaffected by the petty affairs of small men with small hands. 

Why do the nations conspire

    and the peoples plot in vain?

The kings of the earth rise up

    and the rulers band together

    against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,

“Let us break their chains

    and throw off their shackles.”

The One enthroned in heaven laughs;

    the Lord scoffs at them. - Psalm 2.1-4

And we all need to support each other and do this in community, because no individual family can weather this storm alone. 

Six tips to consider taking action

1. Monitor their diet of Internet, social media, screen time: I think that many of you are already doing this, and truthfully it’s impossible to protect your children from ALL the deleterious effects of the Internet now. But being aware of what they’re actually taking in is still important. 

2. Gently push back at their flawed beliefs: Resist the temptation to scoff or be dismissive. Even if their beliefs are silly, they don’t FEEL silly to them at the moment. When they express gloom or resignation or hopelessness, don’t waste an opportunity to connect with them and sit with them in that feeling. But as you do, gently cast doubt. “Do you REALLY think that life is hopeless?” “Are you sure that there’s really zero good news in the world or nothing to be happy or thankful about?” By God’s grace, you can be both empathetic and corrective and make them feel safe to share their true feelings with you. 

3. Keep them tethered to reality: The Internet is an alternate reality with only some shared parts to the real world. One practical way to counteract its totalizing effects is to make sure that your kids spend time in the real world. This can be as practical as making efforts to spend time in nature, such as going bushwalking or to the beach or having a family picnic at the park. There’s a saying now that a lot of people who spend WAY too much time online need to get out of their musty rooms, go outside, and simply touch some grass. 

4. Spend time with real friends in the real world: This is not a groundbreaking new insight or fancy cure. One of the problems that the Internet has caused is that, as humans we still only have 24 hours in a day and every hour that we spend online is one hour less spent being physically present with people. Well let’s turn that around and make active efforts to get kids playing together again. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially if their idea of playing together is being glued to their phone! Maybe the only way we can do this is to be the lame parents who force them to turn off their phones and do a puzzle together instead. 

5. Get them lost in true fantasy worlds: The Internet is a fake crapsack world that is bad for your health. But there are other fake worlds that your children can get lost in which will enrich their soul, deepen their hearts, and grow their capacity to experience beautiful things. Encourage them to read widely, and read fiction. My recommendation for a starting place will always be C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles Of Narnia.

6. MOST IMPORTANTLY, point them to a real reality that is higher than the earth, greater than the kingdoms of the earth, and more beautiful, perfect, and just than anything that we can know down here: They need to know about God’s kingdom which has been enacted in Christ, the servant king. They need to know that Babylon will be decisively cast down. They need to know that God will reign. They need to know that one day the Lamb of God will sit on the throne and every knee will bow down to him whose blood purchased us for God. They need to know that God will wipe every tear from our eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain one day, for the old order of things will have passed away. Disciple your children out of the anxiety and depression of their own minds by filling them with the revelation of future glorious things as shown to us in God’s Word. Plain and simple, read the Bible with them and pray with them. 

Let’s continue to be in dialogue together. Let’s chat. Let’s pray for each other. Let’s support each other. Let’s entrust each other to the God who reigns. Reach out to me to talk any time. 

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Dan 

And as they passed into the shadow of the world, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass, and was rolled back, and they beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise. - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return Of The King.