(ANALYSIS) Preaching to teenagers has always been a challenge.

But in the smartphone age, clergy need to realize that the odds of making a spiritual connection have changed — radically. Young people who spend as many as 10 or more hours a day focusing on digital screens will find it all but impossible to listen to an adult talk about anything, especially in a religious sanctuary.

“As long as children have a phone-based childhood, there is very little hope for their spiritual education,” said Jonathan Haidt, author of a bestseller — “The Anxious Generation” — that has raised the heat in public debates about controlling or banning smartphones in schools.

“An essential precondition is to delay the phone-based life until the age of 18, I would say. Don't let them fall off into cyberspace, because once they do, it's going to be so spiritually degrading for the rest of their lives,” he said in a Zoom interview. “There's not much you can do in church if they are spending 10 hours a day outside of church on their phones.”

It would be hard for the cultural stakes to be higher, argued Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. Thus, his book's weighty subtitle: “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”

While Haidt’s work has ignited debates among politicians, academics and high-tech entrepreneurs, reactions have been muted among religious leaders who are usually quick to spot threats to children. Then again, clergy may not be used to a self-avowed atheist issuing warnings about the "spiritual degradation" of young people.

It would be a big step forward, he said, if “the leaders of various denominations could make a clear statement about how the phone-based childhood is a threat, not only to their mental health, but to their spiritual health. ... We can only save our kids from this if we have the churches, families and schools all working together.”

Local religious congregations are “natural settings for the kind of collective action Haidt proposes,” noted Keith Plummer, dean of the School of Divinity at Cairn University in Langhorne, Pennsylvania.

But there is a problem.

“Far too many Christians ignore the relationship between technology, media theory and spiritual formation for every believer," he noted on The Gospel Coalition website. "We have been prone to assess digital technologies primarily, if not exclusively, on the basis of the content they provide access to. ... But simply avoiding sexually explicit content is not enough, we have to question the formative power of our technologies.”

Meanwhile, parents often insist that smartphones can promote safety, especially during emergencies, noted Haidt. At the same time, many parents fear allowing their children to play in parks and neighbors' yards, activities that were perfectly normal in the recent past.

Truth is, modern “sexual predators are not going to find kids in the front yard or on the playground. The sexual predators have moved on to Instagram and Snapchat,” said Haidt.

Thus, “The Anxious Generation” thesis: “We over-protect our children in the real world and under-protect them online.”

Believers also need to know that researchers have found evidence that religious communities and families play a crucial role in raising healthy children.

“The kids who made it through are especially those who are locked into binding communities and religious communities,” said Haidt.

Meanwhile, it is the “secular kids and the kids in progressive families” who tend to be “the ones who got washed out to sea.”

This doesn't mean that children in religious families are not affected if their parents plug them into what many activists call “screen culture.” Haidt stressed that lives built on smartphones, tablets and computers will change their minds and hearts.

“Half of American teenagers say that they are online ‘almost all the time.’ That means that they are never fully present — never, ever,” he said. “They are always partly living in terms of what is happening with their posts, what's happening online. ...

“There is a degradation effect that is overwhelming, but most people haven't noticed. ... I am hoping that religious communities will both notice it and be able to counteract it. But you can't counteract it if the kid still has the phone in a pocket. The phone is that powerful.”

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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.