(ANALYSIS) Folks who have never worked in journalism would be amazed how many words an articulate expert can say during a 30-minute interview about a complicated subject.

Thus, producing a 700-word column about an interview of this kind is, in many ways, an exercise in deciding what NOT to write about. Trust me on this, since I have spent nearly 36 years writing a nationally syndicated column that — week after week — has to fit into that word length, plus or minus maybe 10 words.

In my “On Religion” column — “Jonathan Haidt: It's time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture” — I focused on what the author of “The Anxious Generation” had to say about the decisions faced by religious believers in the age of digital-screens culture. Even though I write a column that appears in mainstream news publications, I knew that many of my readers would be (to use the Rational Sheep mantra) parents, pastors, teachers and counselors.

Here is a key byte of that column:

(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.” …

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 Jewish atheist issuing warnings about the “spiritual degradation” of young people.

Before I dig deeper into my interview with Haidt, allow me to offer a few words about some Rational Sheep “business.”

Even though this Substack project is now operating in “paid” mode, I am sending this follow-up Haidt interview post to all subscribers (“free” as well as “paid”) because in recent weeks I told my readers that this would be heading their way. My plan, at this point, is to keep sending “free” subscribers content on Mondays and Fridays, with posts heading to “paid” subscribers at midweek and on weekends.

Clicking the paid-mode button was, to be honest, kind of scary for me. To be honest, I am hoping to see enough pledges of support in the next few weeks to make it possible to carry on with this project in the next stage of my work. After six months in “free” mode, I am more committed than ever to writing about faith, family and the digital-screens culture in which we live.

OK, moving on. For me, the hardest decisions I made while writing about the Haidt interview were linked to two words that I thought would be hard to handle in the context of a short column written for mainstream readers.

Those two words were “degradation” and “dopamine.”

That first word made it into the column, but Haidt had much more to say on that topic in the interview (once again, see this earlier post about an After Babel feature: “Jonathan Haidt's warnings for spiritual leaders”).

To read the entire post, please visit Terry Mattingly’s Rational Sheep on Substack.

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.