How can church leaders respond to mass-culture 'signals'?

Flashback: How some Catholic teen-agers responded to deadly smartphone bullying

Let’s pause, 20 days into this project, for a brief review of a crucial term that will keep showing up here at Rational Sheep.

What is a “signal”? In the Rational Sheep overture, I zipped back to my days in a Denver Seminary classroom for this definition:

I define this as a single piece of media or popular culture focusing on a subject that is of vital interest to the church. It can be a newspaper article, a single episode of a television show, a compact disc, a movie, a new video, a best-selling book or some other item. The goal is to tune in a single worthy signal, out of the millions the media pour over us every day.

Right now, one of the most important signals in mass culture — primarily in news coverage (scan this Google News search) — is the impact of screen culture on mental health. Much of the focus is on young people and their smartphones, but the topic is bigger than that.

I could produce an entire blog on this topic, alone.

OK, but what are parents, pastors, educators and others supposed to do about this tsunami of signal material?

Here at Rational Sheep, I will argue that the goal is to address this topic using methods that already exist in strong religious congregations and movements — religious education, preaching, counseling, retreats, service projects and now, rather ironically, various forms of digital publishing (including social media).

However, always remember that nothing makes it into the mainstream of congregational life without the support of the pulpit and denominational leaders higher up (think seminaries and publishing houses).

What does that look like in practice?

Let’s flash back to a news story from several years ago.

I spent nearly a decade in Denver (our children were born there) and I will always keep an eye on what is happening in Colorado. Thus, let me work through parts of an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 2017. Here is the overture:

Anyone trying to reach Cason Kurowski and his family at night in their home outside Denver needs to remember one thing.

Unlike most high-school juniors, Kurowski doesn't keep his smartphone within an arm's length of his pillow. In fact, the whole family leaves mobile phones downstairs at night, including his parents. …

Wait, there's more. Back in September, Kurowski and some friends made strategic — some would say radical — tech changes after the news of two teen suicides, in two days, at area schools. Some students in this circle were friends with a … student who committed suicide last year.

After several planning sessions, they launched Offline October and urged friends to delete four specific apps — Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter — from their phones for a month. The goal, Kurowski explained, was to stop "hiding behind screens. … We wanted to try spending more time face to face, instead of just looking at phones."

The project grew through word of mouth, calls, emails, texts and, ironically, social media. Local news coverage helped spread this slogan: "Don't post a story. Live one."

Yes, if you visit that Offline October feed on X, you will find that it has been inactive for several years. Doing some online digging, I have not been able to find out if this project remains alive or not.

Hold that thought. I still think that people who are concerned about screen-culture issues can learn from this project organized by some young people in a specific place, at a specific time, for some specific reasons.

The key is that these Catholic young people began organizing events that brought them together — face to face — to do real things in the real world. They played board games, took hikes, learned how to cook and did church-related service projects. This project, however briefly, affected how they spent their time, how they spent their money and how they made their decisions.

Let’s keep reading. It’s crucial that someone in the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver passed information about this effort to the boss.

Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila knew all about the suicides, of course, with 72 Colorado students taking their own lives in 2015 and another 68 in 2016. He was intrigued by the Offline October response.

 "One theme that I see running through the stories of teens who struggle with suicidal thoughts is the pervasive influence of social media on their identity and sense of self-worth," stressed Aquila, in his regular Denver Catholic column. "The teenage years have always been a time of uncertainty, as physiological and emotional development takes place."

It's controversial, of course, to link smartphones, social media and suicide. But the painful reality is that bullying is often linked to suicide, wrote the archbishop, and bullies now use social-media apps — along with the nearly 80 percent of ordinary teens whose daily lives include regular, or obsessive, use of Snapchat and Instagram.

There was an Offline October 2.0, but the leaders then graduated from high school.

The question, you see, is whether adults remained committed to responding to this scary signal from mass culture. Did parishes embrace this “do something real” concept and keep it alive? What about the archdiocese?

I did some searches at DenverCatholic.org and found this Jared Staudt essay from 2023: “We need urgent action to protect kids from technology.” Here is the overture:

A frightening trend emerged when I was working in Catholic school administration. The acceleration of problems related to sexuality for young kids was startling, beginning even as early as kindergarten. There was one common source: technology. Without a doubt, the fact that young children regularly use smartphones has led to frequent exposure to sexual images and messages that have made some kids question their own God-given identity. After hearing of problems week after week, I wanted to shout an SOS to every parent: “Please, take away devices from your children, because it’s really wounding them.” We must exercise greater vigilance.   

Later in the article, Staudt noted some strategies at the home level.

In Catholic schools, we saw kindergartners and first graders imitating inappropriate things they had seen on screens. We heard from a third grader that she identified as asexual after she was groomed by an adult through an iPad, given to her by her parents. We often heard of bullying and sexting occurring over phones, even among elementary school students. These are the cases that make me repeat: “Parents, don’t give your kids a phone. Please take away their phones!” 

I am a father of six with three teenagers and try to be very vigilant. We use Gabb phones and Light phones for our teenagers that prevent any direct internet access. Our younger kids have never needed a phone. In Catholic schools, we often had to remind school parents that they could always call their kids at school and their kids would always be allowed to call them if there was a need. In their desire to protect their kids by having constant access to them through a phone, parents are inadvertently harming them by giving them this constant exposure to harmful influences on the web and social media. 

Remember, Staudt is talking about what he experienced in Catholic schools.

In. Catholic. Schools.

In an archdiocese that is quite conservative, in the context of American Catholic life.

Here is a radical question: What would happen if this archdiocese produced materials for use in a once-a-year program in local schools and parishes focusing on the impact of screen culture on life in Catholic homes? Would priests and laity dare to use them?

What if these materials were offered to bishops, archbishops and cardinals through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops? At this point, it appears that national leaders are focusing on how to USE digital media in parish life and outreach — period.

Yes, efforts to wrestle with screens culture would be controversial, in part because of debates it would cause in pews and in homes. But if something like teens leading Offline October isn’t possible, what can religious leaders do?

Silence isn’t working. These issues are not going to go away on their own. Is it accurate to say that souls are at stake?

FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration with Engelmann.com feature: “Mobile phone obsession — Advisor for the relaxed use of mobile phones.”