Yes, 2017 was long ago in tech years, but ...

An "old" column about Andy "Tech-Wise" Crouch fits well with a new one featuring Jonathan Haidt

I realize that, for many Rational Sheep readers, it seems like the “screens culture” crisis has blown into American life all of a sudden like a Category 5 hurricane.

This simply isn’t true. The cultural winds have been rising for several decades now. What has changed is the size, shape and the number of screens involved in the lives of individual people (especially children) and in the typical home.

Television used to be the big issue.

When I started teaching my old Mass Communications 101 course at Milligan College in 1993 (the subtitle was “Popular Culture and Religion”), I asked my students how many televisions were in the home in which they “grew up.” I was expecting the number to be two or three. It was more like four or five. Then we started adding the home computers that became popular in the 1990s, even with dial-up telephone connections to services such as Compuserve and AOL.

That was the start of the Internet era, of course. Then Steve Jobs gave his world-changing 2007 presentation introducing the first iPhone (video here) and the screens revolution kicked into lightspeed.

If a child was born on that day, that would make them 17 years old today? Think about that for a moment.

Here is the big question now: How many screens are in the typical American home today, with a “screen” defined as a device that can connect to the Internet and display visual forms of social-media and entertainment? This would include televisions, desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. I still have several iPods (yes, I am old) that can display videos as well as handle my vast library of essential music.

Many homes still contain some kind of “man cave” that functions as a movie theater and sports venue for grown ups. What percentage of the video content there is shared with children, these days? I imagine that the numbers get lower every year, since children now have their own devices and live in their own entertainment-social media universes.

Does the typical child, today, have three or four screens under their own control? Long ago, back in the 1980s, author Marie “Plug-In Drug” Winn issued a warning that went something like this (I paraphrase, since the contents of my office bookshelves are already in moving boxes): If you let children have television sets in their bedrooms you will get the family life that you deserve.

Television sets? Who needs television sets today?

All of this is an introduction to two “On Religion” columns about faith and screens culture.

One is from 2017, based on an interview with the evangelical author Andy Crouch — focusing on his little book “The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place.” The second column is running in American newspapers this weekend, based on my interview with Jonathan “The Anxious Generation” Haidt.

What inspired me to combine the two columns into one “think piece” is that, in separate communications with these two authors, I learned that they have known each other for several years and will soon be meeting again.

I recently suggested to Crouch that the timing would be right for an updated edition of “The Tech-Wise Family,” in light of everything that has happened since he wrote the original book. I still think it is one of the best resources for use in congregations, religious schools, homes, etc.

There is so much that connects these columns, even though they are seven years apart. Here is the Crouch column: “Can clergy help modern parents struggle with technology issues in their homes?”

The answer, of course, is “yes.” The question is: Will they?

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The evidence keeps growing that families need help controlling technology in their homes, but this is a subject most megachurch pastors would have trouble addressing with a straight face.

"Talking about this subject in many of our churches would be … controversial for reasons that are rather ironic," said author Andy Crouch, senior communication strategist for the John Templeton Foundation in Philadelphia. "Pastors would be preaching in churches dominated by giant video screens and lots of them now ask their people to tweet sermon feedback right there in the service. The technology is everywhere."

It's hard to talk about controlling today's digital-screens culture without being accused of advocating a semi-Amish retreat. But at some point, he said, parents who care about faith, morality and character will have to develop some strategies. For starters, their children will need to hear, over and over: "Our family is different."

Clergy could help parents face this task. But that would require them to address hot-button issues ranging from online porn to whether parents should give children smartphones. It would also require saying, "Our church is different."

Crouch doesn't have easy answers for any of these questions. His new book, "The Tech-Wise Family," includes "Crouch Family Reality Check" pages detailing the struggles behind the principles he recommends. While his family uses candles at its screens-free dinners, Crouch admits that his home's number of Apple devices is in double digits.

Obviously, it's hard to observe any kind of "digital Sabbath" in which all these screens go dark for an hour, a day or even a week, said Crouch. Nevertheless, trying to control this digital lifestyle is a subject religious leaders should discuss with their flocks.

"If we don't have some rhythm with these things – in terms of when we use them and when we don't – then they're using us, instead of us using them," he said. But it's crucial to remember that, "we're not saying all this technology is bad. It's good, when used as part of a Christian family culture. That's what takes planning and commitment."

In his book, and in a telephone interview, Crouch suggested several technology issues that religious leaders could start addressing.

* Parents need to study their homes, room by room, and think about where digital technology is used. It's good, for example, to have one — repeat, one — television in a setting where family members and visitors can use it, together. The goal is to avoid having individuals in different rooms, binging on private screens with no sense of accountability. Also, the family's main computer should be in a public place with the screen facing into the room.

* Husbands and wives, he said, should know each other's passwords and help hold each other accountable. Parents should install software security programs on the home Wi-Fi system, a practical issue that could be addressed in church forums, and monitor how children use smartphones and tablets.

* At the very least, parents can strive for family members to eat dinner together, with zero digital devices on the table. It's also important, he said, to establish that "our screens go to sleep before we do" and parents could insist that bedrooms — including their own — be as "screen-free as possible." Many teens report that they struggle to sleep, because their social-media programs never leave them alone.

For many, the elephant in the family room is exposure to online pornography, starting with pre-teens. It's all but impossible to eliminate this threat today, stressed Crouch. The key is developing common habits and interests — singing, reading, cooking, arts and crafts — that offer alternatives to online addictions.

"This is why the most important things we will do to prevent porn from taking over our own lives and our children's lives have nothing to do with sex," Crouch argues, in his book. "The truth is that if we build our family's technical life around trying to keep porn out, we will fail."

The bottom line: "Many of us are not as captive to round-the-clock, never-ending demands as we believe we are. Instead, we are our own jailers. … The door to a better life is only locked from the inside. We prefer our brightly lit cage of toil and leisure (this cage, after all, comes with unlimited Netflix)."

That brings us to the Haidt column. I do plan to share some more excerpts from my interview with him this coming week.

Yes, the word “clergy” appears in the headline for this one, as well: “Clergy Should Worry About Teens And Smartphones.” Nothing enters the life of a religious congregation without the permission, maybe even the help, of the pulpit.

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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, Penn.

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.”

FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited graphic from the Next Big Future website.