Each Sunday night at youth group, our time of worship through singing is followed by a short sermon then small-group discussion. The high school kids in the group I lead know the routine. Before we open the Scriptures, we pull our chairs into a circle. Then we take out our phones and stack them in a pile on the floor in the middle of the ring. We won’t touch those screens again until the Bible-study hour is done.
The phone stack is a simple habit. But it’s helped the students in our group pay closer attention to both one another and the Bible text.
In his practical new book, Scroll Less, Live More: 10 Healthy Tech Habits for Teens, Samuel James commends a number of similar practices. His goal is to give teenagers “a vivid picture of what it looks like to apply [biblical] wisdom to technology usage in today’s digital age” (155).
James recognizes that simple, repeatable practices can help young people resist the foolishness today’s tech promotes so they can instead grow in the fear of the Lord.
Great Power, Great Responsibility
Scroll Less, Live More builds on the foundation James laid in his previous book for adults, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age. One of his main premises is that technology isn’t neutral. Rather, it’s a powerful force that “shapes and influences us in ways we aren’t always aware of” (30).
One way tech changes us is by changing our expectations. To illustrate this truth, James points to tech invented in the 19th century:
Before the telephone . . . people just accepted that if they weren’t in the same room as somebody, they couldn’t communicate with that person in the moment. After the telephone was introduced, being able to communicate with someone in a different place at any time became not only possible but also important. (125)
Similarly, 21st-century tech such as generative AI brings with it both new possibilities and greater expectations: “AI’s capability to produce an amazing variety of work and art with very little direct human involvement creates an expectation that using it regularly for these purposes is normal” (127). The more we off-load our creativity and effort to it, the more we believe we should do so.
One way tech changes us is by changing our expectations.
Digital technology changes us in other ways too. James draws on the work of tech realists such as Neil Postman, Nicholas Carr, and Marshall McLuhan, but he makes their perspective accessible for adolescents. James repeatedly shows young people how poor digital habits affect their cognition, emotions, and relationships. Living on a phone will slow down thinking, leaving teens feeling anxious, or even angry, amid daily interactions that then become more awkward and strained.
Way of Wisdom: Guard Your Heart
How do we help young people avoid this path? James gives teens some practical encouragements, telling them to charge their phones somewhere other than in their bedrooms overnight. He also provides a list self-examination questions to help them grow in self-awareness and he appeals to family rules such as only using devices in open areas of the home. But ultimately, James is convinced that using technology well involves more than simply following a list of dos and don’ts. He writes,
We don’t need a huge list of rules that will have to be updated every time Apple releases a new phone or a new social media app; we need something that will help us determine how to use technology well in any circumstance. We need wisdom. (16–17)
Proverbs says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (9:10). James is clear that growing in wisdom and the knowledge of the Lord requires more than adjusting one’s screen-time settings; it takes guarding one’s heart.
James encourages teens to think of their hearts as a palace where a king or queen lives. He says, “In any royal palace, you’re sure to find soldiers keeping watch over who and what has access to the very important king or queen inside”; those guards, he contends, are our habits, and “the strength of the soldiers determines how protected the palace is” (158).
Early in the book, James calls teens to learn discernment. As he unpacks this habit, he warns them away from the siren song of social media influencers who question parental authority: “When an online influencer who doesn’t know you or care for you speaks about your parents or mentors in a way that makes you want to trust those people less and the influencer more, that’s a massive sign that what you’re listening to is false“ (44).
Yet James doesn’t merely tell young people to flee digital technology’s dangers; he also beckons them to put on habits that will help them cultivate virtue, in-person friendship, accountability, industrious work, creativity, and rest.
For Parents Too
Many of the habits are relational. In his introduction, for example, James encourages teens to read his book with a parent, teacher, pastor, or mentor. The discussion questions he includes at the end of each chapter make this counsel practical. This counsel is also wise, because while Scroll Less, Live More is a book for teens, it’s a book for parents too.
As a parent and youth worker, I found James’s encouragement to develop a habit of self-awareness convicting. He calls readers to pay attention when being online leads to feelings of anger, anxiety, or boredom so that you know when to “log off and touch grass.” Listless boredom is a form of the sin of acedia: “Spiritual laziness that causes you to fill up on meaningless things so much that you cannot delight in God” (65). He nailed me.
How many times do I fill life’s quiet moments—waiting in a line, a few minutes between meetings, or sadly even lulls in conversation—by pulling out my phone instead of being attentive to nature, the people around me, and the Lord?
Listless boredom is a form of the sin of acedia.
I can get frustrated when I see this tendency in teens, but as Brett McCracken writes, “What parents model with our own devices ultimately matters more than what we say to our kids about them.” James’s book helped me see ways I’ve failed to fight endless scrolling in my own life.
As parents, we need God’s Spirit to help us grow in self-awareness about our tech habits. We need his grace to help us confess those failures to the teens we parent and lead. And we need a heart of wisdom and phone-stack intentionality, not just at youth group meetings but throughout our lives.
Scroll Less, Live More helps teens and parents develop the tech skills they need to live a life rooted in reality and steeped in wisdom.
The Gospel Coalition