Last year felt like a turning point in the rising awareness of the detrimental effects of excessive scrolling. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation released in March and quickly became a bestseller. The book presents an array of empirical data so convincing that it catalyzed countless school districts, states, and even nations to institute new limits and age restrictions on smartphone and social media use for kids. Consensus is growing that the addictive scrolling habits of our digital age are bad for us: mentally bad, spiritually bad, societally bad, and sometimes even deadly.
We’re both longtime editors at The Gospel Coalition, working daily on screens and in the ecosystems of social media and online discourse. We know these technologies can be harnessed in powerfully good ways for discipleship and gospel advance. But we’re also keenly aware of the malformative dynamics of these technologies and the many challenges they pose for Christians today. We see up close how scrolling can help lead to spiritual health but more often leads people to spiritual sickness.
That’s why we’re excited to announce a new book we coedited, coming in April from Crossway and TGC: Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age.
In this volume, we enlisted 13 other contributors to help Christians and church leaders think carefully about the spiritual hazards—and opportunities—of contemporary digital life. We don’t have to passively accept the ways of this scrolling world. We ought to question what needs to be questioned, resist what needs to be resisted, and adopt what can be adopted. But we should do it all thoughtfully, with more conversations in our churches and families about the theological and discipleship implications of our relationship with technology.
Neil Postman Inspiration
We drew inspiration for Scrolling Ourselves to Death from Neil Postman’s 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book has influenced each of our thinking about technology and media, and so on its 40th anniversary, we’re proud to publish a new book that engages Postman’s insights but applies them to the new dynamics of the digital age.
Many of the reasons Postman thought we were “amusing ourselves to death” in the 1980s still apply today. But recent innovations—particularly the internet, the smartphone, and social media—have added new dynamics that only accelerate the trends Postman saw.
As Postman’s book did in 1985, our book in 2025 aims to help you understand how technology is forming you—and the people you lead. Our book focuses on the spiritual dynamics of this formation and its theological and ecclesial implications. We hope it’ll equip parents, pastors, youth leaders, educators, and individual Christians to understand and respond to this highly formative technological moment. With discussion questions after each chapter, the book is also designed for small groups, leader teams, or classes to go through together.
Preorder
The book releases on April 15, 2025, but you can preorder it now at TGC’s store, Crossway, Amazon, or other retailers.
Table of Contents and Chapter Contributors
Introduction: Back to the Future: How a 1985 Book Predicted Our Present (Brett McCracken)
Part 1: Postman’s Insights, Then and Now
Chapter 1: From Amusement to Addiction: Introducing Dopamine Media (Patrick Miller)
Chapter 2: From the Clock to the Smartphone: A Brief History of Belief-Changing Technologies (Joe Carter)
Chapter 3: From the Age of Exposition to the Age of Expression (Jen Pollock Michel)
Chapter 4: The Origins and Implications of a Post-Truth World (Hans Madueme)
Chapter 5: Striving for Seasonableness in a “Now . . . This” World (Samuel D. James)
Part 2: Practical Challenges Facing Christian Communicators
Chapter 6: How the Medium Shapes the Message for Preachers (Collin Hansen)
Chapter 7: Apologetics in a Post-Logic World (Keith Plummer)
Chapter 8: Telling the Truth about Jesus in an Age of Incoherence (Thaddeus Williams)
Chapter 9: “Unfit to Remember”: The Theological Crisis of Digital-Age Memory Loss (Nathan A. Finn)
Part 3: How the Church Can Be Life in a ‘Scrolling to Death’ World
Chapter 10: Use New Media Creatively but Cautiously: Video as Case Study (G. Shane Morris)
Chapter 11: Reconnect Information and Action: How to Stay Sane in an Overstimulated Age (Brett McCracken)
Chapter 12: Embrace Your Mission: Tangible Participation, Not Digital Spectating (Read Mercer Schuchardt)
Chapter 13: Cling to Embodiment in a Virtual World (Jay Y. Kim)
Chapter 14: Heed Huxley’s Warning (Andrew Spencer)
Epilogue (Ivan Mesa)
Cover
We thank Crossway’s superb design team for the book’s jarring cover. It leaves a potent “medium is the message” impression in a way that pays homage to Marshall McLuhan (of whom Postman was an intellectual successor).
The design uses typography to convey the concept, with repeated titles and vertical text suggesting endless, mindless activity. The digital/pixel texture reinforces repetitiveness. A particularly brilliant touch is the smudge effect meant to convey the look of an overused smartphone screen. The designers created this effect by manually smudging printed ink with isopropyl alcohol and scanning it back into Photoshop for a subtle added layer to the design. See the behind-the-scenes photo below, as well as the finished cover.
The Gospel Coalition