As a member of Gen Z—the generation that grew up with smartphones—I didn’t realize how my phone was degrading my spiritual life until I had to give it up. That moment came when I graduated high school and enrolled at Summit International School of Ministry, a Bible school in rural Pennsylvania that requires students to place their phones in a lockbox as a way to eliminate distractions and focus on God. For two years, while on campus, students have no access to their phones.
The result is a few days of withdrawal symptoms, followed by four semesters of clearheadedness and long hours spent worshiping and creating—students start clubs, perform skits, write songs, and, most importantly, immerse themselves in God’s presence as never before. There was a reason my dorm supervisor called our devices “Phone Pharaohs.” The Lord’s command to Pharaoh could perhaps be applied to the smartphone: “Let my people go, so that they may worship me” (Ex. 9:1, NIV).
As the phoneless days stretched into phoneless weeks, I gradually realized all the ways I’d let my phone rob me of life and joy. I’d avoided Spirit-led conversations with strangers, drowned my insecurities in doomscrolling and binge-watching, and neglected the benefits of “such a great salvation” (Heb. 2:3). One benefit of that salvation is a full life in God’s Word, a life too often half-lived as Silicon Valley, in the words of Tristan Harris, engages in a “race to the bottom of the brain stem,” harvesting attention like oil.
The phone-free environment that allowed Summit students to dig deep into God’s Word is the exception. For most young people, the digital age has created a world hostile to reading generally and Bible reading specifically.
Distracted Generation
Though there are few statistics on how Gen Z is struggling to understand the Bible, we can infer such a struggle from experience and from the realities of the digital world.
As the phoneless days stretched into phoneless weeks, I gradually realized all the ways I’d let my phone rob me of life and joy.
A 2022 study showed sharper declines in literacy for nations whose teens engage in greater amounts of “online chatting.” Jonathan Haidt notes the average American teen spends around seven hours a day on recreational phone use—nearly a full-time job of passive swiping and scrolling. Such behavior, warns Nicholas Carr, forms dopamine pathways that make reading a chore. Indeed, the superficial nature of online reading makes it so writers must use fewer words, simpler arguments, and bulleted lists to keep their audience’s attention.
Not only does online life erode our capacity to read, but it distorts how we read by cluttering the page with links, notifications, and widgets. In one study, participants found it harder to recall what they’d read as the number of links in an article increased. And research by Nielsen shows that online readers don’t read: They skim and “powerbrowse”, moving their eyes across the page in a spasmodic F-pattern.
Practical Solutions
Having emerged from Bible school with many months of phone-free life under my belt, I couldn’t unsee how technology had laid waste to the literary mind that had for centuries aided Christians in their study of the greatest of all books. I decided I couldn’t return to a screen-saturated existence, and I prayerfully sought to deepen my experience of Christ without technology.
Here are three steps I’d encourage every Gen Zer to consider as he or she seeks to make space for the life-giving enjoyment of God’s Word.
1: Go minimalist.
Distractions come in many forms, and we may only see the full extent of their influence when we remove them from our lives entirely. At Summit, students learned the value of meditating on Scripture with nothing but the Holy Spirit to guide them. Online commentaries, Christian influencers, and even articles like this one were wonderfully absent, which pushed students into a new frontier of abiding.
Together, we learned the value of the secret place, where man dwells in the shadow of the Almighty and words dissolve into “groanings too deep for words” (Ps. 91:1; Rom. 8:26).
We learned the value of studying Scripture without devices clamoring for our attention. Even when a smartphone is powered off, the FOMO radiating from it has been proven to cripple concentration. And the products of Silicon Valley tech lords often cripple sanctification by the Lord of lords, polluting our minds instead of renewing them (Rom. 12:2).
Thankfully, there’s a flourishing cottage industry of “dumb” phones, including the Light Phone and the CAT s22 Flip, both of which provide a happy middle ground between smartphone versatility and analog tranquility. Choosing a phone with a smaller screen and fewer apps quiets the mind and has helped me enjoy my morning readings without worrying about incoming texts and emails—or defaulting to Google instead of the Holy Spirit when something doesn’t make sense.
2: Read print.
Andrew Murray, author of the beloved devotional Abide in Christ, was a Dutch scholar who published 240 books and tracts. Charles Spurgeon read six hefty books a week and wrote 150 over his lifetime. Billy Graham once said that if he could redo his ministry, he would “speak less and study more.” Tim Dilena, the head pastor of Times Square Church—Summit’s mother church—donated thousands of books to the school from his personal library. What do all these men have in common? Their love of reading made them better students of Scripture.
It’s a good bet that my generation will continue to struggle to read and understand the Bible if reading isn’t a normal part of our lives. Reading is the key to a storehouse of knowledge, the foundation of which is Scripture. But without the key, Scripture—and the double-edged sword of spiritual power within it (Heb. 4:12)—will be as inaccessible to us as The Brothers Karamazov or The Pilgrim’s Progress.
For those who want to build their attention span, reading a real book, newspaper, or magazine will retrain the brain (and the ear) to relish the music of language. Magazines and newspapers can be checked out from most local libraries, and sellers like Thriftbooks offer used books for cheap. For those who want to take their Bible wherever they go, pocket Bibles are an excellent option. While Bible apps are a good resource, the casual reading they inspire may not be conducive to more disciplined study; reading one “verse of the day” isn’t the same as poring over a chapter of Luke.
3: Revel in inefficiency.
We must resist the other way in which Satan tries to glue us to our phones: the cult of maximizing productivity and efficiency. There’s nothing particularly efficient about starting the day by reading a 2,000-year-old tome and then praying. But that’s part of the value of Sabbath: trusting God that the world will keep spinning even when we silence other things to be with him. No doubt the historic decline in the number of Bible-engaged people—from 71 million in 2020 to 47 million in 2024—reflects a paucity of trust-based shalom.
My generation will continue to struggle to read and understand the Bible if reading isn’t a normal part of our lives.
So take that long walk. Don’t answer every text right away. Refuse to spend every free moment listening to a podcast or checking the news (guilty!). To make space for abiding in God’s Word, we must first reject distraction. We must learn to do as the psalmist did: “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Ps. 131:2).
When we’re considering how changing our relationship with technology might better our relationship with God, Alyosha’s words in The Brothers Karamazov prove instructive: “I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.” Let’s live differently. Let’s live for immortality.
The Gospel Coalition