Lately I’ve been reading a book edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa, Scrolling Ourselves to Death (Crossway, 2025). The title is a nod to the 1985 landmark work by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death—a penetrating critique of a culture entranced with television, noting how funneling life through visual media trivializes what’s weighty and diminishes our capacity for sustained, critical thinking.
The essays in Scrolling Ourselves to Death touch on a wide range of topics, but a common thread is this: if becoming a TV-centric culture damaged our ability to engage in thoughtful, patient reasoning with one another, becoming digital enthusiasts who endlessly scroll and swipe and click our glowing devices is like TV on steroids: it messes with our minds in dramatic and disturbing ways. The internet has unprecedented power to distract us and addict us to its profit-driven output through algorithms designed to feed us more and more of what we want to hear, see, and buy.
“Post-truth culture is financially lucrative for media corporations and pundits across the political spectrum who capitalize on polarizing rhetoric,” says Hans Madueme (p. 72). We need to be alert to this devious scheme and stay grounded in the Bible: “God gave us Scripture to keep us rooted in timeless truth” (p. 74).
When we’re continually overinformed but underactivated, we become anxious, angry, addicted, numb, lonely, delusional, and even detached from reality, McCracken contends (pp. 168-69).
The book is honest about the serious harm a lifestyle of scrolling can produce—damage to one’s thinking skills, relationships, and intellectual abilities that are vital for a stable society and for an informed faith in Christ. And so, let’s remember that “the church can be a radical, life-giving alternative to the unhealthy habits of the digital world” (p. 11). “At every opportunity, church leaders should promote the great good of embodied church life…” (p. 57).
