The Internet and Your Spiritual Life

Constant distraction takes a heavy toll on your spiritual life. The internet isn’t just after your brain; it wants your soul too.

When we talk about sin, we usually focus on understanding temptation. And for good reason: knowing your vulnerabilities is vital. It enables you to guard against enticements to which you’re uniquely vulnerable. An alcoholic shouldn’t hang out in bars. The shopping addict should avoid malls—and Amazon.com.

But while it’s wise to focus on temptation, we need to pay attention to our state of mind too. We know that there are certain things that decimate our willpower. Being tired, for instance, leaves us more vulnerable to temptation. Ditto for being hungry and stressed. The same is true for being distracted. It’s like a pickpocket who works with an accomplice. While one is distracting you, the other robs you blind. You don’t even know what hit you.

Bombarded by this continual flow, we become easy marks for temptation.

Have you ever wondered why so many stores blast loud music or provide other diversions? They want you to act on impulse. It’s not in their best interest to provide a distraction-free environment where you can think clearly and resist temptation. Studies have demonstrated that even mild distractions, like trying to remember a phone number, leave people more likely to make unhealthy choices.

The internet is like every store on earth rolled into one. It offers up an endless flood of distraction that wears down your resolve. Bombarded by this continual flow, we become easy marks for temptation.

At the same time, it makes it harder to engage in spiritual practices. Scripture reading is often the first to go. You may not care about plowing through dense classics, but as a Christian, you should care about reading at least one classic. Well, sixty-six classics if you want to get technical about it—the library of holy books we call the Bible. In chapter 6, we saw how Bible reading is a keystone habit, a practice that pays dividends in multiple areas of life. Yet let’s face it—reading the Bible is difficult. It’s a big, daunting book. Yes, it’s the inspired Word of God and filled with breathtaking beauty. But it was written in multiple genres over thousands of years by people from ancient cultures. It demands discipline to read and understand.

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I interviewed Glenn Paauw of the Institute for Bible Reading about the Bible reading habits of contemporary Christians. One of his biggest concerns is how contemporary Christians tend to live off “Scripture McNuggets” rather than “feasting on the whole Word of God.” To correct this habit requires “big readings of Scripture,” he says. “We need to increase the size of our Bible readings. Start reading the words around your cherry-picked passages. Then you’re immediately confronted with context. . . . I’m a big fan of reading entire books of the Bible.”

Switching Cost

Unfortunately, for people with Twitter-sized attention spans, doing “big readings” of an ancient text is nearly impossible. The internet trains us to skim instead of read. It also encourages what cognitive scientists call “task switching,” a practice of shifting your attention from one thing to another. The problem is that each time you shift your attention—a practice the internet encourages constantly—the brain has to reorient itself. The practice imposes “switching costs” that slow your brain down and diminish your ability to concentrate. Here’s how Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass explained the impact of constant switching on the brains of the subjects he studied. “People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. . . . they’re pretty much mental wrecks.”

Even when these habitual multitaskers got offline, the negative effects of the switching persisted. Nass continued:

“The people we talk with continually said, look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused. And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. . . . They just can’t keep on task.”[1]

Strengthen Your Attentiveness

Our brains are addicted to the novelty served up by the internet. No wonder we struggle to quiet our minds and study God’s Word. Hip-hop artist and pastor Trip Lee attests to this dynamic in his own life: “The more time I spend reading ten-second tweets and skimming random articles online, the more it affects my attention span, weakening the muscles I need to read Scripture for long distances.”[2]

In his book 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, Tony Reinke connects our ability to engage Scripture with our willingness to tune out online distractions.

To live an abundant life in this insatiable consumer society, we must plead in prayer for God-given power to turn our eyes away from the gigs of digital garbage endlessly offered in our phones and tune our ears to hear sublime echoes of an eternal enthrallment with the transcendent beauties we “see” in Scripture.[3]

[1] Clifford Nass, “Does Multitasking Lead to a More Productive Brain?,” interview by Ira Flatow, NPR, June 11, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/ 182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking.

[2] Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 85.

[3] Ibid., 144.