Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age
Edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa Publisher: Crossway, 2025; 243pp.
Book Review by Rosalind Byler Reprinted courtesy of The Sword and Trumpet, July 2025.
If the title of this book sounds familiar, it should be. Forty years ago, Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, proposing that media as entertainment (at that time, television) weakened viewers’ capacity for deep thinking and discourse. A media analyst, educator, and a cultural critic, Postman observed that a society’s behavior and thought patterns are shaped by its communications media – and his prophetic cautions are proving correct. Scrolling Ourselves to Death assembles fourteen Christian thinkers to interpret and apply not only Postman’s wisdom but gospel principles to today’s digital media.
The book consists of three sections summarizing and updating Postman’s conclusions describing problems modern Christian communicators face, and focusing on the church’s opportunities to use technology wisely in a counter-cultural lifestyle. Questions at the end of each chapter aid further thought or discussion.
Postman was an unbeliever, but his Jewish background helped to shape his perspectives. He concluded that that far from being neutral, technologies naturally moved users toward secularization. While his concern was amusement, smartphones now act as “digital syringe[s]… to a lifelong, brain-altering, relationship – destroying addiction” to dopamine (21). More time spent in a disembodied environment leads to increasingly unnatural perspectives on gender, community, and relationships.
In addition, a growing and vocal individualism prioritizes the self’s inward desires over religious authority or cultural propriety. Proponents depict this as inner integrity and argue that it exposes injustice; yet its path to authoritarianism is clear. Religious individualism insists that its self-selected church, community, theology, practice, etc., make sense on the individual’s own terms. (Ouch!)The shift from “being instructed to expressing ourselves” has led to a “post-truth” world (Chapters 3 and 4).
This crisis of authority poses new difficulties for Christian leaders and communicators. Congregants who have spent the week affirming their belief systems in algorithmically designed media feeds will listen with skepticism to gospel truth on Sunday. The discipline of apologetics becomes even more challenging in a world of “meager reasoning skills, fleeting attention, and continual distraction” (115). Superficial and fragmented disinformation replaces shared narratives that agree with reality. Submersion in social media increases our tendency to be gullible, making us more receptive to conspiracy theories and divisive fragments of “news.”
Throughout the book, the authors counter these depressing scenarios with sound and simple advice. Preach the Word (non-preachers, immerse yourself in it). Use real Bibles. Review long-past history. Tell and retell the best story, embodying it in baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and historic Christian practices. Stock church libraries; offer teaching on church history. Live in local communities and invest. Believers’ online posts should “add to the net amount of truth, goodness, and beauty” in cyberspace rather than giving more coverage to the partially true, sensational, and ugly (127).
Christians are uniquely taught and Holy Spirit-equipped to do justice and love mercy. Yet it is easy to follow the crowd of noisy public justice lovers (for other people, at least!) into dubious and damaging mercies. The final chapters show positive ways the church can nurture real, abundant life in modern believers. Among the authors’ recommendations are using creativity but caution with new media; reconnecting information with action to help prevent anxiety, anger, or apathetic detachment; and living out God’s historic mission for the church by building strong families, working to bring order out of chaos, loving our neighbors, caring for the needy, and spreading the gospel.
BOTTOM LINE:
Brett McCracken’s introduction will make smartphone users cringe, and the book does not minimize unsettling statistics. Yet Scrolling Ourselves to Death has so much more than gloomy assessments, blistering reproofs, or even wise rules for technology use. The editors’ aim is to help Christians think carefully about how technology changes our thinking. Multiple contributors result in more factors considered, both in the magnitude of the problem and in hope-filled practices. Engagingly written and accessible, this book is a must-read for everyone, beginning with yourself, before considering it for your Christmas gift list. Thriftbooks has it for $16. I contacted Choice Books to carry it as well. We’ll see.
NEXT UP:
Paul Harvey post from 1965…