Thinking Christianly about smart phones

The Government’s proposed ‘ban’ on smart phones raises some vital issues about how as Christians we think about technology.

What is actually at issue here? There are questions of young people having access to unsuitable content, and what screen time does to their thinking. But there are also issues about power and influence on the part of tech companies.

The issues that we often ignore are around parental responsibility, the nature of our relationships, and our commitment to building community. What the tech companies really want is our attention, and that affects the way we think about time.

In conversation with Andy Bannister, I explore these issues, find some surprising sources of insight, and reflect on why we find it hard to think Christianly about technology. A lightly edited transcript can be found below.

The books mentioned include:

Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death

Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age

Paul Kingsnorth Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Stephen Driscoll Made in Our Image: God, artificial intelligence and you

Jaron Lanier 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Ian Paul Revelation (Tyndale NT Commentary)

Transcript of the conversation:

Ian Paul  0:00  

Friends, thanks very much for joining us. I’m not talking to James, and we’re not expounding a Bible passage today. Instead, I’m being joined by Andy Bannister. Andy, great to see you. Tell us who you are and what you do.

Andy Bannister  0:11  

Ian, great to be on your on your podcast. And so I’m, yeah, Andy Bannister, I’m an evangelist and a writer, speaker, philosopher, wear various hats. Main thing is I lead an organization called Solas, that’s the Gaelic Scots word for light. We do two things: we love taking the message of Jesus out of the four walls of churches, we do things in universities, schools, pubs, cafes, and whatnot. And then we love teaching and training Christians how to talk about their faith and the big issues of the day in a natural, persuasive, winsome way.

Ian Paul  0:38  

Fantastic. Now, probably the big issue of the day, particularly this week, is the whole issue around smartphones. I can’t show you my smartphone because I’m actually using it to record this video. And thank you, you’ve got yours there. There you go. Your Black Mirror. We’ll come to Black Mirror Language in a bit. 

And, of course, this week Keir Starmer has announced the government’s intention to bring in a smartphone ban, and it’s, it’s called Australia Plus, because Australia introduced a smartphone ban for young people quite recently, but apparently this is even more so now. I don’t want to get into the weeds about the exact policy, I just want to start off with your own response to that. What do you think? What’s your initial reaction to it, and also about your own experience with your children.

Andy Bannister  1:22  

Great questions, Ian. And do you know, I have to confess to being a little bit torn on on this one. That was my first reaction, and the reason I was torn was simply this. I mean, I think smartphones get into this as interview goes. I think they, they are bad in, in so many ways, not just by the way, for young people, but for adults too, but particularly young people, when you’ve got the brains are being formed with neuroplasticity and all that kind of stuff, formational years, phones, and especially social media are awful. So, on the one hand, I think restricting young people from access to them is a great thing. 

On the other hand, we have here in the UK, and the same I know, I guess, for some other countries too, but in the UK scene, we have a government that I would say is sort of drawn to soft totalitarian sort of tendencies. There’s a restriction, there’s a temptation, as politicians, I think, particularly on the left, the right, I’m not immune from it either, but we’re in a left-wing government right now, to go, you know, if it moves, we need to restrict it, and so therefore there’s part of me, like, great, I’m not entirely sure that in the government ban something else is necessarily a good thing, and by the way, young people are going to find a way around it as well. It doesn’t take a lot of work to figure out a VPN, and so on. 

And then Ian, my other biggest concern is it misses the elephant in the room, which is that this is really a parental problem of going as parents we can have a tendency to outsource our young people to other people. Christians can do it. We don’t disciple our young people. We let the youth leader do it. As parents, more widely, we like our kids are glued to their phones rather than take responsibility. I’ll just wait for the government kind of bans it. 

And Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist in his book on technology, The Anxious Generation. So Jonathan’s done a lot of work in this area. He talks about smartphones as a classic collective action problem, and a collective action problem is a problem you need lots of people to work together to solve, and they are difficult, and they are sticky, and they are hard, and yeah, just like that’s life. But he would say we need to man and woman up and kind of deal with that, rather than easy route to go, right, let’s get the government to ban it, problem solved. We haven’t actually solved it, and some of the underlying issues will remain. So I’m torn for those reasons.

Ian Paul  3:26  

I think that’s very interesting, because you highlight something there. What’s fascinated me about this discussion is the way we’ve, for some reason, this discussion causes us to invert language in so many different ways. For example, I was just really struck on the BBC item on this, the headline was government banning children. It’s not about banning children. What it is about government holding to account tech companies. So, it is interesting that even in the first headlines we’ve inverted this. 

Yes, and I think the issue about parent, as you say, parental responsibility appears to have been completely absent from this, but this is part of a wider inversion of language that these kind of technologies do. So, you know, the classic statement around social media, for example, is that if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. Yes, and I think people have been quite slow to realize that, and realize how our language is switched. As languages switch, then issues around power and responsibility become inverted as well.

Andy Bannister  4:17  

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And then, by the way, you know, none of this is new, right? As you were saying, that the use of language, you know, one of my great literary heroes, George Orwell, in his classic essay “Politics in the English Language” talks a lot about the way you can play politics by changing language. Don’t deal with the issue, just redefine things, play with language, and we’re guilty of doing this. And, by the way, also, I think it’s interesting, Ian, if you put the language into a different frame, and you see the issue. We wouldn’t be going around. I don’t think the BBC would be leading, you know, with like the smoking ban, for example, and trying to, trying to make it older and older and older when you can buy cigarettes. I suspect the BBC headline on that wasn’t “government ban, you know, students smoking”. You, because it’s a pro thing. It’s when we come to this is the problem. I always think, as well. Again, I’ve realized that there are so many rabbit trails in this discussion.

 I also wonder, as well, as parents, and by the way, I’m not picking on parents. I am a parent. I have a 13 year old and 11 year old, so I hold myself counsel here too. We have actually, as a society, gone through a whole series of, I think, handing off things to the state and giving up responsibility, you could argue, and here I know I’m going to touch a live rail. You could argue we’ve done it with education, because traditionally education was in, was in the home. Home education now is quite common, more common than it was, but it’s obviously still the minority option. There was a time when that’s what you did, education was in the home, or a smaller village kind of school community. Now we have these great battery-farmed approaches to education, and we push everything away. 

As parents, we go, right, it’s the state’s job to educate my child, it’s the state’s job to socialize my child, it’s the state’s job to sort out problems around technology, and maybe it’s time as parents we began taking a little bit of responsibility back. And I love your line, by the way, too. We on the, on the, on the product thing. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. 

And the other nuanced way of thinking about just that one is, I sometimes like asking people, Ian, the question, you know, I’ll say to somebody, so think about Facebook, big company in the world, who are Facebook’s customers? And it’s all interesting, people often go, well, I guess, like me, okay, no, no, no, you and I are not the customers, the customers are advertisers. Facebook’s primary goal is to get our eyeballs to stay on their app as long as possible, so that advertisers can sell things to us. They are selling our attention, that is the product that Facebook is selling to its customers. Now, I’m not being mean on Facebook, please don’t hear me as being anti technology, those companies are amazing, but that is the model, and you need to realize that’s the model in order to just be, I think, conscious. How we, how we engage.

Ian Paul  6:50  

Now, you mentioned the question of attention, and I want to come back to that, because that’s the thing that struck me most, which is that attention is the thing we’ve got that they want, and that touches on the question of how we understand time and our use of time, but I just want to put that on hold, because you mentioned the fact that you’re a parent, so firstly, I just want to talk about your experience, because you’ve taken a particular line with your 11 and 13 year old, how’s that gone?

Andy Bannister  7:16  

Yeah, well, the first thing I say straight away to put the frame for this, we, we homeschool, which is, which is interesting. We lived in, we live in Canada for six years, that was just, we had our kids born in Canada, so we have two little Canadians, two little Canadians in the house, because they’re dual nationals. And I would say, when we moved to Canada in 2010 Ian, if you’d said to me homeschooling, my perception would have been a sort of, I don’t know, redneck Texan on a trailer park somewhere, not to offend Americans, many American friends, that was my stereotype. 

And then we began meeting loads of people who do it really well. I remember we had very good Canadian friends who had kids the age my kids are now, and their boys were able to sit at the table and have really sensible conversations with grown-ups, and then go off and play Playstation and hockey. I was like, okay, what is going on here? And so we came back, decided we’d start doing it ourselves. So that gives you the ability, I just recognize at the start to control a few more variables. 

But one of the things we realized early on was, for me, the goal of education is to create readers. If you can get your kids reading, then you have set them up for most things. Phones are a big problem there, because you know kids are going to take the easy option, because we do too, as grown-ups. So, my wife, Astrid, and I made the decision, okay, we are going to probably not allow them to have smartphones until 15 or 16. Then I read Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, and said—Okay, we’re going to raise it to 18 before they get access to phones. Now, we didn’t just impose that, we talked about that with them, and what’s great, Ian, we’ve had not the slightest bit of pushback. The reason I think we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had no pushback is one, I think to be very honest with them about the distraction the phones causes. Two, we’ve been honest about the distractions in our own lives. They, we’ve said to our kids, if you see Mum and Dad on the phone too much, you can tell us, you have our permission, and they’re quite good at going. Get off the phone, come on, let’s go and play football. And I, yes, you run a risk that your kids are going to do that to you, but I thought that is good. 

We imply we’ve applied rules ourselves, so we don’t have our phones in our bedrooms and those kind of things, so the kids can see that we’re struggling and we’re putting boundaries around. And then you just give them lives that are busy and active and fun and full of creativity, and there’s never been a desire to have a phone. The only thing we ran into is because we’ve lived in different places around the world. My daughter has some really good friends in Scotland and in France and in Canada, and they need to communicate because they’re not in the set. Oh, and Australia, by the way, and so we came up with a solution that we allow my daughter, you know, once to have 10 to 15, minutes a day on WhatsApp on my wife’s phone, problem solved. She doesn’t need her own phone, she used that, and that also, by the way, means my wife can see if she needs to what Katrina has been chatting about with her friends, but there’s been that’s fine. 

And my daughter was like, that’s great, Mum, that’s all I need, I just need the ability that I can chat with them, do video call couple times a week, and no phones needed. Should we need a phone for traveling to sports activities and stuff? We’re not there yet. We’ve already decided to get dumb phone, is the answer there. And problem solved.

Ian Paul  10:08  

Now it’s really interesting that you immediately talk about, of course, for young people it is about entertainment, it is about having fun. And recently you wrote an article about your experience visiting the Amish. I want to ask you about that in a second, but in amongst that, you also mentioned this extraordinary book by Neil Postman from the 1980s Amusing Ourselves to Death. What was really fascinating, he was just talking about television there, but his main focus was the shift to the trivial, and I know there’s recently been a book last year which is sort of updating that, but that issue of the trivialization of life is massively intensified with the smartphone era.

Andy Bannister  10:45  

Yeah, and so for people listening to this, Ian, if you people who are kind of readers, as probably you know, a lot of your audience are hugely encourage you to check out Neil Postman’s book. It’s a brilliantly written book. I don’t, he’s, I think he was a Catholic from background, he had a faith of some kind, so it’s very, very, you know, attuned spiritual stuff, but it’s not a book primarily about religion, it’s a book about, as you say, technology, and I think that there’s a number of big ideas and amusing ourselves to death. I think the biggest one that Neil introduces is the idea that the medium of a communication changes that communication? 

So, writing allows a particular type of communication. It’s reflective, it’s more thoughtful, it’s interior as you sit down and read and process. When you move, he’s talking about television, because he was writing in 1985 The moment you move to television, a number of things happen. For a start, first thing is, it’s totally linear. In a book, if you’ve read a paragraph and you haven’t quite grasped something, you can cast your eyes back, you can read over, you can’t, you can’t. Yes, I know you can on a DVD or a video, you can scrub, but we don’t do we. So it’s you certainly couldn’t do that in 1980s exactly. 

It’s also, by the way, it’s totally all encompassing, because you’ve got the sounds and the vision as well, that does something to us, and then the other big idea he introduces, I think you talked about, yes, is the trivialization. He has a, he has a massive shot at TV news, and I think my word, he was in, like, you know, maybe four channels in slightly longer form, and his point is, you trivialize because you go from war in Ukraine to, you know, five minutes on that, and then, and now, and then you move to, like, you know, fire in local pub, and now cat stuck up tree, and you jam all those stories together, and you don’t have time to process, and then I think, yet the other thing that gets layered on top is, as humans, we’re not wired to be able to be concerned about millions of people who are not in the same community as us, and so you get this compassion fatigue, and and because you’re like, what, what do I do with the war in Ukraine? I suppose I could donate to the Red Cross or something. 

I think I read somewhere that, as human beings, we’re generally wired to about 15 to 20 significant relationships, is the way that we’re built. And the nice thing is, listen, if you’re a Christian, you go, God, design us that way. If you’re not a Christian, go, we’re just, we’ve evolved that way. Whichever route you take, you end up in the same place of going that actually were not designed to be connected to the whole of the world, and no longer, no wonder we feel strung out. There’s that line in I’m a big Tolkien person, Ian, and there’s Love, while haunting line in Fellowship of the Ring, where Gandalf is talking to Bilbo, who’s been carrying the ring for years, and he says: I feel thin, stretched out like butter scraped over too much bread.

It’s a great line. When I read that, I’m like, he, he’s not talking, he’s not describing our age, but I think many of us feel thin, we’re stretched out, and that’s..

Ian Paul  13:35  

and in the film it’s portrayed particularly well. Actually, I can see the picture now, and he’s sitting by the window, you can see he’s got that far away look,

Andy Bannister  13:43  

he has exactly, and it’s interesting, his solution, he’s, I want to, I want to see mountains, Gandalf, he wants to get, he wants to get out into nature, and that’s a whole other discussion, although it connects back to Jonathan Haidt, because Jonathan Haidt in the Anxious Generation sets out the cure for what’s gone wrong with with anxiety in children, number one, no smartphones, not until ideally 18. No smartphones. And then, secondly, outdoors play unstructured in the natural world, whether it’s – if you’re in a city, playgrounds, that’s fine. Anything they can get their hands dirty and physical from the countryside, like where we live, we’ve got fields about at the back of the house. Brilliant, those two things together, you will sort out a lot of what’s gone wrong with modern childhood,

Ian Paul  14:21  

it’s been an update to that book, or a celebration of it. I think you just mentioned to me Scrolling ourselves to death.

Andy Bannister  14:28  

Yes, I did a little wave, a little plug. I am not involved in this book, so it’s not a selfish plug. So, this is done by Crossway and the Gospel Coalition, and it’s, yeah, Scrolling ourselves to death is a brilliant book, because what they’ve done in here is it’s a 40 year update, so this came out last year, 2025 about 15 to 16, different authors, men and women in a whole range of different disciplines, and what they’ve done, Ian, is a couple of things. 

Firstly, they’ve updated it to look at the digital scrolling generation, all of the insights that I think that Postman had, and he was not new, he was drawing from a guy called Marshall McLuhan, who was kind. Is kind of mentor information theorist applying to modern age, and then I think through that lens of scripture and Christian wisdom, and how it’s Christians, particularly, do we think about and communicate to this generation, and it’s really good. 

It’s got some good diagnostic pieces and some great practical wisdom too. I’m always after stuff that does that, because we don’t just, we don’t just want to sit there feeling guilty, do we? You want to sit there thinking, okay? What, what changes can I, can I make to bring a bit of a bit of sanity amidst the madness that raises exactly the question about how can we be equipped as Christians, as disciples to think theologically about these issues of technology, and this is where 

Ian Paul  16:00  

I found your article that you wrote, Black Hats and Black Mirrors, really fascinating, because you recount your experience of visiting the Amish in America, in Pennsylvania, and, of course, we, we tend to think of the Amish in very parodic ways, you know, wearing their clothes and having not, having not too many buttons on your jacket, because too many buttons means that you’re proud, and all those kind of things, but actually, when you went there, you were really surprised about the seriousness with which they think theologically about technology.

Andy Bannister  16:09  

Yeah, well, so we were, we had the privilege of having a three month sabbatical in the USA last year. We took the kids, because they’d been born in Canada, but not really done USA, so we had an amazing time, and one of the places, yeah, we went was Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, like Amish Ground Zero, and yeah, as you say, Ian, and I describe on my Substack, I confess I went in with quite a lot of prejudices, like you say, they look funny, they dress, they behave funny, the language and everything, and I was staggered, I mean, firstly, demographically they’re winning, that’s a whole other discussion of going, birth rates are crashing in the West, those guys are doubling. Is it every 50 years? I think they’re something like that. 

They have huge families, and they retain. They’re a very sticky community. They do Christian community really, really well. I came away thinking, my word, yes, I could raise some questions, but they have communities that work. There’s no unemployment. A young couple get married, community builds you a house, all of this stuff. They really do community. 

Ian Paul  17:03 

Many of us saw in the film The Witness, going back many years. Absolutely, Harrison Ford’s early films.

Andy Bannister  17:08  

Yeah, that’s that’s right. Um, but I remember, yeah, I went into Lancaster County, into the, into the visitor, sort of center, and experience there. And one of my prejudices was technology. I remember saying to the guide, who was showing us around the farm and so, who, by the way, interesting, wasn’t Amish, she had friends who were Amish, so she wasn’t like biased, she was a tour guide, and I said, so presumably that was it, no, that was it, I saw a cell phone like plugged into a solar charger, and I was like, what, hang on, what’s going on there, they don’t have phones, and she went, ah, that is a very common myth, she said, no, the Amish use technology, they’re just very, very, very careful about technology, so I said, “Okay, how are they careful?” And then it was she who literally gave me those three points that I built my essay around. 

So the first thing that the Amish do, and she said, “Yeah, they use cell phones, but not often, not in the house. This is here for display. Some of them actually begin to use AI, but they’re very, very, very careful.” Other technologies too, but for any technology, so the Amish asks three questions. 

Question number one, What are the advantages? What does it bring? And I think we’re actually not bad at doing that in the West, as Western, generally Western Christians, kind of two of going, okay, this is great. What does a cell phone bring? All kinds of fun things. 

Second question, we’re not so good at asking, what does it take away? Every technology has a cost to it, so what’s the cost, and the analogy I like, actually, because it takes it out of the digital arena. Take the take the motor car, so the car, right, it’s been with us about 100 years, a little bit more, and yes, mass transportation, all kinds of good things, but we’re also wise enough now to go, oh my word, it’s brought tarmacking of the countryside, urban sprawl, pollution, global warming, all kinds of things. We know that one, but just took us 100 years to realize what are the costs of, say, technology like smartphones. So, what are they? What’s the benefits? What’s the cost? 

And the third question, I love this one. How does it help community to thrive? Because the Amish are all about community, but I came and go, ‘Oh, my word. As Christians, we should be. We should surely be about community.’ That’s doesn’t Jesus say they will know you’re my disciples by how you love one another. So, putting it through that grid of going, how does any technology help or hinder building community? And that community can be my family, it can be my local neighbourhood. I suppose you can scale it up to a nation, you can think about it around churches, and by doing it that way, you’re not being wholly negative, either, which is what, like, yes, there are benefits, there are pluses, and we want to think about those. 

What are the costs? And then, how does this help or hinder community? And then, how do we either walk away or put, you know, some controls around the technology? And the phones are a good one. They have phones, not the house, because if the phone goes at the meal table, you shouldn’t be answering it. Your job is to be there with your family. The phone can wait.

Ian Paul  19:47  

The illustration of the car is fascinating, because one of the impacts, which I think is the most hidden one, with cars, we talk about tarmac and pollution and petrol, and all that kind of stuff, but one of the consequences of the car. Which people were slow to realize is the way that it fragments community, so for example, particularly in the States, you can get in your car to drive to church, so you don’t have to go to your local church within what you know used to be the case that you’d walk to your local church, and in your church would be people who lived in that locality, and there’s a fragmenting there, and it is in my experience, again, there are lots of wonderful things about America. 

Whenever I visit America, what I’m amazed about is the fragmentation, the deep fragmentation, and I, that seems to me that was related to the use of a car. So classic, for instance, in this in the 50s and 60s, you know, people be getting their cars and drivers, salesmen all around the place, and they’d be absent from their family, the fathers would be absent from their family, and it’s really interesting, how that connects back with the question we raised earlier about time. 

I mean, in the film The Witness, I think one of the most fascinating sequences, and I’ve actually used this in teaching, is at the very end, where the two main characters, they sit in silence, and the time just passes, and you can sense the communication between them, between Harrison Ford, oh, I forgotten what the woman actor was, but she went, she went on to be in Top Gun, which is a very different kind of film…

Andy Bannister  21:09  

Kelly McGillis was it? It was, yeah, that’s right, it was. It’s embarrassing that it was a Top Gun reference,

Ian Paul  21:15  

I know, really embarrassing. It is very embarrassing, I’ll hold you to that, but what is fascinating again is the question of time, and you know it is when one of the things that technology allows you to do is to do things more efficiently, and it has an impact on time. In your article, you mentioned Paul Kingsnorth’s book called Against the Machine, yes, and he talks about the four Ps of people, place, prayer, and the past, and the thing that connects those things are about the question of time, and how you use time again. This comes back to the impact of the smartphone, which is on the one hand, with our smartphone, you know, we can communicate very quickly with people in other countries, but then the irony is, how much time do we spend? I mean, I read recently somewhere that, that on average, people are now spending five hours a day on their smartphones, which is extraordinary when you think about all the things we say we can’t do, because we don’t have time, and this comes back to the fact that attention is our commodity, that is what they are grabbing

Andy Bannister  22:06  

And by the way, you obviously use the car as a modern example. I mean, we won’t got time to pursue this one too far, but actually, time is interesting. I remember reading an article a few years ago and looking at the, you know, the technologies that have disrupted society, and one of them was the, was the, was the invention of the clock, because before the clock in traditional societies you regulated yourself by the, by the, by the seasons, and that was a rhythm to life, you know, in the summer you work a bit longer, in the winter you work a bit shorter, now you know we’re by the wrist watch, and then, of course, time starts overcoming relationships, you know, you’re talking to a friend in the street, and you’re like, I gotta go. Sorry, I’ve got to be somewhere in five minutes. 

And so the clock becomes, you know, becomes dominant. And, of course, in factories you then get sort of highly mechanized production, where you come and you start, you know, watching, you know, workers with a wrist walk with a with a with a stopwatch. Timing people, Amazon now have, you know, all of their staff in their warehouses have these little apps, apparently, that you know, track how long to the second it’s taken them to do a pick, and of course, the other one was the was the light bulb, when we went from, you know, being actually, you know, again, we regulate ourselves by the by the natural rhythm, so now we can all sit up there burning midnight oil. 

Ian Paul  23:18  

it’s interesting, I had an African friend who said to me, of course, you know, you in the West have watches, but we in Africa, we have time.

Andy Bannister  23:23  

Well, I’ve had African friends. I remember, I think it was a Ghanaian friend once commented. He said he found the West old. He said, because in Ghana, he said we have three times. I said, what do you mean? He said, we’re morning, afternoon, and evening. So I’ll say, I’ll say a friend, I’ll say to a friend, I’ll see you this afternoon, and that’s just what that means all I’m saying by those examples, I think we are not very good at stopping and asking those Amish type questions, and that doesn’t mean we throw every light bulb went at our house or smash our wristwatches, but take, you know, our phones, for example, we could ask some wise questions about how much we use them, I mean, to be fair, to Apple and Google, and so on, our phones do have the ability to track how much we use them. 

Maybe we should look at our numbers occasionally and go, is that, is that too many. Um, Cal Newport is a writer I like, has written a lot on technology and wisdom. He’s got some practical low-tech ideas, like if you want two hours of non-interrupted smartphone time, write on a post-it note. I will not pick my phone up until 11 o’clock and stick it on the front of your phone. Sometimes that’s all it needs to break the cycle. Now, you can cheat, yes, but you’re cheating yourself, aren’t you? Asking ourselves those kind of questions critically in churches. I think I think it’s not a bad idea for pastors to begin saying, I’d rather you didn’t read the Bible on your phone, if you.. Oh,

Ian Paul  24:42  

I say this all the time. Here’s another interesting bit of technology I say to people, and I say this for effect: putting your Bible readings on your video screen in church is of the devil.

Andy Bannister  24:56  

Oh, that’s stronger than I would be, but I like it. I like

Ian Paul  24:59  

Isn’t well, it is about medium is the message again, because what that does is it decontextualizes the text from the texts that come before and after. I think it’s very interesting you say about reading being non-linear as well, because now it would never happen in our church, of course, but if people slightly lose their attention in the sermon, if they’ve got a Bible open in front of them, they can actually browse and they can say, well, what passage came before this, they can flick back, they can look forward, they can see physically. I mean, if you put, if you put a reading from Ephesians on the screen, you’ve no idea necessarily where Ephesians comes in the Bible. The fact it comes near the end tells you that this is the conclusion of a long story.

Andy Bannister  25:33  

Yeah, by the way, I like your point about the wandering, because I can be a bit notorious in sermons, but I’ve taught myself to do that, of going on the phone, I’m a proper horror. Thankfully, actually, our church has got no cell phone reception because we meet in the basement. I actually love if I, if I do get distracted in the sermon, the next best thing is to go. I’m just going to read on scriptures.

So I agree. The other thing, and by the way, I can tell I have to report back how this goes. I’m preaching at the church we attend into a couple of weeks’ time, and I’m actually, as part of this whole campaign, thinking I am going to try, I had a friend of mine who was my pastor in Toronto, nuclear physicist background, scientific background, he would always do, he would give handouts for his sermons with a text on it, so it’s not quite the same as the Bible, but at least you’ll get in the text, and then he would do have the fill the blank thing to get people to, and we’re talking to him, and going, he goes, “Yes, it is slightly old school. He said, “But trust me, I’ve done the, I’ve done the research, I mean, keeps people’s attention. It gets people’s attention, and I’m also forces me to think about what are the key takeaway points. 

Ian Paul  26:34  

But again, attention, the word isn’t that fascinating. The word “attention” keeps coming back again and again and again. It is now just coming, sort of coming to close. I want to come back to this question, why is it that we’re not so good about thinking theologically about technology? And I guess my question is, number one, what resources do you want to put in front of people, and number two, then how do we bring these to bear on this on this question in front of us about not banning children from using smartphones, but disciplining the tech companies to protect our children and encouraging parental responsibility. Where do you want to point people to in terms of theological resources for thinking about this? An idea, I’ve got an idea in the text, which is Revelation 13. 

Andy Bannister  27:15  

I want to check a couple ideas, and then you can, you can take us into the text. Let me say one thing, Ian, I completely agree with you about the tech companies. The only challenge with that is, again, it sort of pushes it outside from us, of going, you and I, we cannot, unless we get together with millions of people, change how Facebook is going to behave. There’s a wonderful computer scientist called Jaron Lanier and philosopher, he was involved in the invention, a lot of social media stuff now regrets it, and he did that. He’s done a good TED talk on this, and also wrote a book called 10 Reasons to Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which is interesting. And Jaron is great. 

He’s come up with this acronym, which he calls BUMMER, which is why social media is so bad. Bummer stands for The Behaviour of Users Modified and Made into Empires for Rent, which is brilliant. So, that’s what social media is doing. So, we need to re, we need to recapture that. So, I was just a couple of resources, or streams of resources. First thing, great to read some Christian stuff, engaging with tech, and the and the issues. So, to wave some things at people, we’ve already talked about scrolling ourselves to death. That’s from Crossway and the Gospel Coalition. It’s a collection of essays, which is nice, so you don’t have to read the whole thing, have a rummage through, pick the bits you like, that’s really helpful.

Paul Kingsnorth Against the Machine, um, Paul is an orthodox, uh, Christian, come to faith in the last eight or nine years, that means for us, for evangelicals like myself, I love the fact he’s coming at this from a slightly different angle, but he’s got some really helpful thinking in there about what’s going on, and then one last Christian resource theologically, I highly recommend “Made in Our Image” by Steven Driscoll, who’s an Australian evangelist. Brilliant book on AI, particularly on social media, but also theologically, how do we think it through? 

His big issue is this, that we, we are made in the image of God, that’s what it means to be to be human, and we forget that at our peril, and we forget that these things that we are creating, they’re made in our image, so we’re back to the whole black mirror thing, and the problem is technology, Ian, as a black mirror, and mirrors reflect, they reflect the good and they reflect the bad, and that’s why technology has this sort of split personality to it, because it’s reflecting us, and the only way we’re going to solve that, or not going to solve that, because all it’s doing is reflecting the issue. 

What we need to do is use that as an impetus to go, we need to be going back to Christ and going deeper into him, because he’s the cure for our fractured hearts. And by the way, I don’t know, you thought to this when you, we kept using the word attention, I love the fact you can, like, like, all the, like, all good theology. You can always update it and re, you know, readapt it for the current age. And I was thinking, you, there’s a sermon to be preached around John 3.16 isn’t there? For God so loved the world that he gave us his attention. God’s got a universe to run. God could have gone. I haven’t got time. I’ve got, I’ve got 10 seconds. Have you seen my fee? Read, and he didn’t. God gave us, gives us his attention. 

And then we see that in the Gospels too, that Jesus regularly gave attention to people. One of my favourite scenes in the Gospels is the woman caught in adultery, and I know there’s a textual issue about where that belongs, so we’ll forget that for another time. I love the fact that he bends right down, and people, I think, you know, get obsessed with what was he writing, I don’t think doesn’t matter. He was on her level, and he gave her his attention, and then picks her up, and he does that to us. So, yeah, so attention is the key. Three books there, but you’ve got some ideas on..

Ian Paul 

well, I just.. just add my other.. my other favourite example of that is in John, is in Mark five, where he’s busy pushing through a crowd, he’s going to do the bidding of an important man, Jairus, the rule of synagogue, and he feels one woman touch the hem of his, his cloak, and he stops and gives attention to her, and he picks her out of the crowd, and the disciples think the disciples think he’s crazy for two reasons, one is a, there’s so many people, and he attends to one, and the other is he’s very busy and got lots to do, but he stops and gives her attention. Yeah, I think the other, the other text I’d point you, of course, is the book of Revelation, and there’s a good book to read about that, which is my commentary in the Tyndale series.

Andy Bannister 

Shameless plug, always good,

Ian Paul

shameless, absolutely shameless plug. Um, but also I did some research, which I’m just writing up at the moment, on Revelation chapter 13, and the mention of the beasts from the land making an image of the beast from the sea, and causing, well, he actually causes this is fascinating, what you say about the Black Mirror, and about made in our image, the beast from the land does not make the statue the image, he makes the people of the earth, the inhabitants of the earth make the statue. In other words, it’s our own creation. It gives it the power to speak and perform wonders. And a lot of people said, “Oh, this is this is this is futurist. This is looking to the distant future with these things.” And I feel a bit sorry that John Lennox, who’s done some other stuff, is saying something similar. He’s saying he’s reading it in a futurist way. It’s not. 

And one of the things I do when I’m teaching on this is I show people automata made in the first century, which move, are animated, can speak, and can engage with people. This is talking about a real phenomenon in the first century, and if you go to Greece, by the way, there’s a fantastic museum, there’s one in Athens, and there’s one in Heraklion, as well, in Crete, where there’s a man who’s spent his whole life recreating these things, and he actually made an automaton that actually goes into a room where people are drinking, holds out a cup, takes the cup, and pours wine in water and wine into the boat, and gives it back to the individual. 

It’s absolutely phenomenal stuff, but the point that Revelation 13 is making, the point that John is making, is that technology is used number one to impress and awe people with power, so they say who is like the beast, number two to dazzle them and to make them submit, and to aggregate power and devotion, in other words, to draw people’s attention to that person in power, and I think that issue around the aggregation of of power and of control and of wonder, you know, who is like Elon Musk. Oh, what an amazing man. Who is like these people are creating these things, and actually, what Revelation does is gives us a theological critique about the use of technology in collaboration with, or didn’t deploy the deployment of power and domination, and so I think we just need to pay a bit more attention to that, and not get distracted by all these futurist readings.

Andy Bannister

Yes. Oh gosh, can you throw that whole new 33 minute mark? I mean, yes, I think there’s a lot, there’s a lot to be said. My mind was running a couple of ways. I mean, you’re right, there’s automata down through history. I was trying to think of the Turkish chess playing robot from the kind of 1500s

Ian Paul  

absolutely, and they are direct descendants of that technology,

Andy Bannister

the same of the same thing. Yeah, I think the, I think the attention, the I think the attention thing really is that is the core thing, and as you say, it’s always, it’s always been there. I mean, if you want to trace it even further back, you could go to what’s the primary sin in the garden, where does it begin? And obviously, we’ve only got the moment of temptation. I always love thinking, what’s the story behind it? I don’t believe that was the first moment the serpent turned up. I reckon the serpent had been hanging out for a while and sort of goes, oh, come and look at this Eve, and she’s slowly, slowly, slowly taking her attention off where, where it should be, until the moments of thought, and that I think the devil loves to work in that way, and go, don’t, don’t look at the thing you should be looking at, look over here, you know, because if we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfection of our faith, and run the race laid out for us, and yeah, we’re going to trip, and we’re going to stumble. 

That’s part of discipleship, but we run in the right way, but the devil loves to distract us from all over the place. So, yeah, Book of Revelation. And I suppose the other thing, because we’ve, you know, we’ve anyone listening to this, go hang on a minute, you’ve given all these philosophical things. I’m more of a reader. You want to go read something, go read CS Lewis’s cosmic trilogy, especially the third of those, that hideous strength, because again I think that’s got a lot of very prophetic themes in there about attention and technology and power, all comes to play in there, and the first step I think into addressing it is to recognize it, because technology distracts us, right, the opposite of attention is distraction, and if you’re distracted, then you’re not going to stop. 

And pause and think, and so just pausing and thinking is a starting point, and going, okay, where am I in all this? Am I where I want to be, and how can I do something kind of, kind of different? And probably, if you talk to your friends, you’ll find that actually there are others who are thinking like you, and you can support one another, because we’re all addicts when it comes to the black mirrors, aren’t we?

Ian Paul

Andy, thanks so much for joining me, friends. I hope you found that conversation useful. Do make some comments this on YouTube here, and on my blog. And here’s the irony: do share it on social media. Andy, thanks ever so much. And hope to have a conversation with you again sometime soon.

Andy Bannister

That’d be great, Ian. Thank you so much.