Both Virtue and Policy: How Should Christians Fight Tech Addictions?

Last month, Meta and Google were found guilty of negligence in a lawsuit arguing that social media has helped fuel a generation’s mental health crisis. The plaintiff was a young woman who began using Instagram and YouTube compulsively in elementary school, and who began to experience acute depression and anxiety shortly thereafter. She argued that Meta and Google intentionally designed their products to be addictive and exploitative of human vulnerabilities, then failed to inform people about the dangers. She won.

Responses to this verdict have been varied. Some are celebrating the fact that big tech is finally being held accountable for its actions. Some are bemoaning the “victim mentality” and lack of personal responsibility they see in our litigious culture. In Christian circles, some are asking, “Where were this child’s parents?” Is a generation’s addiction and mental health problems the result of exploitative technologies or personal and familial failures? Or to frame the question in positive terms: how do we recover a healthier relationship with technology— through making different personal choices or by pursuing systemic change?

This question has already been debated in other contexts (racism, sexism, and wealth disparity, to name a few). The answer is never a simple binary. As Christians, we can’t lay personal responsibility and moral agency at the feet of big tech or any other societal superpower. Nor can we deny our embeddedness in social systems that shape the nature of the struggle. When it comes to technology, the church has a unique voice to speak to parents of individual families and on behalf of the vulnerable in the broader culture.

Children need protection from those who seek to profit from their insecurities and fears. Those children are in our homes but also our schools and neighborhoods. My elementary age sons have almost no access to technology at home but my nine-year-old came home from school the other day saying, “I have a friend who is AI.” (He somehow managed to ask Google Gemini a question in computer lab and got into a dialogue with it.) He, along with other impressionable young children, are growing up in a world that confuses chat-bots with people and social media likes with friendship. To be concerned about this is not stodgy, old-fashioned, resistant to change, or fearful. It is to insist that image bearers of God are created by God to be embodied, interpersonal, and covenantal, and that we can’t let our children settle for less.

As a pastor, I want parents to be empowered to prayerfully, creatively steward the use of technology in their homes and lead their children in conversations about why this matters. As a mom, I also want parents—and educators and administrators and public librarians and good neighbors—to engage in broader cultural conversations about technology’s limits in our lives. First Lady Melania Trump introduced Humanoid Robots as potential child educators on the same day as the California jury ruled against Meta and Google, revealing how ambivalent our country remains about who should be leading who here. Who will shape and form our children—technology companies (who’ve already been found negligent and exploitative) and their bots, or human adults who can know and love them?

Individual parents may choose not to obtain Humanoids as nannies or home educators, but they may not be able to afford private schools or other opt-out education models if public education goes in that direction. They may limit social media or personal devices for their kids, but they can’t control social pressure or school policies about online learning. When it comes to technology, parents can and should embrace their God-given stewardship of their homes; but they alone cannot change a generational climate. We all must work together to do that.

Christians have always believed that formation happens in families. We claim unique theological categories (and spiritual resources) to equip parents in their calling to shepherd children. Christians also have a long history of advocating for societal change on behalf of others, who may or may not be children in our own households but whose lives can be saved or improved through goods like public hospitals, freedom from slavery, and orphan care.

But Christians can also enact change in smaller, quieter ways by being good neighbors and friends to the vulnerable children and overtired parents among us. As I listened to the White House promise that Humanoid Bots will be “always patient, always available,” I felt exploited in my own weakness as a flawed and oft distracted parent. I thought of many parents I know who are struggling to pay the bills, cook dinner, schedule doctor’s visits, and be present with their kids. In this way, parents are vulnerable too. In their vulnerability, they need something better than Humanoids. They need human friends who are willing to step into the complexity of relationship with them and their kids.

We can’t all lead movements for societal reform, and we aren’t all parents. But we can all prayerfully notice those in our neighborhoods or churches who might benefit from some free babysitting or homework help. Growing up, my own family was upheld by a network of honorary aunts and uncles and grandparents who came alongside my single mother struggling to raise six kids. We were less at risk of becoming addicted to social media or chatbots when I was a teenager, but the involvement of a small village did keep me from harming myself in other substantial ways. The specific dangers may have changed, but the stakes are the same. The world has always been full of vulnerable people. Into this world, the church still speaks.