For many readers, yes. Elizabeth Woodson, an author, podcaster and speaker whose work grew out of discipleship ministry in the local church, offers a simple test: whatever consumes the most of your time shapes who you become. It moves what you believe, then how you act, then over the years your character. By that measure, a feed you open dozens of times a day is a teacher with more class hours than your Bible. The remedy she proposes is old: practices that retrain where you go for peace, hope and identity.
That claim is narrower and more useful than a general complaint about technology. It is an argument about formation. The feed teaches a story about where solutions come from, and that story competes with the gospel.
What exactly is the feed teaching?
Lisa Fields frames the problem as arithmetic. She notes that “so many of us are formed by memes and social media content, and we spend hours and hours consuming that.” Even a person who gives an hour a day to Scripture and prayer is still being formed for many more hours by something else. Her conclusion is blunt: “So it’s like trying to counteract that messaging is very difficult.”
Woodson names the content of the lesson. She defines a false narrative as “a problem that I have that I try to find a solution that’s outside of Christ or the way of Jesus.” The one she believes drives all the others is what she calls radical expressive individualism. In her words, it is the conviction that “the solution to everything is inside of myself. I should be able to trust myself, trust my emotions.”
Notice how precise that is. The feed rarely tells you to reject God. It tells you that you already contain the answer, and that the right input will help you find it. A podcast, a masterclass, a life coach, a better search. Woodson walks through this chain when she describes how people chase peace: more information promises more control, and more control promises calm. Prayer simply drops out of the sequence. The person never decides against God. They just never get around to asking him.
She adds a detail that explains why the story persuades. The people selling the easy route leave things out. Someone online announces that a side hustle became a full-time career and makes it look effortless, while the complicating details never make it into the post. The feed offers self-reliance with the hard parts edited out.
Whose church is being described?
The conversation does not treat this as an abstract problem about “society.” Fields raised it while reflecting on a talk she had just given on spiritual formation for African Americans, and she located it “in our church culture.” The people in view are Christians who still show up. Fields describes friends in their late thirties, faithful in attendance and service, who have grown quietly bitter because life did not follow the checklist they were promised. She puts it simply: “it’s like mentally you’re gone.”
Woodson’s picture of what the church can be draws on a familiar vocabulary of church as family. When it is what it is supposed to be, she says, she shows up and finds “these spiritual mothers and fathers, aunties, brothers and sisters.” That language names something the feed cannot imitate: people with standing in your life who expect you to keep coming back.
The source has a limit worth stating plainly. Neither speaker claims the algorithm affects Black Christians differently from anyone else, and neither offers historical evidence about how Black churches have practiced these disciplines. What they describe is a formation problem inside the communities they serve, and a resource those communities already possess: a tradition of church as extended family that requires presence rather than scrolling.
Isn’t trusting yourself sometimes the healthier choice?
This is the strongest objection, and Woodson takes it head on. She says plainly that “a lot of times people trust themselves because the authorities around them have proven to be untrustworthy.” Anyone wounded by a church leader, a family system or an institution that claimed moral authority knows that turning inward can be self-protection. Refusing to hand your life back to people who mishandled it makes sense.
She also calls emotions beautiful, part of who God made us to be. Her claim is narrower: emotions need a standard outside themselves through which to be understood. A feeling can tell you something is wrong. It cannot reliably tell you what to do about it.
So the real choice lies somewhere other than between yourself and whoever happens to be in charge. The failures of leaders are real, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Trust can move to God, with every voice, including your own and the church’s, tested against Scripture. Woodson’s diagnosis points the same way: “these are all things I’m trying to earn on my own.” Radical self-trust makes you responsible for producing things only God gives.
Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:2 speaks to this kind of slow shaping: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Paul is writing to a community of believers after eleven chapters about God’s mercy, and the verbs describe an ongoing process. The verse assumes something is always shaping the mind. It says nothing about phones, so applying it to the feed is application rather than exegesis. The principle still fits: conformity happens passively, and transformation requires a different input.
How does the feed handle pain?
Woodson identifies escapism as the second major way the false story shows up. When something is too hard to face, distraction is the easiest move: scrolling without purpose, watching whole seasons at once. She describes the message underneath it: “But what I’m told is just amuse yourself. Sit here for another dopamine hit. And the way you deal with the hard things is by not dealing with them.”
She also explains why most people never notice. “tech companies spend a lot of money to capture our attention. So we’re not even thinking long enough to say, how is this stuff forming me?” Formation by the feed works because it never pauses long enough for you to evaluate it.
Fields presses on a subtler version. She is direct about her own position: “I’m not anti therapy. I’m in therapy.” Her target is self-diagnosis through social media, filtering categories through the self until, as she puts it, “Our diagnosis becomes our identity.” A label then becomes the reason a person cannot do what God asks, such as loving and serving others. Her sharpest line names the danger: “you’ve given language to your disobedience.”
Woodson adds the detail that makes the critique land. People find a category because they “saw all of these memes or carousels and I fit the little checklist that they put, even though, I don’t know who made this checklist.” A graphic of unknown origin can end up defining a person more firmly than Scripture or a trained clinician ever did.
This needs careful reading. Neither speaker dismisses real diagnoses, and seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. God works through trained counselors and clinicians. The warning is against letting algorithm-delivered labels replace both professional care and the call to grow. A real clinician helps you change. A checklist on a carousel often helps you stay put.
What do the old habits interrupt?
Woodson is clear about where her practices come from: “what I present in the book aren’t brand new habits. They’re just things the church has done for centuries.” Each one interrupts a specific lesson the feed teaches.
Lament interrupts performance
When life disappoints, many Christians know only two options: pretend, or drift the way Fields’s friends have drifted. Woodson recalls growing up in church without much permission to express disappointment or anger at God. Lament is the third option. Citing her count that 40 percent of the Psalms are psalms of lament, she describes them this way: “Like you have the people of God saying, this isn’t what we signed up for, Lord, you’re not doing what we thought you would do. We need you to show up.”
Psalm 13:1 shows the genre: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” This is poetry and prayer. The psalmist is not teaching that God forgets. He is telling God how it feels, inside a relationship he refuses to leave. Online, pain is either hidden or performed for an audience. Lament addresses it to the one listener who can act.
Woodson is honest that lament does not guarantee rescue on a schedule: “So when I prayed for deliverance, he brought me sustenance.” She recalls a low season when a friend across the country texted, unprompted, to ask if she needed prayer. Her circumstances did not change that day. Her sense that God saw her did. The claim is modest, and stronger for it.
Fasting interrupts the pull you cannot see
Woodson admits fasting does not come easily, and that is its value: “I realize how much I am controlled by the food as soon as I stop trying to eat the food.” She calls it a spiritual palate cleanser that reminds her what she longs for in God lasts longer than what culture offers. The feed works the same way. Its grip stays invisible until you stop. She also ties fasting to listening, and her explanation describes the whole problem: “he’s hard to hear when the noise of life is louder than his voice in my life.” Silence from God and noise from the phone can feel identical from the inside. Only one of them is under your control.
Rest interrupts the belief that everything depends on you
Woodson treats rest as trust. She asks why people hustle and work endless hours, and suggests an honest answer: “maybe it’s ’cause I’m trying to find identity and productivity and not who I am in the Lord.” Constant checking and constant output share a root. Both assume that if you stop, something will collapse. Psalm 127:2 confronts that assumption directly: “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.” This is wisdom poetry, so it states a principle rather than a promise that rest guarantees success. The principle cuts against the feed’s logic. Sleep is something God gives to people he loves, and the anxious extra hours add nothing he was waiting on. Putting the phone down at night is a small way of believing that.
Why does staying with people matter so much?
Fields grounds community in creation. Genesis 1:26 records God saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” She reads the communal language of the verse as a reminder that being human means being interdependent, and that running from community fights what we were made for. That reading is an interpretation of the plural, and the broader point about interdependence rests on much more of Scripture than this one verse.
Woodson’s observation is that depth comes from staying. Relationships feel shallow when nobody has worked through anything together. Real belonging “requires me staying when things get awkward, staying when maybe there’s some friction in the relationship.” Then she names the cultural direction: “And what the culture gets us to do is to be isolated by ourselves.”
Fields extends this to artificial intelligence. She uses AI tools herself and says, “Technology can help with information.” Her concern is people turning to these tools for relationship because human relationships feel too hard, and she insists “we are designed for relationships with other humans, not technology.” She refuses to make it a generational caricature. She tells of a friend whose coworker, a man around 40, pulled out a chatbot mid-argument to settle it.
Woodson’s response is to teach the skills people have lost: “Let’s log off and let me show you the tools of this is how you form a friendship.” Her diagnosis is that “our patterns have been overtaken by just scrolling and consuming instead of living in existing and embodied relationships.” The fix is ordinary and physical: a shared table, a home opened to others, memories made in person instead of in a group thread.
What is the feed unable to give?
Woodson uses the word shalom for the wholeness Scripture describes, created in Genesis and restored in the new Jerusalem of Revelation. She makes two claims about it that, taken together, overturn the feed’s whole offer. The first: “The only way we can truly get it is by being connected to the one who created it.” The second: “we can’t have shalom unless all of us have it.”
The algorithm sells wholeness as a product you assemble alone, one more input at a time. Woodson’s account says wholeness is received from God and shared with others, which means no amount of private optimizing can reach it. That is why her habits are communal and God-ward rather than clever. Lament hands the pain to God. Fasting and rest admit you are limited. Staying through friction ties your peace to someone else’s. Each one is a way of receiving what you cannot produce, and as Woodson says, “there’s no neutrality to the options we choose.”