We need to understand the unique challenges to following Jesus here and now. Inevitably the way to live among those challenges will be found in the scriptures and the Christian past. Our faith is shallow because our lives are shallow, because our cultural moment is shallow. Many like it that way as it makes it easier to sell us stuff. Jesus is calling us to depth, further up and further in forevermore.

Matthew Lee Anderson says that our culture is in a crisis of attention. I think we all know this, even if we haven’t used this language. Have you noticed that it’s increasingly difficult for you to read books with sustained or difficult arguments? Or to read a physical book at all? Have you noticed how you want to skip from app to app as you scroll and tap? Have you noticed how you can’t even queue for the bus or watch the adverts without needing to pick up your phone?

Our capacity for attention has been eroded. Though, for all the smartphone has been a culprit here, Neil Postman was decrying a similar problem caused by television in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nicholas Carr said similar things about the internet in The Shallows. This isn’t a new problem, but it’s an accelerating problem, I fear. We see this play out in many directions, not least in our politics, but I’m trying to explore the causes of our shallow faith.

My concern is that this inability to give sustained attention to one thing is a cause of our shallowing faith. To put it another way, along with the shift in our Sundays and preaching; the loss of community and catechism, we have a fifth problem: the rise of entertainment.

Is entertainment bad? No. But the modern entertainment systems—and I think particularly of the physical technologies, but it would also be true of the content of what we ‘consume’—have shifted us in some ways that are counter to Christian formation.

There are two aspects of this, the first one could be overstated, but essentially we spend an inordinate amount of time consuming entertainment. If the aspects of Christian discipleship that we’ve touched on take time—and most do in one way or another—we don’t have much time. Sometimes because we’re living lives that are too busy, and this is often what people blame, but I suspect that for most people it has more to do with the amount of entertainment we watch.

I can’t remember the last time I met a Christian who didn’t have a TV. 20 years ago I knew several. I have a TV. I probably watch too much of it. I also use social media a fair bit, maybe too much. If you’re in a young enough generation that you’d never watch TV, assume that I mean YouTube. People find it strange that we don’t pay for a streaming service, which has been an economic decision rather than a moral one and we have access to some from family members. People seem surprised that we only have some of them.

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