You didn’t stop praying. Not exactly. It just got harder to focus. Harder to stay still. Harder to shake the feeling that nothing’s really happening when you do. You’re not angry at God. You’re just… tired. Disconnected. Somewhere between the Bible app notifications, the spiritual content on your feed and the group chat full of hot takes, something got lost.
Faith didn’t leave. But it started to feel quieter. Harder to reach. And in its place? Noise. Endlessly scrollable, algorithm-approved noise.
This is the paradox of being a Christian in 2025. We’re more digitally connected to faith than any generation before us yet many of us feel less spiritually grounded. The reasons aren’t always obvious. It’s not a crisis of belief or traditional burnout. It’s something subtler — call it digital saturation or spiritual numbness. Whatever it is, it’s changing how we engage with God.
The shift isn’t just anecdotal. Research is beginning to illuminate how the structure of our digital lives impacts our spiritual rhythms in ways we might not fully recognize.
Dr. Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has spent decades studying attention in the digital age. In her book Attention Span, she notes that people now spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting tasks.
“We don’t give our minds time to settle, and that leaves us feeling fragmented,” she writes.
That fragmentation doesn’t stop at work tasks or social feeds. It changes how we process everything — including how we relate to the divine. A prayer that once might have been ten minutes becomes two. A Scripture reading gets skimmed instead of meditated on. Even worship becomes something to consume rather than participate in. We are overstimulated and underformed.
Dr. Felicia Wu Song, a sociologist at Westmont College and author of Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence and Place in the Digital Age, argues that technology subtly trains us not just in how we act but in how we think — and feel.
“When our default posture is to be constantly connected, constantly available, we begin to lose our ability to be present,” she says. “And spiritual life depends on presence.”
Presence is difficult to quantify, but its absence is easy to feel. When prayer feels like a chore or when even moments of worship feel hollow, we often assume we’re doing something wrong. But what if part of the problem isn’t us — it’s the systems we’re immersed in? Spiritual life requires margin, and most of us have outsourced all our margins to screens.
In the Christian tradition, silence has long been viewed not as emptiness but as sacred space. It is where we wait, listen and allow the Spirit to speak. But in a world that values speed, volume and stimulation, silence now feels uncomfortable — even threatening. The very conditions necessary for hearing from God are the ones our culture has most effectively trained us to avoid.
A 2022 study in Behavioral Sciences found a strong correlation between frequent social media use and higher levels of emotional exhaustion, anxiety and depressive symptoms. These aren’t just mental health concerns — they’re spiritual ones. Emotional exhaustion erodes our capacity to engage deeply with others and with God. A numbed emotional state is not neutral ground. It’s often where apathy takes root.
What’s more, a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions found that heavy social media use is associated with structural changes in the brain — specifically in regions responsible for self-control, attention and emotional processing. These are the exact faculties required for sustained spiritual practices like prayer, meditation and self-examination.
This doesn’t mean that social media is inherently destructive. It’s not. The internet has opened up access to incredible resources — sermons, communities, devotionals, scholarly insight, worship music, testimonies — tools that can deepen faith in powerful ways. But access isn’t intimacy. Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. And the more content we consume, the easier it becomes to confuse the two.
Online faith spaces are particularly susceptible to this distortion. Spiritual life becomes something to observe instead of something to live. We follow a dozen pastors on Instagram. We watch strangers cry during worship on TikTok. We listen to carefully edited podcast episodes about “quiet time hacks” while we drive, text or clean. It feels like engagement, but often it’s just exposure — and exposure without embodiment doesn’t lead to transformation.
That kind of ambient spiritual guilt — the feeling that you’re “sort of” engaging, but not really — can leave believers feeling even more stuck. Many Christians in their 20s and 30s are not deconstructing their faith out of anger or rebellion but because they feel spiritually disoriented and emotionally exhausted. The scroll never stops, yet the presence of God starts to feel further and further away.
The Apostle Paul’s words to Timothy feel oddly suited to the moment: “Always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). If there’s a line that defines digital faith today, it might be that one. We are oversaturated with ideas about God, commentary on God, opinions about church and debates about theology — and yet many of us feel less able to locate God in our own daily lives.
There’s also the performance factor. Online culture encourages visibility and self-branding, even in spiritual spaces. Christians are incentivized — sometimes subconsciously — to present a faith that is aesthetically pleasing, emotionally stirring and algorithmically successful. But spiritual formation rarely looks like that. Real growth is slow, often hidden, and almost always un-Instagrammable.
When you compare that process to a perfectly lit quiet time video on Reels, it’s easy to feel like you’re doing it wrong. But the Christian life isn’t built on curated moments. It’s built on long obedience in the same direction — and long obedience doesn’t trend.
None of this means you need to throw your phone into a lake or delete every app. It does mean we have to get honest about the impact these platforms are having on our spiritual habits. Not just in terms of what we do but in terms of what we no longer make time for — silence, solitude, deep community, long Scripture reading, unhurried prayer. The things that used to be foundational are now often optional. And not because we stopped believing in their value — but because we forgot how to sit still long enough to do them.
Psalm 62:1 says, “Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from him.” That kind of rest isn’t passive. It’s intentional. It’s not scrolling in bed while your brain shuts down. It’s placing yourself in a posture to receive — one that can’t be multitasked or gamified.
It’s worth noting that Jesus, whose time on earth was defined by urgency and need, routinely withdrew to solitary places to pray (Luke 5:16). He lived in a culture of constant pressure and limited time, yet he carved out space not just to teach or perform miracles but to be still. His model of ministry was not one of overextension. It was one of retreat and return. If he needed it, we probably do too.
Maybe the most faithful thing you can do this week isn’t to post a new insight or share the perfect devotional quote. Maybe it’s to close the apps and sit in the quiet. Not because silence is magical, but because it’s in the quiet that all the other voices finally fade — and the voice of God has room to speak.
Spiritual numbness doesn’t arrive all at once. It settles in slowly, hidden beneath constant connection and endless input. But the way back is equally subtle. Less noise. More presence. A few deep breaths. A few verses read slowly. A few honest words whispered to God in the dark.
It’s not dramatic. It’s not flashy. It probably won’t trend. But it might just bring you back to life.
