You Cannot Love Both God and TikTok

Governing our digital lives is among the greater challenges facing us as a species, as a Church, and as individuals. Because the Bible’s many books were written thousands of years ago, we might make the mistake of thinking that Sacred Scripture contains little direct guidance for how to govern our personal relationship to our smartphones. And if we made that mistake, we would miss the powerful, eternal lessons that Scripture encourages us to keep in mind when interacting with human technology. For starters, one of the ways we are made in God’s image is as creators — some have dubbed human beings homo faber (“Man the Maker”) — and human technology works best when our creations give glory to God. The detailed instructions for constructing the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:10–22) and the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 6:1–38) provide positive examples where woodworking, weaving, goldsmithing, and sculpture are all employed to testify to God’s power and majesty. Good technology use arises when humans align their creative ability to God’s commandments, employing their God-given talents for worship and hearing the cry of the poor.

The second lesson is that God made us free (Gal 5:1), meaning we are free to choose good uses for our technologies, but we tend to construct Golden Calves (Exodus 32:1–4; 1 Kings 12:28–33). Our creative capacity comes with a powerful tendency to construct idols that displace the affection and attention due to God. The Golden Calf provides a fitting metaphor for the modern worship of small, powerful, portable devices. Thomas Merton once described idolatry as taking some external object and making it the center around which a person’s spiritual energy is devoted and consecrated. That is a fitting description for the smartphone and its various apps. The average American checks their phone 144 times per day, spending at least 2 hours per day on social media.¹ When seen alongside data suggesting that the share of Americans who pray daily has dropped precipitously since 2007 (when the iPhone was invented),², it seems relatively uncontroversial to suggest that the growth of smartphones and the declining rates of prayer are related. It also seems obvious to suggest that not all the time we spend on our phones is time well-spent (brain rot was the 2024 word of the year for a reason). There are real human costs when we forget the true God who brought us out of bondage and instead make graven images, explaining why the first two commandments speak strongly against idolatry, understood as the process of trying to contain God in a man-made image or device.

The Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9) is frequently employed as the archetypal warning for what happens when humanity tries to make a name for itself (when our reverence becomes self-aggrandizing). God does not take issue with humans making bricks (tool-building), but things go wrong when human ambition attempts to supplant or rival God. Runaway pride results in catastrophe, division, and misery. The Tower of Babel is less an ancient myth than a reality currently being lived out on a global scale. Vanity is the center of the online attention economy, and social media amplifies outrage, tribalism, and division. This human division can be quiet as well; a recent study showed that 50% of Canadian men feel isolated, and while phones are not the only reason, the negative impact of phones is three times stronger for men than for women.³

The most extreme example of a bad use of technology from Scripture can be found in the passion and death of Jesus Christ. One (reductive) reading of Jesus’s crucifixion would be to see it as a powerful symbol for how humanity’s technological prowess goes awry. Sophisticated human organization, coupled with wood and metal craftsmanship, all become crudely employed in the art of torture, and from Auschwitz to Nagasaki, the devilish side of human ingenuity reveals that technologies often turn against us and lead to the debasement of human life. As it is with our big technologies, so it is with our small devices.

The eternally guiding scriptural principles about technology, then, are that we are made in God’s image as creators. We are free to use technology to praise God in alignment with his commandments, but we often use our freedom unwisely to build idols, and at our worst, we become the cruelest beasts. The human propensity for vanity, idolatry, and cruelty are sins that flow through all our technologies, and to govern them wisely, there is an increasing need for the kind of moral guidance St. Thomas Aquinas’ virtue ethics still provides. The digital transformation of the past quarter century has escalated the need for good moral instruction, and this brief reflection applies core elements of Aquinas’ virtue ethics (as elucidated by Romanus Cessario in Introduction to Moral Theology) to the personal use of smartphones, demonstrating that Catholic moral theology still has much to offer in the age of constant connectivity.

When viewed through the lens of Catholic virtue ethics, every minute spent watching TikTok, scrolling Instagram, or checking the box scores on ESPN.com becomes worthy of moral attention because Catholic moral theology is concerned with identifying what leads us to divine perfection, and what moves us away from it. At a time when 57% of Americans admit they are addicted to their phones,⁴, we need guidance for exercising prudence, making wise choices, and exhibiting self-control over our technologies. Catholic virtue ethics makes consequential every click, swipe, and scroll because in every act, a human person either comes closer to loving God, or fails to do so.

We Are Purpose-Built

God created the human person for union with the divine. This is the heart of Catholic anthropology, and Cessario does not mince words: “Mistakes about the human being prompt mistakes in ethics.”⁵ This founding assumption that we were made for theosis breathes life into the purpose-driven (or teleological) focus of moral theology, which evaluates behaviors by their ability to promote human fulfillment, ultimately found in the stable pursuit of God’s will. A purpose-driven approach to ethics is more fruitful because it frames personal digital behavior as good when it fulfills the perfection of the person, and this is the filter which needs to be applied to our smartphone use.

Watching instructional videos on YouTube can help one develop new skills and talents or to understand a medical diagnosis. Listening to Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons or Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast can deepen one’s understanding of God’s eternal covenant. Many uses of digital technology can enhance human fulfillment and help us become better versions of ourselves. Or one could use their phone to share deep fake videos of Bishop Barron, research conspiracy theories, or watch a popular streamer being harmed and humiliated. Because good and bad usages look nearly identical (staring into a screen with earbuds on), a purpose-driven approach provides the best framework to interpret the Christian moral life because it flows from the assumption that there is a point to human existence built into the fabric of the universe. The design of our being — the law God wrote on our hearts — serves as a constant guidepost for discerning the quality of how we choose to spend our time on our phones. How does any particular use of technology bring me closer to God or help me grow in virtue? Our behaviors either align to this purpose, or they do not. There is no middle ground.

It is frustratingly difficult to talk about digital behavior because it comprises a wide range of activities that can be directed toward diverse ends, so much so that rules-based approaches to ethics — those that attempt to distinguish good actions from bad ones — are hard to apply in the digital space. While it is easy to identify some immoral digital behaviors that should be illegal — such as accessing child pornography, phishing scams of seniors, ransomware attacks, sextortion, or cyberbullying — it is much harder to determine if a child spending three hours a day playing Roblox while their parents shop Facebook Marketplace can or should be restricted. A more productive question for smartphone use than “Is it wrong?” is “Is it good for us?” This question emphasizes that the goal of moral theology is the promotion of human flourishing, and anything that interferes with that divinely created purpose causes harm.

 The Divine Light of Reason Shines in the Darkness

If human beings have a purpose (to achieve union with God), and digital technology interferes with that purpose, Aquinas suggests we should be able to see evidence of the negative impacts on the spirit because the normal, fully functioning human mind can rightly discriminate between those things that are conducive to the good ends of human flourishing and those that are not. Aquinas claims that the human mind can intuitively identify what is unhealthy, and there is a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that we are fully conscious that social media platforms have a negative impact on our spirit. Consider one teen comment in a recent report suggesting 50% of teens recognize that social media is bad for them:

The overuse of social media in our society seems to be the main cause of depression among those in my age group. People seem to let themselves be affected by the opinions of people they don’t know, and it wreaks havoc upon people’s states of mind.⁶

This succinct confession confirms research from 2019 that established the link between social media participation and depression, which may be worse in teen girls than boys because social media increases their exposure to bullying and decreases activities that have a positive impact on wellbeing, such as sleep. This is proof positive of Cessario’s maxim that “every disordered deed yields its own punishment”⁷, but it also shows that we are aware when we inflict pain upon ourselves. Human happiness consists primarily in the satisfaction experienced by the human subject, and human beings are increasingly aware that digital media is making them very unhappy.

The Imago Dei asserts that every human person bears the indelible imprint of the Creator — a divine likeness that endows each body and soul with an inherent, inalienable dignity. This concept of the human person must not be confused with evolutionary development or reduce human beings to neuronal processes as if man were a machine. And yet moral investigations cannot ignore these evolutionary and cognitive processes, either, because they are useful in detecting how harm to the human person is caused. Neuroscientist Sofia Carozza suggests “digital technology shapes us from within”⁸ by describing how online behaviors such as doom-scrolling (the excessive consumption of negative news and social media content) displace experiences that the nervous system expects and relies upon for its successful development and functioning. “Passively consuming information displaces personal agency — or in other words, active engagement with the environment. This is a basic expectation of our nervous system.”⁹ Cessario claims that human nature exhibits a recognizable stability,¹⁰ but digital technology upends how we engage with reality, perhaps destabilizing and redirecting “the trajectory of our being.”¹¹ We crave God, but digital experiences redirect this craving toward an insatiable appetite for more digital experiences.

You Cannot Love Both God and TikTok

It is perfectly said of the smartphone that “to pursue counterfeit loves while imagining that one loves God is like trying to move both north and south at the same time.”¹² One cannot love both God and TikTok. Jesus makes this claim when he says, “You cannot serve two masters: God and money. For you will hate one and love the other” (Matthew 6:24). Money is more accurately rendered as mammon, an Aramaic word for wealth and possessions. Mammon personifies wealth as a competing master or a tempting, greedy force that enslaves individuals. In the West, we have largely agreed to ignore this uncomfortable passage, choosing instead to believe it is possible to love both God and money, but the smartphone symbolically represents the tempting and enslaving force of mammon more faithfully than money ever could. To paraphrase the great technological writer Jacques Ellul, he who has technology is the slave of the technology he has, and he who has it not becomes a slave to the mad desire to get it. Ellul observed that it often comes to pass that the individual “is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom”¹³ What Ellul called technical slavery functions on the illusion of choice.

In a related way, Aquinas argues the human being who chooses unhealthy activities is not free, but a slave to their choices. Applying the above maxim to the handheld digital space:

Social media seems to expand the opportunities for self-expression, but it in fact limits and confines. Social networks push us to present ourselves in ways that conform to the interests and prejudices of the companies that run them. This fact is more limiting than most realize.¹⁴

Our online choices are constrained by the social expectations, allowances, and invisible architecture of the platforms we use. These oppressive algorithms channel what we see and are exposed to at the same time they appear to provide limitless freedom of choice, which is not the purpose of freedom. The ability to choose to use our phone for this or for that within a controlled platform elevates choice to an end itself, but as Cessario points out, “human choosing in itself does not constitute the ultimate value for human existence.”¹⁵ The ultimate value of human choice is the freedom to do God’s will and cooperate in His grace, otherwise known as freedom for excellence.

To govern our digital lives effectively, we must transcend freedom for freedom’s sake and reclaim freedom for excellence. Freedom for excellence requires developing operative habits  that energize the quest for a happy life and make its attainment possible. This longing for a different kind of freedom explains why more and more people are ditching their smartphones to take back control of their lives. These minor forms of resistance are manifestations of the claim that “theological ethics must adopt an uncompromising attitude toward anything that contravenes authentic human love.”¹⁶ According to one study, 71% of people spend more time on their phones than with their romantic partner,¹⁷ often employing a practice called phubbing where someone is snubbed in place of a phone. Smartphone addiction has become such a commonplace epidemic that many colleges and universities have help pages dedicated to this topic.

Children who spend long periods of time using digital technologies are more likely to have social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties.¹⁸ A large body of research has also found a “relatively solid association” between violent video games where players inflict harm on others and increased aggression and moral disengagement.¹⁹ The epidemic of social disconnection is a public health hazard; chronic loneliness increases the risk of premature death and raises the likelihood of heart disease, stroke, and dementia. If these disease clusters are viewed as health conditions and as a social spiritual sickness, it is possible to recognize how digital behaviors contravene authentic human love. We are on firm footing when we suggest that current digital habits impact individuals’ ability to form healthy human relationships full of authentic human love, and we must take an uncompromising attitude that directly confronts obsessive smartphone use.

We Need Help

Pornography addiction, online gaming addiction, and all the other previously mentioned activities that contravene human love need to be reduced, eliminated, and/or redirected. But most harmful digital activities are not this egregious. And simply recognizing that certain digital behaviors are unhealthy because they obstruct divine union and contravene authentic human love union does not mean that individuals have the power to stop themselves. Cessario sums up our dilemma: “to know the truth does not mean that every Christian does the truth.”²⁰ This is a variant of St. Paul’s admission that “what I do is not the good thing that I desire to do” (Romans 7:19). Or, as Stump puts it, a defective will can only be fixed by a person who does not have a defective will in the first place.²¹ Put yet another way, an alcoholic would find it easy to quit drinking if they were not an alcoholic. We need help.

The human person matures morally if no impediment inhibits its development, but there is good reason to suggest that smartphones serve as a potent impediment to the development of the moral life. The development of virtue is a quest for the perfection of moral character that always takes place within particular circumstances, and the modern obstacle for the development of virtue requires reckoning with our unique generational challenge — omnipresent technology that is fun, entertaining, easily shareable, highly addictive, and time-consuming. Technology has a way of misshaping needs and desires, and disordered desires impair a person’s ability to operate in a fully human way. But God is not powerless, even in this digitally mediated world. He remains capable of exercising His call on the human heart and inspiring prudent action. Achieving the highest form of freedom requires faith; “Aquinas takes faith to include crucially a free act of will, in which a person hates his own moral wrong and longs for the goodness that is God’s.”²² We have to admit we have a problem and long for something more fulfilling.

It has been said that people write the books they need to read, and I wrote this article primarily for me. In the first hour of my day, I use my phone to pray the Divine Office, read the New York Times, check my work email, read yesterday’s box scores, check the weather, review my calendar, listen to podcasts, check in on my work email, and enjoy new pictures of my grandson. I live my life with the automated, unconscious routines I carry with me, and I will conclude by sharing two habits that have been personally useful in helping me govern my own smartphone use more effectively.

The first habit is becoming clear about my end and object before I pick up my phone because “prudent persons look ahead to in order to ensure that what they do achieves the good.”²³ In Aquinas’ moral philosophy, the object of a human action is what is being done, which defines the objective morality of the act. The end is the purpose or goal, defining the subjective morality of the act. For a human action to be morally good, both the object (what is done) and the end (the intention) must be good. If either is bad (or unconscious), the action is at least partially bad (or at least not good), and if there ever was a place where ends and objects get confused, it is when I pick up my phone without a plan. I began to notice that my object or my intent would imperceptibly shift after I picked up my phone. My object (scrolling through headlines) and the end (to be informed? to be entertained?) became confused, ambiguous, or undefined. Now, before I pick up my phone, I internally declare my end and object. Example: I am picking up my phone to check the weather (object) so that I can determine if it is going to be nice enough outside for my wife and me to go out for a bike ride and get some exercise (intent). My object is clear, and my intent is healthy. I have given myself a chance to live consciously.

Consciously living in an increasingly digital world requires actively managing our brain stem and biosocial drivers in new ways so that we can pursue other avenues of action with more cognitive potential and creativity. This process of intentionally declaring my object and end is a form of discernment, and:

Discernment requires vigilance. We must reflect on how our use of technology aligns with our values and whether it contributes to our growth in virtue. Are our digital habits fostering patience, humility, and charity, or are they drawing us toward pride, distraction, and selfishness?²⁴

By applying Aquinas’ structure of a moral act when I pick up my phone, I am achieving a greater wholeness, rather than living with a divided and distracted self. This simple practice of declaring my object and my intention enables me to use my phone to enhance my life, ensuring that it is directed toward fulfilling ends that provide opportunities to grow in virtue.

The second habit is eucharistic adoration, of sitting in the warm sun of God’s love. It does not need to be a formal, hour-long adoration service (but it is good when it is). Arriving to weekday Mass 10 minutes early and staying 10 minutes later in front of the tabernacle is a simple, silent encounter that reduces my anxiety and increases my awareness of why I am here, and what I should want to get out of life. I reject the pressing belief that the real action is somewhere else, that I am somehow missing out, and I come back home to the present moment. In adoration, my “wasted time” of non-productive activity allows me to stand in awe of the Creator who gave me my breath and heartbeat. In the hush of the dimmed sanctuary surrounded by stained glass depictions of saints who successfully faced the challenges of their times, I am suddenly walking on a very different road. Instead of rushing hither and thither on the highway, I am back to walking my steady, silent pilgrimage toward the living mystery of Christ, who invites me to rest in the boundless love of God. Without the obsessive pull of my phone, the silence of adoration allows my soul to be grabbed by that “magnetic pole” that draws all souls toward itself (John 12:32)²⁵

The End

Catholic anthropology starts and ends with a positive purpose for human life, which is a process of spiritual purification to achieve union with the divine. The acceptance of God’s plan is the only way to achieve that freedom, and any rejection of this plan means an individual human life never reaches true fulfillment or perfect freedom. The smartphone’s addictiveness directs the will toward ultimately unfulfilling (or at least less fulfilling) appetites than the love for God, and the fully integrated human person would not choose against his own happiness. The free life of blessedness transcends the world of human strivings so that individuals can act in alignment with the divine will. When individuals freely make choices in conformity with their ultimate good, only then does true fulfillment follow.

The smartphone is the present manifestation of the perennial human challenge to make every interaction, including our digital ones, oriented toward the greatest commandment — loving God and loving others. Digital asceticism calls for us to fast from the dazzling distractions in hopes that we will experience the great spiritual realization best expressed in a modern variant of the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart’s revelation: “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a scroll.”