The great challenge to Christian discipleship in our age is not persecution, though that exists. It’s not intellectual doubt, though that’s real enough. It’s not even the seductive pull of rival ideologies, though we face those too.
The challenge is distraction.
We live in an attention economy where the most powerful forces in human history are optimized to capture and monetize our mental bandwidth. Every notification, every infinite scroll, every autoplay video is the fruit of enormous engineering effort applied to one goal: keeping you engaged, which is to say, keeping you from whatever else you might be doing.
This poses an unprecedented problem for spiritual formation, because formation requires exactly what the attention economy destroys: sustained attention, patience, depth, repetition, and presence.
The Formative Power of Attention
Dallas Willard used to say that spiritual formation is the process by which the human spirit is given a definite form or character. We become what we habitually attend to. Our loves are shaped by our gazes.
This is ancient wisdom, found across traditions. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” You become what you behold. The eye is the lamp of the body.
But it’s also confirmed by contemporary neuroscience. Neural pathways strengthen with use. The brain rewires itself according to what we repeatedly focus on. Attention isn’t just how we engage the world—it’s how we form ourselves.
The attention economy understands this, even if it doesn’t use theological language. It knows that if it can capture your gaze, it can shape your desires. If it can fragment your attention, it can prevent the formation of depth that might lead you to question its offerings.
Consider what’s at stake. The classical Christian tradition identified several practices essential to discipleship:
Scripture meditation—not skimming verses, but dwelling with text, reading slowly, returning repeatedly, allowing words to sink from head to heart.
Prayer—both scripted and spontaneous, but always requiring presence, focus, the stilling of distraction, the discipline of showing up when you don’t feel like it.
Sabbath—a day set apart from productivity, from the compulsion to do, a practice in being rather than achieving.
Community worship—the embodied gathering with others, the submission of individual preference to corporate rhythm, the patience of liturgy.
Every one of these practices requires sustained attention. Every one is undermined by the habits the attention economy cultivates.
The New Acedia
The desert fathers identified a demon they called acedia—sometimes translated “sloth,” but meaning something more like spiritual apathy, restlessness, the inability to stay present to God and the soul.
Evagrius described it this way: the monk afflicted with acedia looks out his window constantly, hopes for visitors, finds his current work unbearable, is certain he’d be more spiritual somewhere else.
Does this sound familiar? The constant checking of devices. The inability to sit still without stimulation. The restless scan for something more interesting. The sense that real life is happening elsewhere.
We’ve technologized acedia. We’ve engineered it into our devices, optimized it for engagement metrics, and normalized it as “just how things are.”
But it’s not just how things are. It’s a spiritual condition with spiritual consequences. And it requires a spiritual response.
Resistance and Formation
What does discipleship look like when distraction is the ambient condition?
First, we need to recognize the problem honestly. Many Christians sense something is wrong with their spiritual lives but misdiagnose the cause. They think they need better content—more engaging sermons, catchier worship songs, more relevant books. But the issue isn’t content. It’s capacity. We’ve lost the ability to attend to any content deeply, including the things of God.
Second, we need to practice attention as a spiritual discipline. This means creating spaces for depth: device-free times, media fasts, extended silence. It means accepting that these practices will feel uncomfortable at first—the discomfort is precisely the point. We’re retraining capacities that have atrophied.
Third, we need to recover communal supports for attention. The individualism of modern faith puts too much weight on personal willpower. We need churches that structure time differently, that create liturgical rhythms capable of forming counter-habits. The community can hold what the individual cannot.
Fourth, we need to be honest about trade-offs. The same technologies that fragment attention also connect us to teaching and community that previous generations couldn’t access. I’m not advocating Luddism. But I am suggesting that we count the costs more carefully, that we treat these tools with appropriate suspicion, that we ask what we’re losing even as we celebrate what we’re gaining.
The Deeper Issue
But there’s something deeper here than tactics for managing technology. The attention crisis reveals a theological crisis.
If we find it nearly impossible to pray, perhaps it’s because we’re not sure prayer matters. If we can’t slow down for Scripture, perhaps it’s because we don’t really believe those words are life. If we can’t stop checking our phones, perhaps it’s because that’s where our hearts actually are.
The attention economy exploits a void. It offers substitutes for the goods we were made for: belonging, meaning, recognition, rest. As long as we’re looking for these goods in digital forms, we’ll remain captive.
Augustine’s famous observation remains true: our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The restlessness scrolling of the modern soul is just Augustine’s insight technologically mediated. We’re looking for home in places that can’t provide it, and the more we look there, the less capable we become of recognizing home when we find it.
A Different Way
The good news is that formation works. The brain can be rewired. Habits can change. The capacity for attention can be rebuilt. I’ve seen it happen—in my own life, imperfectly; in others’ lives, sometimes dramatically.
But it requires intention. It requires patience. It requires community. And it requires a willingness to feel the discomfort of withdrawal from stimulation we’ve grown dependent on.
It also requires hope—not optimism about technological fixes or willpower, but hope in the God who is forming us into Christ’s image, who works in us “both to will and to work for his good pleasure,” who began a good work and will complete it.
We live in an age of distraction. But we serve a God who calls us to attention: “Be still and know that I am God.” That command was never easy. Today it requires more intentional resistance than ever.
But the invitation remains: Come and see. Taste and see. Behold.
The life of discipleship is still available. But we may have to fight for it in ways previous generations didn’t. The battlefield is the space between our ears, the territory of our attention.
What are you giving your attention to? And what is it making of you?