Ep. 111: Using Technology Wisely

Isaac Dagneau:
Well, with me today is Andy Crouch. Andy is an author and speaker. He’s actually a former executive editor at Christianity Today. I don’t really know what else to say, because I mean you’ve done a lot. You’ve done a lot of things. It’s great to have you on the show today, Andy.

Andy Crouch:
It is a pleasure to be here, Isaac. Thank you very much.

Isaac Dagneau:
To begin, let us know a little bit more about who you are so I don’t have to say those things, because I don’t really know. Yeah. You tell us who you are. Yeah, we’d love that.

Andy Crouch:
In order, I suppose I’m a son of parents who happily are still living and well and now are grandparents of my kids. I’m also a father. My own children are in their late teens, one in her late teens, another is 20 now. He would insist that he is not in his teens anymore. I’m a musician. That was kind of my first professional work. I’m also a journalist and I’ve spent the last 15 or 20 years really doing journalism. That’s my kind of portfolio, writer, editor, musician, dad, son, husband. That’ll do it.

Isaac Dagneau:
That’s awesome. That’s good. When it comes to your faith, did you grow up in a Christian home, or how does that kind of work out?

Andy Crouch:
I grew up in a home where we did go to church most Sundays I would say. Yet, it was a little hard to say how that affected our family life. We sometimes talk about nominal Christianity or nominal Protestantism. I think that was really, that would describe my upbringing. At the beginning of high school my family moved. My parents wanted me to connect with other kids and they dropped me off at the local Methodist church. Actually in the course of just a week of encountering fellow teenagers, high school kids, who really took their faith seriously in a way I had not seen before that, I had made a very particular decision to discover what it was to be a Christian. I happened to end up in a high school in Boston, Massachusetts, not the Bible Belt by any means in the United States, where there was an amazing community of Christian kids. I really came to my own faith in the context of that community. In some distinction from my family and some tension I would say at that time, but began to own it for myself in high school.

Isaac Dagneau:
That’s so good. Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s important for us to hear that. Okay, so recently I was sitting down with my pastor, I think it was about six months ago. I guess that’s not really recently anymore. Anyways, six months ago. He showed me this book called The Tech-Wise Family. He’s like, “Hey, I’m reading this and it’s very good. You’re totally welcome to borrow it”, so I grabbed it from him and I’ve started to read it. Anyways, Andy, this is a book you’ve recently written just last year called The Tech-Wise Family: Every Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place.
This is kind of what we’re going to get into in this conversation, it’s for our listeners to know as well. Yeah, let’s just jump right in here because we only have so much time. You say, Andy, in the preface of your book that the main point is about how to find the proper place for technology in our family lives and how to keep it there. Obviously there’s a reason why you even had the impulse to write a book about this in the first place. Why do there even need to be books and resources about the proper place of technology? What is this, I guess, problem that you are writing to provide a solution to?

Andy Crouch:
Well, the kind of proximate reason that I wrote the book is that I would be speaking about any number of topics and I would mention in the course of my speaking certain decisions my wife and I had made about different kinds of technology as we were raising our children. For example, that we didn’t have any screens available to the kids before double digits I like to say, before ten years old. No TV, no laptop, no nothing, no screens. I would mention this in some other context, but after I would speak there would be a line of young parents wanting to talk to me asking, “How did you do that? How do you maintain those boundaries?”
What I realized, technology I think almost by its very design wants to be everywhere in our lives. Our phones want to be with us all the time. There’s always a notification to check out. They’re kind of built, in fact the promise of technology as I think of it is “easy, everywhere”. We always add technology to our lives, and in a sense to our whole society, because it says it’ll make our lives easier. We know technology is really working when it’s just always available.
I actually think we all sense that there’s something that is not working well about this, whether it’s people trying to get their spouse’s attention when their spouse is absorbed in their phone, or kids trying to get their parent’s attention. In the research for this book we asked teenagers, “What is the thing you would most like to change about your relationship with your parents?” We’re asking the teenagers this question, and their number one answer was, “I wish my parents would spend less time on their devices and more time talking to me.” That’s what the kids want.
This is often framed, the screen stuff is often framed as “Oh, the kids are always on their screens”, and to some extent that’s true, but the parents are also always on their screens. We’ve allowed all these things into our lives. It’s actually not just about screens, it’s many other forms of technology that are sort of omnipresent, whereas I think there’s a proper place for technology. That’s in the title of the book, putting technology in its proper place. I’m not saying technology is bad. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have it in our homes. I am saying we should make choices about where it is and when it is, and in a way how we use it.
That’s what I felt like we needed some help with because the default settings are everywhere, all the time, always available, always there to be helpful. I actually think we miss out on some of the best things of life as individuals and as families when we allow technology to operate on its default setting. This is really about changing the default settings and making some choices rather than letting the technology make the choices for us.

Isaac Dagneau:
That’s interesting. The next kind of question I want to ask is what kind of is God’s purposes for us as humans when it comes to our relationships and stuff. Obviously, you’re sort of saying we need to put technology in its proper place so it doesn’t affect the relationship between a father and a son and different members of the church. Yeah, because I like how you kind of speak into this at the beginning of your book as well, the commitment to gain wisdom and things like that. Yeah, what is God’s purposes for us as humans?

Andy Crouch:
Wow. I suppose a way you could’ve asked that question back in the first century, that would’ve been the first century way of asking that question would be to say “What is the greatest commandment?” This would be kind of the first century Jewish way of framing the question you just framed of God’s purpose. What’s the greatest commandment? The Jews have the whole Torah, right, all of the law. It has lots of different commands, but what’s the one that like sums it up? A Jewish scribe asks Jesus of Nazareth that question. Jesus actually gives exactly the answer every Jew would expect. He quotes this thing called the Shema Yisrael, the sort of fundamental text of Jewish life to this day. It says, “Hear O Israel: the LORD is God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and all your strength.” Interestingly when Jesus quotes it he actually adds something that’s not in the Hebrew version, but he says, “You shall love with all your mind as well”. Heart, soul, mind and strength.
Then Jesus adds quoting another part of the Torah, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. What I take from this is that our purpose is to become a full human beings, in other words full of heart, soul, mind and strength, so develop all those capacities we have. Think of the heart as kind of the ability through what we desire and care for to make choices. The heart for the Hebrews was not just emotion, it was also will, like affective will. The soul as fullness of self, depth of self, not being a shallow person, being a deep person, having soul. Strength, having kind of bodily capacities that we express in the world. Then minds, using our cognitive capacities, and all of those being oriented towards love, both of loving God who made us, who desires for a relationship with us, and loving our neighbor, loving our fellow human being.
The interesting thing about technology is in a way what all these devices to is they replace aspects of heart, soul, mind and strength, especially strength. Right? There’s kinds of work that used to have to be done, I mean take laundry for example. My great- grandmother probably spent one or two days a week doing laundry, like full days, mostly using the strength of her own body. Well, now actually right after we get off the phone I’ve been told by my wife I need to put some laundry in the washing machine. I’ll like, “Oh, I’ll lift that laundry just about 12 inches into the laundry machine. I’ll close the door. I’ll press a button and then it’ll do all the rest.” I’m using basically no strength.
Think about how our minds, kind of our cognitive capacities now, if I need to remember something I’m very likely … Well, if I need to find out something I ought to remember, I’ll go Google it rather than storing it in my own mind. In a way what technology has done is on the one hand it’s tremendously extended our heart, soul, mind, strength capacities, but in another way it tends to replace them. The other thing it does, especially as it gets more engaging, is it can really interrupt our capacity to pay that kind of loving attention to God and to other people that we’re meant to pay. I really think our purpose is to develop you could say skill, heart, soul, mind, strength. I think the deeper version of those, and I talk about this in the book, is wisdom and courage, like fullness of understanding who I am as person. That’s kind of soul and mind together. Then courage is kind of strength, and commitment, that’s heart and strength. Courage is when you can against resistance do things. The problem is if you make your life easier and easier, you’re actually taking away opportunities to develop wisdom and courage.
The family I think is the first place for all of us, no matter exactly what kind of family we’re born into, we’re born into this little community of human beings that has to learn how to really love each other. That’s what we’re here for. Technology can either help some of that. Mostly it doesn’t really help. It’s kind of neutral to negative on actually developing the things that make me most human.

Isaac Dagneau:
Right, okay so that last thing you just said there, neutral. I want to quote something from your book that I think is interesting. You say that technology is a brilliant, praiseworthy expression of human creativity and cultivation of the world. I’ll interject there and say that’s so true. I mean we look around and it’s beautiful to see the things that people are actually creating because of technology. Then you do say, like you just said, but it is at best neutral in actually forming human beings who can create and cultivate as we were meant to. I know you kind of already spoke into that, but I’m wondering if you can just kind of further explain that a bit. I think that’s really interesting.

Andy Crouch:
It’s worth exploring because there is a difference here. As an expression of what it is to be human, I think technology is wonderful. There’s all kinds of possibilities it opens up in the world. I actually think another aspect of what we human beings are here for actually is to take the world God made and through culture, through cultivating, through exploration, discovery, and invention unfold the possibilities of the world. That’s essentially what technology does by harnessing the discoveries of basic science. That’s all good. The only thing is paradoxically that this very good expression of what it is to be human doesn’t actually help to form the most important parts of being human. It’s once you’re formed, so once I’ve learned to write, let’s say, technology can help me write a book and distribute it. It can end up on your pastor’s desk, and we’ve never met, and now we can have a conversation using technology and other people can hear that conversation. All that is great.
What made me the kind of person who could write a worthwhile book or who could have, let’s hope that we’re having a worthwhile conversation, what made me that kind of person that could have that kind of conversation with you? Actually technology had almost nothing to do with it. It was other people. It was sometimes very difficult experiences in my life. It was a lot of practice, a lot of embodied effort involved initially just in learning to read, which happened in relationship with another person. It just didn’t happen automatically or through technology, and all the way down to having ideas worth using technology to print and publish and express.
This is why actually I think technology in the workplace is mostly a great thing. It extends our capacity to be productive. The home is not about being productive. Productivity is great for the workplace, but the goal of family is not productivity. It’s relationship, it’s love, it’s connection, it’s formation. In those things technology actually is not very helpful, and sometimes is really distracting.

Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s good. For those that are listening and have read your book and that are just sold on this truth and they want to do this, you do offer in your book ten tech-wise commitments. I actually find them very helpful because some of them kind of speak a little bit more internally. You just have this intuition that “Oh, this is right. I want to do this.” Some of them are very practical. As my pastor would say, “Some of it is pretty radical”. I mean, some of these things like even in our own local church it’s like, “Okay, some families are not doing this.” Obviously we … Everyone … You even say in the book kind of take them or leave them or kind of customize them. I wonder if you could briefly go through some of these commitments.

Andy Crouch:
Right, sure. It’s not the ten commandments. It’s not just the ten suggestions. These are things that in our family through a lot of trial and error we realized if we didn’t do these we were missing out on the best of family life and we were kind of succumbing. I have ten. I’ll go through them pretty fast and then you can drill down on any ones you want.
The first is actually just super basic. It’s like what do we want family to be about. If you decide, “We are going to develop wisdom and courage together as a family”, that that’s what family is for, to make us people who are wiser than we would be otherwise and more courageous than we would be otherwise, then you’re going to filter every choice like “Do we get an iPad? Do we get four iPads, four for each person? Do we have iPads in the car? Do we get a microwave oven? Do we use electric lights?” You can actually filter all those questions through the question of “Will this help us develop wisdom and courage?” If it will or if there’s a way to use it that it will, then bring it on. If not, then let’s think about how to set some boundaries or some barriers or bright lines.
The second one is … The next two are about kind of space and time. The second one is we said to our kids, “We want to create more than we consume. We’re creators, not consumers fundamentally. We’re going to fill the center of our home with things that reward skill and active engagement rather than things that kind of encourage you to be passive or let the device do it.” For us this meant we looked at literally the place where we spent the most time. Our kind of first floor of our house is kind of an open living, dining, kitchen area. It’s a small house. That’s where the family spends most of the time. We decided we wanted to exile all the things that worked on their own or that took over being human from us like the TV, like the glowing rectangles of various kinds. This centre of our home was going to be filled with things like an arts and crafts table for the kids, like a grand piano that we spent the kids’ college savings on when they were very small. The kitchen, a place to cook, a fireplace, we’re fortunate to have that, and lots of books, all these things that kind of make you engage rather than just passively disengage. That’s thinking about the space you live in.
Then the third one is about time. The basic idea here is to be human is to be designed for a rhythm of work and rest. We’re meant to work part of the time, but then we’re meant to rest as well. This is the Biblical kind of idea of Sabbath, a daily, weekly, annual kind of tradition of rest. Here’s how we think about it in our family. One hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year we try to turn off everything that has an off button. We really disengage from the devices, especially the glowing rectangles as we call them in our family, to cover all the TV, the phones, the laptops. One hour a day, for us that’s dinnertime. One day a week, for us that’s Sunday. One week a year when our family gets to take a week or often two of vacation. During that time we just turn it all off.
I mean we really turn it off. In other words, at the dinner hour we actually turn of the electric lights and light candles. I don’t know. If you’ve ever had a reasonably brief power outage, like the electric service goes out, actually those are kind of really fun times. Right? Suddenly you have to gather around the fireplace or light some candles. You have different kinds of conversations. Well, in our home we have a power outage every dinner time. The kids love to light the candles. We gather around the table. We eat food that we’ve prepared. It’s just his wonderful break from the kind of device led life. That’s kind of the principle of sabbath played out every day, having a rhythm every day, and played every week and in the course of a year.
The next one is actually related to that. It’s super simple, but you wouldn’t believe how few people do this. Maybe you would believe. That is we wake up before our devices to and they go to bed before we do. We do not sleep with our phones. Now 80% of teenagers in the United States sleep with their phones. This is like the worst thing you can do, honestly at any age, but especially teenagers. For our whole family, and all these commitments are not things we made our kids do, it’s things the whole family does. We decided the bedroom needs to be a place where we get to disengage and rest, deeply rest. You can’t deeply rest when that thing is like beeping, buzzing, lighting up, or even just sort of lying there waiting for you to check it. We put our devices to bed, then we go upstairs and go to bed. There’s six more if you want to hear them quickly.

Isaac Dagneau:
You know what, let’s … We have four minutes, so let’s actually jump to some other questions.

Andy Crouch:
Yeah, sure. Well, I should say the other ones get very specific like how do you use time in the car, how do we use entertainment, TV, movies and so forth. On all of these the goal, and I have suggestions in the book, but the goal is really to get us thinking about what’s really helping us thrive as a family in wisdom and courage, not just sort of be passive and allow the devices to form us.

Isaac Dagneau:
Which is so good. I’m glad you give really practical kind of commitments or suggestions as well because for some people that’s just what we need to get us started. We just want something black and white, “Okay, this is good. I want to tackle this.” I’m glad you do that. Question now in our few minutes left. When you consider sort of these commitments that you’ve made, when you kind of look around at the general kind of, at least the Christian world, what do you see is most lacking today? What commitment would you love to see really held onto and cherished today?

Andy Crouch:
Well I think I would have to say the sabbath, this rhythm of work and rest that we have lost in the, I was going to say industrialized world, but actually in the industrial age there were still Sundays. The whole society had a kind of shared commitment rooted in religion, but not necessarily specifically religious to have a day of rest. It’s really in the consumer era when businesses need that seventh day of revenue honestly that those sabbath laws in most Western countries have fallen like Dominoes. Now all the shops are open. Now Sunday is just another day. Maybe you don’t go into the office, but you still do your email.
I think this is a huge loss for families, for individuals, actually for the whole society, especially for people who are at the margins economically and need to work, to be told that you have to take a Sunday shift or you have to take seven days worth of shifts to fill out your schedule and your income. If there’s one thing that would just be the … It is a very radical idea. Honestly I get a lot of pushback from Christians about this. It’s actually in the Bible. You’re supposed to remember the Sabbath, keep it holy, and not just you but everyone who works for you it says in the command. It would be sabbath would be my number one thing that I wish we would reclaim.

Isaac Dagneau:
Now, okay consider your son. He’s 20 years old. He’s not considered a Christian young adult, as he would probably like to be called now, a young adult not a teenager.

Andy Crouch:
He really is.

Isaac Dagneau:
There you go. When you consider him and those like him, and obviously girls as well, which commitment would you see would be best catered towards them? Would it be the same, sabbath, or would it change for young adults?

Andy Crouch:
Well, the need for rest is kind of universal. I might add the need for sleep and for really good, deep sleep and not this kind of distracted sleep that we can get when we have TVs on in our bedrooms or whatever. That’s pretty fundamental. Actually I would go back to this very first thing. The thing about the beauty and the challenge of the 20s is they’re really about who are you going to become. The difference between the 20s and the teens is in the teens other institutions around you, school, family, if you’re a church goer, church, all the scaffolding and infrastructure was there to kind of shape you. In your 20s you exit all those formative environments and now you have to choose them. You have to choose who do I want to be. I would hope that when we reflect on it we think “I want to become a person of wisdom and a person of courage, and ultimately a person of love with heart, soul, mind, strength capacity for love.”
It’s really about you have to examine every part of your life. I tell you, the culture around you will not help you become that honestly. You have to be intentional about it. My son is having to do this now as he lives with a household of other guys right now. What does it mean to live in a household that’s not your family where you’re actually making choices about what’s good and what you most want from your relationships with each other? I just think being intentional about that rather than … There’s a way to live in a house full of, like share the rent, but not share life and not actually doing anything intentional together. We’re all just little individuals pursuing our own thing under the same roof. That’s so short of what can happen in your 20s. I think that sense that I’m going to choose relationship with other people who help me grow in wisdom and courage, that’s probably the key thing.

Isaac Dagneau:
So good. Thank you so much, Andy. I really do appreciate your work in writing this book, and just your heart in this as well. If you’re listening right now and you’re interested in Andy’s book, go get it. I’m almost done. I think I’m on commitment number seven, I think. You can head to our podcast episode page to find a link for the book there or just type in Tech-Wise Family in Google and you’ll find in on Amazon and different things like that. Also, be sure to check out Andy-crouch.com for more about Andy, his books, other resources and things like that. Anyways, thanks again, Andy. I hope to talk to you again.

Andy Crouch:
Isaac, thanks so much. This was really fun. Thank you.