You might think you’re the only one whose attention span has shrunk in recent years. Yes, Facebook and Twitter in your pocket are part of the problem — with a beep or a vibration notification every few minutes to cue you to look at them again. But the problem is bigger than just you and your supposedly lagging willpower or focus. Let’s kick that around for a couple of paragraphs, then get to the Mo app.
Stolen Focus
You’re not just losing your focus. It has been stolen. That’s the argument of Johann Hari in Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again (Penguin Random House, 2022). It is an entertaining, informative, easy to read book. It starts with the author’s almost desperate commitment to a digital detox (he put his devices in storage and went to an isolated island for eight weeks) and then follows his many interviews with smart academic types who are researching the various aspects of the problem. It’s not just you, it’s almost everyone. And it’s not just an individual problem, it’s the whole digital system that we are all swallowed up in.
I’ll just list a few of the chapter titles by way of summary.
- Ch. 3: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion (you don’t get much sleep and you don’t get real vacations anymore)
- Ch. 4: The Collapse of Sustained Reading (screen reading just isn’t the same)
- Ch. 6 and 7: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Facebook is not your friend, but neither is any other tech company)
In the second half of the book, Hari offers some solutions. On the individual level, get more rest, eat less junk food, get a lock box for your phone (with a timer, so you can escape your phone and its apps for a few hours), re-learn how to read books instead of screens, and so forth. On the systemic level, it is possible to give tech companies different incentives, so they become more interested in providing apps and services that make us better and more informed. Read the book for the full story. The good news is that you can regain some control over where your eyeballs go and what your brain thinks about. If you think you’ve got a problem, imagine the challenge facing the kids or grandkids. They are surrounded by screens and don’t remember any other way to live. So get the book and read it. Thank me later.
Losing Focus in Church
How does this affect church on Sunday and the church life of the average active Mormon? I’m just going to throw out some ideas and see if they resonate with you. What are potential problems and possible solutions?
First, paying attention in sacrament meeting. Am I the only one who listens to a speaker for two or three minutes, then reaches for the phone to find something more interesting? Or even just do it automatically, almost as a reflex, whether you are looking for something interesting or not? Yes, sixty minutes rather than seventy minutes is an improvement. But the recent practice of trying to make every sacrament meeting talk a rehash of a recent GA General Conference talk doesn’t help at all. Solutions? You could turn off your phone for an hour. You could try harder to listen to the speaker. If you are a speaker, cut out a couple personal stories and throw in a few more scriptures. Don’t regurgitate the talk you were given as a topic. Instead, write your own talk with a hat tip or two to the GA talk.
Second, what about class? A few years ago, there was hope that the new curriculum (which turned out to be Come Follow Me) would improve things. Oh well. Adult Sunday School can very from DOA to actually informative and enjoyable. It mostly depends on the teacher, with the best teachers ignoring the curriculum and just bringing their own good ideas, good research and sources, and positive discussion questions to the class. There are many good teachers in the Church, but not that many get called to teach Gospel Doctrine. So … possible solution: Call better teachers! Move “Gospel Doctrine Teacher” higher on the ward priority list.
Third, what about the youth? I’m thinking youth classes and Seminary. I worry that more and more LDS video snippets are displacing actual engagement with the scriptures. The problem with videos is they are like those TV movies with the “based on a real story” disclaimer. The LDS videos are based (sometimes in a very loose sense) on some scriptural text, but they add a lot of LDS interpretation and fill in a lot of gaps with (let’s be honest) convenient fictions well beyond what is actually said in a given scriptural text. Sometimes a video presents things that simply are not in the text or even that run completely contrary to what’s in the scriptural text. The correlated LDS youth curriculum is to the point that some young Mormons go to college, take a good Introduction to the New Testament class or simply read the New Testament carefully for the first time, and then have the predictable “hold it, say what?” reaction that might just lead them right out of the Church.
Solutions for the youth? Less curriculum management, fewer videos, more deep reading. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. Maybe do two Seminary days in class (Tuesday and Thursday) and the other days online or just a log in and do a lesson or reading on your own time. Five days of early morning seminary is overkill and wears out a lot of the youth. See Chapter 3, The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion.
So what is your experience? What has worked for you to regain control over your devices and apps? To get back your once-admirable ability to focus? What about church? Is there really a problem or am I on the wrong track? Do we just have less tolerance for boredom than in prior years? Here’s an honest question: Does anyone learn anything in church anymore? When was the last time you actually learned something, a fact or an idea, in church on Sunday? When was the last time your kid said, over Sunday dinner, “Hey, I learned something interesting in class today!”?
Wheat & Tares 
Geriatric millennial here. Texting wasn’t a thing until I was in college, and even laptops in classes were rare. We doodled and did crossword puzzles in boring classes/meetings.
The primary kids love the videos. They can’t follow a KJV story because of the archaic language. I’m a fan of more accessible translations.
Our ward had a seminary teacher shortage and proposed two day a week seminary. The Gen-X parents threw a fit and refused (but also don’t want to teach or be the second adult in the building…). My kids are just a couple years younger and I think the five-day model is just too much.
The Internet / Smart Phone is either the biggest curse earthlings have ever faced or it’s the most significant blessing since fire and the wheel. You decide.
In the context of the COJCOLDS, I vote the latter. At least that’s my experience. And Im not just saying this in the discussion of distractions. I’m describing the search for truth.
I purposefully save a W&T post to read in Sacrament meeting. I just cannot even engage with sacrament meeting speakers any more. It’s a mental health choice. The topics are dreadful, there is zero engagement, and I just can’t. It’s how I get through the meeting.
On SS weeks, I give the teacher ten minutes to reel me in. If they can, great! If they cannot, out comes the phone. It’s about 50/50. I usually start with the app to read the lesson myself, but sometimes even that’s not enough. On the weeks I’m with the deacons, I don’t need my phone and it’s great actually.
Yes our phones are such a curse. They ruin pretty much everything. And during COVID what else was there to do since we were all stuck at home? I’ve started re-setting boundaries on phone use and so far it’s been positive.
Wait — fewer personal stories and more scriptures? In theory, we’ve been reading the scriptures all week. I want to hear other people’s take on them and personal experiences with the principles in them. I once sat through a training for teaching RS by a presidency who directly discouraged telling or soliciting personal experiences. I went home crying. Then what are we at church for? We could all stay home and recite a catechism of doctrines, or we could learn from each other. Stories are an amazingly effective form of teaching. Yes, some people’s stories are off, and I might not agree with their conclusions, but they get me thinking in a way that quotes I’ve heard my whole life don’t.
But totally agree about the video thing. The only time in two years of teaching primary that I shared a video was to show the clip from Zorro where Antonio Banderas is pretending to be a priest but hilariously mixes up the 5th and 6th commandments. (I stopped before Catherine Zeta Jones talks about her lustful thoughts.) My 12YO comes home from church complaining that they just watched a bunch of church videos. Admittedly, he also comes home complaining about one teacher that just rambles on about his life’s story, but that’s because there’s no apparent gospel tie-in to the stories; the guy just enjoys a captive audience.
Smartphones are both a blessing and a curse, as they provide convenient but different ways to engage with information and each other. About 9-ish years ago, I taught youth Sunday school (14-15 year olds), about the time non-Apple smartphones were really taking off. This was a middle-class suburban ward, and maybe 3 of the 7 kids in the class had smartphones, from which they could read scriptures if asked (but often also texted and screwed around). The other kids either came from families that couldn’t afford smartphones, or had very conscientious parents that wouldn’t allow them to have their own phones yet. And only one of those kids regularly brought printed scriptures to class. So it was kind of an awkward transitional phase when young people (and their parents) were still trying to figure out how to engage with this rapidly growing and changing technology, and it was nearly impossible to keep them engaged in the scriptures, so I reached a point where I just didn’t try to actually read from the scriptures in class anymore. However, I realized I had to approach teaching very differently to keep them interested, so I instead had more topical discussions with the kids about things that mattered to them. When I was a youth (early 1990s) lugging around a quad from class to class every Sunday was a minimum expectation. We didn’t have any better option, and in hindsight, we were bored out of our skulls. As part of our lessons back then, we often went around the room taking turns reading the relevant scriptures. Smartphones have gotten us away from doing that, and I think maybe that’s a good thing.
And I’m not sure if we’ve got it figured out by now. Among adults in my ward now, almost all scripture reading in church is done electronically. So its hard to tell if a person is actually deep in the scriptures or deep in social media. On rare occasions when I get asked to teach lessons, I ask everyone to put their phones and tablets away. If there are any scriptures relevant to the lesson, I put them on a Power Point slide as part of the lesson.
When I was released as Bishop, I requested to be the Youth SS teach and got it. I taught for 3-4 years, and I can guarantee nobody in my class was bored! I once even brought a live black widow spider to class for an object lesson. It was in a jar, and then I put it in a paper bag. I told the kids I had something deadly in the bag that could kill them. They didn’t believe me, so I asked one of the always goofing around boys to look in the bag and tell the class what he saw. He looked, and said there was a black widow spider in it. Nobody believed him even though he insisted it was there. Then I asked the most studious person in the class, the one most likely to correct my English (she did all the time!). She looked in, and said, yes, there was a live black widow spider. Now most of the kids believed her, but not everybody. Then I took it out, and now everybody believed. When then discussed belief, truth, and why we trust some people but not others. (BTW, this was pre smartphone)
In thinking about the ideas in the original post, I agree whole heartedly with the thrust of the post. My observation is that most sacrament meeting are boring in the sense they some manage to leave me wondering if the speakers are really capable of putting any real thought in to their speeches. No wonder the smart phones come out. My wife is far more guilty of that than I am. Most of the gospel doctrine lessons are boring as they are not engaging to me. I keep hoping that the lessons will improve to the extant that they will give me new ways ways to think about the gospel topics, but I have go prepared to be disappointed. No wonder people are getting bored and turning to their phones to fill the time. There have been many times I would have chucked the second hour entirely if it weren’t for my wife wanting to stay.
I think that “Come Follow Me” was a step in the right direction. It gives only a few talking points, which gives teachers the leeway to adjust the lesson however they feel like. Also, there’s an expectation for “students” to now contribute equally to the lesson with their comments, which should encourage more interaction. To put it in college terms, the Church wants to shift Sunday School from a lecture format to a seminar format.
However, I don’t think many Sunday School teachers take advantage of this opportunity because they’re used to being told what to do. Similarly, like testimony meeting, comments from students can either enrich or derail an entire hour. It depends on how enthusiastic or apathetic members are with Sunday School in each ward/branch. It’s very much “Russians roulette” in terms of Sunday School experience.
I was recently in a stake conference where a visiting 70 mentioned how he went to another Christian church and they had some wonderful fellowshipping. At one point in the middle of the service they had a break for people to go talk to people around them. They sang spirited songs. They had the occasional shouted “Amen!” during the sermon. He then mused that he “wished there was some way we could have more excitement in our church meetings.” (or something to that effect.) I wanted to stand up and tell him that he had just listed a handful of ways to do just that. But alas, rather than being governed by a vision of … of well, anything, we are governed by a handbook and a heaping dose of tradition.
Sacrament meeting is boring because we’ve designed it to be boring, and then set the bar as low as possible. “Give a talk about a talk” (which itself is often full of quotes from other talks) is our way of making things easy. So when we assign our members that task, they read off the talk a paragraph at a time occasionally inserting “I know this is true” between sections. Of course, we’ve often only given them 4 days notice that they’re speaking in church, so the blame isn’t always on them.
Teaching lessons is a skill. Not everyone has that skill. We need more emphasis on calling people to teach that have that skill. Everyone who attends their classes can learn something about how to teach a lesson, as well as learning something about the gospel. That doesn’t mean the same 4 people need to teach gospel doctrine exclusively for the next 50 years, but we don’t call any random person to play the organ, and we shouldn’t call any random person to teach lessons.
Finally, based on my experience as an exec sec (an excellent ‘fly-on-the-wall’ calling) my ward placed far more emphasis on individuals temple recommend status and orthodoxy when calling people to teaching assignments than to any teaching skill. An active temple recommend was required to teach a youth class – something that I don’t think I ever heard explicitly stated for any other calling. (Though, it would have been such a strong assumption for many other callings (EQP, RSP, etc.) that it wouldn’t have needed to be mentioned.)
I don’t believe our problems with holding interest in sacrament meeting can be tracked to cell phone use. For me, the over use of the words “know” and “true” is the problem. Our testimony meetings most of all have become an exercise in sharing a short scripted statement of certainty. Nothing new or personal is to be said, for fear the bishop will ask you to sit down. People don’t use the words used in scriptures to describe their own growth in their relationship to the Savior; desire, faith, hope, belief. Instead they say they know the church is true.
It’s not only boring, but it has no meaning other than stating a blind loyalty to the church. I want to connect with real people with real struggles that have real relationships with God. Unfortunately church leaders are so scared of people leaving the church right now, they are set on controlling everything presented in church. Sometimes bishoprics only dare call their own family members to teach and speak.
This is not only boring, but it’s exclusive to people who don’t think like them. There ought to be room for all kinds of thinkers in the church. When we broaden our speakers and teachers we broaden the kinds of people who will feel comfortable at church. We help long time members in understanding other ways of thinking. This helps us be more welcoming to people of all kinds in our missionary work.
When we turn away from seeing the gospel in a true/false all or nothing narrative, and we allow ourselves to openly see and discuss the real details in all their variations, we teach people to think in a more flexible way, so that their testimony doesn’t break in half when they do face (as they will), scriptures that conflict, leaders that aren’t Christ like, and the many other issues in the church that simply aren’t completely perfect yet, or “true”.
Sacrament meetings no Sunday School lessons are uninformative and boring because the talks and lessons are designed for the lowest common denominator. They are designed so that no person need fire up even a single neuron to actually think.
In my day, Church attendees were expected to think about what they heard. Now, they are not. They are expected to simply sit. This is not even as mentally stimulating as passively watching janitors clean up after a televised hot dog eating contest.
This plays right into the hands of Facebook and Instagram. Idle minds realize that they will learn nothing from the talk and lesson, so they look up old flames on these pernicious apps in order to facilitate illicit affairs.
The answer is clear—return to expecting listers to think and give them something to think about.
1. Funny story – I borrowed Stolen Focus from the library, but had to return it unread, because…I couldn’t focus enough to get around to actually reading it. You’ve reminded me to put my name on the hold list again and see if I do better second round.
2. Often church is boring. Many reasons cited up-thread. Often church is vexing. Things said that are un-Christlike, untrue, and offensive. (No desire to ever bring a non-Mo). Occasionally it is inspiring, so I keep returning. I’m old school. I bring a small notebook and doodle or write my emotional responses to what is being said or record how many wood slats there are in the front of the chapel above the choir seats or create anagrams from a word in the program or Hymnal. Although the church makes it possible to log into the Internet, you must agree to abide by its terms and conditions each time, which lays down a layer of guilt when I use it for other things.
The worshipful ritual of the blessing and partakig of the sacramental emblems is my key focus, everything else in comparison is confetti. But, I do enjoy the sacramental sermons from time to time dependig upon who is delivering the same, and that hey are not a rehashment of GA conference talks. I can access those on-line at my convenience. I like those sermons which are spiritually nutritional, by the adding of meat to the milk of the sermon, I want to hear of personal experiences, not others, i want to hear how the gospel fits practically into daily life, and i want to hear of how the gospel has helped one become a better person. And i want to be challenged. What i don’t want is same-old, same old. The gospel of Jesus Christ, to me, is educational, enlightening, and exciting. If i come away from the sacrament meeting where the sermons lack for encouragement and challenge, i can always remind myself that i have together with everyone else on the day, partaken of the Lord’s supper. As for the gospel doctrine class, I want discussion, expressions of opinions and understandings, how the lesson fcan impact my life for the better. It’s what i call fellowship, education, and learning together.
I remarked to a friend this weekend that I’m excited that movie theaters survived the pandemic. With large screen TVs and high quality speakers, it’s easy to get a high quality experience at home. BUT, even if the movie is highly engaging, there’s still a 50/50 chance I’ll pull my phone out of my pocket at some point. In the theater, once a movie starts I never pull out my phone. If a movie is that bad, I’ll leave the theater (like I did for about 20 minutes during middle of Avengers: Endgame). Church content pales in comparison the Avengers Endgame and I was bored during that.
Add to all of the above I suffer from industrial deafness, so I don’t hear higher pitched sounds. I hear about a quarter of the words spoken. Our chapel was built in the 50s and has a very loud air conditioning system. Much of the year it isn’t needed because our latitude is the same as southern florida, and we are on the coast, but the bishops mother in law turns it on whenever she enters, and if anyone turns it off she walks from the left front to the right side of the lounge
to turn it on again. I have been told not to turn it off.
In the last month we have had the sacrament passed to the Bishop before someone from the congregation shouted that it hadn’t been blessed, (so bishop and councilors not paying attention either) and the sacrament set up with the bread on the outside. Detracts from the sacrament.
If one more person uses the story of “Stone Soup” during a talk or sermon at church, I may just stand up and scream, “Enough already!”
Because the Church deliberately blocks internet, I always had a book teed up on my phone that I could read if the talks and lessons were extremely bad, which they were 80% of the time. That percent only got higher when we changed wards. I don’t care to hear their awful political / culture war observations, and I absolutely never need to hear any variation of “obedience” or “follow the prophet” again until they day I die. I am likewise full up on the phrase “covenant path.” No. Thank. You. It has been years since I heard anything uplifting, novel or useful from the pulpit. That’s a long time. Our last ward basically killed me. And the number of times a “teacher” showed up to an adult class with a #&!^X!!@ seminary video instead of an actual lesson was enough to make me spit. It’s abundantly clear that people don’t understand that church is a voluntary activity, and that you have to work to make it worth attending.
MTodd: I couldn’t agree more. If it’s a good movie, I’d much rather be in the theater, because I will absolutely be on my phone, doing my coloring app or similar, if I watch it at home.
All you need to say about Seminary now, is that CES has officially said they are switching from scriptural mastery to doctrinal mastery (read–words of the living prophets, rarely grounded in scripture). A real loss that is just another disappointing tangent to the insipid CFM. There is so much lay literature out there, that even if you don’t read Biblical Hebrew or Greek, for instance, you can grasp the documentary hypothesis, or the idea of Q in the New Testament. Old school seminary in Mesa–memorizing 160 passages of scripture, reading the scriptures cover to cover–actually gave me an advantage after I left the bubble of BYU (in some cases even before–rejecting biblical literalism), when I enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. I specialized in Medieval Arabic and Islamic History, so because I wanted a job, I taught stuff way outside my field, notably World History and (secular) Religious Studies. My knowledge of the Bible was a great help, in graduate school (my Mennonite friend and I just killed it when it came to the Judeo-Christian origins of Islam–because we knew the Bible) and as a professor, especially in Global Religions. Of course the fact that it was professionally useful for me is going to be a rarity. Where it is bound to help young people today, is that, as you noted, if they leave a kind of Mesa/BYU bubble, take a class, or even when exposed to other religions and cultures, they are bound to notice the expressions of religion in scriptural, sociological, ritual, and doctrinal levels. Then they might look inward and evolve morally and ethically. Or pack their U-Haul and go back to the Jello Belt. Nothing at Chuck-O-Rama will upset their world view. Seems like a loss to me.
I don’t think we can blame the inability for people to pay attention in church on cell phones and other electric gadgets. Church got boring long before there were cell phones. It was dumbed down because in their attempt to correlate everything, they aimed at the least educated and new members. So, it started getting boring in the 1970s and gradually got more and more boring. They just stopped worrying about adults learning or being inspired.
My husband was playing bingo with the children 30 years ago. because the meetings were just boring. I was still trying to find something worthwhile from church so I would listen and then at home, I would make some comment about one of the talks and he hadn’t heard enough to even register. So, now I have stopped going and he plays on his cell phone.
It may be true that young people have shorter attention spans because of electronics, but I think church being not worth paying attention to is a separate problem.
“Idle minds realize that they will learn nothing from the talk and lesson, so they look up old flames on these pernicious apps in order to facilitate illicit affairs.”
John Charity, I salute you!
Can we get Qualtrics to create an anonymous teacher rating survey with the hopes of improving our church experience?
Because I left academia as a possible profession, I try to teach CFM/adults/gospel doctrine/etc in mostly a seminar format. The antics of RMN actually broke my proverbial shelf so I consider myself in year 1 of 2 in this calling – I don’t see myself going all in on BOM historicity etc so I will step down somehow (and then spend 2nd hour at DQ or 7-11 or the nearest honky-tonk and listen to Bon Jovi while driving home). For the moment hopefully I am catering to the fellow unknown nuanced ward members – my companion teacher is an old school Utah County gal who thanks the Lord for “the covenant blessing of moisture” (her words) when it rains and actually teaches in more of a lecture style, although we both try to give some helpful historical background.
We had Stake Conference in August so this past week I used all the material from Psalms-Ecclesiastes and ignored correlated suggestions to discuss repentance and staying on the path. Instead, I had folks read from Psalms and Proverbs in French, Spanish, and German and the 30 people in class each shared the name of their favorite hymn; we had 5 hymns with multiple votes. I also shared info about the religious sentiments of Elvis Presley and Kris Kristofferson and thereafter offered a perfunctory apology to the Bishop who was attending class.
Hearing Psalm 23 in German was way cool, I’m just saying…
A few years ago I read Greg Prince’s biography of David O. McKay. I learned that McKay and his counselor’s (Q3) fought against Harold B Lee and the Q12 over Correlation. McKay felt that Correlation would eventually destroy the church. Because Lee outlived McKay, Correlation became “God’s will” and McKay proved to be “prophetic”. (Similarly, RMN outlived GBH so the rejection of the term “Mormon” became Gods’s will).
Thanks for the comments, everyone. Great discussion.
Josh H and Jack Hughes say cell phones in church are a blessing or a curse. Yes, it’s still a little strange to me that no one brings scriptures to church anymore, just a cell phone.
Chadwick says he saves a W&T post to read during Sacrament Meeting. Would that all LDS members followed Chadwick’s example. At least they’d learn something, which somehow the LDS curriculum doesn’t seem to be accomplishing any more.
Laurel, I’m not saying banish all personal stories from LDS talks. Just make sure there are a few scriptures in every talk. I’ve sat through too many meetings where there isn’t a single scripture cited or quoted. If you can’t ground your sacrament meeting remarks in the scriptures, then what are you talking about?
Geoff -Aus, you share so many interesting stories about your weekly church experience (as in eyeroll type of interesting). It sounds more like a reality show than an LDS ward. You must be the rock of your ward to still be attending every week. You are the eye of the storm.
Angela C, church blocking Internet? There was a year or two (about five years ago) that Facebook was blocked, but I don’t see that anymore. I wonder if this is a local unit thing?
englecameraon, Seminary dropped scriptural mastery? I know they went from 40 scriptures per year to 25 and switched around their selection of scriptures a few years ago — I posted on that a couple of times when that happened. But moving to a new “doctrinal mastery” approach is news to me. I gotta go find out what’s going on. Expect a post on this in a few weeks.
Chet says he will flee his calling rather than teach Gospel Doctrine Book of Mormon. It’s Old Testament that I can’t handle, given how much damage the LDS curriculum does to the Hebrew Bible to make it fit the correlated LDS script. If I had to teach OT again, I would physically burn a copy of the manual in front of the class the first week.
gesmith60, you are suggesting that there is a sort of “geriatric roulette” that actually directs the course of LDS doctrine and practice over the years. Great topic. To add to your list, my view is that the early death of Harold B. Lee put Spencer W. Kimball in office as a way to reverse the LDS racial policy that kept LDS members of African descent out of temples and the priesthood. Harold B. Lee would never have taken that big step. And I wish Gordon B. Hinckley had lived to be 120 years old. Let us pray for Dieter Uchtdorf. Live long and prosper. Peach and long life.
It’s hard to make something intellectually stimulating when you’re required to check your curiosity at the door.
The church doesn’t actually want the membership learning anything about our scriptures or history. It wants to provide the illusion of learning under the guise of “edification,” but without curiosity and freedom of thought/belief, boredom is inevitable.
Pfffft long before cell phones I just used to read my scriptures during boring lessons. If the class is spit, read holy writ!