By Ben Leblanc, TGC.
Here’s a thought experiment.
Imagine a Gen-Z pastor. He just started a small church with two other men. The church is growing steadily, and he’s been tapped to be the youth pastor once enough teens join the congregation. He even went to Bible school. There’s only one problem: This pastor hates reading.
Not only does he hate reading, but this pastor has, on occasion, expressed a general distaste for education. It’s simply not for him. He doesn’t think it matters for communicating the gospel—especially to younger generations.
This pastor scrolls through Instagram reels during every free moment: waiting in line at the cafe, waiting at stoplights, sitting on planes, immediately after waking up, and before going to bed. He doesn’t register this as a bad thing. His constantly scrolling, drifting mind is a mere fact of life, along with the fact that he hasn’t read a book from cover to cover since high school or that his Instagram is often inundated with charlatans, trolls, and “AI-generated slop content.”
If you don’t know a pastor like this, it may not be long before you do. The internet and AI revolutions have thrust the church into a new era of pastoral leadership, where many young pastors are shaped by—and shepherding folks formed by—a post-literate digital world marked by disembodied diets of low-calorie “brain rot” ephemera.
Meanwhile, biblical illiteracy is growing. In 2022, a comprehensive survey found that 26 percent of evangelicals think the Bible is more made-up than historical (up 9 percent since 2016); 56 percent think God accepts the worship of every religion (up 8 percent since 2016); and from 2020 to 2022, 13 percent more evangelicals agreed with the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” How much these stats have to do with our collective brain rot is unclear, but it’d be naive to think the two are unconnected.