Jean Twenge has been researching generational differences for a quarter century. But she noticed in 2012 abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. Up until that time there were gentle slopes of line graphs. Suddenly they became steep mountains and sheer cliffs. That year is when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

Her latest article in The Atlantic asks the ominous question: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The generation she is thinking about would be the trailing edge of the millennial generation (born between 1995 and 2012). She calls them iGen because the smartphone and social media have shaped their lives.

Psychologically they are more emotionally vulnerable than the leading edge millennials. “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

A national survey of seniors found that: “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.” Jean Twenge says, “There’s not a single exception.” She says the advice she would give to a teenager based on this survey is: “Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do anything that does not involve a screen.”

Of course, we don’t have to look at these dismal statistics and just lament. Her article and research should be a call to action for parents and grandparents. They are the ones buying these devices so they need to reevaluate the potential dangers to their children and grandchildren.

Pastor Rick Stedman asks, “Is it reasonable to believe that God exists?” He says it is because of zombies, superheroes, music, sports, and science. That is his premise in his book, 31 Surprising Reasons to Believe in God.

He begins his book by telling a true story of a family on rural property in northern California. They found a rusted can by a tree. They ended up finding eight cans containing 1427 gold coins worth an estimated $11 million.

Asked if they had any clue of the treasure, they realized in hindsight seeing a tin can tied to the tree where the wood had grown around the can. There was a clue to the treasure, but they just didn’t see it. Rick Stedman says we have many more clues to God’s existence than we often fail to see.

For example, our culture has this fascination with superheroes and fantasy movies. You would think that in a society that has become so secular, popular interest in supernatural heroes would have diminished. In fact, our current interest illustrates the spiritual longing within all of us.

In his section on “yearning for a better world” he talks about how even non-believers believe human trafficking is a vile evil that must be stopped. This provides common ground for discussion. It challenges the secular idea that all morals are temporary and inventions of culture. Our universal rejection of such evil, argues for a transcendent standard.

In another section he talks about the glory of the universe, mathematics, and the scientific method. Each of these, in different ways, argues for something more than the natural world and point to the existence of God. He also argues that our desire for something more (love, peace, and immortality) also argue for the transcendent.

This is a book that will encourage your faith, but also is a book you can give to your non-Christian friends who have never thought about the clues around them that point to God.

You have probably heard comments about certain people living in a bubble. They live in affluent communities cut off from some of the realities that most Americans face. Due to the research by Charles Murray, we can now identify where these bubble communities are located.

In his book, Coming Apart, he argued that a high-IQ, highly educated upper class was formed over the last half century that is disconnected from the culture of mainstream America. Charles Murray put a quiz in his book that PBS decided to post online. More than 47,000 people posted their scores along the zip codes where they lived when they were ten years old.

Charles Murray did an analysis of the quiz data along with other data. Even though this is not a true representative sample of America, it does provide some interesting conclusions. Overall it reinforces our general assumption that many of the leaders in politics, business, and the media grew up (and often still live) in bubble communities.

For example many of the bubbliest zip codes in America are located in New York or California. In New York City they are found in the Upper West Side and the Upper and Lower East Sides in Manhattan. They are also found in Brooklyn and suburbs of New York. California has lots of bubble zip codes in the San Francisco region, in the Silicon Valley, and in Los Angeles region.

We also find lots of bubble zip codes in the Washington, D.C. area, especially in the suburban communities that house many of the politicians, bureaucrats, and other government officials that make policy decisions that affect our everyday lives.

I hope you share my concern that many of the people who have such a significant influence in our daily lives live in a world with a very thick cultural bubble that separates them from the lives of ordinary Americans. This is not a positive demographic trend.

The Bible gives us a story of the world told through God’s perspective. That is why the Christian worldview provides the best explanation of the world. It answers questions like: Why am I here? and What is my purpose in life?

Greg Koukl provides a big-picture introduction to the story of the Bible in his new book, The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important That Happens in Between. He was on my radio program to talk about how this book can answer questions Christians and non-Christians have.

Christians need this book to put the puzzle together. Dump a puzzle at your feet and you will see what the Christian puzzle looks like for many believers. It is a pile of pieces that they have never tried to put together. To make matters worse, some of the pieces come from other worldviews and don’t even fit the puzzle. This book puts the puzzle together.

Non-Christians need this book because it tells the true story of history in a way the makes sense. Greg Koukl anticipates the questions and skepticism they may have about the story and answers those questions with his extensive apologetic background. He reminds them that this isn’t a religious fairytale. It is a true story of the way things really are.

The narrative backbone of the story includes five parts: God, Man, Jesus, Cross, and Resurrection. The book takes you through a theological tour of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Christians will be able to fill in pieces in their puzzle. Non-Christians will be able to see the big picture and understand why it is important for them to make a decision about the truthfulness of the gospel.

The Story of Reality would be a great sermon series or Bible study for Sunday School classes or small groups. And it is a book to hand to someone who does not understand the gospel and may even think it is irrelevant.

Throughout the years, John Stossel has been trying to find ways to simplify economics and illustrate the benefits of free markets. He has found that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is often invisible to his viewers. Friedrich Hayek’s “spontaneous order” is clearer but still hard to show.

That is why he began to use some of the ideas found in the article, Rinkonomics: A Window on Spontaneous Order. The book inspired him to rent a skating rink in order to illustrate some of these key economic principles.

He says, imagine you have never seen a rink and are trying to get a government regulator to approve this new business. You will flood an area, freeze the water, and then charge people to strap sharp blades on their feet and zip around the ice. There will be few rules. Most regulators would resist your bizarre skating idea. They would want stoplights, barriers, and someone on a megaphone directing skaters.

John Stossel decided to do just that. He rented a rink and began to boss people around: “You, turn left, you slow down.” The skaters hated it. And it didn’t make the skating any safer. Some people responding to him actually lost their balance and fell.

Perhaps you think they needed some experts. Government regulators would say he failed because he is not a skating expert. So he hired an Olympic skater. She did no better with the megaphone.

Actually for skating to work, you only need a few rules, like skate counterclockwise. And you might need an employee to police reckless skaters. The rest comes from spontaneous order. “Skaters make their own decisions. No regulator knows the wishes, skills and immediate intentions of individual skaters better than the skaters themselves.”

The principle here is simple. Let people make their own choices, and spontaneous order will surface. Skaters find their own path. Buyers and sellers make lots of independent decisions in a market economy. Spontaneous order arises. This is the simple lesson from a skating rink.

Your children are facing an onslaught of profanity through the media. Movies are one place where profanity reigns. One survey has been tracking profanity in movies from the first swear word on film (1939’s “Gone With the Wind”) to “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which holds the record with 798 swearwords. There has been a 500 percent increase over these many decades.

The Parents Television Council has documented that the fact that the number of expletives on television programs has doubled in just the last decade. Kids and adults use more profanity simply because they hear it more than ever before.

Let’s start with a definition. The word “profane” means: to treat something that is sacred with abuse or contempt. It means to desecrate. Something profane is unholy. It is certainly not a positive attribute. What does the Bible teach?

Paul says in Ephesians 4:29, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs.” Colossians 3:8 say, “Rid yourselves of all things such as these: anger, rage, malice, slander and filthy language from your lips.”

Sometimes we hear young people say that it really doesn’t matter what you say, it is only words. Words make a difference. Make a joke in public about hijacking a plane and see if words have consequences. Make a derisive comment about people’s appearance to their face and see if they merely ignore it.

As believers, we should submit our vocabularies to the Lord. The world is watching us. Peter (2:12) admonishes us to keep our “behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.” In a world awash in profanity, Christians should watch what they say.

No doubt you have heard the phrase, “politics is downstream from culture.” It is a way of explaining that what is at stake in our world often begins upstream in the culture.

Popular culture is all around us and delivered to us through broadcast media and social media. We perceive the world through news reports, through movies, through entertainment programs, and through music. Every form of communication has a message. Sometimes it is blatant and intentional. Often it is subtle and not even perceived by the artist, actor, musician, or broadcaster. He or she may simply be telling a story but that story comes from a worldview perspective.

A wise and discerning Christian should frequently ask: What message is being delivered? Is the viewpoint true or false? How does it line up with biblical principles? But let’s face it many of us merely accept what we read, see, and hear uncritically.

And that brings us to politics. We are bombarded by messages every day. Most Americans watch lots of television, listen to a fair amount of music, and visit various websites. Unless they are approaching all of this entertainment with lots of discernment, they will begin to accept the worldview perspective of the writer, the actor, the director, the musician control the story and the perspective.

Most of these stories come from a liberal, secular viewpoint that becomes easier to embrace. If someone stood before you and lectured about abortion, homosexuality, or gender identity, your guard would be up. But if these stories portray liberals, feminists, and gays in a positive light, they get into our head and emotions. And if they portray conservatives and Christians in a negative light, the same thing happens.

All of this to say, that we need to pay attention to popular culture, because politics is downstream from culture.

In a recent Point of View booklet that I wrote about media bias, I began by talking about the influence that “the narrative” has in the establishment media. The narrative in the minds of reporters and editors helps them determine which facts to include and which to discard. In a recent article, columnist Wilfred Reilly catalogs the many current examples of how the media narrative was wrong but blinded those in the media to some important facts and information.

The first example has been the question about the origin of the virus. Early on, most of the media discounted the idea that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab-leak theory was labelled a conspiracy theory and was considered taboo. If you continued to cite evidence for that theory, you could be banned (even permanently) from social media. Now most media outlets will at least acknowledge the plausibility that the virus leaked from a laboratory.

Another example is the drug hydroxychloroquine. A media narrative developed early on to discount the effectively of the drug, probably because Donald Trump talked about it. Now there is a major study that has since found that the drug can increase survival rates for Covid patients.

A third example can be found in the press story that President Trump ordered tear gas against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square so that he could stage a photo op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Almost a year later, most of the establishment media acknowledge that this is not true. One government report explained that the professional park police made plans for the raid days or weeks earlier, and that the protestors were anything but peaceful.

These three examples illustrate how powerful a media narrative can be and is one more reminder for why we need discernment when we consume the news.