A Generation Unfit for God: Why Millions Can No Longer Pray

Photo by Drew Beamer (source)

We are living through the most successful assault on the human soul in history, and most people don’t even know it’s happening.

The attack isn’t coming through persecution. It’s not bombs or bullets. It’s far more insidious—a systematic rewiring of human consciousness itself. We’ve been neurologically hijacked, and the consequences reach straight into our capacity to encounter God.

The average adult now maintains focus for barely forty seconds before the mind fractures and darts elsewhere. We’ve shattered the fundamental human ability for sustained attention. And with it, we’re destroying the conditions required for a spiritual life.

Dr. Kwasniewski has spoken compellingly about our societal addiction to smartphones, and he’s right to identify the spiritual stakes involved. Sadly, the problem runs deeper than device dependency. We’re not just attached to our screens; we are, in fact, addicted to them. We’re being trained by them. We’re witnessing a corruption of human consciousness that hinders our ability for lingering, for deep thought, for wonder and contemplation—the natural prerequisites of attentiveness and conversion. The constant drip of notifications and dopamine loops of digital life prevents pause and reflection. And now, with artificial intelligence accelerating this transformation, the danger multiplies.

Algorithms don’t merely reflect human desire; they shape it, pulling attention away from depth toward distraction, from meaning toward trivia. What once required discipline—study, meditation, introspective intention—is now displaced by endless scrolling and endless noise. This is no minor cultural shift but an unprecedented threat to our ability to think, to wonder, to be present, to be truly human.

Christian faith requires abilities that modern life steadily erodes. Let us consider what those abilities are, and how they are threatened like never before.

Scripture demands dwelling over verses, allowing revelation to unfold slowly through repeated reading, the way water seeps into dry soil. Prayer isn’t multitasking with closed eyes. It demands an inner quiet that only comes when outward clamor has ceased. Worship isn’t passive attendance. It calls for the full presence of body, mind, and spirit. That unity is cultivated through patience and discipline. Yet patience and discipline are the very virtues our digital age diminishes, dilutes, and dissolves.

Years of dopamine-driven digital habits have done significant harm. Bodies fidget, trained by constant stimulation to recoil from stillness. Minds split into restless pieces, skipping across screens like stones over water. Spirits short-circuit before they can settle into sacred rhythms, the flicker of transcendence extinguished by the glow of a notification.

What has been created is not merely a distracted people but a generation neurologically unprepared for the sacred. And this is not some abstract concern. For Catholics, it strikes at the very heart of our faith. If attention has been sold off to the highest bidder, then prayer itself becomes impossible. A Church filled with restless bodies and chaotic minds cannot produce saints. And if nothing changes, neither will the next generation. Future Catholics will inherit not just a weakened faith, but a nervous system incapable of sustaining it.

Photo by Jr Korpa (source)

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han offers the most penetrating diagnosis of this condition. In his masterwork The Burnout Society, he reveals how we’ve created what he calls the “achievement society”—a system that demands perpetual performance from exhausted men and women. Unlike traditional disciplinary societies that imposed external constraints, the achievement society colonizes us from within. We become our own slave-drivers, constantly optimizing, constantly performing, never reflecting, never content.

Han’s insight cuts deeper than most realize. Digital capitalism has not simply occupied our time; it has corrupted society. We’ve internalized the logic of constant productivity, turning even leisure into another form of work. Social media becomes labor. Entertainment becomes optimization. Rest becomes impossible because the inner taskmaster never sleeps. And for Catholics, this corrodes the ground on which faith stands: a people trained to measure every action by output, every moment by efficiency, cannot understand grace. Grace is gift, not achievement. To pass on the faith in such a world would mean not just providing catechesis but re-teaching humans how to be human.

Most crucially, Han identifies what he calls the “violence of positivity”—the toxic demand that everything be immediately gratifying, instantly meaningful, perpetually uplifting. This violence destroys our capacity for what he terms “lingering contemplation.” We’ve become allergic to difficulty, to waiting, to the patient suffering that spiritual traditions recognize as essential for growth. The sacred requires what Han calls “the art of lingering,” but we’ve been conditioned to crave speed, surface, and immediate satisfaction.

Young people suffer most acutely from this distortion. Their minds were molded during all their formative years by machines designed to command attention and monetize distraction. They’ve spent adolescence in mind-altering feedback loops—swiping, tapping, refreshing endlessly. When they enter church, they’re totally unprepared, like a casual jogger suddenly thrown into an ultramarathon. A fifteen-minute homily feels unbearable, five minutes of silence would be excruciating. As creatures made in the image of God they hunger for transcendence, yet as products of digital capitalism cannot remain present long enough to receive it.

What some might see as hostility toward faith could actually turn out to be a neurological inability for it—the undermining of the nature presupposed by grace. If we do not grasp this point, all strategies—above all, those that lean into the digital—will fail to address root causes and may exacerbate them.

Churches find themselves trapped in false choices. Some embrace entertainment-style services with videos, graphics, and abbreviated everything. Others maintain more conventional formats while watching congregations dwindle. Both approaches miss the deeper crisis. We’re not dealing with stylistic preferences or generational gaps. We’re confronting what I call spiritual ADHD—the inability to sustain the focused attention that genuine Christian practice demands.

This condition is manifested everywhere that sacred life once flourished. Religious families struggle to pass down traditions requiring sustained engagement. Parents attempt to share Bible stories with children who are incapable of calm and composure. Teenagers resist family devotions that compete with the dopamine hits from Instagram and TikTok. Even dinner conversations about faith get interrupted by digital intrusions.

Photo by Thomas Kinto (source)

Christian marriage bears particularly severe wounds. Biblical marriage is not a contract of convenience but a sacred covenant, demanding decades of patience and sustained devotion to another person’s spiritual growth. Such a covenant requires constancy—eyes fixed on one another, hearts trained to endure, wills sharpened to sacrifice.

Yet couples today increasingly cannot sustain that undivided focus. Intimacy itself is under siege. It must compete not only with busyness but with infinite digital alternatives—apps, feeds, images, and temptations designed to dismantle desire and scatter loyalty across countless false intimacies. What God hath joined together, the digital age daily worketh to pull apart. Spouses come to the marriage bed already exhausted, their senses dulled, their affections dispersed among infinite distractions. Marital infidelity becomes less about adultery in the old sense and more about a slow erosion: a thousand divided glances, a thousand competing affections, until the sacred covenant itself begins to feel impossible.

If marriage is the first school of love, this erosion is no private tragedy. It is, I suggest, a cultural catastrophe. For when husbands and wives cannot hold faith with each other, how will parents teach their children to hold faith with God?

The crisis reaches into faith communities themselves. Contemplative traditions that sustained monasteries for centuries cannot survive in minds addicted to novelty. Theological education falters against entertainment-driven learning models. Religious art, music, and literature that once lifted souls now compete with content engineered for instant arousal and just as instant abandonment.

Digital culture has made us resistant to the very experiences through which God traditionally reveals Himself: silence, stillness, sustained openness to mystery. Without serious intervention, we face a crisis unlike anything in human history. Not political or economic crisis, but something far worse. We are nearing the extinction of human interiority itself. Entire generations will lose access to the spiritual inheritance that created Western civilization. The sacred will not vanish outright; we will simply lose the capacity to perceive it. Like people born blind trying to grasp the idea of color, we will carry cultural memories of transcendence while living in complete spiritual darkness.

The trajectory is clear and terrifying. Religious institutions will complete their transformation into museums. Prayer will become unbearable. Scripture will dissolve into senseless syllables. Worship itself will feel torturous, because minds will no longer possess the inner architecture for reverence. We will retain the vocabulary of faith while losing the capacity for faith itself. And the loss will not stop there.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski (source)

Recovery requires recognizing focus as a spiritual discipline, not merely a cognitive resource. Protecting sustained awareness becomes as essential as prayer itself. This means acknowledging that digital life doesn’t merely distract from spiritual development; it actively opposes it. Resistance, not accommodation, is the only path forward.

The choice grows clearer by the day. Either we reclaim the stillness that makes space for God, or we surrender it to shattered minds that can no longer hear His voice.

This is the sharpest spiritual struggle of our age—not because circuitry is evil in itself, but because it has been twisted into a tool against awakening, against awareness. The devil’s deadliest victory won’t be declared. It will come disguised, in the quiet erosion that renders the sacred unthinkable. And once thought itself is captured, there is no pause, no prayer, no presence. Only the infinite scroll.