Christian Mind & Culture — The catechism you never agreed to, three hours a day
A word on the word “catechism”
This piece leans on a word that makes some believers — especially in Baptist and free-church traditions — instinctively wary, because they have mostly heard it from Rome. So before the article begins, a definition is owed.
“Catechism” is not a Roman Catholic word. It is a Christian one, and it is older than the divisions between us. It comes straight out of the Greek of the New Testament — katēcheō (κατηχέω), “to teach by word of mouth, to instruct” — literally to sound a thing down into a person’s ears until it is known. The word is already in your Bible.
“so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.”
Luke 1:4 (NASB1995)
The word translated “taught” there is katēcheō. Luke wrote his Gospel so that Theophilus would be firmly catechized — grounded — in what he had been told. Paul uses the same word in Galatians 6:6, of the one who is taught the word and the one who teaches. A catechism, at root, is simply ordered instruction in the faith: most often a set of questions and answers, repeated until they are known by heart.
And it belongs to the whole church, not one wing of it. The Reformation produced some of its finest examples — Luther’s Small Catechism (1529), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), the Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647). Baptists have their own, and always have: the Baptist Catechism of 1693, long associated with Benjamin Keach; Charles Spurgeon’s catechism for families (1855); and, in our own day, the widely used New City Catechism. To catechize is not to be Catholic — it is simply to disciple on purpose, in an ordered way.
So when this article speaks of “the catechism you never agreed to,” it is not borrowing another tradition’s term. It is using the whole church’s word for the thing that quietly and repeatedly forms a person — and pressing the one question that matters: who is doing the forming?
You would never sit through a three-hour daily class taught by an instructor whose name you do not know, whose worldview you have never examined, and whose only measurable goal is to keep you in your seat as long as possible. You would walk out. You would call it indoctrination.
And yet, by the most conservative estimates, the average adult now spends well over three hours a day inside exactly that class. We call it “the feed.” We call it scrolling. We call it nothing at all, because we barely notice it happening. But make no mistake: it is a school. It has a curriculum. It has an instructor. And it is forming you.
Formation is not optional. It is only ever directed.
Here is a truth Scripture assumes on every page: every human being is being formed. You are not a fixed object. You are being shaped over time — by what you attend to, what you repeat, what you practice, what you submit to. The only question is never whether you are being discipled. The only question is by whom, and toward what.
For most of history, the formative forces in a person’s life were slow and visible — family, church, town, work, the rhythms of a place. You could see who was shaping you. You could name them. Now the most powerful formative force in the average Christian’s life is an algorithm, and it is invisible by design. It does not announce itself as a teacher. It presents itself as a mirror — “we just show you what you want” — which is precisely the disguise that makes it so effective.
“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:2 (NASB1995)
Paul names two and only two trajectories: conformed, or transformed. Pressed into the mold of the age, or remade by the renewing of the mind. There is no third category called “neutral.” There is no slot for “I just use it to relax.” The feed is not relaxation. It is the mold. Three hours a day in the mold is a lot of pressure.
What the algorithm actually optimizes for
Be clear-eyed about the mechanism. The recommendation engine behind every major platform has one job: maximize the time and attention you give it. It is not optimizing for your wisdom. It is not optimizing for your peace. It is not optimizing for truth — truth and engagement are not the same thing, and where they conflict, the machine has no instinct to choose truth.
And it has discovered, through trillions of measured interactions, exactly which human appetites keep a person scrolling. Outrage holds attention. Envy holds attention. Fear holds attention. Comparison, contempt, novelty, low-grade anxiety, the itch of the unfinished — all of it holds attention. The feed is not malicious in the cartoon sense. It is something quieter and more dangerous: it is indifferent, and it has learned to feed the parts of you the Bible calls the flesh, because the flesh is reliably profitable.
“Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.”
1 John 2:15–16 (NASB1995)
Read John’s three categories slowly, and then think about what an engagement algorithm actually serves you. The lust of the flesh — appetite, craving, the next hit. The lust of the eyes — wanting what you see, the endless catalog of other people’s lives. The boastful pride of life — status, comparison, the performance of a self. That is not a coincidental overlap. John wrote the diagnosis of fallen human desire two thousand years ago, and the most sophisticated machines ever built reverse-engineered the same three levers because they are the levers that work.
Catechism by repetition
Nobody is handing you a doctrinal statement when you open the app. That is the point. Formation rarely arrives as an argument. It arrives as repetition. The old catechisms understood this — they taught the faith by question and answer, repeated until the answers became reflex, until “What is the chief end of man?” produced its response before you had to think.
The feed catechizes the same way, only it never tells you the questions. Scroll for a year and you are not handed a thesis that your worth is measured in attention — you simply absorb it, post by post, metric by metric. You are not taught in a lecture that contentment is impossible and the next thing is always the thing — you are trained into it by ten thousand small comparisons. You are not argued into the belief that outrage is the normal temperature of a thinking person — you are conditioned into it until a calm response feels like weakness.
This is the SmithForChrist framework applied to a screen: behavior follows belief, and belief is built by repetition. The man who cannot understand why he feels anxious, envious, scattered, and perpetually behind would do well to count the hours. The mind does not stay neutral under that much input. It conforms.
The decision point
Here is the confrontation, and it is not a comfortable one. If you spend three hours a day in the feed and forty minutes a week in the Word — and many sincere believers are at a ratio far steeper than that — then whatever you call your formation, the math has already decided it. You are being discipled. You are simply being discipled by the louder voice.
This is not a call to delete every account and move to a cabin. It is a call to stop pretending the feed is nothing. It is something. It is a formation system, and you are inside it, and a disciple of Jesus does not get to be passive about what is forming him.
Renewing the mind on purpose
Romans 12:2 does not say “be less conformed.” It says be transformed, and it names the mechanism: the renewing of the mind. Renewal is active. It is something you do on purpose, against a current, with intent. Here is what that looks like with the feed:
- Name it accurately. Stop calling it “just scrolling.” Call it what it is — a teacher, a formative input, a catechism by repetition. You cannot resist a force you will not name.
- Count the hours, honestly. Your phone will tell you the number. Look at it. Then put it next to the time you spend in Scripture and prayer. The ratio is the real measure of who is discipling you.
- Audit what it is feeding you. For one week, notice what you feel after twenty minutes in the feed. Anxious? Envious? Contemptuous? Restless? That is the fruit. A tree is known by it.
- Give the first input of the day to God. What forms the mind most is what reaches it first. If the feed is the first voice every morning, it sets the frame for everything after. Let the Word get there first.
- Build friction. Move the apps off the home screen. Turn off the notifications that are engineered to summon you. Set the phone down in another room. You are not weak for needing structure; you are wise for not trusting your appetite at full volume.
- Replace, do not just remove. A vacuum refills. The hours reclaimed from the feed do not become holy on their own — give them to Scripture, to prayer, to actual people, to silence. Renewal is replacement.
Where this ends
The gospel speaks directly into this, and not as a productivity tip. The reason the feed has such a grip is that it is selling the same counterfeit the world has always sold: that your worth is something you must manufacture and defend, that your peace is one acquisition away, that you must be seen to be real. The algorithm did not invent those lies. It only industrialized them.
“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”
Matthew 11:28–29 (NASB1995)
“Learn from Me.” That is a discipleship invitation, and it is the only one that ends in rest rather than exhaustion. The feed will never give you rest — its entire design depends on you never being satisfied. Christ offers the opposite: a verdict over you that does not need defending, a worth that was settled at the cross and cannot be raised by a good day or lowered by a bad one.
So the question is not whether you will be discipled. You will. It is only whether you will keep handing three hours a day to a teacher who profits from your restlessness — or whether you will, deliberately and against the current, sit down again at the feet of the One who is gentle and humble in heart, and let Him renew your mind until it is His shape and not the algorithm’s.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist