Spiritual Bondage

In 1900, a former schoolteacher named Carrie Nation walked into a bar in Kiowa, Kansas, proclaimed, “Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate,” and proceeded to hurl bricks and stones at bottles of liquor. The men, interested less in spiritual salvation and more in physical safety, fled to a corner. Nation destroyed three saloons that day, using a billiard ball when she ran out of bricks and rocks, which she called “smashers.” She eventually—and famously—switched to a hatchet, using it across years of attacks on what she considered to be the cause of society’s moral failings. The movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries—which eventually brought about Prohibition—considered alcohol to be unhealthy for women, families, and the general state of humanity.

In modern times, the Dry January challenge began in 2012 as a public health initiative. Dry January is choosing not to drink beer, wine, or spirits for one month. In a 2025 article for The Atlantic Shayla Love writes that younger generations are staying away from the booze at higher rates than previous generations, sparking the rise of a neo-temperance movement. This new drop in alcohol consumption is not about the moral tragedies of drinking (alcoholism or drunk driving), but self-improvement and wellness:

Today’s sober-curious post on Instagram about how Dry January has reduced their inflammation, sharpened their jawline, and improved their sleep score. The sanctity of the home, or the overall moral health of society — not to mention the 37 Americans who die in drunk-driving crashes every day — appears to be less of a concern […]

In a 2020 Gallup poll, 86 percent of respondents said that drinking alcohol was morally acceptable, an increase from 78 percent in 2018. By contrast, more than half of young adults surveyed in 2023 expressed concerns about the health risks of moderate drinking.

In a relatively short period of time, smartphones have grown to a near-ubiquitous status. With each passing new release, smartphones are becoming more powerful and all-encompassing. Understandably, this is leading to increased user adoption and a surge in daily screen time.

Here are some highlights (2024 Statistics):

• On average, Americans spend 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phones each day.
• People check their phones an average of 58 times each day. And almost 52% of phone checks occur during work hours.
• Worldwide statistics show that the top 5 nations in cell phone use were the Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, and Ghana, averaging just over 5 hours a day on their smartphones.
• Around 1 in 3 (36%) Americans believe they spend too much time on their smartphones each day.

There is a correlation between generations and phone screen time per day:

Gen Z - 6 hours and 5 minutes, with 56% feeling addicted Millennials - 4 hours and 36 minutes, with 48% feeling addicted Gen X - 4 hours and 9 minutes, with 44% feeling addicted Baby Boomers - 3 hours and 31 minutes, with 29% feeling addicted

One study found that, on average, children get their first phone at age 12. That means that the average American is expected to spend approximately 12 years of their life looking at their phone.

More than half of Americans believe they are too dependent on their phones (52%). As many as 3 in 5 (59%) use their phones in the bathroom, while 27% will text when at stoplights.

By 2027, there are expected to be 7.69 billion smartphone subscriptions.

For the past 100 years, the 90,000 residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico, have participated in a unique annual ritual: the burning of Zozobra. With a budget of just over one million dollars, the city constructs a towering 50-foot papier-mâché effigy, which is set ablaze as the crowd chants, “Burn him!” The purpose is to symbolically purge the community of its collective anxieties.

As described by the New York Times, Zozobra is imagined as a beast from the nearby mountains, lured into town under the guise of a celebration. Dressed in formal attire, Zozobra “thrusts the town into darkness and takes away ‘the hopes and dreams of Santa Fe’s children.’” The townspeople attempt to subdue him, but it’s only when the Fire Spirit-summoned by the unity of the citizens-arrives that Zozobra is ultimately defeated by fire.

The ritual’s goal is to literally incinerate the worries and troubles of Santa Fe’s residents. Before the burning, people stuff the effigy with written notes of their anxieties, medical bills, report cards, parking tickets, and even loved ones’ ashes. The act of burning these items serves as a powerful symbol of letting go.

Fire, both historically and in this ritual, represents destruction and renewal. It “eliminates dead vegetation and enriches soil, promoting new growth; it rejuvenates via destruction.” By channeling fire through ritual, people hope to gain control over the cycle of death and rebirth, using flames as a metaphorical reset button. The burning of Zozobra unites the community in optimism, offering a chance to vanquish the undesirable and begin anew each year.

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, then screens continue to fuel and even accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience.

The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

TikTok’s grip on our collective attention spans might be even more dangerous than we thought. According to the company’s own research, users may only need to watch 260 videos before developing addictive behaviors. The findings also link excessive use to a series of mental health issues, including impaired memory, loss of analytical skills, diminished empathy, and heightened anxiety.

Lawsuits have filed against TikTok, accusing the platform of falsely advertising its algorithm and putting children at risk. The lawsuits claim that the company prioritized user engagement over the well-being of its younger audience.

The unredacted documents suggest that TikTok struggled to balance safety with its desire to keep users engaged. While the platform implemented features like screen time alerts and usage limits, its own data shows these measures had little effect. In fact, the screen time limit feature reduced usage by only 1.5 minutes per day, raising concerns that such interventions were more about optics than actual safety.

The platform’s effect on body image also emerged as a significant issue. The documents allege that TikTok’s algorithm has a bias toward promoting content from conventionally attractive users. Meanwhile, harmful content—such as videos related to eating disorders and suicidal ideation—often slipped through moderation and became part of algorithm-driven “bubbles” that young users were frequently exposed to.

In a statement to NPR, a TikTok spokesperson responded to the allegations, saying, “We have robust safeguards in place, which include proactively removing suspected underage users, and we have voluntarily launched safety features like default screen time limits, family pairing, and privacy settings for minors under 16.”

“Is Everyone Getting High?” That’s the title of a recent article in The New York Times. The article observes:

The old distinction between medical and recreational drugs is breaking down… It’s becoming impossible to count all the options we have these days for altering our consciousness with chemicals and plants. You can buy ketamine from club drug dealers on your phone, or by mail from online medical clinics to treat depression. Alongside vapes and gummies, C.B.D. dispensaries sell kratom, an herbal stimulant that some people use to boost work productivity and others to detox from opioids. Cannabis sellers may or may not be legally licensed, and may also sell psychedelic mushrooms. Some people source their Xanax or Adderall from sites on the dark web, others from a physician. Those seeking an alternative to coffee can head to a kava bar to sip an herbal narcotic long used in traditional Polynesian medicine.

And almost anyone get the drugs from easy sources. The article continued:

Today, drugs no longer need to be scored in wraps or baggies from sketchy neighborhoods; they can be ordered online through anonymous browsers and appear in your mailbox in professionally labeled packages. You don’t need to buy your college roommate’s Valium; you can buy it with your smartphone and a cryptocurrency app.

Do you have a deep, dark secret?

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” describes a man slowly going mad because of a dark secret. The narrator recounts a murder he has committed, of an old man with a filmy blue “vulture eye,” whose regard the murderer simply could not endure.

The narrator-killer hides the old man’s body under the floorboards of his house, but then he begins to hear the beating of the dead man’s heart beneath his feet. The sound—clearly a metaphor for the murderer’s tormenting shame and guilt—grows louder and louder. In the end, the narrator can stand the thumping no longer; seeking relief, he confesses his crime to the police.

Most, if not all, of us have guilty secrets, secrets we have never told anyone. Psychologists call the secrets we keep about ourselves “self-concealment.” Although what you self-conceal might feel uniquely shameful, the experience of carrying a guilty secret really doesn’t vary that much across the population. Michael Slepian, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia University, maintains a website called KeepingSecrets, which organizes into various categories the things that people are hiding from others. The most common secrets anonymously cataloged involve infidelity or indiscretion. In short: Your own tell-tale heart probably involves love and sex.

Internal documents from Tik Tok executives and employees reveal that the social media platform is driven to capture the attention of users. Here were some of their own internal statements:

• An internal presentation on the 2021 strategy for TikTok describes the company as being in an “arms race for attention.”
• “It’s better to have young people as an early adopter, especially the teenagers in the U.S. Why? They’ve got a lot of time.”
• “Teenagers in the U.S. are a golden audience.
• “The product in itself has baked into it compulsive use.”
• “The reason kids watch TikTok is because the algorithm is really good... But I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes.”
• As an internal guide on push notifications explained, a key goal of TikTok’s push notifications is to “Activate & Engage users with the right content at the right time, to encourage users to open the App more and stay longer.”
• In a chat message a TikTok employee confirmed that the company’s “goal is not to reduce the time spent” on the TikTok app, but rather to ultimately “contribute to DAU [daily active users] and retention” of users.

A Texas man stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas. There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."

Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

So, the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut. In the absence of healthy gut flora, brewer's yeast had taken up residence in his stomach, and was turning any starch he ate into alcohol—and enough to inebriate him. The problem is by no means common, but happens from time to time. Usually, it's after a round of antibiotics that inadvertently wipe out the good bacteria that our bodies need to stay healthy and in balance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The man's staggering experience is a powerful picture that sometimes we look for external explanations for internal problems, but sometimes the real problem is inside, deep inside in our life.

A black bear broke into the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee. NBC News reported the following story: "A neighbor called the Knoxville Zoo late Monday night and alerted a ranger, saying there was a bear in a nearby park, according to a zoo official. A short while later, the ranger saw what he presumed to be the same bear climbing over a fence and into the zoo.

It was unclear where, exactly, the ursine interloper wound up. The ranger had to wake up the zoo's four resident bears on Monday to conduct a 'nose count.' “They weren't too happy with us." It's fairly common for zoos to encounter smaller animals like dogs, cats, or squirrels trying to break over or around or through the zoo's walls.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Apparently, the bear in this story couldn't handle all that freedom and wanted to return to comfort of captivity. Sound like a familiar story? How often do people attempt to turn away from the sin that has them in spiritual bondage, only to return to it again? (Prov. 26:11; 2 Pet. 2:22).

Every year, 2.8 million people around the globe die from alcohol abuse or misuse. The alcohol industry racks up an annual revenue of $1.5 trillion. Alcohol is also the leading cause of death globally for people age 15–49. It causes more than half of the 1.35 million traffic fatalities every year and is involved in the majority of homicides and cases of domestic violence.

Furthermore, despite the widespread belief that moderate alcohol consumption is good for your health, the only amount of alcohol consumption that doesn’t carry significant risk to your overall health is none.

Fifteen years ago, Sherry Hoppen was a mom of three, a ministry leader in her church, and a volunteer at her local pregnancy center when her younger brother was killed in a drunk driving accident. The tragedy triggered her own slow spiral into alcoholism—one that nearly destroyed her marriage and her life.

Over the next decade, Hoppen evolved from a casual drinker to an addict who barely recognized herself, always secretly drinking or causing scenes at family holidays due to her dependence. Like many who struggle, she thought she could “fix” herself and moderate her drinking, even as she daily hid vodka-filled water bottles inside her purse.

Hoppen said, “I was scared to tell anybody because I knew if I did, my drinking days were over. And I didn’t want people to see [our family] fail.”

Her husband was a church elder, she led the children’s church choir, and they were beloved business-people in their small Michigan community. She said, “I couldn’t imagine letting anybody see what was really going on. I didn’t want to go to rehab because . . . everybody knows if you go to rehab, including my kids.”

It took Hoppen four more years after recognizing her dependence to commit to sobriety. Her story as a churchgoing suburban mom concealing alcohol addiction is increasingly common. In 2023, around 9 percent of adult women in the US struggled with alcoholism—about 11.7 million women. This means that in an average church of 500 people, at least 20 women attending likely struggle with alcohol dependence as well.

Alcohol abuse is rarely discussed with or even known by a woman’s closest friends or spouse. Until recent decades, alcohol brands marketed themselves primarily to men. In the 1990s, however, the industry recognized that women were an under-tapped market. This led to the introduction of sugary drinks for “entry-level drinkers.” A decade later, “skinny” versions of premade cocktails launched for women who wanted low-calorie options. Rates of alcohol use disorder rose by 83% between 2002 and 2013, on par with the rise in feminized alcohol marketing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Our silent shame robs others of community, solidarity, and support. Churches have an opportunity to meet women in the midst of their brokenness. People ultimately just want to belong, feel seen, and not be judged in their brokenness.

Jonathan Haidt, author of a bestseller, "The Anxious Generation," challenged church leaders to address an important issue. He writes:

As long as children have a phone-based childhood there is very little hope for their spiritual education. An essential precondition is to delay the phone-based life until the age of 18, I would say. Don't let them fall off into cyberspace, because once they do, it's going to be so spiritually degrading for the rest of their lives. There's not much you can do in church if they are spending 10 hours a day outside of church on their phones.

Believers also need to know that researchers have found evidence that religious communities and families play a crucial role in raising healthy children. Haidt continued, “The kids who made it through are especially those who are locked into binding communities and religious communities.” Meanwhile, it is the "secular kids and the kids in progressive families" who tend to be "the ones who got washed out to sea."

Haidt stressed that lives built on smartphones, tablets, and computers will change their minds and hearts:

Half of American teen-agers say that they are online 'almost all the time.' That means that they are never fully present – never, ever. They are always partly living in terms of what is happening with their posts, what's happening online….

There is a degradation effect that is overwhelming, but most people haven't noticed…. I am hoping that religious communities will both notice it and be able to counteract it. But you can't counteract it if the kid still has the phone in a pocket. The phone is that powerful.

Astrology is a meme, and it’s spreading in that blooming way that memes do. On social media, astrologers and astrology-meme machines amass tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. People joke about Mercury retrograde, and categorize “the signs as ...” literally anything: cat breeds, Oscar Wilde quotes, and Stranger Things characters. In online publications daily, weekly, and monthly horoscopes and zodiac-themed listicles flourish.

This isn’t the first moment astrology has had and it won’t be the last. The practice has been around in various forms for thousands of years. In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go away—you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines. Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles said:

(For a time) it went back to being a little bit more in the background. Then something happened in the last five years that’s given it an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. Millennials have taken it and run with it.

The stigma has receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people. One researcher said, “Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient.”

Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” SimilarWeb reported in December 2024 that the top 10 astrology sites received a total of 38 million visits in one month.

Editor’s Note: You can check the most up-to-date astrology stats on SimilarWeb here

An article on Vice starts with an intriguing question:

You know the feeling. A sort of internal itch … Wouldn't it be nice to see what my friends are up to? But, no, you're working. You need to finish your article or file a report or get to your appointment on time. But you can just check Facebook quickly, can't you? And then you're five minutes late to your appointment, again.

Is Facebook really addictive? Well, that all depends, but based on this study from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, it's sure hard to resist that urge to go and look at Facebook. "Surprisingly" the article concluded, "the data suggests that the checking of social media accounts ranks higher than having a smoke or a drink as a 'self-controlled failure.'"

While this conclusion may seem surprising, it really isn't. Part of why people give in to compulsions is because they determine that the consequences aren't great enough for them to resist. Behaviors like smoking and drinking have a much higher "cost" than quickly checking a social media account.

Yet, spending excessive time on Facebook does cost something. It costs time, and when people check Facebook twenty times per day, that time adds up. Maybe it’s time to start studying the real costs associated with social media addiction.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Since Facebook use is beginning to decline among young people, for this illustration you could include or substitute other popular social media sites such as: Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, WeChat, Messenger, or Telegram. You can find a list of the top 35 social media platforms for 2024 here.

On a June afternoon in 2018, a man named Mickey Barreto checked into the New Yorker Hotel. He was assigned Room 2565, a double-bed accommodation with a view of Midtown Manhattan almost entirely obscured by an exterior wall. For a one-night stay, he paid $200.57.

But he did not check out the next morning. Instead, he made the once-grand hotel his full-time residence for the next five years, without ever paying another cent.

In a city where every inch of real estate is picked over and priced out, and where affordable apartments are among the rarest of commodities, Mr. Barreto had perhaps the best housing deal in New York City history. Now, that deal could land him in prison.

The story of how Mr. Barreto, a California transplant with a taste for wild conspiracy theories and a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, gained and then lost the rights to Room 2565 might sound implausible. Just another tale from a man who claims without evidence to be the first cousin, 11 times removed, of Christopher Columbus’ oldest son. But it’s true.

In jail before he was released on his own recognizance, Mr. Barreto said he used his one phone call to dial the White House, leaving a message about his whereabouts. There was no reason to believe the White House had any interest in the case or any idea who Mickey Barreto was. But you could never quite tell with Mickey — he’d been right once before.

Whatever his far-fetched beliefs, Mr. Barreto, now 49, was right about one thing: an obscure New York City rent law that provided him with many a New Yorker’s dream.

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Satan; Temptation - Like a bad tenant who won’t leave an apartment, we allow sin to overstay it’s welcome in our lives; (2) Resentment or Anger—People in recovery often say, “Don’t let that person live rent free inside your head”—which means don’t hold on to your resentments over people who have hurt you. Let the hurt go.

Sociologist Dalton Conley shares a story about backpacking through Europe when he was 18. He writes, “I had no iPhone. ... I couldn't Google. And I was alone.” But according to Conley his long stretches of solitude weren't a bad thing. We all need time to disconnect, cutting the umbilical cord of technology.

He continues, “Time away from our social networks … helps us figure out who we are. ... I'm afraid that with no solitude, we will become less, not more, connected to our friends and families.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Believers should also consider the necessity of solitude and the perils of our over-connected world. Used properly, solitude can connect us with God. Conley's main point needs to be heard—especially in noisy, busy, over-connected churches.

In his book, The Anxious Generation, author Jonathan Haidt confirms our worst fears about what happened to Generation Z, the first generation to go through puberty with constant access to the internet. He writes, “… it was not merely that playing and socializing had shifted to phones, tablets, and gaming consoles but that real-life pleasures and risks were also disappearing: rough-and-tumble outdoor activities, opportunities for physical independence, unsupervised recreation.”

Free play had been in retreat and technology on the march since the 1980s. But it took the invention of the smartphone to complete the mutation of childhood from “play-based” to “phone-based.” He writes, "… giving smartphones to young people en masse constitutes the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.”

While all this was happening, parents (who were hypnotized by their phones, too) were hearing about, and sometimes seeing at home, children succumbing to real distress—depression, anxiety, self-harm, even suicide.

Starting in about 2010, suicide rates for young adolescents in the U.S. shot up (increasing 91% for boys ages 10-14 and 167% for girls). The rate of self-injury almost tripled between 2010 and 2020.

Ironically, the creation of social media—with their promise of “connectedness”—has left young people lonelier and with fewer friends. For girls, the apps have proved toxic, Mr. Haidt writes: “Social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it …. The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation … in all of us."

“It’s hijacking my brain.” Say young people addicted to social media and who are desperate for help. Many people have compared the addictive nature of social media to cigarettes. Checking your likes, they say, is the new smoke break. More than 75% of teens check their phone hourly, and half say they feel like they’re addicted to their devices.

Here are some of the things they’ve said:

“TikTok has me in a chokehold.”

“I would 1,000% say I am addicted.”

“I feel completely aware that it is hijacking my brain, but I can’t put it down. This leaves me feeling ashamed.”

Maybe you’ve had similar feelings yourself, no matter your age. Although it’s true social technologies offer some benefits, many people feel uncomfortable with how much time they spend online and often wonder if they’re addicted.

One approach is to view your media consumption as a diet. Just as there are many ways to have a healthy diet, there are also a variety of ways to develop healthy and personalized social media habits.

The researchers offered practical steps that you can take right now to reduce your dependence on social media. This includes turning off notifications, removing apps that you find harmful, curating your social media feed by unfollowing certain accounts, setting your phone to grayscale to reduce the appeal, and reserving phone-free time.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In addition to the practical steps listed above, the believer should add prayer (Heb. 4:14-16; Jam. 1:5), time in the Word (especially memorizing God’s promises for overcoming destructive habits, Ps. 119:11), and finding an accountability partner (Prov. 27:17).

According to a new poll, more Americans over the age of 50 are using cannabis now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Among a sample of over 2,000 older adults (ages 50-80), 12% said they had consumed a product containing THC within the past year and 4% reported doing so multiple times per week.

Study leader and addiction psychologist Anne Fernandez, Ph.D. said,

As the stress of the pandemic and the increased legalization of cannabis converged, our findings suggest cannabis use increased among older adults nationally. Older adults represent a vulnerable age group for cannabis use due to interactions with medications, risky driving, cannabis-related mental health impacts, and increased possibility of falls and memory issues.

The 12% using cannabis in 2023 is notably higher than the 9.5% in 2019, and much higher than the 3% reported in a 2006 study. Back then, only 12 U.S. states had legalized medical cannabis laws. The National Poll on Healthy Aging reported in 2017 that 6% of older adults were using cannabis for medical purposes.

Those who were also unemployed, older adults who said they were unmarried and had no partner, and those who said they drank alcohol, were more likely to use marijuana. Dr. Fernandez notes an especially concerning finding: People with alcohol use high enough to potentially cause physical and psychological harm were close to eight times as likely to use cannabis in the past year.

This group of dual-substance users is one that doctors and public health officials need to pay special attention to. Dr. Fernandez explains, “Other research has shown that using both alcohol and cannabis increases the chance that a person will drive while impaired. They are also more likely to have physical and mental health issues, including substance use disorders.”