Underestimating Technology’s Foothold on the Next Generation

Generational change is real, and one of the chief drivers of it is technology. We’ve always had technology, of course, but one of the things we don’t realize is that technology is not just a neutral.

Religion Jun 5, 2026 0 7 Add to Reading List

Underestimating Technology’s Foothold on the Next Generation

June 04, 2026 by: Kevin DeYoung

The World We Inhabit

It seems like for the last fifty or sixty years, and certainly as long as I can remember, that evangelicals have given a lot of attention to generations and what the next generation is going to be like. I’m Gen X, and I used to be the next generation that you had to reach. And then there’s millennials, and I guess now there’s Gen Z.

And so on one level, I want to say generations don’t fit into a nice, neat box. People are more the same than they are different. I think that’s part of our Christian anthropology—that we’re made in the image of God, and we have a sin nature. So I want to push back on some of the generational talk that makes it sound like the next generation are aliens from another land, and you can hardly understand them.

Having said all of that, I am persuaded that generational change is real, and one of the chief drivers of it is technology. We’ve always had technology, of course, but one of the things we don’t realize is that technology is not just a neutral. It can be used for good or bad. And it’s not just something that we use, but it’s something that uses us and shapes us. So what we probably underestimate about the next generation are the things that someone like me may not even see.

I may not know what I don’t know. Speaking of technology, I—as Gen X—I’ve blogged for a long time, I’m on Twitter, I know how my iPhone works, I know how computers work—I’m at home in this digital world. And yet I remember when email wasn’t a thing. I remember in college you had to go to the computer lab to use a computer, and the noise that the modem made, all of that. Some people have a cultural memory of what that pre-digital world was like.

My kids don’t have that. They can hear funny stories about it. They can read about it. So the horizon of what seems normal changes. We all grew up with cars, and we just take it as a given. A car does a lot of good things, but we don’t often think, Wow! How did the automobile change the world almost as much as anything in the history of the world?

What did it do to neighborhoods? What did it do to houses? What did it do to churches because of how you can get to different churches? Do you need six churches within a mile radius downtown? No, you don’t need that because you drive places. We just don’t think of that because it’s a given. That’s just the way the world is.

So we can underestimate the givenness that a younger generation has with the technology that’s just there. We don’t take them as presumptions; we take them as artifacts that younger generations just assume. And then you multiply that not just by technology but by cultural assumptions, especially around the sexual revolution. You just realize it’s one thing for people my age and older to look at pride month and ask, Have we lost our collective minds?

But if you grow up and that’s every June you’ve seen, you really have to be taught why it’s wrong because it just seems normal. It doesn’t seem scandalous anymore because it’s just the world you inhabit. Those are the sort of things we can underestimate in the way that cultures are different.

Kevin DeYoung is the author of The (Not-So-Secret) Secret to Reaching the Next Generation.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte. He has written books for children, adults, and academics, including Just Do Something; Impossible Christianity; Daily Doctrine; and The Biggest Story Bible Storybook. Kevin’s work can be found on clearlyreformed.org. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children.

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