The Smartphone as Temple - A resource for Pastors
If you’re preaching on pleasure, purity, or the formative power of culture, one of your biggest challenges is helping people see what they’ve stopped noticing. Lectures don’t do it. Statistics don’t do it. But description can.
James K.A. Smith argues in Desiring the Kingdom that we are not primarily formed by our thoughts but by our loves, our habits, our liturgies, what we give our attention and affection to daily. He uses the shopping mall as a case study: a modern temple, complete with pilgrimage, icons, chapels, and priestly exchanges, quietly forming us into consumers.
What follows applies that same lens to the smartphone. Use it as a reading in your message, adapt it for your context, or let it shape how you frame the conversation. It’s designed to be heard, not just read.
…I want to take you to the most common and formative temple of our time.
You don’t need to drive anywhere. You don’t need to leave the building. You don’t even need to stand up.
Just reach into your pocket, or your handbag
There it is. The temple. Slim, glass, warm to the touch. You carry it everywhere. To the dinner table. To bed. To the bathroom. You reach for it before you’re fully awake. It’s the last thing you see before you close your eyes.
Pretend you’re an anthropologist. You’ve never seen this before. Just describe what you observe.
Watch the worshipper enter the sanctuary. There’s a small ritual at the threshold, a thumbprint, a glance, a pattern traced on glass. The face of the faithful relaxes. The shoulders drop. The eyes glaze slightly. They’ve crossed over.
Inside, there are no walls. No ceiling. No exit signs. The space is infinite — a feed that never ends, a scroll without a bottom. The outside world is shut out. There is no clock here. Five minutes becomes forty. I was just going to check one thing.
The liturgy is simple. A single repeated gesture. The thumb moves up. The thumb moves up. The thumb moves up.
And with each movement, a new image. A new body. A new life. A new vision of what you could have, who you could be, what you’re missing.
This temple has saints. They are beautiful. Impossibly so. Their skin is smooth, their bodies sculpted, their lives sunlit, curated and happy. They dance for you. They undress for you. They invite you, with a glance, into a life you don’t have. Their bodies are the ideals you’ll learn to aspire to. Their relationships are the ones you’ll measure your own against. Their pleasure becomes the standard by which your own life feels small.
There’s a chapel for every desire. A reel for every appetite. Want to feel beautiful? Here’s a chapel. Want to feel desired? Here. Want to imagine a different partner, a different body, a different night? Swipe. The chapel is open.
And behind the altar, a priest. You can’t see this priest. You’ve never met them. You don’t know their name. The priest is the algorithm. And here’s the strange thing: this priest knows you better than your spouse does. Better than your best mate. Better, sometimes, than you know yourself. The priest watches what makes your thumb pause. What makes your pupils dilate. What makes you stay. And the priest serves you, faithfully, more of what you love.
You did not choose this priest. But this priest has chosen you.
And every day, the scroll preaches a gospel so simple a child can absorb it:
Pleasure is your birthright. It should be instant. It should be effortless. If you’re not feeling it right now, swipe.
There’s something better one thumb-flick away.
You don’t argue your way into this gospel. You don’t decide to believe it. You just open the app. And again. And again.
You leave the chapel, not really, you never really leave, but you carry something with you. A vague restlessness. A quiet dissatisfaction with your own body. A subtle comparison running in the background of your marriage. A wandering eye that’s been trained to wander, ten thousand swipes deep. An appetite for novelty you didn’t have a year ago.
And eventually, because the liturgy works, you start looking for the more concentrated dose. So you download Tinder. Because of course you do. You’ve been swiping on people for years already. Or you open a tab in incognito mode. Because you’ve been trained to expect bodies on demand, and now you want the purest version of that promise.
The feed didn’t make you do it. It just formed you to want it. It distorted you.
Here’s what’s frightening.
This temple sleeps on your bedside table.
You worship there in the queue at the supermarket. In the bathroom at work. In the bed beside your spouse, while they sleep. You give it your first waking moments and your last conscious thoughts. You give it more attention in a week than you give to God in a year.
It’s not just there, it’s the billboard. The bus stop image, the YouTube ad break. The Netflix scene that didn’t need to be there, the song lyric you’ve sung a hundred times without thinking about, blasted in your ears through little white pods.
You are being formed in a thousand small moments you didn’t even count as moments. By the time you sit down in church on a Sunday morning, you’ve already been to a hundred services this week. You just didn’t know you were attending.
And the gospel it preaches is the oldest one: that the ache inside you is solved by satisfying it. That pleasure is the proof you’re alive. That the restless heart finds its rest not in God, but in the next image, the next body, the next swipe, conquest, and orgasm. and that the good life is simply more of what feels good, on demand, forever. This gospel is forming you. Whether you like it or not. Whether you believe it or not.
You don’t have to believe it for it to shape you. You just have to keep opening the app and living in this world.
Preaching on this is not easy. You’re not just delivering information, you’re asking people to see themselves honestly, maybe for the first time. That takes courage from you, and grace for them, and the help of the Holy Spirit.
But here’s what you carry into that room that the algorithm never can: a gospel that doesn’t just name the hunger, but feeds it and can satisfy it. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” This restlessness isn’t a problem to be managed; it’s a signpost. And you get to the point where it leads. Jesus.
Preach it faithfully. Your people need someone who will.
Want to hear how this content landed in a full Sunday message on the Idol of Pleasure? Listen here
