The issue isn’t merely about blocking explicit material or limiting screen time. The deeper problem is the worldview that social media platforms communicate—a worldview that shapes how teenagers understand their worth, purpose, identity, and community. And increasingly, that worldview stands in direct opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Beyond Content Filters

Instagram’s move to PG-13 restrictions addresses symptoms while ignoring the disease. Yes, teenagers should be protected from explicit sexual content, graphic violence, and predatory behavior. But even when social media is scrubbed clean of objectionable material, it continues to communicate powerful messages about what it means to be human and where value comes from.

Consider the testimony of former Meta employees who appeared before Congress. Jason Sattizahn, one of the whistleblowers, stated bluntly: “Children drive profits. If Meta invests more in safety to get kids off of them, engagement goes down, monetization goes down, ad revenue goes down. They need them.”^2 The platform’s design is not neutral; it is engineered to maximize engagement, and engagement comes from triggering fundamental human desires and insecurities.

The result is that social media functions less like a communication tool and more like a discipleship program—teaching teenagers what to value, how to think about themselves, and what makes life meaningful. And the lessons it teaches are profoundly at odds with the gospel.

The Messages in the Feed

Social media may appear to be simply a tool for connection and entertainment. But beneath the surface, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat convey powerful messages about human worth and identity. Consider what teenagers absorb through hours of daily scrolling:

Your Worth Is Determined by Metrics

Every post comes with numbers: likes, comments, shares, views, followers. These metrics become the measure of value. A post with thousands of likes signals success; one with few interactions represents failure. Teenagers learn to equate their self-worth with external validation that can be quantified and compared.

Research indicates that up to 95% of young people aged 13-17 use social media platforms, with nearly two-thirds reporting daily use and one-third using social media “almost constantly.” That means these metric-based messages are not occasional influences but constant background noise shaping teen consciousness.

The impact is measurable and troubling. Teenagers increasingly report anxiety around posting, fear of being judged, and obsessive checking of engagement metrics. Self-worth becomes a fluctuating commodity tied to factors completely outside one’s control.

Your Identity Is Your Image

Social media reduces identity to what can be captured, filtered, and displayed. Who you are becomes synonymous with how you appear. The carefully curated feed—showing only the best angles, most flattering moments, and peak experiences—becomes the “true self,” while the messy reality of everyday life is something to hide or improve.

When asked about social media’s impact on their body image, 46% of adolescents aged 13 to 17 said social media makes them feel worse.^3 The platform’s emphasis on appearance creates an environment where teenagers constantly compare themselves to impossible standards—standards often enhanced by filters, editing, and strategic posing.

Your Value Comes from Being Seen

Social media operates on a simple principle: visibility equals significance. The person with millions of followers matters; the person with few does not. Teenagers learn that being noticed, being watched, being talked about is the pathway to mattering. Obscurity equals irrelevance.

This is why teenagers report feeling pressure to post regularly, to maintain their “presence,” and to stay active on platforms even when they don’t want to. To disappear from social media feels like ceasing to exist in any meaningful way.

Your Life Should Look Perfect

The curated nature of social media creates a distorted picture of reality. Everyone else appears to be living their best life—traveling to exotic locations, attending exciting events, surrounded by friends, always happy. The ordinary struggles of life are hidden, creating the impression that everyone else has it together while the viewer alone is failing.

This creates what researchers call “compare and despair”—the sense that one’s own life is inadequate when measured against the highlight reels of others.[2] What teenagers don’t see is that everyone is curating, everyone is filtering, and everyone is presenting only their best moments. The comparison is between real life and an illusion.

Consumption Defines You

Social media has become increasingly commercialized, with every scroll exposing users to products, brands, and influencer marketing. Teenagers absorb the message that purchasing the right things—clothes, makeup, technology, experiences—will bring fulfillment and social acceptance. Identity becomes tied to what one owns and consumes.

The influencer culture reinforces this constantly. Success is measured in material terms, and happiness is presented as something that can be purchased. The gospel of consumerism—that having more will make you more—permeates every corner of social media.

Connection Means Performance

Relationships on social media are transactional. Maintaining friendships requires constant posting, liking, commenting—a never-ending performance of connectivity. Genuine intimacy is replaced by public displays of affection and carefully managed social capital. The question isn’t “Who knows me?” but “Who sees me?”

Teenagers report feeling exhausted by the demands of social media relationships. There is pressure to respond quickly, to be available constantly, and to maintain the appearance of connection even when genuine relationship is absent. The irony is profound: platforms designed for connection often leave users feeling more isolated than ever.

You Are the Center

Perhaps most fundamentally, social media reinforces a self-centered view of existence. The user’s feed is customized to their interests. The camera points inward. The primary question is always: “What about me? How does this affect me? What do I want? What do I feel?” The self becomes the reference point for all of life.

This radical individualism is baked into the platform’s design. Everything revolves around “my” feed, “my” followers, “my” posts, “my” brand. Even altruism and service get filtered through the lens of self-presentation—doing good becomes another opportunity for content that enhances one’s image.

The Formative Power of Repetition

These messages wouldn’t be so dangerous if they were encountered occasionally. But teenagers are not encountering them occasionally. They are immersed in them—sometimes for hours each day, every day, for years.

This repetition has formative power. Just as liturgy forms worshipers through repeated practices and words, social media forms users through repeated patterns of engagement. Post, check for likes, compare, feel inadequate, try again. The cycle repeats hundreds of times per day, inscribing its messages deeper and deeper into the teenage psyche.

Instagram’s PG-13 restrictions do nothing to address this formative power. A teenager can scroll through perfectly appropriate content for hours and still absorb all these toxic messages about worth, identity, perfection, and self-centeredness. The problem isn’t just what teenagers see—it’s what social media is teaching them to believe about themselves and the world.

The Inadequacy of Technical Solutions

This is why technical solutions—content filters, time limits, parental controls—while potentially helpful, are ultimately inadequate. They treat social media as a content delivery problem when it’s actually a discipleship problem.

Parents can limit screen time to an hour per day, but if that hour reinforces metric-based worth and image-based identity, the damage is still done. Churches can warn teenagers about explicit content, but if they don’t address the deeper worldview being communicated, teenagers will still be formed by social media’s vision of human flourishing.

The real danger of social media isn’t pornography or violence (though those are dangers). The real danger is that it offers a comprehensive alternative gospel—a different story about what makes humans valuable, what gives life meaning, and what human beings are for.

And if the church doesn’t recognize this, doesn’t name it, and doesn’t offer a compelling alternative, teenagers will graduate into adulthood having been discipled more by Instagram than by Jesus.

What’s at Stake

The stakes here are not merely psychological or social. They are spiritual and theological. Social media’s messages about worth, identity, and purpose are not simply unhelpful—they are lies that distort the image of God in human beings and undermine the gospel’s claims about human nature and flourishing.

When teenagers learn to measure their worth by likes, they are learning to reject the biblical truth that worth comes from bearing God’s image. When they construct identity around curated images, they are learning to reject the gospel’s offer of identity in Christ. When they center their lives on self, they are learning to reject God’s rightful place at the center of all things.

These are not neutral habits or preferences. They are competing liturgies, alternative gospels, rival claims about ultimate reality. And the question facing the church is not whether social media is “good” or “bad” but whether the church’s discipleship will be more formative than social media’s.

The Need for a Counter-Narrative

Instagram’s announcement should serve as a wake-up call to the church. If the broader culture recognizes that social media poses dangers to teenagers, how much more should the church—with its deeper understanding of human nature and flourishing—recognize these dangers and respond?

But the response cannot be merely reactive or prohibitive. Teenagers don’t need just warnings about what to avoid; they need a compelling vision of what to embrace. They need to hear a different story about human worth and purpose—one that is more beautiful, more satisfying, and more true than anything social media offers.

That’s the gospel. And in Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore what the gospel says in response to each of social media’s false messages, and how the church can help teenagers be formed by truth rather than lies.

For Reflection:

● What messages about worth and identity are the teenagers in your life receiving from social media?

● How much time are they—and you—spending being formed by these messages each day?

● Does your church recognize social media as a discipleship issue, not just a content issue?

In Part 2, we’ll explore the gospel’s counter-narrative to social media’s messages and examine the church’s responsibility to disciple teenagers in this digital age.

[1] “Instagram says it will make the app more ‘PG-13’ for teens with a new series of changes,” NBC News, October 14, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/instagram-says-making-app-pg-13-teens-rcna237350. Accessed October 14, 2025.

[2] Edward Noon, “Compare and despair or compare and explore? Instagram social comparisons of ability and opinion predict adolescent identity development”, Cyberpsychology Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, May 2020, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341377712_Compare_and_despair_or_compare_and_explore_Instagram_social_comparisons_of_ability_and_opinion_predict_adolescent_identity_development. Accessed October 15, 2025.