There’s an old saying: you are what you eat. Most of us heard it as a line about vegetables. I’ve come to think it goes a lot further than food. What we take in doesn’t simply pass through us. It slowly rewrites us. It shapes what we crave, what bores us, what we laugh at, and what we stop noticing at all.
I’m writing this mostly to the man I used to be. He went to church, knew the right answers, and sat through a lot of sermons. He would never have said the Bible bored him. If he was honest, though, it did. A movie could move him faster than a psalm. He wasn’t a rebel. He was stuck in religion, and he hadn’t stopped to ask what had been training his appetite all those years.
Before we go on, let me say what this article isn’t. It isn’t a lecture about your coffee, and it isn’t a list of things to give up so you can feel holy. It’s about something quieter, the steady diet of stories, images, and sounds we take in every day without thinking. That diet is changing us, and today it is doing it more powerfully than it ever has.
The fences came down
Think back to the 1980s and ’90s. There were only a few channels. Movies came from a video store with the rating printed on the box, and usually a parent was standing at the counter. Those weren’t innocent days, and I don’t want to pretend they were. Still, there were fences. Some things were simply hard for a ten-year-old to reach.
Most of those fences are gone now. A whole library of films, series, and books fits in a child’s pocket, and the next episode starts before anyone decides to watch it. The ratings that used to mean something have drifted too. A 2013 study in Pediatrics looked at the top-grossing films going back decades. It found that gun violence in PG-13 movies had more than tripled since 1985, and that since 2009 those PG-13 films had carried as much violence as R-rated ones, or more (Bushman et al., 2013). The label on the box stayed the same while what was inside it changed.
I’ll say the next part carefully, because it’s heavy. In a 2022 national survey of teenagers by Common Sense Media, the average age at which teens said they first saw pornography online was twelve. Fifteen percent said they had seen it at ten or younger. Children are running into adult questions years before anyone has helped them carry those questions.
It isn’t only screens. A few years ago a dark, explicit adult thriller became a bestselling phenomenon, and a lot of that fire spread through young readers recommending it to each other online. Nobody voted for that. A culture simply ingested it together.
How a story trains a generation
Stories do more than entertain. They teach us what freedom looks like, who the villain is, and where joy is supposed to be found.
Do you remember Footloose? It came out in 1984 and told the story of a small town that had outlawed dancing, a grieving preacher, and a new kid from the city who leads the young people to dance their way free. It’s a story many of us carried around for years. Watch what it taught, though. The church was the wall, the grownups were the problem, and joy was something you escaped to, out past the edge of the family and the faith.
Compare that with the old barn square dance. Grandparents and grandkids were on the same floor, a caller was hollering the steps, and the whole community was in one room. The dancing wasn’t an escape from the family. It was the family. Nobody had to sneak out to have joy.
Scripture isn’t against dancing. When the ark came into Jerusalem, “David danced before the LORD with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). And his wife, Michal, “looked out of the window and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD, and she despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16). David answered her plainly: “It was before the LORD… and I will celebrate before the LORD” (2 Samuel 6:21).
So the question was never really dancing or no dancing. The question is who the dance is before. A generation got trained, one story at a time, to picture joy as running away from God. Here’s the gentle part for anyone stuck in religion: sometimes we’ve been Michal at the window, frowning at joy we didn’t understand. Either way, our sense of what’s delightful got shaped by someone, and often it wasn’t the Lord.
That’s why a sentence like “Family, let’s gather and read the Bible” can sound strange today, almost embarrassing. God has said this kind of thing from the beginning: “these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7). The Bible didn’t get smaller. Our taste got trained.
Augustine found the Bible tame
This isn’t a new problem. Augustine, one of the great teachers of the early church, describes it honestly in his Confessions. As a young man he had been thrilled by Cicero, the most polished writer of his world. Then he picked up the Scriptures:
“When I then turned toward the Scriptures, they appeared to me to be quite unworthy to be compared with the dignity of Tully. For my inflated pride was repelled by their style, nor could the sharpness of my wit penetrate their inner meaning.” (Confessions 3.5, Outler translation; “Tully” is Cicero)
His culture had trained his palate, so God’s Word tasted plain to him. A little earlier in the same book he describes the strangest part of all: “Within me I had a dearth of that inner food which is thyself, my God—although that dearth caused me no hunger” (Confessions 3.1). He was starving and didn’t feel hungry. That’s exactly the danger I want us to see.
The food on our plates
Food is a good picture of all this, because it’s so easy to take things in without knowing it.
Researchers looked at more than 85,000 packaged foods and drinks that Americans bought between 2005 and 2009 and found that about three-quarters of them contained added sweeteners (Ng, Slining & Popkin, 2012). Many of us were taking in far more than we realized.
Another study kept twenty adults at the National Institutes of Health for four weeks. For two weeks they ate mostly ultra-processed food, and for two weeks mostly unprocessed food, and they could eat as much or as little as they wanted. On the ultra-processed diet they ate about 500 more calories a day and gained weight. Here’s the part that stopped me: they rated the meals about equally pleasant, and they reported no real difference in hunger, fullness, or satisfaction. They also ate faster (Hall et al., 2019). They took in more and got less, and it felt the same.
I’ll give you one example from my own life, and only one. Cutting high-fructose corn syrup helped me. That’s my story, not a prescription. I’m not a doctor, and researchers still argue about how it compares with ordinary sugar. It does raise a question that goes well beyond food, though: what else are we taking in without knowing it?
A lot of what we watch and read works the way that study describes. It hooks us quickly, goes down easy, and keeps us coming back. Over time it hollows out the substance, and the whole while we still feel satisfied. We don’t feel empty. That is the trouble.
Don’t look back
When the angels pulled Lot’s family out of Sodom, the rescue was real. Then “Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:26). Jesus thought that backward glance was worth remembering. He said it in three words: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32).
Her feet were leaving, but her appetite hadn’t. Many of us are like that. We’ve come to Christ, or at least to church, but our tastes are still back in town, looking over our shoulder at what we were trained to love.
Remade from the inside
Here’s the good news. You aren’t going to fix this by gritting your teeth, and nobody is asking you to. Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Transformation is something done in us. And he tells us how it happens: “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
We become what we behold. That’s the same principle that has been working against us, now turned around for our good. The Spirit hasn’t stopped doing this work. He still takes people with trained, tired tastes and teaches them to hunger for God.
God has been inviting people to this table for a long time: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good” (Isaiah 55:2). In the end the invitation isn’t to a reading plan or a stricter set of rules. It’s to a Person. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger” (John 6:35).
So start small, and be patient with yourself. Read a Gospel out loud at the table, even if it feels odd the first few nights. Tastes really can be retrained. Most of us learned to like things we once couldn’t stand. “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Psalm 34:8). For the little ones in your house, remember that Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them” (Matthew 19:14). The fences may be gone, but you can still set a better table. Take these questions to your own church and your own pastor too. You don’t have to work this out alone.
If you’re where I was, faithful in attendance, quietly bored with the Book, and more alive in front of a screen than an open Bible, you aren’t a lost cause. Your taste was trained, and it can be retrained. The One who made you knows what you were made to hunger for. Come to the Bread.
Soli Deo Gloria.
— J.L. Morgan