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Ad Blockers as a Spiritual Discipline

Spiritual disciplines are activities which we pursue, not because they’re inherently valuable (they often are), but in order to shape ourselves into the kind of person who God wants us to be. Asking “What would Jesus do?” is often about as ineffective as stepping up to home plate and asking, “What would my favorite baseball player do?” The answer is irrelevant if we haven’t engaged in activities to make us the kind of person who’s capable of doing those things.1 The spiritual disciplines aren’t a matter of earning favor with God or pulling ourselves up by our own power; instead, they place us where the Holy Spirit can work on our lives, transforming us into greater Christlikeness.

Traditionally, spiritual disciplines include practices such as prayer, Bible reading, Christian meditation, celebration, service, silence, simplicity, confession, and worship. But this isn’t an exhaustive list; for example, John Ortberg writes that “any activity that can help me gain power to live life as Jesus taught and modeled it” by “help[ing] me do what I cannot now do by direct effort” is a spiritual discipline.2 The classical spiritual disciplines are those that Christians across the centuries and the world have found valuable, but it’s natural that, in our current culture and technological setting, we can find unique practices that help shape us as disciples of Christ.

Advertising is a huge business: around $500 billion annually in the US, around $1 trillion a year globally. Alphabet (Google), the 3rd largest company in the world, earns 77% of their revenue from ads (across Google Search, YouTube, and the ad networks they run for other websites). Meta, the 8th largest company in the world, earns 98% of their revenue from advertising. Incredible amounts of ingenuity, effort, and skill are put into advertising. Advertising encompasses many fields: Graphic design, copywriting, and commercials employ artists, authors, and actors who otherwise struggle to make a living with their creativity. Psychology and neuroscience are tasked with better understanding potential buyers’ behavior and how to craft ads for better results. (Phil Kenneson, a professor at Milligan University, once shared in a conference talk that many psychology majors at Milligan end up entering the field of advertising, rather than the fields of counseling or therapy that you’d stereotypically expect for graduates of a Christian college.) Researchers, statisticians, and data scientists gather and process troves of information about human behavior and decisions, resulting in stories such as Target knowing a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did and predicting within weeks of the due dates. (After blowback from this highly targeted approach to advertisement, a Target executive explained, “We started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random… We found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons.”) Advertising is relentlessly optimized: marketers craft multiple versions of Internet ads then perform A/B tests to digitally track which versions get the most clicks so they can continually refine for better results. Social media posts’ time of day, format, and style are carefully monitored then automated for maximum engagement. Marketers get ever more clever in where they put ads: on streaming platforms’ pause screens, over urinals, in the operating system on the new computer you already paid for, and more.

What does all of this mean for you, personally? There are only three possibilities:

  1. Advertising doesn’t work. Trillions of dollars are being wasted, the psychologists and marketers are wrong, Google and Meta are making bank by doing nothing of value. You have nothing to worry about.
  2. Advertising does work, but only on some people. You, dear reader, are immune. Whether due to superior intelligence, willpower, discernment, or taste, you are secure in your own thoughts and desires. You are a rock, an island of serenity, the captain of your own choices.
  3. You’re being manipulated.

Manipulation would perhaps be acceptable if the people manipulating you had your own best interests in mind. And some advertising arguably takes this form, such as public service announcements or nonprofits trying to raise awareness for their cause. Evangelism can be considered a form of marketing at the crudest level (although the tactics and techniques should often be much different!). In a healthy marketplace, advertising can be constructed as merely the effort to raise awareness among potential customers of a product or service that would improve their lives.

But so much of advertising does not meet this; it’s instead an attempt to convince people to want things they don’t want and buy things they don’t need. In The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer traces a brief history of advertising. He explains that 19th century advertisements simply explained their products. (“Tired? Then drink Coca-Cola. It relieves exhaustion.”) In the 20th century, however, psychological techniques were employed to manipulate people. Edward Burneys, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, became known as “the father of public relations” and the “father of American advertising” for his work in applying propaganda techniques to advertising. This new advertising was used to encourage an increase in consumerism and consumption, in response to the “problem” of the dramatically increased production of the Industrial Revolution.3 Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers wrote in 1928,

Any community that lives on staples has relatively few wants. The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than by needs. And man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.

Advertising-developed, ever-increasing desires go directly against the instruction of Scripture:

“Now godliness combined with contentment brings great profit. For we have brought nothing into this world and so we cannot take a single thing out either. But if we have food and shelter, we will be satisfied with that” (1 Tim. 6:6-8).

“In any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of contentment, whether I go satisfied or hungry, have plenty or nothing. I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:12-13).

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear” (Mt. 6:25).

“One’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Lk. 12:15).

People are exposed to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of advertisements per day. Even if we’re able to tune them out - and our brains are sometimes remarkably good at tuning them out - they become part of the background noise of modern life, a constant hum of distraction as each ad tries to strike the right mix of color and action and emotional appeal and wit, and as our brains are continually tasked with split seconds of processing to decide whether the ads actually merit attention.

We’ve become numb to this; we simply view it as part of modern life. When I pause my Hulu show and see an ad for toilet paper pop up on the pause screen, I shake my head at advertisers’ ingenuity then move on. But, if we could take a step back and view this objectively - the hundreds of deliberate distractions per day, the deliberate appeals to sex and vanity and envy and insecurity that so many ads employ, the repeated attempts to damage our contentment and peace of mind - we’d do our best to take action against it.

Getting an ad blocker is an easy way to take action.

Ad blockers are software extensions for your web browser that, at minimum, limit or prevent advertisements. Many ad blockers include additional features such as blocking tracking cookies that advertisers and social media companies use to monitor your behavior, blocking popups, and hiding or blocking additional user-defined content.

An ad blocker is extremely easy to set up:

  1. I recommend uBlock Origin. Go to the uBlock Origin website, follow the link for your browser, and follow the on-screen instructions to install it. (This works for Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Brave Browser.)
  2. For Google Chrome: In 2024, Google Chrome made a set of technical changes to their web browser, known as Web Manifest V3, that significantly restricted ad blockers’ functionality, so uBlock Origin is no longer available. (There are some legitimate technical challenges that motivated these changes; however, considering the massive conflict of interest that results from Google’s dependence on advertising revenue, it’s easy to suspect that the solution they chose was motivated by finances rather than purely technical considerations.) You have two options:
  3. For iPhone, I recommend AdGuard.
  4. I have less experience with other browsers or platforms, but there are many options available.

Even a simple uBlock Origin setup is remarkably effective. On the occasions when I surf the web without an ad blocker active, it’s such a contrast that I’m left feeling like I’ve been wading through muck. uBlock Origin can automatically skip many commercials in streaming media: plug your laptop into your TV, start a show, and enjoy an ad-free viewing experience on a big screen. Ads are often resource-intensive, so blocking them can improve your device’s performance, make older devices more usable, keep them running quieter, and prolong battery life.

With a bit more work, you can gain additional features. For example, if I go on Twitter/X because I’m following a link to a specific discussion, I want to read that specific discussion, but Twitter/X wants to distract me with its “What’s happening” sidebar, so that I’ll get sucked into following rabbit holes and spend more time on their site (and I do), so they can boost their DAU stats and hopefully serve me more ads. uBlock Origin lets you set up custom filters, which you can use to hide the sidebar completely. Specific filters are often technical, but you can normally find someone online who’s already done the work. For example, here are my uBlock Origin filters to hide Twitter’s “What’s Happening” and Facebook Reels:

! Hide the 'What's happening' sidebar on Twitter.com
x.com##*[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
! Facebook Reels
facebook.com##[aria-posinset] [href="/reel/?s=ifu_see_more"]:upward([aria-posinset])
www.facebook.com##[aria-label="reel"]:upward(2)

To set these up: Click the uBlock Origin icon in your browser’s toolbar, click the gears icon, go under “My filters,” and paste these in.

And there are even more steps you can take: Switch from ad-supported Google Search to a more privacy-conscious alternative like Duck Duck Go. Switch from ad-supported search entirely to a paid product like Kagi for web search or Fastmail or Proton for email. (“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” If the current state of advertising is genuinely bad, then consider voting with your wallet for a world with less advertising.) With a little more technical effort (which AI chatbots can make accessible even for non-technical folks), a Pi-hole can block ads for every device on your home network, not just your web browsers. The point isn’t that everyone should do all these things - the point is that, in a society that treats advertising as a natural, unavoidable part of the economy, media, and everyday life, we have more options than we realize. And the basic options are remarkably effective - start there.

So install uBlock Origin. Reclaim a little more focus, a little more contentment. Take another step in following Christ.

Footnotes

  1. This illustration comes from Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines. ↩

  2. John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted, p. 51 and 52, emphasis added ↩

  3. See John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, p. 182-182 ↩