Generation Alpha—the kids born from about 2010 onwards—are the first to grow up with TikTok and similar platforms as a normal part of life. For many of them, TikTok isn’t just where they get entertainment. It’s where they learn about the world, discover new ideas, and form opinions about politics, culture, relationships, and even faith.
That’s a big shift.
When you only get your information from a platform built on speed, emotion, and personalisation, your view of the world is shaped in ways you might not notice. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t feed you a balanced diet of truth—it feeds you what keeps you watching. That might be funny, comforting, shocking, or even outrage-inducing. But it’s rarely slow, balanced, or reflective.
TikTok is built for speed. You open it, and you’re hit with an endless stream of short, loud, and often emotional videos. The algorithm learns what you like and keeps showing you more of it. In minutes, you can go from cat videos to intense political arguments—without even searching for them. The format makes it easy to share strong feelings and hard to share complex ideas.
Tik Tok does indeed give younger people a voice, lets them organize quickly, and spreads messages that might be ignored by mainstream media. That’s true. We’ve seen youth-led movements grow through social media, and TikTok has been part of that. It can amplify calls for justice and expose wrongdoing. But it also amplifies lies just as quickly. A fake video, edited to look real, can spread to millions before anyone checks the facts. And once people believe something, it’s hard to undo—especially if the correction is slower and less exciting than the false claim.
But the real issue might not be TikTok itself—it’s how it’s being used. The app is training us to expect information in quick, visual bursts. That’s not how deep understanding works. You can’t weigh evidence, question sources, or see the bigger picture if you’re scrolling at the speed TikTok demands.
Consumption of information shapes our hearts and minds. Jesus often spoke about hearing and seeing truth—“Let anyone with ears to hear listen.” Truth takes time to hear. It requires patience, humility, and discernment. TikTok’s pace leaves little room for any of that. If we’re not careful, we can end up shaped more by the algorithm than by the Spirit.
For Generation Alpha, that means their moral and spiritual imagination is being formed in an environment where trends outrun facts, where performance often matters more than substance, and where truth is packaged for maximum impact, not accuracy.
Faith doesn’t grow well in that kind of soil.
Christian faith, in particular, calls for practices that are almost the opposite of the TikTok experience—listening deeply, sitting with hard truths, reading Scripture slowly, praying without distraction, learning in community, and discerning God’s voice over time. These habits require patience and stillness. TikTok trains the opposite: constant motion, instant reaction, and a sense that if something doesn’t grab you in the first few seconds, it isn’t worth your time.
If Generation Alpha’s primary “teachers” are influencers and trends, then spiritual formation risks becoming shallow. Instead of wrestling with big questions about God, suffering, forgiveness, and justice, faith might shrink to a few aesthetic quotes, feel-good videos, or out-of-context verses over background music. It’s easy for “Christian content” to become just another niche in the algorithm—a quick hit of encouragement sandwiched between makeup tutorials and political hot takes.
There’s also a deeper danger: the erosion of trust in any authority outside the algorithm. TikTok’s constant stream of voices can make it hard to know what’s reliable. If you’re thirteen and your feed shows conflicting claims about the Bible, Jesus, or morality—each presented with confidence and emotion—how do you sort truth from opinion? If you haven’t been taught how to discern, you’ll likely just trust the content that “feels right” or matches your preferences. That’s not discernment—it’s just preference dressed up as truth.
The Church has an opportunity here, but it will require more than just posting its own TikToks. If we want Generation Alpha to have a faith that lasts, we need to model and teach slow, deep engagement with God’s Word. We need to create spaces where they can ask questions without fear, where truth isn’t reduced to a soundbite, and where formation happens in community, not just in front of a screen.
We also need to help them see the difference between consuming faith content and living faith. Watching a 30-second Bible verse video might inspire someone for a moment, but it doesn’t replace the long work of learning to love God and neighbour over years.
If TikTok remains the main source of information for Generation Alpha, their view of faith will be shaped by what trends, not what’s true. And that will leave them vulnerable—to shallow belief, to confusion, and to walking away when the next trend contradicts what they thought they knew.
In a world of fast takes and instant outrage, Christians are called to a slower, deeper way. We’re called to love our neighbour, which means listening before reacting. Seeking justice requires more than a viral video—it requires wisdom, persistence, and courage.
Faith that endures can’t be built in the attention economy’s pace. It needs a different rhythm—one that teaches them to pause, to listen, to test what they hear, and to trust something deeper than the algorithm. Without that, we risk raising a generation fluent in scrolling, but unpracticed in seeking the One who calls them to be still and know God.
