You’ve probably heard the phrase “phoning it in,” which suggests doing something with the minimum possible effort, or unenthusiastically going through the motions without care or commitment. And you’ve no doubt witnessed it in a variety of places: a fellow student who slops together their part of a team project; a store employee who is too busy scrolling on their phone to be helpful; the guy sitting on the stationary bike at the gym yakking to his buddy without breaking a sweat.
The phrase comes from mid-20th century journalism, when a traveling reporter was rushing to meet a deadline and couldn’t make it back to the office to type out their story. Instead, they would call their editor and dictate the raw facts, literally “phoning the story in.” In radio, if a high-profile guest couldn’t appear live in the studio, they would “phone in” their segment. While convenient, these segments suffered from compressed audio quality and lacked the energy of an in-person appearance, leading to the idiom’s negative connotation.
Ryan Burge is a political scientist and a leading U.S. data analyst on religion and politics. I read his non-partisan Graphs About Religion substack twice a week. This week he dug into social science research to discern the level of religious engagement of the average American. Typical survey questions included the frequency of religious service attendance, prayer outside of services, reading scripture or devotional literature, participating in prayer or scripture groups, sharing religious views with others, and saying grace before meals. Burge created a “religious behavior index,” a metric combining the above behaviors into a single scale from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). The mean score for the entire sample was 3.73 out of 10, suggesting that the typical American isn’t engaging in a lot of religious behaviors.
Sadly, several Christian denominations averaged a 3.8, which puts them on par with the average, nominally religious American. This suggests to me that many religious Americans are simply “phoning in” their faith, without allowing it to transform their lives in deeper ways. Burge observes that based on numerous studies, those who regularly engage in religious activities frequently experience a number of benefits, such as longer life expectancy, being less likely to suffer from mental illness, and being more likely to gain civic skills, (among other positive benefits).
I’m reminded here of the phrase, “dialing it in,” which initially was used to describe the process of finely tuning a racing engine. “Dialing it in” has come to mean showing a high level of focus and care, of pursuing continual improvement and higher levels of excellence. My encouragement for you, dear reader, is that rather than “phoning it in” with your faith, you would continue to “dial it in,” ever growing “in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).
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