Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell, says he would support a ban on online shopping on Christmas Day.
Major retailers such as John Lewis and Amazon are planning online Christmas sales for as early as Christmas day itself.
Bishop Stephen said only essential services should run on Christmas Day so people spend time with their families.
In The Mail on Sunday he said: "How you shut down the internet for a day I don't know, but if anyone has an idea I would certainly back it in the House of Lords"
Christian CEO Trevor Single from the Family Matters Institute discussed Bishop Stephen's comments on Premier and said: "At Christmas time it is a great time to get together with your family and build on that rather than individuals focusing on ourselves and on our phones.
"Wouldn't it be great if we could just switch our phones off for a little while?"
He gave some suggestions for how to spend time with family when it might be more tempting to retreat: "get people to put suggestions of what they'd like to do on a piece of paper and put it into a jam jar and get one of the party to draw that one piece out and everybody says 'let's go and do that'."
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Article by Cara Bentley
Cara Bentley is a multimedia journalist and newsreader and covers Politics for Premier.
