Americans love their Bibles. So much so that they keep them in pristine, unopened condition. Or, as George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli said in a widely quoted survey finding, “Americans revere the Bible but, by and large, they don’t read it.”
Anecdotes abound. Time magazine observed in a 2007 cover story that only half of U.S. adults could name one of the four Gospels. Fewer than half could identify Genesis as the Bible’s first book. Jay Leno and Stephen Colbert have made sport of Americans’ inability to name the Ten Commandments””even among members of Congress who have pushed to have them posted publicly.
Perhaps the first step toward improved Bible literacy is admitting we have a problem. A 2005 study by the Barna Group asked American Christians to rate their spiritual maturity based on activities such as worship, service, and evangelism. Christians offered the harshest evaluation of their Bible knowledge, with 25 percent calling themselves not too mature or not at all mature.
Thanks for posting this, Kendall. This is a huge problem that I’ve been very concerned about for years. It’s bad enough that biblical literacy (in the sense not only of familiarity with basic Bible knowledge, but of the ability to read it with comprehension) has declined so drastically in our post-Christendom secular society. What’s much worse is that biblical literacy has eroded so severely within the Church itself. That’s where the paradox or irony of people loving and revering the Bible but seldom reading it really strikes home.
I agree that the biggest problem is the need to help people see “the big picture.” In liturgical churches, we’re helped by the fact that each week, both the eucharistic prayer and the Nicene Creed provide a short summary of the sweep of the biblical drama of salvation from Creation to Final Things (new creation), centering on Christ’s decisive death and resurrection. But so often, all people get exposed to are short snippets of Scripture that are seldom shown to be connected as part of a great overarching story.
I’m glad to hear about the imminent launching of BibleMesh as a tool for dealing with that widespread problem. I’ll be looking for it next month to check it out.
Fortunately, however, there’s another side to this problem. I’m encouraged by the fact that there are more high quality tools for introducing people to the big story and helping them overcome their biblical illiteracy than ever before. Each week there are millions of Americans who gather for an evening to go through a basic Bible study program like Kerygma (Presbyterian), Disciple (Methodist), Bethel (LC-MS), Word and Witness (ELCA), etc. My favorites are the first year surveys of the whole Bible put out by Kerygma and Disciple (far superior to EFM in my judgment). The fact that millions of Americans devote several hours each week to learning how to read the Bible fruitfully and especially to learning the big picture in a more than superficial way is very promising. But they’re still a tiny minority of churchgoers.
We have to do much better. I’m for anything that helps solve this huge problem. I plan on launching my own attempt at a website similar to BibleMesh in the future. Any suggestions would be welcome.
David Handy+