Double literacy loss
Last week I was asked by a graduate student the following question: In today’s culture, what is the biggest challenge for Christians in attempting to steward and share the scriptures with the next generation—whether within the church or without?
This was a very helpful question to be forced to face head on. I’m not especially good at apologetics, either in practice or at the level of theory. But a concise answer occurred to me that I’ve been reflecting on since I gave it.
The biggest challenge, it seems to me, is a sort of double loss of literacy.
First is biblical literacy. For centuries this has been the ambient culture of Western societies, including the United States. Whether or not this or that individual was a Christian, the default setting around him or her was inflected by the Bible: its stories, its characters, its plots, its very verbiage. Read public speeches from the nineteenth century. They are positively studded with allusions to the Bible. A Bible nerd from 2022 wouldn’t catch them all. But a barely literate teenager in 1822 might have. That’s what “biblical literacy” means. Even a generation ago at my own institution, students came in with impressive knowledge of the Bible. Today, not so much—even from students who are committed Christians, having attended church all their lives.
But that’s not the only challenge, or rather, the only loss of literacy.
The second is literal literacy. People under 25 today, including those who earn high school and college and even graduate degrees, including those who get A’s and B’s and generally “succeed” at school, do not read. That is to say, they are not readers. For most of them, perhaps nearly all of them, sitting still with a book for 30 minutes, much less two or three hours, is either wishful thinking or a nightmare. One gets itchy after five minutes at most. Check for mentions, check for texts, check for DMs, refresh the feed, refresh the inbox, send a Snap, send a Polo, stream a video, play a game—the options are endless. This presumes one is already sitting down, book in hand, ready and even eager to read. That’s too much. Nine times out of ten down time is the same as it always is, every evening and late into the night: watching a show on a streaming service and/or YouTube, assuming all the social media and communication with friends are turned off (which they aren’t).
None of this is meant as criticism. Don’t (yet) imagine me as an old man waving my cane at the youngsters to get off my lawn. My register here is not pejorative. It’s purely descriptive. Teenagers and twentysomethings today, by and large, are not readers. By which I mean, they are not readers of books. They read endlessly, as a matter of fact, but their reading takes place in 5-15 second chunks of time on a glowing device, before the next image or swipe or alert restarts the clock. Minds trained on this from a young age simply lack the stamina, not to mention the desire, to read for pleasure for sustained stretches of time.
In a prior age of mass education and biblical literacy, one largely devoid of screens, literal literacy was crucial for apologetics as well as evangelism and discipleship, because it meant that the necessary conditions for coming to have a direct experience of and relationship with the Bible were in place. It meant too that, often if not always, a primary entry point for reaching someone with the gospel was studying the Bible with them. For their own preexisting habits, as well as their inherited mental atmosphere, conduced to support the reception of Bible reading in their daily lives. Getting to know the God of Christian faith and reading the sacred book of Christian faith were convertible; to do one was to do the other.
No longer. And it seems to me a profound error—the older generation “always fighting the last war,” as the saying goes—to assume that this once apt or successful strategy is a fitting approach moving forward. Even if you were to convince a 17-year old curious about Jesus that the Bible is the way to learn about Jesus, why assume that she will now do something she never otherwise does, namely spend hours in deliberate demanding literary study, in order to keep learning about him on her own? That’s a bad bet. Assume rather that she likes the idea of doing so but will never quite find the time to get around to it.
What does this mean for evangelism and discipleship today? For reaching the next generation with the riches and truths of Holy Scripture?
An answer to the second question will have to wait for another day. Partly I simply don’t know; partly a proper answer is too big for this blog post, perhaps for any such post.
As for evangelism and discipleship: What it means, negatively, is that the Bible will not, for most young people, be the principal means thereof. Which means, positively, that something else will be. Not that the Bible will be uninvolved. Only that it won’t (usually) be the point of entry, and it won’t (directly) play the starring role.
What will? So far as I can tell, the answer is liturgy, friendship, witness, and service. That is to say, the sacramental life of tight-knit Christian community in mutual support and external care. The Bible will and must saturate such a life, from top to bottom and beginning to end. Such a life will be dead on arrival if the testimony of the apostles and prophets does not animate it from within and at all times.
Nevertheless this role is different than the role the Bible has had in churches, especially “low” Protestant churches, these last two or three centuries. It will take some getting used to. It’s time we got started, though. The double loss of literacy is a fait accompli. It’s a done deal and already in the rear view mirror. The only question is whether we respond, and how. We can mourn and bemoan the loss, recalling the good old days. Or we can get to work.
I say let’s get to work.
