The Book We No Longer Know
Biblical illiteracy is not merely a religious problem, it is a civilizational one, and the church must lead the way back.
There is a passage in the eighth chapter of Nehemiah that ought to haunt us. The people of Israel, newly returned from exile, gathered in the public square. Ezra the scribe brought out the Torah and read it aloud from morning until midday. The people stood and listened. They wept. They confessed. They celebrated. They were, in the truest sense, reconstituted by the encounter with the Word of God.
I think about that scene a great deal these days, because something like the inverse of it is occurring across much of modern American Christianity. We have the Book. We simply do not read it anymore.
The statistics, by now, are familiar to anyone paying attention, and yet they retain their capacity to shock. Surveys consistently find that fewer than half of Americans who identify as Christians read their Bible with any regularity. A majority cannot name the four Gospels. Substantial numbers are unable to identify the most basic contours of biblical narrative, the Exodus, the Sermon on the Mount, the resurrection appearances. Among young adults who were raised in the faith, the rates are even more dismal.
We have constructed a Christianity of feeling and belonging, of social connection and therapeutic comfort, that floats free of its textual foundation. We have kept the emotional register of the faith while slowly evacuating its content. And we are only beginning to understand what we have lost.
What the Scriptures Say About Themselves
This would be merely a sociological concern if the Bible did not speak so insistently about its own necessity. But it does, and with an urgency that should arrest us.
"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." -Psalm 119:105
The psalmist is describing something we have largely lost: a sense of Scripture as navigational. The ancient Hebrews did not read the Torah as a cultural artifact to be appreciated or a historical document to be analyzed. They read it, memorized it, chanted it, built their calendars and rhythms around it, because they believed it told them where they were and where they were going.
The Apostle Paul, writing to his young protégé Timothy, makes a sweeping claim about the nature of scriptural text that the early church took with absolute seriousness:
"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." - 2 Timothy 3:16–17
Note the comprehensiveness of the claim. Not some Scripture. Not Scripture when supplemented by the right cultural commentary or the right feelings on a Sunday morning. All Scripture. And note the purpose: not emotional edification, though that may follow, but equipping. The image is almost military, the thoroughly equipped soldier, prepared for the full range of what might be asked of her.
The author of Hebrews reaches even further, offering a description of the living Word that should stop any casual reader in their tracks:
"For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." - Hebrews 4:12
This is not a description of an inert document. It is a description of something that acts upon the reader, something that cuts through the layers of self-deception and social performance that accumulate around the modern self like sediment. When we abandon the regular reading of Scripture, we abandon the primary instrument by which that sediment gets cleared.
The Warnings We Have Ignored
What happens to a people when they lose their sacred text? The biblical writers had an answer, and it was not optimistic.
The prophet Hosea, speaking to a Northern Kingdom that had grown prosperous and spiritually complacent, delivered a diagnosis that reads with uncomfortable contemporaneity:
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests; because you have ignored the law of your God, I also will ignore your children." - Hosea 4:6
The destruction Hosea names is not primarily material. It is moral and spiritual, a people who, having abandoned the formation that comes from wrestling with divine law, find themselves incapable of navigating the deeper questions of how to live, what to value, and who they are.
Amos describes it even more starkly as a famine, which is to say, as the most primal kind of suffering:
"'The days are coming,' declares the Sovereign Lord, 'when I will send a famine through the land — not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.' " - Amos 8:11–12
There is something almost unbearably sad about that image: people staggering, searching, unable to find the very thing that was always available to them. One thinks of a person who has misplaced their glasses and cannot find them because they need their glasses to look. The Word is there, but the capacity to receive it, having been long neglected, has atrophied.
Jesus himself, in the great temptation narratives, reaches for the Hebrew Scriptures three times to ground his resistance to the devil. But what is most revealing is the first thing he says, drawn from Deuteronomy:
"It is written: 'Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" - Matthew 4:4
He is not simply quoting a proof text. He is articulating an anthropology, a view of what human beings fundamentally are and what they fundamentally need. To be human, Jesus is saying, is to be a creature of the Word. Deprive a person of bread and they will die in weeks. Deprive them of the Word and something essential in them will die, too, only more slowly and less visibly.
Why It Matters Beyond the Pews
I want to insist on something that may seem counterintuitive to secular readers: biblical illiteracy is not merely a problem for the church. It is a problem for the civilization that was, in part, shaped by the biblical tradition.
Much of what we take for granted in our moral vocabulary, the infinite dignity of the individual, the obligation to care for the stranger and the poor, the notion that history is going somewhere rather than merely repeating, the idea that those in power are accountable to something higher than their own power, has deep roots in the biblical narrative. When a society loses its familiarity with that narrative, it does not simply lose a religious resource. It loses the underground aquifer that has been quietly feeding its moral imagination.
When people do not know the story of the Exodus, they have a harder time understanding why liberation matters. When they have not sat with Job, they are less equipped to face suffering without cynicism or despair. When they have not read the Sermon on the Mount, they miss the revolutionary inversion at the heart of the Christian ethical tradition, the suggestion that the meek, the mourning, and the pure in heart are not losers in the human drama but inheritors of its deepest goods.
The current crisis of meaning, loneliness, and moral fragmentation that afflicts so many Americans is not unrelated to this loss. We are trying to navigate profound questions, about identity, about purpose, about how to live with one another across difference, with instruments that have been stripped of their most powerful guidance system.
James, in his letter to the early church, offered an image that strikes me as both beautiful and convicting: the person who hears the Word but does not act on it is like someone who looks at their face in a mirror and immediately forgets what they look like. But the person who looks intently into the Word and continues to do so is like someone who has finally discovered what their face actually is.
"But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it, not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it, they will be blessed in what they do." - James 1:25
We have, as a culture, stepped away from the mirror. And we are struggling, with increasing desperation, to remember what we look like.
What the Church Must Do
The church is, of course, the primary institution responsible for this crisis, and it is also the primary institution capable of addressing it. But doing so will require something more than adding another Bible study to the church calendar. It will require a fundamental rethinking of what formation means and what the local congregation is for.
The first and most urgent step is for pastors to take preaching seriously again as an act of scriptural exposition. There is a mode of contemporary preaching that uses the biblical text as a launching pad, a brief citation before pivoting to psychological insights, cultural commentary, and motivational content. It is often engaging. It is almost always insufficient. The congregation leaves having heard about the Bible without having heard the Bible. Pastors must return to the ancient practice of reading and explaining the text itself, in its historical context and canonical shape, allowing the strangeness and the difficulty as well as the comfort to come through.
The second step is to recover liturgical reading of Scripture as a congregational act. Many traditions have lost the lectionary, the ancient practice of reading systematically through the biblical text across the church year. Its restoration would mean that congregants, even those who struggle with private reading, would hear large swaths of Scripture read aloud in community over time. The ancient wisdom of the church assumed that formation happened through repeated exposure to the full range of the biblical narrative, not through a curated selection of favorite passages.
Third, churches must rebuild the infrastructure of formation that once existed in small-group settings, Sunday school classes, and catechetical instruction. The Sunday morning service is too brief and too passive to carry alone the weight of biblical formation. People need small, accountable communities where they can read slowly, ask hard questions, and be challenged by those who know them. They need a context in which not knowing is acceptable and wrestling is encouraged.
Fourth, churches must be willing to raise the cost of membership. For much of recent American Christianity, the implicit deal has been: we ask very little of you, and in exchange we hope you will return. The result has been communities of low commitment and low formation. The historic church understood that the catechumenate — the structured process of learning the faith before full membership — was essential to producing people who actually knew what they believed and why. Some version of that rigor is worth recovering.
Finally, parents must be re-enlisted as the primary teachers of the faith in the home. Deuteronomy 6:6–7 commands the Israelites to speak of God's words when they sit at home and when they walk along the road, when they lie down and when they get up. The sacred text was meant to permeate the rhythms of daily life, not be confined to the religious hour. Churches can help by equipping parents with the resources and the permission to do this — by signaling clearly that the dinner table, the bedtime conversation, and the long car ride are sacred instructional spaces.
The people who gathered to hear Ezra read the Torah did not understand it at first. So the Levites moved among the crowd, explaining the text, making the meaning plain, helping people understand what they heard. That is still the task. It always was. The Book is still here. The question is whether we have the humility to return to it, the patience to read it carefully, and the courage to let it read us in return.