“Growing Christians Are Reading Christians”

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Kidnapped, a tale of adventure set in the Scottish Highlands. He dedicated the novel to his good friend, Charles Baxter, and confidently asserted it was a book to be savored: “This is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter evening schoolroom when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near. . .”¹ Well over a century later, the prospect of a young man or woman choosing to spend an evening in the pages of a well-worn epic is more remote. So says a National Endowment for the Arts report, “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.”²

The study, based on 2002 Census Bureau data, indicates that, for the first time in modern history, fewer than half of all adults now read literature (defined as any fictional story, play, or poetry). Furthermore, adults reporting to have read any book in the last 12 months dropped from 61 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2002. And the rate of decline is increasing. Between 1982 and 1992, literary reading dropped five percent; by 2002, it had dropped another 14 percent.³

Some see disaster. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Andrew Solomon tied a decline in reading to a rise in depression and Alzheimer’s disease. Persuaded that television watching bred mindless passivity, he concluded that “the crisis in reading is a crisis in national health.”⁴ Others are less anxious. Columnists George Will⁵ and Joseph Epstein⁶ presented a number of qualifying points: 1. The report ignores literary non-fiction (e.g., biography, history, theology) and generates absurdities (e.g., a pulp romance outweighs Augustine’s Confessions); 2. It ignores quality; most fiction is mediocre or worse (e.g., Oprah Winfrey’s book club serves us a steady diet of victimology, reinforcing the reader’s “own self-pity or self-righteous anger”);⁷ 3. Deconstructionist literature professors bear much of the blame, in that they have defamed great works of literature; 4. Ninety-six million serious readers is nothing to sneeze at, and “Serious reading has always been a minority matter.”⁸

Some of the blame for a fall-off in literary reading is laid at the feet of “distractions of the electronic culture.”⁹ Televisions, radios, computers, Palm Pilots, iPods, VCRs, DVDs, and CDs are everywhere and multiplying, as is their use.¹⁰ According to George Will, the din of these technologies deprives us of two treasures that reading affords—solitude and silence.¹¹ Of course, Internet reading is reading,¹² but it is generally more hurried, and something is lost when books fall by the wayside. As Joseph Epstein observes, “Sustained reading, sitting quietly and enjoying the aesthetic pleasure that words elegantly deployed on the page can give, contemplating careful formulations of complex thought—these do not seem likely to be acts strongly characteristic of an already jumpy new century.”¹³

Movies such as The Passion of the Christ and Chariots of Fire can be edifying. Televised Olympic heroics can inspire, as can televised political speeches. But for the “people of the Book,” there is no substitute for the written word, and woe is the culture that counts reading, including Bible reading, an antiquated method of learning. Who will relish the allegory of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress? Who will take the time to appreciate the example set forth in Corrie ten Boom’s biography, The Hiding Place? Who will bother to read Isaiah or Acts or Revelation in a sitting?

In his Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, Don Whitney argues that “growing Christians are reading Christians.”¹⁴ Indeed, for it is hard to imagine effective and joyful discipleship without the “solitude and silence” of reflective reading.¹⁵ (And blessed is the pastor whose congregation grants him a book allowance and reading days.)

How can those unaccustomed to “contemplating careful formulations of complex thought” as found in books sustain enough of theology and biblical ethics to confront the culture in the name of Christ? Simply, they cannot.

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