![]() “They’ve never read one book in their life approaching the length of the Bible, and so since they’ve never done it before, they think they can’t now,” Whitney said. It’s a challenging book, and even if people believe, in the abstract, that it would be good to read it, that doesn’t mean they know how to make sense of a particular passage or even where to start. “That is clearly the responsibility of the local church,” Whitney said. Some choose to participate online, but others have dropped out completely.Ĭhurches are also the main place that people learn how to read the Bible. Pew Research Center found that nearly a third of regular churchgoers have not returned to church buildings. But the pandemic took a visible toll on church attendance. Only about 3 percent were not meeting in person at all, according to Lifeway Research. Most churches remained open, with an additional online option. The State of the Bible survey collected data in January 2022 as the omicron variant of the coronavirus was surging. “As we’ve been tracking and kind of digging into what really happened around Scripture engagement in 2022, we realized there were some big issues happening in the United States at the time that we were collecting the data.” “The elephant in the room is COVID-19,” he told CT. When regular services were interrupted by the pandemic and related health mandates, it impacted not just the corporate bodies of believers but also individuals at home. ![]() Plake thinks the dramatic change shows how closely Bible reading-even independent Bible reading-is connected to church attendance. Before the pandemic, that number was at about 14 percent. More than 13 million of the most engaged Bible readers-measured by frequency, feelings of connection to God, and impact on day-to-day decisions-said they read God’s Word less.Ĭurrently, only 10 percent of Americans report daily Bible reading. It is the steepest, sharpest decline on record.Īccording to the 12th annual State of the Bible report, it wasn’t just the occasional Scripture readers who didn’t pick up their Bibles as much in 2022 either. Now only 39 percent say they read the Bible multiple times per year or more. That percentage had stayed more or less steady since 2011.īut in 2022, it dropped 11 points. In 2021, about 50 percent of Americans said they read the Bible on their own at least three or four times per year. “What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.” We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,” John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year. When researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report saw this year’s survey statistics, they found it hard to believe the results.
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