The Great Bible Shelving and How to Reverse It

The American Bible Society (ABS) issued its “State of the Bible” report last week, and even for those accustomed to reporting about secularization and the shrinking of the American church, it’s a doozy. 

For the first time, fewer than 100 million Americans fit into ABS’s “Bible User” category. This is the latest evidence of what the ABS calls an  “unprecedented” decline in Americans’ engagement with scripture since the start of the pandemic.  

The study, completed annually in partnership with NORC (previously National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, also found a sharp decrease in those reading their Bibles. Half of Americans, about 128 million, said they picked up their Bibles in 2021. Only 40%, or 103 million, said the same a year later.  

Americans reading the Scriptures less will surprise no one. I have had several friends leave the Christian faith since the start of the pandemic. I know I am not alone, as it is happening nationwide. 

The last decade has seen a rapid decrease in the number of Americans claiming to be Christians, a collapse of church attendance and an increase in church buildings being sold. The signs of secularization are apparent to anyone paying attention. 

But 25 million people abandoning Bible reading in a single year cannot be simply chalked up to secularization. It’s so strange that I felt compelled to take a hard look at the data from the pandemic years and offer some educated guesses to explain the great Bible shelving of 2022. 

First, I was tempted to dismiss that year’s startling findings altogether. Perhaps a pandemic-era oddity or a methodological change in the study created an illusion in the data. 

However, like 2023’s data set, this year’s numbers held steady. Again, like last year, they declined slightly, and I found no evidence of an updated methodology causing mayhem in the data. 

Nevertheless, I wondered if ABS’s methodology had led the drop to be exaggerated. The organization defines bible users as “individuals who read, listen to, or pray with the Bible on their own at least 3-4 times a year”—a low bar. 

Perhaps most of those 25 million rarely picked up the Good Book before the pandemic either. This seemed like the simplest theory.  

However, the 2022 data showed the opposite of what I had predicted. 2021 saw a spike in the number of people who picked up the Bible a few times, presumably to help them through stress and grief at the height of the pandemic. ABS calls these people the “moveable middle,” whereas people who either read the Bible frequently or not at all are called “Bible engaged” or “Bible disengaged.” 

In 2022, the moveable middle numbered about 66 million people—roughly what it had been before the pandemic. The number of Bible-engaged people, by contrast, plummeted by 15 million people and has continued to drop in the two years since. Serious Bible readers, not just casual verse poachers, were abandoning their quiet time or Scripture meditation.

So, the plot thickens. Nearly one-quarter of Bible-engaged Americans disengaged from the Bible during the second year of the pandemic. What on earth happened? 

Perhaps, I thought, we have witnessed a change in identity among the group that used to be America’s most significant Bible readers: evangelicals. Today, one in five American Muslims call themselves evangelical, and they do so, according to sociologist Ryan Burge, because evangelical has become a synonym for Republican or cultural conservative. 

This change has coincided with an exodus of self-described evangelicals from church. After all, why would one need church to identify as a Republican? 

So if church has become unnecessary for evangelicals, maybe the Bible has become so too? 

This theory may be true but does not help explain the Great Bible Shelving. Donald Trump had co-opted evangelicalism between five and seven years before 2022, and there is little reason to think Trumpvangelicals all needed exactly half a decade to abandon that aspect of the Christian life. 

To be sure, right-wing politics and Christian nationalism are in the secularization soup, but we will have to look further to find the ingredient that gave 2022 its peculiar taste. 

Then, I began thinking about my life and Bible-reading habits around 2021-2022. Like many others during the pandemic, I spent more time online than ever. I found myself checking email and social media immediately when I woke up, the time I had typically spent in prayer before the pandemic. 

I switched to the Catholic lectionary readings for a time because I could access them online, but that hardly helped. Smartphones are so responsive to our slightest impulse that, before I knew it, I found myself distracted on ESPN or X (formerly Twitter) or finishing an Atlantic article begun the night before. 

Sad as it is to say, if my phone was within my reach, meditating on the Scriptures and spending time with God in prayer were often out of reach. 

Is the same true of other Bible readers? Could the smartphone and pandemic-era “internetization” of everything have drawn people away from God’s story as narrated in the Scriptures? 

I believe so. With churches closed or implementing social distancing, many believers were not receiving encouragement from their Christian communities to pray and spend time with the scriptures. Clicking over to see how their Twitter nemesis had reacted to their latest brilliant barb offered more of an endorphin hit. 

Two years later, those newly learned habits have become old, ingrained habits. 

What can Christians do to moor themselves again in the biblical story? 

First, avoid social media or news sites first thing in the morning and pray over the Scriptures instead. After all, this is the story where we find our identity. To remember who we are, we will need to read, talk and think about it often. 

Second, keep your phone out of reach early in the day or, if it is your habit to pray before bed, at night. Over half of American adults spend more than half their time online, and we must escape that constant stimulation to hear and talk with God. 

Finally, churches should offer opportunities to read and discuss the Bible together. If the people with whom we share our lives find their identity within the story of the Scriptures, we will be more likely to seek it there as well.