I remember people in my grandparents’ generation who routinely quoted the Bible by memory. Not just verses, either. Paragraphs. Whole chapters, even. That generation of believers was proud to know their Bibles, but it’s clear that times have changed. Since the 1960s, Biblical literacy has been on the decline. Gallup polling from a few years back revealed that:
- Only 45% of Christian adults in America could name all four gospels
- 60% of Christians couldn’t name more than five of the Ten Commandments
- 55% of high school seniors believed Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife
- 15% of Americans said Billy Graham preached the Sermon on the Mount
- 12% of Americans believed Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife
- 82% of Americans said they were familiar with the Scripture, “God helps those who help themselves.” The only problem is that this “verse” is nowhere to be found in the Bible!
American society has never been as Biblically illiterate as we are today. Secular elites in the media and academia have gone to great lengths to expel religion – and especially Christianity – from the realm of public discourse. They have insisted that the “separation of Church and State” exists to protect the State from the Church, but honest historians will concede that our nation’s founders established this doctrine to protect the Church from governmental intervention, not the other way around.
Professors and pundits have persuaded generations of Americans to believe that secularism and humanism are about facts, science, and real knowledge, while faith is about mere feelings, superstitions, and believing in something in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Having sown such seeds for years, secularists should now be reaping the harvest of their dreams: a society that is liberated at last from the archaic chains of Biblical appreciation.
But their hopes for a post-religious utopia have yet to be realized, and their assumption that America would become a more sophisticated society once religious expression was quarantined to quietly die behind four church walls cannot be supported by the data.
As Biblical illiteracy has risen in America, so has the number of children being raised in one-parent households, the number of men in prison, the number of adults and children suffering with depression and anxiety disorders, and the number of Americans dying by drug overdose. Increases in the divorce rate, the suicide rate, the proliferation of pornography, the scourge of human trafficking, and the national debt appear to be inversely correlated with decreases in America’s knowledge of the Bible.
Of course, no one can prove that Biblical illiteracy is the primary cause of these societal problems, but it would be naive to suggest there is no causal relationship whatsoever. Entire generations of people were told, “You can have knowledge or you can have faith, but you can’t have both.” And many of us believed it.
A Harvard University professor recently wrote an article insisting the university remove a paragraph about “Reason and Faith” from its General Education program. He wrote, “We must never juxtapose the words ‘reason’ and ‘faith,’ for that makes it sound as if ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ are parallel and equivalent ways of knowing, and we have to help students navigate between them. But universities are about reason, pure and simple. Faith – believing something without good reasons to do so – has no place in anything but a religious institution, and our society has no shortage of these.”
The great theologian Dallas Willard took a different approach to the perceived conflict between biblical faith and reasonable knowledge:
“The biblical stories know absolutely nothing of ‘blind faith’ or ‘leaps of faith’…such leaps are a pure fantasy imposed upon those stories and upon the religious life by the prejudices and tortured turns of modern thought. The result has been to undermine the foundations of faith in knowledge and to leave the teachings of Jesus and his people (along with those of all other religions) hanging in the air, with no right or responsibility to direct human life. That also explains how many people can now say, ‘All religions are equal.’ What is meant is that all religions are equally devoid of knowledge and reality or truth.”
The Bible is not about blind faith. It is about choosing to see God because you know He is there.
Faith isn’t “believing in something without good reasons to do so.” It is acting on what you have seen and engaging your will based on what you know to be true.
Higher learning was never meant to be faith-free; on the contrary, Harvard (where the aforementioned secular professor is employed) is named after John Harvard, an intellectual Christian preacher who donated the first 400 books to the Harvard library.
For over seven years at The Story, I’ve preached a lot about questions and doubts. I’ve always said doubts are welcome at our church, and I hope that will forever be so. But I also feel a great burden for the people I know who have been asking the same questions for a while now and, even though they have found good reasons to believe, they remain stuck in their doubt-induced stasis.
Truth be told, they already know that God is real. They already know Jesus is God. By and large, they’ve already found all the answers they need, but it seems like they’re afraid to admit it.
Why? I can’t be sure, but perhaps it’s because once you know something, you’re responsible for acting on it. Once you know Jesus is God, you have to come out of the proverbial closet, and these days, coming out of the “Christian closet” can be scarier and more taboo than coming out of almost any other closet.
But you know it’s time to trust the Word of God.
It’s time to shake off the stasis and get serious about the Bible.
Deep down, you know that Scripture offers you and those you love a better way of life.
If you’ve been living in a cloud of darkness and doubt, I pray you will give God’s Word a chance to shed some light and clarity on your life. If you don’t know where to begin, visit thestory.church/groups to connect to a community of people studying the Bible together.
