The Gap Between Bible Sales and Bible Reading

 By Shane Morris - Posted at BreakPoint:

Published April 3, 2025

In his Confessions, St. Augustine tells the story of a spiritual experience that triggered his conversion. Torn between his fleshly temptations and his attraction to Christianity, the future church father sat down beneath a fig tree and wept. Then, he heard a child’s voice chanting “Take up and read; Take up and read.” Augustine took this as a sign to read the Bible and immediately opened to Romans 13 where Paul warns against drunkenness and sexual immorality, urging readers instead to put on Jesus Christ.

At these words, Augustine writes, “light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”

This has always been the case with Scripture, whose power to speak to restless hearts and to make wise the simple has not dimmed in the centuries since Augustine wrote Confessions. But today, shockingly few people are heeding the voice’s advice.

Bible reading in the U.S. has fallen to what is likely an all-time low. Pew Research reported back in 2014 that 45% of American adults seldom or never read Scripture. Today, that number has shot to 61%. Just 22% said they read the Bible outside of religious services at least once a week.

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