The Bible is the best-selling book of all time—estimates run as high as 6 billion worldwide, one for almost every person alive. Yet it’s a rare Bible owner who picks it up often enough to pick up much of what’s in it. Sixty percent of Americans say they read the Bible at least on occasion, but fewer than half can name the first book. Only a third know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, many guessing Billy Graham. Ten percent of people surveyed believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Fully a quarter of American Bible readers do not know what it is that Easter celebrates (“Baptist Standard, Dec. 4, 2000).
A survey conducted on behalf of the Barna Group research organization discovered that American attitudes toward the Bible, whose language and teachings suffuse the country’s founding documents and history, are fragmenting driven largely by negative attitudes of those in their 30’s and younger. The American Bible Society reports a major shift with about as many Americans engaged with the Bible—reading it four or more times per week and believing it is God’s word—as there are those who are somewhat skeptical of the scriptures’ validity.
According to the survey, so called “millennials”, the generation born from the early 1980’s to the early 2000s, are driving the rise in negative views of the Bible. 19 percent of millennials believe no literature is sacred, compared with 13 percent of adults. Where 50 percent of all adults believe “the Bible contains everything a person needs to know to live a meaningful life,” that number drops to 35 percent of millennials (Mark A. Kellner, Deseret News, April 27, 2014).
Larry Stone, a noted Christian author, said, “The thing that jumped out at me was that in three years, the percentage of people antagonistic to the Bible grew by over 72 percent. That is an astounding increase.” He went on to say, “When our nation started, the Bible was really important to us. Early Americans had differences, but we really treasured the Bible. If they only had one book in their home, it was the Bible.”
May 2, 2011 marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James version of the Bible. M. Russell Ballard said, “We must ever remember the countless martyrs who knew of the Bible’s power and who gave their lives that we may be able to find within its words the eternal happiness and the peace of our Heavenly Father’s kingdom.”
Steve Walker suggested several ways of opening up new vistas and revitalizing the reading of the Bible: 1 ) Try a little risk in your Bible reading by being vulnerable to the possibility of actually having to do something about it. 2) Try seeing what’s actually on the pages of the Bible, and not just what you noticed last time through. 3) Try meeting the people of the Bible as people rather than Marvel superheroes. When Genesis shows what Joseph becomes, who could not love the man? 4) Try reading for joy rather than out of a sense of duty. For example, in Acts we read, “And there sat in a window a certain young man named Eutichus, being fallen into a deep sleep; and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell from the third loft, and was taken up dead.” A shamefaced Apostle interrupts his sermonizing to re-animate the disciple he bored to death and then our hero, that very night, “talked a long while, even till break of day.”
5) Try soaking in the attitude of the Bible—frank, open, honest. It doesn’t talk down to us. 6) Try pursuing the questions such as: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” “Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?” “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” “Who is my neighbor?” and “Lord, is it I?” 7) Try making the most of the Bible’s open-ended invitation to change. Bible study is heady stuff when it’s rethought rather than merely reviewed (“Illuminating Texts,” BYU Magazine, fall 2014).
I tend to think that perhaps the reason the millennials’ might have lost their passion for the words of the Bible is because their mothers (and fathers) failed to impart them. It is written, “…They had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it” (Alma 56:47-48) Perhaps it is time to get the Bible not only into our hands but also into our heads.
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