Three hundred years after the printing press ushered in a “reading revolution,” the human family has entered what British columnist James Marriott calls the “counter-revolution” — a “reading recession,” summed up in startling statistics:
- An estimated 54% of Americans now read below a sixth-grade level, and 30% read “at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child” (4-5 grade). That’s according to Andreas Schleicher with The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which concluded in 2024 that literacy levels are “declining or stagnating” in most highly developed countries.
- Daily reading for pleasure among U.S. adults has also decreased by 40% in the last 20 years, with roughly half of Americans admitting to not reading a single book in the last year.
Trends in younger generations are even more pronounced:
- Reading levels have fallen for all ages of U.S. children to their lowest level in decades. One-third of eighth graders are below even basic reading proficiency, and 12th-grade reading scores hit their lowest level in 2024 since tracking began three decades ago.
- While 37% of U.S. 13-year-olds said they read for fun almost every day in 1992, 27% said the same in 2012 and only 14% in 2023.
An ever-diminishing fraction of the human family appears to be reading in a consistent way. Many consequences of this multigenerational reading retreat have received scrutiny, ranging from increased cognitive decline and memory loss to decreased empathy and increased susceptibility to misinformation.
We rarely hear serious consideration, however, of what plummeting literacy may be doing to the human soul. Drawing from available research on reading, “cognitive patience” and digital distraction, here is what the reading recession means for faith today.
Dwindling reading, dwindling faith: 7 connections
1. Losing unmediated access to sacred text
Before the printing press, lay people had to rely exclusively on what others told them about God’s will.
As more believers today lose interest in directly accessing their faith’s foundational texts, they also become more dependent on a crowded field of voices ready to teach them about God — some truthful and others out to injure faith. All this can breed a shallower, secondhand spirituality derived primarily from emotional sound bites, hot takes from podcasters and out-of-context quotes on Instagram.
“Without text,” writes Harvard scholar Niall Ferguson, “it is hard to keep track of the stories that help us understand our purpose in this world and our relationship to the divine.”
Marriott cautions more broadly about a “tragic impoverishing of the human experience” as great literature is laid aside that previous generations saw as “among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.”
2. Attention atrophy and superficial skimming
Humanities scholar Thomas Chatterton Williams writes about “the rare patience a book still demands of a reader — those precious slow hours of deep focus.”
That becomes more of a radical act in a world where an estimated 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, often accompanied by attention-capturing techniques Asa Park recently summarized:
“Whatever it takes to make people click. Energy can never dip, not even briefly. Every second must justify itself or it gets cut. No pauses, no breathing room. … Remove all dead air. Silence is failure.”
No wonder UC Irvine’s Gloria Mark reported that attention spans in 2023 were a third of what they were in 2004. The attention we manage to give, according to research from UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, increasingly reflects a superficial “skimming” that demonstrates the limited “cognitive patience” required to deeply engage a text.
“We’re rapidly losing the ability to think deeply at all,” Georgetown scientist Cal Newport warned, arguing for an urgent need to “reclaim our heritage as contemplative beings” and calling for a “full revolution in defense of thinking, launched against the digital forces seeking to degrade it.”
3. Less critical thought, more passive consumption
“To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning,” Neil Postman wrote in “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
Marriott similarly pointed out that “certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing.” He summarized observations from historian Walter Ong, who highlighted decades ago how “writing cools and rationalizes thought.”
By contrast, an “age of short-form video favors heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions,” Marriott cautioned, underscoring “innumerable means for bypassing logical argument” among pundits who “can shout and weep and charm (their) audience into submission.”
4. Flattening spiritual vocabulary
Regular engagement with books strengthens cognition, vocabulary and emotional intelligence — all of which helps human beings grasp more complexity.
A decline in reading consequently leads to a narrowing of our working vocabulary in a way that makes it more difficult to put sacred experiences into words. Instead of acknowledging a “betrayal of God’s will” or a “dark night of the soul,” painful emotions can instead be simply dismissed as a “bad mood.”
We might also miss a moment of transcendent joy or peace — lacking the language to capture our experience, similar to ancient Americans in the Book of Mormon who experienced a deep spiritual encounter but “knew it not.”
5. Shrinking influences on inner development
The reading recession is “not merely about literacy,” Pastor Gary Grogan told the Deseret News. “It is about spiritual formation.”
“Faith requires attention, reflection, memory, imagination and the ability to sit with sacred truth over time,” he added. “When people stop reading deeply, they often lose some of the very capacities that help sacred texts move from information to transformation.”
Yet isn’t information what a book is for? “The idea that reading is just for information or just for entertainment — both are wrong,” said Jessica Hooten Wilson, author of “Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice.”
“If reading is only for one of those things, then AI should replace it,” she told Deseret News. “But if reading instead is a formational activity by which the human being practices and learns to become more human, then we can’t get rid of it.”
6. Starving the imagination
When a society loses the stamina or desire to read deeply, something begins to erode that is even deeper than language, knowledge and attention, according to Wilson: namely, the ability to grasp a reality beyond the material world.
“Words are regular reminders of the twofold nature of reality that things are both literally there and spiritually significant,” Wilson shared in a Deseret News interview, with every word potentially “signifying a thing that you can’t see right there, and that is not materially in front of you.”
To the degree imagination itself gets injured, then so too will a “hope for things which are not seen, which are true,” as one ancient Book of Mormon prophet described faith.
But again, if short-form videos have trained the brain to expect a dopamine hit every few seconds, should it surprise anyone if the quiet of prayer and the black-and-white pages of scripture come to feel largely inaccessible and “boring,” despite their promise of opening a communion with the living God?
In that place, people are more likely to conclude, “I’m just not spiritual” or “Faith isn’t working for me,” rather than recognizing a spiritually suffocating socialization well underway. Yet if the seed of faith gets “choked” and never grows, don’t blame the seed, the same early prophet cautioned. “It is because your ground is barren, and ye will not nourish the tree, therefore ye cannot have the fruit thereof.”
7. Forgetting the living God
“We forget a huge amount of things that we want to remember,” Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, told Deseret News — citing some of their survey research across decades on the impact of reading the Bible.
People can still cultivate faith by listening to others read scripture online or in groups, McConnell pointed out — emphasizing that the Bible reminds readers of “who God is and what he wants” in a way that helps them “understand his heart for us.”
The Book of Mormon speaks of a Mulekite people who arrived in America but had “no records with them.” As a result, the text states, “their language had become corrupted … and they denied the being of their Creator.”
Rather than optional, reading sacred text may be indispensable to a deeper attachment with God. Pastor Francis Chan once held a Bible up in front of a congregation and asked them directly how many were “spending time alone” with God’s word on a regular basis.
“If you’re not,” he said, pausing, “… I don’t really have much hope for you.”