The Age Of Reading Is Over
(ANALYSIS) So claims the cover headline on The Atlantic magazine’s August edition. The subheadline inside asks, “Can Civilization Survive the Postliterate Era?” This 8,700-word blockbuster by staff writer Rose Horowitch (paywalled here) says Americans are losing the ability to comprehend “longer written works that convey rich and complicated information” because “digital technologies have hijacked attention and made focused reading all but impossible.” Moreover, “things are about to get worse, and fast.”
Times of London columnist James Marriott proclaimed similar alarms in a Substack column last Sept. 19. He follows up with an Oct. 6 book titled “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.” Advance publicity says he’ll contend that reading's downfall “threatens democracy and the future of humanity” and is “the most important cultural shift of our time.”
The 21st century reading crisis raises immense implications for American Christianity, but few analysts are pursuing this in depth.
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In our 250th year as a nation, Americans should note that Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette became essential reading across the colonies and helped unify them for revolution.
Franklin also invented the post office, which distributed printed materials, and the public lending library, which provided free books for all and, he boasted, “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” The founders saw journalism and an informed public as requirements for democracy.
Recent months have seen a plenitude of news articles about evidence of eroding literacy that suddenly accelerated around 2010, usually blamed on the rapid spread of smartphones on top of on-screen media. Some examples, mostly from Horowitch’s reporting: Standard reading test scores for fourth and eighth graders have declined notably in the past decade (setting in before COVID). Despite simplified reading comprehension passages, ACT and SAT scores have reached a three-decade low.
In one 2024 nationwide exam, only 35% of high school seniors ranked “proficient” in analyzing complex themes in fiction or the effectiveness of an essayist's argument. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read on their own for fun jumped from 8% to 29%.
With adults, nearly 30% were recently found unable to paraphrase or draw inferences from a multi-page text versus less than 20% in 2017. One survey showed less than half of adults read one book of any sort during 2022. Among 236,000 respondents in a time-use survey, those reading for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. And everybody knows about the newspaper and magazine slump.
In 1958, the English translation of Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” was the best-selling novel; last year it was the latest “Hunger Games” title for young adults. College professors continually face complaints if they require the same amount of book-reading they did not long ago. Colleges and high schools alike assign more excerpts because students resist longer texts.
At the same time, Americans probably access even more verbiage than before. What’s new, Horowitch writes, “is what they read, and how.” People are awash in “textual fragments” — e-mails, text messages, online posts and captions. But there’s less sustained attention to longer writings with complex information and analysis.
Then this key observation. Last year, sales of printed books were higher than a decade ago, but “among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20% of adults accounted for more than 80% of all books read.” Cultural elitism is settling in. The readers are the leaders.
We’ll skip past the huge impact of Horowitch's observation that artificial intelligence “is the first tool to threaten the continued existence of writing,” the necessary companion of reading.
After millennia of oral communication, Horowitch writes, “reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”
Such a post-literate age will reshape, but not doom, American Christianity. Across much of church history, parishioners were illiterate, dependent upon educated preachers, teachers and oral tradition to absorb the faith, aided by chanting, poetry, music and the visual arts.
One of the few recent religious analyses was an April 22 Substack column by Aaron Renn, featured last year as “a new star in conservative Christian intellectual circles” by The New York Times. Controversially, he blames the literacy slide on America’s declining Protestantism, which imparts literacy “as a matter of principle" because "all believers must have direct access to the Holy Scriptures.”
The Reformation’s “priesthood of all believers” and emphasis on personal Bible study demanded widespread literacy training. “An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.” And yet Catholicism fosters much more Bible study than formerly, while Protestants’ bookishness is eroding.
Abigail Woolley Cutter, who teaches theology at Tennessee’s King University, wrote a poignant 2023 reflection posted by The Living Church magazine. She said most students are “uncomfortable strangers” with texts, “eager to leave the unpleasant experience as quickly as possible,” and have difficulty understanding popular books written at the level of (yes!) The Atlantic. With students “simply not equipped to read effectively on their own,” it’s “impossible to host meaningful discussions on assigned readings.”
“A Christian life need not be tied to high levels of literacy,” she admitted, and we teach the faith by “prayer, holy living, and the church’s worship,” not just books, but “is something more than nostalgia at stake for Christians when fewer people believe reading really matters?”
She insisted there is. Ancient Jews pondered a written Torah and passed it to Christian apostles and their successors whose added writings guided believers ever since. “Christianity does foster a special relationship to reading and writing. This is not only because of the Bible and our thoughtful responses to it, but also because of our close ties to Christians of other times and places."
It is “genuinely Christian” to advocate “widespread, and careful use of reading and writing.” So “let us keep reading, pondering, discussing, and teaching texts.”
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.