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Will a “Post-Literate” America Reshape Christianity?

Will a “Post-Literate” America Reshape Christianity?

Last updated on: August 14, 2026 at 9:26 am by Richard Ostling

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Will a “Post-Literate” America Reshape Christianity? 2026-08-14T09:26:38-04:00 Richard Ostling

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THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Here’s a potential 2026 Book of the Year: “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” by London Times columnist James Marriott. The title will go on sale October 6, but Doubleday’s advance publicity says it will document a strong, irreversible decline of book-reading and related literacy skill. Marriott will call the shift from “the age of print” to “the age of the screen” the “most important cultural shift of our time” and contend this threatens democracy and “the future of humanity.”

The current issue of The Atlantic magazine has a similarly apocalyptic cover story titled “The Age of Reading is Over,” with a sub-headline that asks “Can Civilization Survive the Postliterate Era?” Staff writer Rose Horowitch says “digital technologies have hijacked attention and made focused reading all but impossible,” undermining the ability to comprehend “longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.” Moreover, “things are about to get worse, and fast.”

Horowitch had addressed one aspect in an Atlantic article for November, 2024, titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” She interviewed 33 professors at name-brand campuses who lamented how high school graduates have become “less able to persist through a challenging text.” Some schools never required youths to read even one entire book, assigning only literary excerpts, poems, or journalistic articles.

Handicapped

Such analysts foresee not mass illiteracy but a coming “post-literate” population that’s able to read long texts but far less inclined to actually do so, thus becoming handicapped in comprehending substantive writings. Numerous news articles have depicted American youths’ declining scores on standardized reading tests, and The Guy scanned reporting on other evidence of decline here: https://religionunplugged.com/news/the-age-of-reading-is-over/.

Another example of such journalism was “The Future of Reading,” published a year ago by First Things magazine. Author Wessie du Toit, who teaches teens in Britain, said that since 2010 “digital devices,” especially smartphones, are overriding deep thought in a way that’s “akin to a drug epidemic.” He believes serious reading and writing will continue, but only among an elite minority class that exercises cultural power, as in ancient and medieval times.

Will Christians’ literacy fade and surrender such influence to secularists? Notably, this magazine is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, yet the article says little about what impact all this will inevitably have upon churches’ faith and practice. Nor has there been much serious discussion elsewhere about such an obvious and vital question. More on this below.

Hyper-Addictive

With Marriott’s forthcoming book, we can sense what he’ll say due to a lengthy Substack column he posted last September 19. In his scenario, the years after 2010 “will be remembered as a watershed in human history” when smartphone use first dominated developed nations. True, movies and then TV previously captured the time and attention of book-readers, but “the smartphone demands your entire life” and is “designed to be hyper-addictive.” The average Generation Z user spends nine hours a day staring at a screen that offers “pointless notifications, inane short-form videos, and social media rage bait.” Artificial Intelligence will not help matters.

The background; A “reading revolution” developed with Europe’s change from laborious hand copying to printing using moveable type, invented in 1454. He says by 1700 mass reading was becoming “the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history.” Now, the “screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.”

Marriott argues that widespread availability of inexpensive printed material “changed how people thought.” In books, “knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected, and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas.” Reading undergirded the Protestant Reformation, modern market capitalism, rapid development of science and technology, the industrial revolution, democracy, and devotion to human rights. In other words, “the world as we know it.” He says “nothing will ever be the same again. . . . The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.” We may find it’s impossible “to run the most advanced civilization in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.”

Readers = Leaders

Picking up Du Toit’s theme about elitism, Marriott says “it is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilization it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.”

Turning to the impact on churches, alarmists need to remember that for most of Christian history few believers were able to read and write and relied upon an educated class for teaching and preaching, supplemented by oral recitation, the visual arts and drama. Europe’s Protestant revolt was fostered by printed propaganda, and by belief in the “priesthood of all believers” that necessitated mass literacy for individuals’ Bible study. Today, Catholicism also encourages such personal study, but pundit Aaron Renn thinks post-literacy will work better for the liturgical drama of Catholicism than bookish Protestantism.

One of the more thoughtful articles on the spiritual implications was written in 2024 by Abilene Christian University theologian Brad East for Christianity Today magazine. He takes the emerging culture as inevitable and urges church strategists to respond accordingly. Since “it seems that for the foreseeable future, a majority of Christians will not be readers anymore,” he offers tentative suggestions.

Accept It

Most Christians will probably not be daily Bible readers, but he thinks one faction might consider that tradition to be “non-negotiable” and take extraordinary countercultural measures, perhaps founding more classical academies, imposing bans on screens during worship services, and requiring that only printed Bibles be used in church and home.

But more generally, churches “should accept that we live in a postliterate world and therefore must minister to a postliterate people,” meaning “most church members are not and never will be readers.” Yet in Christian belief this “does not make them less than other believers” or “preclude their maturity in the faith and service of God.”

Worship models from “pre-modern illiterate” times may be revived among Protestants who currently emphasize individual Bible-reading, he suggests. They could remain biblically educated through much more oral reading, performance, and memorization, and longer sermons with detailed exposition of passages. In these ways, Christianity’s written tradition can still be transmitted by “a mind, imagination, and vocabulary shot through with the stories and characters and events of Holy Scripture.”

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