Bible Illiteracy and the Contribution of Biblical Higher Education
By Rod Dreher
Rawlings School of Divinity
CLED 720: Biblical & Theological Foundations of Education
Genevieve Hamer
July 1, 2022
Bible Illiteracy and the Contribution of Biblical Higher Education
Historians have recognized for over twenty-five years that defining the term “literacy”
presents peculiar challenges. Is a person who can read and understand a sales receipt but not a
work of literature “literate” or “illiterate”? What about a person who can read a familiar text
but struggles with a new and unfamiliar text? What if such a person cannot write? And what
role does intergroup conflict and polemics play in the assessment of il/literacy? As historians
attempt to describe ancient societies, who, specifically, qualifies as “literate” and who as
“illiterate”?[1]
Defining “Bible literacy” has not been any easier. Usually, discussions of Bible literacy leave
the term undefined. For example, Christianity Today’s May 24, 2010 article, “Why Johnny Can’t
Read the Bible,” appears to understand Bible literacy in terms of naming any of the four
Gospels, identifying a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount, or recognizing popular biblical
figures and/or stories.[2] Similarly—and wrongly—Gallup News Service’s November 19, 2004
report, “Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory,” appears to
equate biblical literacy with a literal interpretation of the Bible.[3]
As a professor of New Testament for undergraduate and graduate students, I can confirm
anecdotally the truth of George Gallup Jr. and Jim Castelli’s quip, “Americans revere the Bible
but, by and large, they don’t read it.”[4] And as a result of not reading the Bible, Americans
don’t know the Bible.
For the last few years, however, I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the
“knowledge-of-content-details” approach to Bible literacy. My dissatisfaction was sparked by
two factors. First, I was assigned to a work group that assessed the strengths and weaknesses
of my university’s information literacy program. As I became aware of standard definitions and
discussions of information literacy, I found that most people understand information literacy in
terms of skills, competencies, and values, rather than in terms of knowledge.[5] A parallel
understanding of Bible literacy would emphasize skills, competencies, and values with respect
to the Bible and its potential influences in contemporary culture and society rather than
picayune knowledge even of key biblical data.
Second, my colleagues and I tried to address problematic results in our students’ scores on
the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) Bible content exam. The problems included
(i) insufficient progress between first- and fourth-year students on the exam, (ii) an inexplicable
gender gap in exam scores, (iii) problematic correlations between students’ majors and their
performance on the exam, and others. As a faculty, we unanimously agreed that the
standardized Bible content exam did not adequately assess our course objectives or in-class
discussions and learning experiences. However, that agreement did not produce any consensus
about how to assess our students’ learning as part of their Bible major, what we should assess
for, or what standards we ought to expect of our students. If defining “Bible literacy” has
proved difficult, assessing it is doubly problematic.
I do not have answers. Even so, I would like to see some discussion of the problem(s) and a
broad-based set of solutions that transcend—but do not exclude—specific faith-traditions.
Toward this end, I would like to point to a study released earlier this month by the Center for
the Study of Religion and American Culture, a program of the IU School of Liberal Arts at
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). “The Bible in American Life”
examined “how people use the Bible in their personal daily lives and how other influences . . .
shape individuals’ use of scripture.”[6] This emphasis on how Americans use the Bible—rather
than what they know about the Bible—offers a glimpse into how Americans conceive what the
Bible is and what it’s for. The results reported in “The Bible in American Life” might not be
surprising, but they are (or ought to be) challenging for those of us who teach Bible in college,
university, and Seminary settings. Here are three examples that strike me as particularly
relevant:
Although the report does not have a specific section on gender, the authors repeatedly
note that women outnumber men among those who read the Bible outside of a worship
service. “Among most faiths and denominations in the United States, women constitute the
greater portion of congregants and attendees. This gender difference can also be seen among
those who read scripture individually, outside formal services: 56% of women and 39% of men
said they read scripture individually in the past year.”[7]
If I understand the numbers rightly, this means that women are nearly 50% more likely to
read the Bible outside of worship services than men. Surely such a tendency should give women
an advantage in assessments of Bible literacy, right? If so, that advantage has not shown up in
my own university’s assessment of Bible knowledge. In recent years, we have discovered a
consistent—and as yet unexplained—gender gap among our students’ performance on Bible
content tests.[8] According to the Director of Institutional Effectiveness at my university,
“Female students on average score lower on these Bible tests than their male counterparts. It is
difficult to identify a cause for this since the female students score higher on almost every other
measure recorded by the university. The female students produced grade point averages about
a quarter of a point higher than the males, yet the males earned higher scores on standardized
Bible tests.”[9] We are not yet sure what to make of this trend. At the very least, we ought to
be concerned that (i) women are more likely by half to read the Bible on their own, and yet (ii)
they may also be more likely to score lower on our standard assessments of Bible literacy.
Unlike gender, the report does have a specific section on race.[10] A number of factors—
including age, religious affiliation, and income—correlate positively to Bible reading outside of
worship. “But the strongest correlation with Bible reading is race. Specifically, black people read
the Bible at a higher rate than people of other races, and by a considerable margin. . . . 70% of
all blacks said they read the Bible outside of worship at least once in the last year, compared to
44% for whites, 46% for Hispanics, and 28% for all other races.”[11]
The report discusses what African-Americans think about the Bible (“Out of all
respondents, 50% of blacks view the Bible as the ‘inerrant word of God.’ This is more than twice
the rate for white people.”[12]), how they read the Bible (“Of those who have read scripture in
the past year, 68% of black people have memorized some passage, compared to 40% for whites
and 55% for Hispanics.”[13]), and why they read the Bible (“to learn about many practical
aspects of life,” including “personal relationships, wealth, and learning about the future”[14]).
All three of these measures strike me as out-of-place in American institutions of biblical higher
education, and yet they pertain precisely to the Americans most likely to read the Bible
individually. Certainly part of the problem is racial. Historically (and even contemporarily),
white males have dominated the field of biblical scholarship, and yet the Americans most likely
to engage the Bible individually are neither white nor male. The solution, however, will have to
transcend race; that is, those of us who teach the Bible and/or prepare women and men for
ministry must learn to address the interests and concerns of those with are historically and
culturally prone to actually read the Bible. Failure at this point, whatever our racial or ethnic
makeup, only heightens the “ivory tower” of biblical scholarship and further marginalizes
professional engagement with scripture.
The longest single section “The Bible in American Life” reports individuals’ reasons for
reading the Bible.[15] “Despite the coverage popular media gives to people claiming biblical
mandates on social issues, individuals are actually far more likely to read the Bible for personal
edification and growth than to shape their views of culture war issues. Indeed, Bible readers
consult scripture for personal prayer and devotion three times more than they do to learn
about abortion, homosexuality, poverty, or war.”[16]
Over a decade and a half ago, Robert Ferris and Ralph Enlow issued a call to reassess “Bible
college distinctives” in order to develop “a new Bible college mandate.”[17] The authors
identify seven distinctive features of Bible colleges as a result of their (generally) reactionary
formation against “theological liberalism between 1890 and 1930.” Their fifth distinctive,
“Emphasis on indoctrination in orthodoxy as a safeguard to doctrinal purity,” receives further
discussion in a section entitled, “Critical Thinking.” This distinctive affected every aspect of
academics at Bible colleges, but it especially impacted the study of the Bible. “In many cases, a
devotional and homiletical handling of Scripture was substituted for careful textual and
exegetical study.”[18] Despite significant increase in the number of Bible college faculty with
“earned doctorates from evangelical or from non-evangelical and secular institutions,” the
authors nevertheless warn, “our fundamentalist heritage is very much with us. Devotional and
homiletic uses of Scripture still are valued more highly than serious biblical study.”[19] This
warning resonates with me at a personal level.[20] Even so, I find it difficult to reconcile two
facts, (i) that I direct much of my effort in the classroom toward motivating students to engage
the Bible beyond merely as a devotional resource (and equipping them to do so), with (ii) that
the majority—even vast majority—of Americans who engage the Bible on their own do so
precisely for devotional purposes. I am in no way interested in re-tooling my classes into
Sunday-school-esque experiences funded by federally backed student loans. But I cannot
escape the suspicion that I am doing my students a disservice by ignoring or marginalizing the
very motivations that might encourage them to read the Bible in the first place: personal prayer
and/or devotion.
Notes
[1] See the recent discussion in Chris Keith, Jesus against the Scribal Elite: The Origins of the
Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), esp. 20–33.
[2] See Collin Hansen, “Why Johnny Can’t Read the Bible,” Christianity Today 54/5 (May 2010):
38–41. Cited 20 March 2014. Online:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/may/25.38.html.
[3] See Frank Newport, “Third of American Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution
Theory,” n.p. [cited 20 March 2014]. Online: http://www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-
Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Suppo….
[4] Quoted by Hansen, “Johnny,” 38.
[5] For example, see the Association of College and Research Libraries’s (ACRL) webpage,
“Information Literacy Resources” (http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/infolit [cited 20 March
2014]). On their page, “Introduction to Information Literacy,” the ACRL offers the following
definition: “Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use
information” (http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/infolit/overview/intro, n.p.).
[6] Philip Goff, Arthur E. Farnsley II, and Peter J. Thuesen, “The Bible in American Life: A
National Study by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture,” 2 [cited 20
March 2014]. Online:
http://www.raac.iupui.edu/files/2713/9413/8354/Bible_in_American_Life_R….
[7] Ibid., 8; see also pp. 7, 11, 19, 22–23.
[8] My discussion of this issue relies solely on data from my institution. Although I suspect these
general trends are more broadly applicable (i.e. we are not out of the mainstream), I do not
have any data to support that suspicion.
[9] Private e-mail dated 21 March 2014
[10] See Goff, et al., “Bible,” 20–21.
[11] Ibid., 20.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
