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Is the End of Reading Here?

ByZach Franzen

Editor’s note: The conversation about the end of reading continues! You can read a bit of my reflections right here. To his credit, Zach’s perspective is sunnier than mine!

A month ago, The Atlantic ran a bleak article by Rose Horowitch. It paints a future where technological winds blow readers off a cultural cliff, even those hanging on by their fingertips. The article’s shocking suggestion? “Reading is a short-lived human anomaly.”

But is it? Is reading a short-lived human anomaly, or is there reason to hope for its persistence?

Here are three thoughts to consider:

First, lots of educated people predicted calamities that didn’t happen. Thomas Malthus predicted unchecked famine and the dangers of population growth back in 1798. Paul Ehrlich did much the same thing in 1968, warning that hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s. Then, of course, Y2K, peak oil, and climate catastrophes have all passed their sell-by dates.

That doesn’t mean all negative predictions are wrong or that people aren’t responding to real pain. It just means that predicting the future is a complicated business, even for The Atlantic. 

A second thought springs from a story I read about Malcolm Muggeridge. In a discussion of the superiority of books to TV, a respondent asked, “If Jesus had access to TV, don’t you think he would have used it?” Muggeridge said, “He did have access to it. He’s God. And critically, he chose to use words, spoken and written, to communicate his message.” And this is more than a funny quip. God chose to reveal himself through words, not images. 

Christians have strong reasons to preserve and expand literacy. We’ve seen these endeavors play out in history. The invention of the printing press, combined with the Christian conviction that ordinary people should know the Word of God, drove up literacy rates. The Reformation intensified this conviction and built institutions around it. Consider Scotland with its parish school movement, Scandinavia with its catechesis and Lutheran confirmation, or New England with its Puritan schools. All of them treated literacy as a gateway to God’s Holy Word.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 shows us a God who speaks, whose words are written, whose people read them and then teach them to the next generation. “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” Therefore, post-literate Christianity becomes hard to imagine. 

This brings us to a final thought. Literacy will never disappear from a Church that faithfully reads, preaches, and teaches the story of a God who loved the world and redeemed it. Faithfulness has consequences, and they will accrue to those who read God’s word. The Atlantic’s article reminds us of literacy’s benefits. Those of us leading our children through this civilizational rite of passage will find them comforting.

Reading teaches a child to hold current information in their mind even as they add new information. It teaches them to assemble disparate pieces of information into a whole. It teaches abstract thought, letting them examine ideas apart from their immediate experience. It lets them pause over a claim, to reconsider, compare, or notice contradictions. And because books remain after the speaker leaves, reading focuses authority on the argument and not on the author’s personality. These aren’t small advantages, and when they accrue in a country or group of countries, they spur a civilization to greatness. 

For those of you struggling through phonics lessons or reluctant-reader coaching, the prize is worth your pain. 

Horowitch points out that reading forms the mind. And Christians know that reading, especially of God’s Word, forms the person. If The Atlantic article finds you in need of a little encouragement, consider that reading and a love of language are likely to persist as long as there are people who believe in a God who speaks.

Photo by Filip Mishevski on Unsplash

Zach Franzen
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