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Let’s see who’s reading the Bible!

When was the last time you read the Bible? I came across some interesting statistics from the respected Barna Research Group regarding Bible reading.

• Bible Reading During A Typical Week By Year: 2006-47%, up from 36% in 1988. Great! Down from 47% in 2006.
• 96% of evangelical Christians have read the Bible in the past seven days. (2006)
• Women (51%) are more likely than are men (42%) to have read the Bible in the past week. (2006) According to Barna’s statistics, over the years, it’s always been that way.
• Nearly seven out of ten born again Christians (67%) have read the Bible in the past week. (2006)
• 62% of Protestants have read the Bible in the past week versus 28% of Catholics (29%) (2006)
• Bible reading during a typical week drops as age drops: 58% of Elders (Builders and Seniors); 47% of Boomers; 42% of Busters and 32% of Mosaics read the Bible in a typical week. (2006)
• Blacks (66%) are the ethnic group most likely to have read the Bible in the past week, follwed by whites (45%), Hispanics (41%) and Asians (20%). (2006)
• Bible reading by adults during the week by region-Northeast 38%; West 42%; Midwest 45%; South 57%. (2006)
• The percent of adults in California, Oregon, and Washington that read the Bible during the past week (other than while at church), has risen from 29% in 1994 to 42% in 2006. Good showing! 

Our poor Bible reading habits make sense when we consider that, as a whole, America has some pretty pitiful reading habits overall. Take a look:

• Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.
• 42% of U.S. college graduates never read another book.
• 58% of the U.S. adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year

On an ironic note, 81% of the U.S. population feels “they have a book inside them.” Don’t bother writing it, friends. Very few will ever read it.

The National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk, on the decline of literary reading in the United States, has this telling figure:

56.6% (2002) was the percentage of the U.S. adult population that read any book at all (down from 60.9% in 1992). Pathetic!

The Department of Education’s 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, found that only 31% of American college graduates possessed high-level reading skills. That figure doesn’t suggest sustained interest in reading. The figure that really got my attention was this one: “80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.” I wonder if Harry Potter books padded those numbers? A May 2006 New York Times article stated that Harry Potter has sold 11 million copies in the U.S. That’s a lot of books, sure, but a small number in relation to the general population of 110 million households in the U.S. 

Though this has little to do with anything, where my own online ministry is concerned, our website received 31,248 hits in the first two months of 2008 compared to 31,984 hits in the last THREE months (October-December) of 2007. It’s also interesting to note that, since December 2007, the average person who stayed on our website for one hour or more has INCREASED from 8.6% in December to 11.6 in January to 13.1% in February. I’m not sure if that means people are reading more or if that means I’ve written longer articles. It was encouraging anyway.

Some of you might prefer reading the Bible online, on your iPod, or listening to someone else read to you while you’re working on your computer, something I’ve only recently started doing. There are SO many options and opportunities and really very few excuses. 

So, go read your Bible. It will bless you.

Every blessing,

Michael Tummillo