When I first read about this, I decided not to address it unless somebody asked me to.
Somebody did. So here goes.
The American Bible Society has ranked 100 cities (metro areas, really) in America according to how “Bible-minded” they are. This list was generated by a survey of some 43,000 randomly selected Americans. Two questions were asked by interviewers: 1) In the past seven days, have you read the Bible outside of church or synagogue? 2) Do you strongly agree in the accuracy of the Bible? If your answer to both questions is “yes,” the ABS considers you to be “Bible-minded.”
Not surprisingly, the most “Bible-minded” cities are located in the South, and the least “Bible-minded” cities are in the Northeast. Syracuse comes in at 86 out of 100. So the local newspaper ran a story saying that our fair city is among the 15 least Bible-minded cities in the nation.
I don’t actually know what that means. It seems to me that this survey is seriously flawed, and its value is severely limited, for several reasons.
First, we already know that church attendance and participation is far lower in the Northeast than in the South and Midwest. Why should we be surprised, then, that more Southerners and Midwesterners read the Bible than Northeasterners? Does this really provide us with new information?
Second, there is no way to know how honestly respondents would answer the first question. Research has already shown conclusively that when the Gallup organization asks, “Did you attend church last week?” about half of those who
Third, why is being “Bible-minded” tied specifically to reading the Bible outside of church or synagogue? The question implies that opening a Bible during corporate worship doesn’t count as an indicator of Bible-mindedness. Curiously, then, reading the Bible “in church” (including church Bible studies, I suppose) is regarded as inferior to reading the Bible some other time. But how can one assume that someone who reads the Bible for personal devotion but rarely or never attends church is objectively more “Bible-minded” than someone who only reads the Bible when they are following the lectionary readings during Sunday worship? Since the Bible is a book written for faith communities, shouldn’t reading and interpreting it as part of a congregation yield a better understanding than reading it alone? It’s also worth remembering that billions of Christians and Jews lived prior to the invention of the printing press and didn’t know how to read. Is Bible-mindedness therefore possible only in the modern era of cheap print?
Fourth, the first question makes sense only if it is asked as a follow-up question for those respondents who have already indicated they regularly attend church (which is itself a problematic variable – see above). If that is the case, then the intent of the question is to ascertain how much additional Bible reading churchgoers do. Yet because the same question was asked of all respondents, it presumably yielded a positive response from people who read the Bible (either as a sacred book or as an interesting piece of ancient literature) but have no connection to the faith tradition to which it belongs. How do you measure the “Bible-mindedness” of people who study the Scriptures out of context and arrive at theological conclusions at odds with the most generous definition of Christian orthodoxy?
Fifth, what does the phrase “accuracy of the Bible” mean? Does “accurate” mean “literally true” or simply “truthful”? You might believe the story of Jonah is a parable and not history, but also believe it “accurately” communicates important truth. Won’t this phrase mean different things to different people? What, then, is its value as a measurement of anything?
Part of my pastoral ministry has been to promote biblical literacy. I even published a book to encourage people who know little or nothing about the Bible to start reading it. So I’m all for more people reading the Bible. But I find the ABS ranking of “Bible-minded” cities to be fairly ridiculous. I grew up in a part of the country where lots of people could quote lots of scripture, but were not at all interested in how the Bible challenged some of their cultural prejudices. The Bible was routinely “proof-texted” to support long held assumptions and narrow agendas. Knowing the content of Scripture, therefore, is not necessarily “Bible-mindedness.” Such knowledge may be used to twist the meaning of Scripture by cherry-picking texts and connecting unrelated texts to support wholly unbiblical worldviews. On the other hand, practicing Christians who claim to know very little scripture may have absorbed enough of its central teachings to alter how they make decisions and relate to other people. They may embody the spirit of the Bible even though they don’t know its letter.
My hope is that those who, through their participation in faith communities, have internalized the biblical ethos – which includes values such as faith, hope, love, justice, peace, and forgiveness – will seek to deepen their relationship to God and their understanding of biblical faith by studying the Scriptures. I hope their exposure to the text in worship will whet their appetites both for group Bible study and personal devotion with the Scriptures. This will lead to more than “Bible-mindedness.” It will result in “God-heartedness,” a holistic orientation of one’s life toward the sacred that could never be measured by a survey – and is far preferable to anything that could.
©2014 by J. Mark Lawson
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