Reels vs. Reading
Did you read a book in 2025?
According to a YouGov poll released at the end of 2025, four in ten Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025. 27% of Americans read between one and four books in 2025, that includes digital, audio, and print formats, and another 13% read between five and nine books. In the Canadian Leisure & Reading Study 2024, just under half of all readers read between one and five books in 2024 (45%). Just under a third (29%) read or listened to 6-11 books, which was up 4% over 2023, and 19% read or listened to 12-49 books, up 4% compared with 2023.
In the fall of 2024, The Atlantic published an article, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” The professor interviewed in the article was shocked to learn that many students had reached an elite college without ever having read a single book in high school. This sparked a flurry of articles in various publications addressing the broader issues of reading and literacy.
In the blog post “Losing Our Words: The Decline of Reading and the Rise of Reels,” Alistair Chalmers writes,
”But for Christians, reading isn’t (or shouldn’t be) just a hobby; it’s central to our faith. Ours is a revealed faith—a faith built on words, not images. God chose to speak, and those words were written down. The Bible is not a video reel or an infographic. It is a book—one that requires careful attention, time, and meditation.
The decline of reading, then, is not just a cultural problem; it’s a discipleship problem. If we are people of the Book, we must be people who read the Book. We cannot grow in the knowledge of God, in wisdom, or in discernment if our attention is too fractured to sit quietly with Scripture.”
When reading declines, so does biblical literacy. Sadly, this is the reality we see in the church. One of the key foundational principles in our Reform tradition is Sola scriptura (Latin for 'by scripture alone’). That the Bible is the sole, infallible, and supreme authority for Christian faith and practice. And as we read in 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (ESV):
16All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
17that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
It is important for Christians to be engaged in God’s Word to grow in our faith. In the book “A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation” by Matthew C. Bingham, he writes, “Reformed spiritual formation is centered on the Word, marked by simplicity, and committed to engaging the heart through the mind.” Foundational to Reformed spiritual formation is what Bingham calls the Reformation Triangle, which is “the nexus of Scripture reading, meditation, and prayer.” [A book worth reading]
To promote biblical literacy, we must first foster general literacy. It’s crucial that when people read the Bible, they do it well. It is good to read deeply and widely, to know how to read different genres, for there are different genres in the Bible. There are history (narrative), law, wisdom, poetry, prophecy, gospels, epistles, and apocalypse. We need to know how we are to approach and best read each genre.
I read this quote, “You can’t read the Bible well if you don’t read.” So, I encourage you to pick up a book, maybe less time scrolling through reels and more time reading God’s Word.
Pastor Kyu