Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm Shane Morris.

In his confessions, St. Augustine tells the story of a spiritual experience that triggered his conversion.

Torn between his fleshly temptations and his attraction to Christianity,

the future church father sat down beneath a fig tree and wept.

Then he heard a child's voice, chanting, take up and read.

Take up and read.

Augustine took this as a sign to read the Bible and immediately opened to Romans 13,

where Paul warns against drunkenness and sexual immorality, urging readers instead to put on

Jesus Christ.

At these words, Augustine writes,

light as it were of serenity infused into my heart. All the darkness of doubt vanished away.

This has always been the case with Scripture, whose power to speak to restless hearts and to

make wise the simple has not dimmed in the centuries since Augustine wrote confessions.

But today, shockingly, few people

are heeding the voice's advice. Bible reading in the U.S. has fallen to what is likely an all-time low.

Pew Research reported back in 2014 that 45% of American adults seldom or never read Scripture.

Today, that number has shot to 61%. Just 22% said they

read the Bible outside of religious services at least once a week. Some of this disengagement

from the Bible is disengagement from books in general. Americans are reading less than at pretty

much any time in history. The U.S. Census Bureau found in 2023 that less than half of American adults had read even a single

book in the last year, down six points from the previous decade.

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