For years now, I’ve kept an eye on evangelicals’ growing distress over what they call ‘Biblical illiteracy’ —the flocks’ growing ignorance of doctrines and Bible stories that their leaders consider essential knowledge. But as America continues to secularize, non-Christians are losing familiarity with the Bible as well. A recent Washington Post opinion post offers a professor’s frustration with what he calls ‘religious illiteracy’ —but he only means one religion here.
This professor’s lament marks a turning point in America’s secularization. And it’s one that Christian leaders can’t do much about. Today, I’ll show you how biblical illiteracy is leaving its mark across media and higher education alike, and then why this isn’t exactly a crisis.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 5/26/2026. They’re both available there now. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do!)
SITUATION REPORT: An Ivy League professor frets about ‘Religious illiteracy’
On May 8th, The Washington Post published an editorial from Gregory Conti: “Ivy League students are suffering from religious illiteracy.” His subtitle: “I’m a Princeton professor. Many students know nothing about Christianity.”
In the post, he writes of his growing frustration with his students’ unfamiliarity with both Christianity and Biblical mythology:
Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments, and several students didn’t know what they were.
This isn’t an isolated problem. It’s increasingly common on college campuses to encounter students who are unfamiliar with the most basic features of Christianity, such as the difference between the Old and New testaments or between Catholics and Protestants.
Here’s the interesting bit: This associate professor at Princeton isn’t a Christian. And he teaches politics, not theology! He’s frustrated because so much of American politics draws upon Bible-based imagery and specifically Christian doctrines and ideas, his students don’t really understand the material he teaches!
For years now, I’ve tracked Christian leaders lamenting what they call ‘biblical illiteracy’ among their flocks, but this might be the first time I’ve seen a non-Christian openly wish that his students had better understanding of Christianity so they can better understand American politics.
But it’s not just American politics that American students won’t understand well. As we’ll explore today, there’s a wealth of cultural stuff going on in America that many people won’t understand either. That ignorance is a reflection of America’s ongoing secularization, a trend that Christian leaders seem incapable of changing.
Biblical illiteracy has been a growing concern among evangelicals for many years
In 2000, the Tampa Bay Times ran a story that surely worried their readers:
A Gallup Poll shows that the number of people who read the Bible at least occasionally has dropped to 59 percent from 73 percent in the 1980s. [. . .] It is the Bible, also known as “the Good Book,” and it remains unrivaled as the world’s all-time best seller. It is also widely and frequently hailed as the underpinning of America’s values system.
(Quick fact-check: The Bible isn’t the #1 bestseller on Earth. It’s just that tons of publishers offer tons of editions of it, and lots of ministries buy the book in bulk to distribute. Also, Americans can all be thankful that our country’s values aren’t based on the Bible, but rather on Enlightenment ideas like civil liberties and human rights.)
By 2017, Lifeway Research (run by the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC) found that fewer than half of Americans in one survey had read more than a few stories in the Bible. Only 11% of respondents claimed to have read all of the Bible, with another 9% saying they’d read all of it more than once. Perhaps more worrisome for the evangelicals at Lifeway were the survey’s other discoveries: Only 52% considered the Bible a “good source of morals,” with 38% thinking it was an actual “historical account” and 26% thinking it was “true.”
In 2024, Ken Ham (a prominent Creationist) lamented that 11% of Protestant churchgoers couldn’t identify whether a given Bible story was from the Old or New Testaments. He declared, “Biblical illiteracy is rampant.” The survey he discusses can be found here. (Hilariously, only 39% of respondents in that one knew that the myth of Rome’s founders, Romulus and Remus, isn’t actually a Bible story.)
Ligonier (an extremely hardline Calvinist evangelical site) has been tracking biblical illiteracy for years now with annual surveys. They call their reports “The State of Theology [Year].” Their most recent report, The State of Theology 2025, continues to show that even evangelicals increasingly don’t buy into hardline Calvinist teachings. They’ve written some strident editorials about how upset this makes them.
(But in 2019, Randal Rauser accused Ligonier of being biblically illiterate. He’s “broadly evangelical” himself, proving that the doctrinal yardstick strikes again!)
An interesting observation about biblical illiteracy
In 2024, Denison Forum (a hard-right evangelical news site) outlined the scope of biblical illiteracy: Americans couldn’t reliably name the four gospels in the Bible, more than a few of Jesus’ disciples, or even half of the Ten Commandments.
Interestingly, Denison Forum’s writer also notes that the Bible is a big part of culture, too:
Without that knowledge [of the Bible’s mythology], you miss the biblical allusions in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. and plays of William Shakespeare, and fail to understand the inspiration for Michelangelo’s David and Handel’s Messiah.
He’s right. For Americans, Christian mythology underpins many of our cultural stories. Navigating our political and entertainment scenes without that knowledge must be like reading Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene without knowing much about the important people and events in England and Europe in the 1580s-1590s.
And I know how that feels! When I was in college, I tried reading this ginormous allegorical poem. Alas, about 95% of it was lost on me. Sure, anyone could guess that “Gloriana,” the titular Faerie Queene herself, represented Queen Elizabeth. But some of these others were total ciphers.
Increasingly, secular media has reminded me of that attempt to read Elizabethan court poetry.
Cultural biblical illiteracy on the rise too
This story’s been on my mind for a couple of years now. Some time ago, I ran into an analog horror story called “The McKinney Family Home Videos.” (Analog horror is a genre that creates VHS-style vintage video to tell a story.) The story details a father’s descent into religious madness. He gets involved with a cult, starts murdering young women, and finally annihilates most of his own family. Here’s a decent video explaining the series.
I don’t remember which video I watched about it back then, just that the guy who created it really didn’t understand all the religious imagery involved. He was a young adult who clearly hadn’t been raised Christian, so some of the ideas in the series were as mysterious and opaque to him as those in The Faerie Queene had been to me.
It got me thinking about the sheer number of allusions to Christianity in this genre of video. Analog horror is rife with these allusions—series like “The Mandela Catalog” prominently involve Christian ideas. (Here’s a good explainer for it by Night Mind.) But without a decent working knowledge of Christian theology and mythology, some of the richer ideas in this genre just swim out of reach.
The cultural side of biblical illiteracy on this very fine Memorial Day week
Of course, more is at stake here than just understanding YouTube video series. Hell, more is at stake than understanding the allusions made by political figures.
Knowing about the goofier parts of the Bible and Christian culture helps protect us against their recruitment attempts, sure. But it also helps protect us against false Christian claims about America itself. We need to know that America wasn’t founded as “a Christian nation,” that it is not based on “Christian values,” that our rights don’t derive from the Bible, and that our civil liberties are purely secular in nature and always were.
Moreover, we need to understand that all of these truths are actually good things for everyone—including Christians.
As time goes on, fewer and fewer people will have the cultural understanding of Christianity to understand past media and speeches. And fewer and fewer media-makers and speechwriters will include allusions to Christian mythology. In time, those allusions may strike future readers and watchers like Spenser’s poetic allusions hit me in college—they’ll know an allusion is being made, yes, but not to exactly what.
And all Christian leaders can do is wring their hands about it. Every time that I’ve ever seen them get upset about biblical illiteracy, all they can suggest is pushing Bible reading harder at the flocks. But the flocks never seem excited about reading their mythology book. They’re almost as secularized as non-Christians themselves.
As for our OP, I don’t think the situation will improve for his students. But I wouldn’t be surprised if one day colleges start offering an “Intro to Christian Mythology” type of class. That’s when we’ll know the decline has well and truly entrenched in American culture.
Either way, America is still America with or without Christianity. Because its values never actually hinged on Christianity, those values will endure just fine. Hopefully, we’ll still be Americans when Christianity finally becomes a historical oddity—cultural ephemera on par with Elizabethan court gossip. An American can dream!
NEXT UP: Christians still claim that they’re the champions of charity and always have been. But the truth is far less complimentary to their religion. See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
Endnote
In the vein of “media influences I didn’t understand,” I also wanted to mention John M. Ford’s How Much For Just the Planet?, a Star Trek novel. Its story frequently riffs on classic Broadway musicals. However, I’m only familiar with a couple of those. So I didn’t understand much of that part of the book. It’s still a fun, incredible romp and I completely recommend it—along with everything else John M. Ford has ever written.
0 Comments