We are always living at the end of things. The 3-year-olds clutching iPads, the teenagers with no greater ambition than becoming an influencer, the grandmothers who grow irate at the headlines being fed to them by algorithms: All are merely new symptoms of the reality that the descending ages continue. Humans too often choose the insubstantial and empty over the good and the true and the beautiful.

“The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world,” G. K. Chesterton once wrote. In this moment, what is ending is reading. The question is what happens to the church when the people of the book no longer choose to read. 

Several public thought leaders are protesting the decline of intelligence, the replacement of art by entertainment and the dumbing down of education by pointing to the loss of reading in our culture. In “The End of Reading Is Here” in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch describes how podcasts have replaced books and streaming has replaced literature: “This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture.” Noting that information is today transmitted horizontally from peer to peer instead of vertically from generation to generation, Horowitch writes: “The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.” 

More high schoolers attend to TikTok and Instagram than Anna Karenina or “The Divine Comedy.” If you watch current dystopian films such as “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” you will be frightened at how real the satire feels. Do we not worry that we are residing in parodies like “Idiocracy,” where President Camacho struts on stage with a machine gun punctuating his exclamations? Soon, as in the aforementioned movie, people will be cloning their loved ones after they pass and downloading their memories into new flesh, as though we’re all replaceable. 

In 1925, T. S. Eliot lamented: “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men.” We are as full of straw in this millennium as Eliot observed his contemporaries to be in the 20th century. We have nothing between our ears, less in the treasure trove of our hearts, and thus exhale mere vanity again and again. Whether this age is better or worse than those that have come before is less the point than how we are called, as Christians, to respond to degeneration. Surely we should not, as Eliot foresaw, move to our end with only a whimper. 

I have been teaching in college for two decades, and I can no longer assume my incoming students have read a single book before arriving in my classroom. Lost to the next generation are the wonders of the Odyssey, Frankenstein or A Tale of Two Cities. Students have some vague awareness of “Romeo and Juliet” from comedic cartoon versions of the plot. But in classroom discussions, they ask if Gilgamesh is linked with Nelson Mandela and whether Jane Eyre was written after Cromwell. The story about who they are, how the world got here and in what way they can contribute their lives to the future is a hurricane of nonsense to most of these young people. 

When I encourage Christians to read books, I am not pushing for the church to produce the talented tenth or for an elitist stronghold for the sake of the kingdom. There are enough warnings in Scripture against worldly knowledge for the sake of power and privilege. Take Jer 8:8-9, for one example: “Your know-it-alls will be me unmasked, caught and shown for what they are.” But the purpose of reading for Christians should accord with the vocation of the church, which is greater love of God and neighbor. In part, this love begins with an intimate knowledge of the story that God has written before our time, is writing now and will continue to write when we return to him. 

There were days when the majority of the Western world was illiterate and learned much about God through stained glass, statues and preaching. But we should not desire to lean backward on the substitutes or additions to the Gospel while we still can read the Gospel. How are we to love the Lord better? By meditating on his word day and night. How are we to love each other? By seeing one another for who we are, not what the world reduces us to. 

These are merely a couple of answers that should reaffirm reading as important for the life of Christians. We serve a God who created the world through words, who called himself the Word, whose Spirit breathes into words that they may have life in us. 

In Horowitch’s article, she uplifts books as an “essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality.” For Christians, this is even more true. Our central book, the Bible, emphasizes knowing the Lord, remembering what the Lord has done, seeing Christ as the fount of wisdom and walking humbly with our God. Reading has been a spiritual practice for Christians for thousands of years. Even before the incarnation of the Messiah, God highlighted for his people the centrality of reading Scripture. As we see in Dt 17:14-20, he outlined that the king must be one who can read and write, seemingly unnecessary skills for a king in the ancient world, but necessary from God’s perspective. Then, when the baton is handed on from the Jews to those of the Way, the practice of reading remains as significant as fasting, praying or gathering together. 

Years ago, I was being chauffeured to a speaking engagement by a Christian woman who told me that she preferred reading self-help books to reading the Bible because they were easier to understand. Now, I expect I’ll begin to hear stories of people who prefer watching “The Chosen” to actually reading the New Testament, or listening to Audible versus reading the Psalms for themselves (though I do think audiobooks are real books). It is a temptation to choose what is easy over what is challenging, but the saints do not commend that we remain milk drinkers forever. They upbraid us for not being ready for the meat. If reading is difficult, perhaps that is the very practice we need to climb toward the light. And perhaps the wide road of podcasts and YouTube has a lesser destination at their end. 

While I am not one who enjoys fearmongering, and I stay as far from culture wars as I can manage, I do think the lament over the loss of reading is worth the attention it is receiving. I believe our God is bigger than all our deficits, and the church will survive despite all the ways that the world lures it toward devastation. The kingdom of God will continue even if people lose the ability to read about it.

As for me and my house, we will keep the books. 

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University. Her most recent book is Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress. She is a senior fellow of the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C.