Our National Illiteracy

No, I’m not talking about that segment of the population that cannot read nor those who have limited education. Rather I’m talking about an illiteracy that runs through every educational level of our nation reaching from the least to the most highly educated of our people. I’m talking about Bible illiteracy.

 

The Winston-Salem Journal, dated October 1, 2010, carried a news article entitled “Religious survey finds few knowledgeable.”   The lead paragraph read: “Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.”   While the survey was not exclusively about biblical knowledge but rather covered religion in general, it nevertheless points to a lack of Bible knowledge within our nation.

 

When a people no longer have a good working knowledge of the Bible, one of two things happens. Either they reject Christianity altogether, as many in our nation have done, or else they are misled by some perverted form of it. In either case the fundamental problem is a lack of knowledge. Whenever one is lacking in Bible knowledge he becomes easy prey for whatever religious charlatan comes along.

 

The prophet Hosea said, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” It was true then, it is true today.

Claude