Read a book, save the world

The rise of digital media is a multifaceted phenomenon, one with some benefits but also a number of increasingly clear downsides. The tenuous cultural position of books is one aspect that deserves greater attention. I don’t simply mean here the transition among youth to consume media visually by means of memes and reels. And while digital text (like the kind you are reading now) remains ubiquitous, physical media are becoming relics of a bygone age. This is perhaps especially true of books.

Some of this is simply the result of cultural trends and adoption of new forms of media consumption and engagement. Younger people who are digital natives are formed to engage with words on a screen and even more so to engage with digital images. But some of it is also the result of intentional choices by those who are entrusted with making decisions and providing wisdom about how to educate. A statement on media education from the  National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) makes a judgment about the contemporary situation: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”

This gets things exactly backwards. If anything we need to recenter the book as a medium of civilizational preservation and education in the face of countervailing cultural and technological trends. But the NCTE statement does represent one of the competing visions for education that are vying for control of schools across the country. This is a perspective that results in functional illiteracy and a fundamentally uneducated populace. And the result of that is a people who are ill-equipped to fulfill the responsibilities of citizens in a democratic republic.

The conditions for democratic self-governance are numerous, and many of them are only possible as a result of intentional cultivation. The benefits of reading books are manifold, which is one of the reasons that the educational establishment in this country has recognized that it is a distinct advantage to be surrounded by books—and by parents who read to their children. A typical progressive policy response to inequality is to reduce everyone to the same level. This would mean taking away books from those who have them and splitting up two-parent households to equalize the lack of advantage experienced by those who do not have the blessings of such social contexts. These are, perhaps not coincidentally, the actual results of many progressive educational and social policies.

And while access to books may in some sense be a privilege, especially when viewed from the long lens of history, it isn’t the case that all privileges should be removed or abolished. We need to discern when injustice is the result of exclusivity that ought to be more widely shared rather than an unjust or unfair benefit that should be removed. The answer to the fact that some people do not have access to books is to make the availability of books more widespread. The goal is to address the lack of parental engagement in some households is to get parents more involved rather than to make everyone equally and impersonally dependent on the state.

Books remain and will forever remain culturally formative. This helps explain why so much of our social distress in recent years has focused on libraries and questions of censorship.

There are many things we need to do to address the disposition towards illiteracy in today’s world. One way to recenter the book is to refocus on reading in our own lives, and this can take the form of individual practices as well as broader initiatives. That’s why the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy has launched the Reading Wheel Review this month, and the existence of reading groups, review publications, book sellers, and publishing houses all over the nation and the world are cause for hope.

Of course it matters what and how we read as well as that we read at all. But reading itself is a necessary first step, for our personal development as well as for social flourishing and democratic self-government. Christians, along with Jews and Muslims, are sometimes called “people of the book” because of the centrality of written revelation to our religion. But we are also called to be people of the books in the plural sense, and that’s why in literacy has always gone along with Christian missions.

We are a people called to preserve and promote civilization through this culturally formative technology. As we take up and read books—most importantly the Good Book—we should keep the words of the Apostle Paul foremost: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8).