Kerby Anderson

On my radio program the other day, I provided a good news/bad news story. The good news is that the youngest generations (millennials and Gen Z) are reading the Bible. The bad news is they don’t always believe that what they are reading is accurate.

The statistics come from The “State of the Church” initiative and were recently reported by Leonardo Blair in the Christian Post. Interviews with over 12,000 were conducted online. They discovered that approximately 50 percent of self-identified Christians report reading the Bible weekly. That is the highest level of Bible reading among Christians in more than a decade.

David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group, has observed that, “People aren’t just curious about faith — they’re opening Scripture for themselves. This trend aligns with other signs of renewal we’ve seen in our research, like growing commitments to Jesus and increased church attendance.”

Women traditionally have been more likely to read the Bible weekly. But the latest data show that more younger men are reading the Bible than younger women. It is also worth mentioning that nearly 40 percent of young adult Gen Z women now identify as religiously unaffiliated.

While we can applaud the fact that so many are reading the Bible, we must also deal with the fact that fewer maintain that the Bible is 100 percent accurate. Twenty-five years ago, 43 percent of Americans thought the Bible was completely accurate. Today that percentage has slipped to 36 percent. Even among self-identified Christians, less than half (44%) strongly affirmed the accuracy of the Bible.

This disconnect illustrates why we not only need to teach the Bible, but we need to teach Christians why it is true by pointing to an abundance of evidence that confirms the Bible.