By Joshua Arnold

The vast majority of Americans suffer from critical biblical illiteracy, according to the American Bible Society’s 2026 State of the Bible (SOTB) report. Only 17% of Americans told pollsters that they have read the entire Bible, while 48% claim to have read “about half” or more. Sadly, this widespread Bible ignorance is largely due to a lack of trying. The size and complexity of Scripture may intimidate people from ever cracking the cover. Yet biblical muscles, like physical muscles, are best developed through small amounts of exercise every day.

When asked in the January 2026 SOTB survey, “How much of the Bible have you read?” only 17% of Americans said they had read the entire Bible, while another 17% said they had read “most,” 14% said “about half,” 35% said “a little,” 10% said “none,” and 7% said they were not sure.

For starters, it’s a sad commentary on contemporary American society that this is even a meaningful poll question. There was a time when nearly all Americans had read the Bible. Even professing non-Christians could intelligently discuss Christian teaching and deploy biblical imagery, even if they rejected the Bible’s central message of obedience and faith. Today, many people who fill a pew on Sunday morning know less about Scripture than likely atheist Thomas Paine.

Admittedly, there is no hard polling data from, say, the late 18th or early 19th century to prove this to the satisfaction of today’s statisticians. But the rich biblical allusions found in extant documents, combined with the fact that most families would possess only a few books, including the Bible, suggests that Bible knowledge was once far more ubiquitous. Although a biased reader of Scripture, Paine reasoned, in 1776, “the quiet and rural lives of the first Patriarchs have a happy something in them, which vanishes when we come to the history of Jewish royalty. How many American Christians know their Old Testaments well enough to even have an informed opinion on that assertion? And Paine was possibly the least religious figure in America’s founding era.

These numbers are more than dry statistics that vary slightly from year to year. They should be a giant alarm bell alerting Americans to a sense of urgency over their spiritual danger. The reality is, reading only part of the Bible leaves one dangerously vulnerable to false teaching.

Granted, reading a little Scripture is better than reading no Scripture at all. But it is also true that Satan — and false teachers who follow his example — loves to take small doses of God’s word and distort them into something false.

Consider how Satan misquoted God in the garden (Genesis 3:1) and misapplied God’s word in the wilderness (Matthew 4:6). Because Eve did not know God’s word as she should (Genesis 3:2-3), she fell into sin. Jesus’s knowledge of God’s word (Matthew 4:7) was instrumental in his rebuke of Satan and resistance to temptation. To recognize when someone is misusing God’s word, you must first know the whole message.

The SOTB survey data suggest one reason for today’s biblical ignorance is a lack of biblical effort. According to the survey, 42% of respondents said they "never” read the Bible, another 13% read it less than once a year, and 7% read it once or twice a year. Another 6% of people read the Bible three or four times a year, 7% read it once a month, and 6% once a week. Finally, 6% read the Bible several times a week, 3% read it four or more times a week, and 9% read it every day.

To summarize: 68% of Americans read the Bible less than once a month, but only 18% read it more than once a week.

Incidentally, these numbers suggest that many Americans have actually read far less of the Bible than they claim. The percentage of Americans who read the Bible more than once a week (18%) is almost exactly the same as the percentage who have read the entire Bible (17%). Granted, there are doubtless some people who used to read the Bible more frequently than they do now. But, for those who read the Bible less than weekly, it’s fair to question whether their Bible reading follows any sort of systematic plan that would enable them to read “most” or “about half” of the Bible. More likely, they have read far less — perhaps even less than they think.

In fact, the SOTB report is itself conscious of this problem, “When self-reporting, people try to make themselves look good, so we assume these numbers are inflated, but it’s still interesting to see how much of the Bible people say they’ve read.”

The SOTB report identified several notable correlations across the survey data, including one which may help people grow more comfortable with reading the full revelation of God. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of respondents who said they “follow a reading guide, schedule, plan, or program” for the Bible have managed to read most or all of it. In fact, Christians have long recognized the virtue of having a reading plan, which is why there are so many of them.

Many reading plans guide readers through the entire Bible in a single year. FRC’s “Stand on the Word” Bible reading plan covers the whole Bible in a more or less chronological order over two years. This provides a more accessible entry point, as it means participants will spend only 15 minutes a day reading the Bible.

According to one estimate, social media users spent an average of two hours and 24 minutes each day on social media in 2025. If the average user redirected only one-tenth of that time to reading God’s word, he or she would have read the whole Bible in two years. This perspective makes it clear: Americans who haven’t read the whole Bible simply haven’t put in any effort.

What about Americans who are curious about Scripture but don’t know where to start, or how to interpret what they read? “Americans who are interested in and open to the Bible [have] swelled by 9 million people over the last 2 years,” noted Dr. John Farquhar Plake, American Bible Society’s Chief Innovation Officer and editor-in-chief of the State of the Bible series. “Bible Curious Americans tell us that they would welcome someone to guide them through the complexity of the Bible.”

That is the role of the church. Many daily Bible readers read on their own, but they do not follow Jesus on their own. They belong to a local body of believers who can field tough questions and help paint the big picture. This is especially the job of pastors, who presumably have more theological training than those they teach.

The benefits of Bible reading are too many to count. Reading the living and active word of God makes the reader wise (Psalm 119:99), joyful (Psalm 19:8), aware of what is right and wrong (Matthew 5-7), and able to persevere (Revelation 2-3). Americans are foolish, anxious, morally confused, and quickly intimidated because they do not read God’s word and obey his commands. How can Scripture be a universal prescription? Taste it for yourself, and find out.

I conclude, then, with this challenge: how marvelous would it be if the SOTB survey had to change its question. Instead of asking, “How much of the Bible have you read?” what if Americans were so enmeshed in God’s word that it became more revealing to ask, “How many times have you read the whole Bible?”

It isn’t difficult. At 15 minutes every day, you will read the whole Bible in two years. Keep it up, and that is twice during a college degree, five times in a decade, and easily 20 times in a career.

At first, reading so much Scripture seems like a daunting task — or simply boring. But, after a couple read-throughs, the text actually begins to come more alive. You begin to notice nuances not evident at first, phrases repeated in different sections, and books that tie the various texts to one another. The rich web of biblical literature provides a fathomless ocean of fruitful study for those who summon the courage to take the first plunge.

This piece originally appeared here.