Generation Y and the Bible
Despite an interest in spirituality, ethics and social justice, over 70 per cent of young people never read the Bible, research has found.
The findings are detailed in the Bible Society Australia’s new report, ‘The Bible according to Gen Z’, and reveal, according to editor Adrian Blenkinsop, that young people are struggling to connect and engage with Scripture.
“Generation Z doubts the authenticity and relevance of the Bible, struggles with its language and is baffled by its stories of strange rituals, bizarre laws and violence,” he says, noting that this is the same in almost every developed country.
Matt Valler, Global Project Leader for The Bible Engagement for Youth Project, says that research conducted in Britain suggests some interesting trends.
“Thirteen per cent of teenagers say they read the Bible at least once a month – a figure higher than any church attendance statistics for that age group. However, the trends still all appear to point downwards, particularly in terms of young people and church attendance,” he says.
“The issue we are facing in the UK – where the context is very similar to Australia – is whether Christianity can find an authentic postmodern expression. Not just in style or format, but in terms of the deep structures of how we think and live. Young people are basically postmodern, the church is basically not, and therein lays the problem for the future of Bible engagement, and indeed of Christian faith in the UK.”
The Bible Society recently published statistics which suggest that much of the British population is clueless about Scripture. Almost a third (29 per cent) of children aged between 8 and 15 did not know that the Nativity story is biblical, while a staggering 46 per cent of parents were unable to specify whether or not the story of Noah and the Ark is found in the Bible.
On the other hand, 6 per cent of children believed Hercules to be a Scriptural character while over half (54 per cent) of parents asked thought that the Hunger Games could be a biblical story.
The concern is that the Bible is considered largely irrelevant by modern society, and parents are simply not bothering to share the well-loved stories with their children.
‘The Bible According to Gen Z’ picks up on how we can transform these statistics, with individual chapters and case studies focussing on subjects such as reading the Bible through community, interactive story-telling and the context of our culture.