People of the Page: Why Christians must read…

READING IS SPIRITUAL WARFARE. We are drowning in information, tossed about in a relentless deluge of digital imagery, soundbites, and short-form videos prescribed by the algorithm. Yet, even as access to information is at an all-time high, the ability to reason is disappearing as quickly as our attention spans. Having grown accustomed to bite-sized chunks of unrelated data being forced down our intellectual gullets, we have almost completely lost the capacity for sustained linear reading. Any writing longer than a few sentences may as well be War and Peace to the average citizen perusing the web. For the secular thinker, this atrophy of cognition is a civilizational misfortune, but for the Church, it is an existential crisis.

Christians are inseparably tethered to a Book. For the Church, the discipline of rigorous reading is more than an intellectual hobby; it is essential to preserving our theological language. It equips our moral imagination and serves as a bulwark against cultural drift. To survive the shifting sands of a confused world, we must cling to the foundational truth of the written word as a theological necessity.

In an image-saturated culture, Christians must remember that our faith is inherently a religion of the Word. When God chose to reveal His character, covenants, and counsel to humanity, He commanded inspired writers and prophets to record His utterances in writing. Human history was forever altered when the Word became flesh, and that fact, its foretelling, its importance, and its future implications are preserved for humanity by ink on page.

The theological importance of reading cannot be overstated in that light. God explicitly determined that His truth would be delivered through words, syntax, grammar, prose, poetry, and historical record. Thus, the capacity for and practice of deep reading is not an academic preference or a highbrow pastime; it is a spiritual fundamental.

Allowing our attention spans to be shattered by the endless feed of clips and images is quietly destroying our ability to know the God who reveals Himself upon the page. A Christian who cannot sit still long enough or follow linear reading well enough to navigate a complex sentence will struggle with doctrinal truths of justification, atonement, sovereignty, and the eschaton. If we lose our ability to navigate the page, we lose the grammar of our faith. When we allow our cognitive capacity to deteriorate, when we perpetuate the destruction of our attention span by the constant feed of short-form information, when we deem dense paragraphs too exhausting, we are closing off the primary medium through which God has chosen to communicate with humanity.

We live in a world obsessed with communication but incapable of deep comprehension. We can stream a torrent of images from the other side of the globe, but cannot focus long enough to read a few pages of sustained theological reasoning. This visual idolatry is devastating believers whose attention spans have been shattered, causing deeply grounded theology and doctrine to be replaced by shallow visuals and catchy sentimentality.

In this world, picking up a book with substance that challenges the mind is not a nostalgic diversion; it is an act of spiritual warfare. Reading is a liturgy of the mind—with which we are commanded to love God. Reading requires silence, patience, and intellectual humility—few things are more arrogant than rejecting learning. The reader is forced to slow down, engage their moral imagination, and weigh arguments. When a Christian sits quietly with a book, they are throwing off the frantic weight of the algorithm and actively training their soul for contemplative worship.

We are a people of the page, living a faith that is anchored by the eternal Word, preserved in writing, and revealed in reading. We will never protect the doctrinal integrity of the Church or carry biblical reasoning into our daily decisions if we are no longer a people who read. It is not possible to defend what is not understood, and understanding cannot be grasped without a patient reading of the text. Thus, reading the Word and actively engaging our minds in reading deeply of other texts is imperative for the believer. May we reject the visual slavery of our culture, cast off the idolatry of short-form, quick-hit reasoning, and reclaim our attention spans for the glory of God.

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