IN OUR ever spiralling, splenetic, and spiteful culture wars, there is at least one thing on which we can all agree, whether we be woke Liberal or gammon Reform: reading is good for you.
Spooked by a seemingly endless stream of polls and studies showing that British people generally, and children in particular, are reading less and less, everyone now seems to agree that it is a good idea, in the words of the Sunday Times campaign, to Get Britain Reading (Leader comment, 24 October 2025). This year has been designated the National Year of Reading, which is backed by institutions as diverse as the National Literacy Trust and the Premier League.
It is good to see, then, that the Bible is leading the way. Nielsen BookScan data show that UK Bible sales have been increasing steadily since Covid, reaching £6.3 million last year, up from £3.6 million in 2019.
This is, in fact, part of a wider trend in religious (especially Christian) publishing, which has bucked the general flatline of non-fiction genres and shown modest growth over recent years. It is particularly notable, however, that it is the Bible that is trailblazing here, because the Bible is — famously — the most owned but least read book in Britain. If people are buying Bibles, it is not because they have been unavailable of late.
There is an easy, obvious, and rather dodgy line that could be drawn between these two stories. It goes like this: Britain has stopped reading because it has stopped valuing the Bible. It will start reading again when it starts reading, and appreciating, the Bible. The Word of God is the foundation for human words. The rise in Bible sales augurs well for Britain’s literate future.
Truth told, this is a pretty thin argument. Quite apart from anything else, the logic can run in the opposite direction. Thomas Cranmer wrote, optimistically, in his preface to the second edition of the Great Bible, that scripture would be available to “all manner of persons”. Almost as soon as parishes were ordered to chain up a Bible for the people to read, however, the authorities started passing restrictions on Bible-reading. The Bible did not open up a world of reading. It did not even open up a world of reading the Bible.
Two hundred and fifty years later, when churches did start to educate the labouring classes, Christian elites retained a similar anxiety about what they would consume. “I seldom read,” one fictional master-manufacturer, in a didactic tract, told an employee who wished to become educated in order to understand the rights of Man, “except in my Bible and my ledger.”
A century on, Edmund Gosse’s wonderful memoir, Father and Son, recounts how his highly literate but extremely pious father “prided himself on never having read a page of Shakespeare”, for fear of its moral and spiritual corruption. Reading the Bible did not naturally lead to reading in general. There is no reason to believe that it will do so again.
AND yet, if the clear and obvious line is a bit dodgy, there is a better, if more meandering, connection between the two stories. Since the late-16th century, the Word has been central to Britain’s culture and identity. To be English, Welsh, or Scottish was to be a people who — in theory at least: the reality was often murkier — had unmediated access to the Word of God. That Word was the final authority on pretty much everything. The entire epistemic structure underpinning society — the way in which knowledge and authority was ordered and organised — was Word-based.
“Whenever a man took up his pen”, the historian John Redwood once noted of the 17th century, “and attempted to write about the weather, the seasons, the structure of the earth, the constitution of the heavens, the nature of political society, the organization of the Church, social morality or ethics he was by definition taking up his pen to write about God.” And, because God was known first and foremost by reading his Word in his book, that meant that reading stood at the heart of all knowledge and order. Culturally, politically, psychologically, ideologically, we were a people of the book.
This is one of the reasons that literacy rates were so high so early in self-consciously Protestant countries. The Netherlands, Scotland, England, Sweden, and Denmark led the way in the early modern period.
Again, we should not exaggerate here. Mass literacy was a comparatively late and comparatively brief phenomenon, even in Britain. “In this country, there are probably not less than two hundred thousand persons who read for amusement or instruction among the middling classes,” wrote the Scottish judge Francis Jeffrey in the 1820s. It only was in the 80 or so years between the Forster Education Act of 1870 and the advent of mass radio and TV ownership in the next century that the British public really did “get reading”.
BUT, when they did, it made a big difference. Jonathan Rose’s superb book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes shows what a transformative effect reading had on millions of poorer people.
This was the age of a (relatively) peaceful transition to a fully enfranchised democracy, peaceful elections, economic growth, high levels of political participation, and, eventually, state welfare; and, while it would be silly to ascribe such changes simply to our mass literacy, I am convinced that the attention, concentration, patience, empathy, and humility demanded and enabled by sustained reading was one of the foundations on which these structures were built.
Reading is no panacea, and it is the elitist’s sin to confuse literacy with morality. It is worth recalling that Josef Stalin annotated and read thousands of books, from philosophy to art criticism, and had, in the words of Geoffrey Roberts’s Stalin’s Library, a “fanatical, life-long commitment to reading and self-improvement”. Mao was a big reader, too.
But, if no panacea, reading is still a medicine. Perhaps one of the reasons that we live in that spiralling, splenetic, and spiteful culture war is that we do not read so much today — or that, when we do, we limit the length to 280 characters.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the host of the podcast Reading our Times.
