What’s Wrong With Today’s World? Could It Be Kids Aren’t Being Taught The Bible?
Poll Finds Only 9% of Generation Z Youth Ages 15-17 Are “Scripture Engaged,” 47% Considered “Disengaged”
Elizabeth Johnston reports:
For Christian parents in this aggressively secular world, ensuring that our children are actively engaged in the Body of Christ and growing in their relationship with Him can be daunting.
However, if your child is routinely absorbing the Word of God, you’re doing better than the vast majority of parents raising Gen Z children — the youngsters who may one day be your own child’s ministry field.
A recently released report from the American Bible Society found that just 9% of Gen Z youth—that is, Gen Zers between the ages of 15-17, as opposed to 18-24, are what’s considered “scripture engaged.”
This is compared to a dismal 47% who are “Bible disengaged.”
The State of the Bible 2021 does not have wholly depressing statistics for Americans at large — it found that half of all American adults qualify as a “Bible user” — it is clear that Gen Z, as the study concluded, has a “precarious relationship with the Bible.”
The organization revealed that “only one-third of Gen Z youth (34%) are Bible Users, while 43 percent of Gen Z adults qualify. Compared with Gen Z, millennials have a much higher percentage of Bible Users, approaching the national average (49%).”
What’s more, they wrote that the “turmoil of 2020 did not spark greater Bible use among teenagers. Gen Z youth (27%) are more likely than Gen Z adults (19%) or millennials (9%) to say they decreased their Bible use in the past year.”
Interestingly, millennials were the most likely to say that they had increased their Bible use over the last year, that is 29%, compared to 27% of Gen Z adults and 21% of Gen Z youth.
