Reading as Rebellion

I have smart friends who think that encouraging young people to begin a life of reading is a lost cause. They point to surveys showing a massive decline in book-reading across the board. They share alarming anecdotes from high school teachers and college professors who claim their students are incapable of absorbing an entire book. Research studies back up these stories and statistics. Scholars debate what the loss of reading does to our brains and what the decline might mean for our culture long-term.

Everyone agrees. We live in an age of vanishing readers—a digital desert where sustained attention has evaporated and the next generation risks losing its imaginative inheritance.

But we can still read! some say. Sure, we read snippets here and there wherever we scroll online, and we dip into an occasional article or post on a sports page or in a political forum. But reading a book, going about it the old-fashioned way, where you give yourself over to a thoughtful and sustained argument that unfolds over several chapters, or where you lose yourself in a novel alive with beauty and subtlety—this practice appears less and less common for all ages, but especially the young.

Reading just can’t compete with other habits and practices, my friends tell me. Young people don’t and won’t read. Pushing a book on them makes you resemble the parent cajoling a toddler to open up for a spoonful of mushy peas. “It’s good for you! Trust me!”

I know the stats. I’ve heard the stories. But I believe we’re humans, not robots. Trends aren’t determinative. We make choices. We have agency. Which is why I refuse to bow to the fatalism that marks too many takes on the decline in reading—the insultingly low expectations of teachers and commentators who throw up their hands and surrender the next generation to the power of the cultural tides.

I want you to rebel. That’s right. In today’s world, reading is an act of holy insurgency. I want you to ignore the chatter of parents and professors who claim you’re no longer able or willing to exercise your mind through reading. I want you to swim upstream against the currents that make it easy to settle for superficiality.

To Rebel for Yourself

First, I want you to rebel for your own good, so you can reclaim one of the greatest gifts you’ve received and one of the greatest gifts you can give: your attention.

Your attention is a sacred resource. That’s why so many organizations are after it. Life in the digital age is designed to capture your attention through perpetual distraction. To divert your powers of concentration so your eyes are drawn this way or that.

Iain McGilchrist, a renowned neuroscientist, makes the case that attention is more important than we realize. What we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, matters. Attention changes the way we see the world.

You know this already. When you’re hanging out with a friend and start to talk, your spirit deflates a little if your friend begins scrolling or texting during your conversation. You wonder about your importance, especially if no explanation follows as to why something online needs urgent attention in that moment.

Giving your attention to something is a way of assigning value. To fail to pay attention also makes a statement. “Attention is a moral act,” McGilchrist writes. “Attention has consequences” (133).

No wonder so many people are competing for your mind space. The barrage of emails that flood your inbox, the clickbait headlines that startle you, the notifications that ping your phone, the apps and platforms that keep you scrolling or playing—they’re all designed to hook your heart. The landscape of your inner life is for sale.

The forces competing for your attention are winning. Even now, don’t you feel the little tug to jump into the stream, even if just for a minute or two, to see “what’s going on,” to dive back into the endless scroll of news stories, funny dances, prayer requests, or colorful advertisements? When you stream a movie or show, do you feel during the slow or quiet moments the itch to check your phone for news or play a round of a game you like? One screen isn’t enough to satisfy the need for stimulation, so you glance back and forth, from the bigger screen to the smaller, so you can “watch” and scroll or text or play. Multitasking isn’t only for work these days; we multitask our entertainment too.

Over time, our attention—one of the most valuable aspects of our humanity—gets spread so thin we have trouble concentrating on anyone or anything for long. We’re everywhere and nowhere all the time. We train our mental muscles to be ever on the lookout for the next bit of stimulation, while the muscles of sustained attention wither from disuse. Our inability to focus makes it hard to have long and meaningful conversations with other people. It weakens our capacity for deep thinking and consideration. It robs us of an emotional and intellectual life that goes deeper than the surface of whatever screen is most captivating in the moment.

This is just the way things are nowadays, people say. No. You can resist. You can stand out in a world of superficiality. I believe you want more for yourself. Or at least you want to want more.

Reading, especially when it’s challenging, is one way you rebel against all the corporations and influencers and platforms trampling the walls around the garden of your consciousness. Reading is setting a sentry at the gate, on guard against the horde of distracters intent on invading your mind space. Reading is clawing back your powers of attention so you can give yourself fully to the people in your life, so you can carefully weigh proposals and debates in society from multiple angles, so you can see today’s news through the lens of history and philosophy, so you can grow in wisdom and compassion, so you can savor the world’s greatest works of literature without the help of AI chatbot summaries.

Every time you power off your phone and pick up a book, you rebel. You haul yourself up onto a lifeboat in a sea of superficiality. You exercise your God-given mind and refuse to let your mental muscles atrophy. You defy the low expectations of those who say reading is a lost cause.

I want you to rebel for yourself. Drive a stake into the ground and tell the ever-encroaching attention vampires, “You will not colonize my mind.”

To Rebel for Your Soul

I also want you rebel for your soul. Reading isn’t just a rebellion for the sake of your mind; it’s rebellion for the good of your heart. Reading is war in service of worship.

Does that sound over the top? Maybe a bit far-fetched? Not when we bring the Bible into the picture.

Christians get called, rightly, “people of the Book.” God’s people meditate on God’s Word. And meditation goes deeper than reading. It means to sit, to ponder, to consider, to contemplate. The Bible calls for our gaze, not a glance.

The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength and with all our mind. How do we learn to love this God? Well, when Moses first delivered this command, he followed it up with instructions on how to make God’s Word the centerpiece of everyday life. The ancient Israelites were to repeat the words of the Word throughout the day, teaching them to their children, discussing them at home and on the road.

One of the biggest obstacles to this kind of Word-soaked life is the distraction of a digital age. We’ve lost the ability to experience the power of great poetry, or feel the weightiness of wonderful music, or stand and stare at a masterpiece of art. It’s often said, most works of art yield their secrets slowly. The same is true for God’s Word. The Bible makes demands of us. It calls for thought, for patience, and for devotion. The path to truly internalizing and digesting Scripture is rugged, intentionally so, for this is how the Spirit does his work in our lives.

But what about all the Christians in the past who couldn’t read? Were they unfaithful? No. Literacy doesn’t equal holiness. Some of the ghastliest atrocities our world has ever seen were committed by the well-read, while many a saint never learned to read or write. Reading may not be essential, but God’s Word is. Illiterate peasants cherished God’s Word by listening to it and committing it to memory.

Just imagine our forefathers and mothers of the faith in centuries past, with only a handful of books and maybe a tattered Bible passing into their possession over a lifetime. What would they say if they saw the thousands of Bible editions and tools and commentaries we have at our disposal? How does it make sense that even with all our resources, we don’t know the Scriptures as well as they did?

Meditation on God’s Word, contemplation of his wonders—this is basic Christian practice. To read and understand God’s Word is to mount an insurgency against the shallowness of an ever-scrolling word and to be rooted, like the tree that describes the righteous in Psalm 1—planted and fruit-bearing through delight in God’s law and meditation day and night. Reading can help you see, truly see, the glory of God. And the glory of God lights the way for you to truly see others.

Consider Jesus’s haunting question to Simon the Pharisee after a woman entered the house and washed Jesus’s feet with her tears: “Do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Not “see” in the sense of acquiring knowledge, but see with the eyes of attention, to see with spiritual intuition. It’s the kind of sight that demands paying attention while stirring in oneself the compassion that destroys any attitude of superiority and changes the one looking.

What receives our attention? What is it we see? What are we missing? The Bible would have us be more attentive to where we give our attention.

To follow Jesus means to pay attention to him, to be like Mary of Bethany, who reclined at his feet and hung on his every word. Theologian John Webster writes,

In our world today, many voices seek our attention. Influencers everywhere hawk their wares. How tragic if we develop the capacity to attune to everything but the Word of the Lord. The most radical, countercultural practice we can cultivate today is an intensity in reading and listening to the Scriptures—a steadfast attention that refuses to allow anything to wrest our focus from the Bible. To listen until it hurts, as Jacob wrestled with God, refusing to let go until he was blessed.

Reading is the best way to rebel in a world that can glance at everything and gaze at nothing.

For God’s sake, and for your own, read.

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