The data didn’t make sense.
The American Bible Society (ABS) and Barna Group researchers looked at the results from 1,000 cellphone interviews asking people about their engagement with Scripture. The numbers seemed to show more people were reading the Bible a lot more. But nothing else had dramatically changed.
There were not more people praying, or going to church, or identifying religion as something important in their lives. There wasn’t a corresponding increase in people saying the Bible was the Word of God. It was just this one metric, breaking logic and defying trends.
“When you get a big surprise in the social sciences, that’s often not a good thing,” said John Farquhar Plake, lead researcher for the