No, Bible-reading has been declining for decades. Oddly, it has declined even as the number of contemporary-English, user-friendly translations have increased. When I was grade-school age, many Evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant churches encouraged a considerable amount of memorization: the Ten Commandments, the Greatest Commandment and the Second Greatest Commandment (Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, etcetera), the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, Genesis 1 and 2, John 1, I Corinthians 13, Hebrews 11, and numerous individual verses and parables were on the list of things learned by rote in many Sunday Schools: there were competitions both within one’s own church, and often with neighboring churches to see whose children had memorized the most Scripture passages.
The decline may be caused (in part) by the very wealth of versions now to be had. When there is just one, such as the AV-KJV, it has no competitors; as it is the only one available, it’s the one that can be taken as being, for all practical purposes, “the Bible”.
In England at least, this was still possible until the 1950s; the AV had not been displaced by the RV, and in fact, the men who worked upon the Revised Version were instructed to make as few changes as possible, consistent with faithfulness to their work as revisers. Even the RSV, despite being much more recognisably modern in language than the RV, was still recognisably in the same tradition as the AV.
There were plenty of translations after the AV - but the only one that seems still to be used, is the Challoner modernisation of the Douai-Reims Bible. AFAICS, things didn’t really change until the 1970s - Challoner & Knox were for Catholics; the 1917 Tanakh was for Jews; JWs had their version; whereas the AV was common to English-speaking Protestantism. Perhaps it’s not wrong to think of it as an English Protestant equivalent of the Vulgate.
But after 1960, there was the NEB, NAB, JB, LB, GNB, REB, RJB…a flood of versions; & when there is a flood of Bibles jostling each other for attention, it’s no longer possible to think of any one of them as uniquely “the Bible”. It’s easy to be confused, & far simpler to give up trying to understand the Bible.
Maybe the changes in the Liturgy have had an effect too; much liturgical English is eminently forgettable. Cranmer, OTOH, knew how to write memorable & rhythmic English - as did Tyndale: the AV is (so I’ve read) 90 % Tyndale.
The loss of close familiarity with Greek & Latin has almost certainly had an effect on English style. To study them, meant having to read a great deal of elegantly expressed verse, much of it very memorable indeed - anyone who has no knowledge of either can hardly be described as educated; such a person should on no account be allowed to translate the Bible or the Liturgy. IMHO, there has also been a grievous loss of the ability to distinguish between art & trash. ##
By the time I was in Jr. High/High School, a lot of ‘experts’ discouraged memorization and even implied it might be harmful. (Why I’m not certain). Instead, Sunday Schools focuses on what is called ‘Inductive Learning’, otherwise known as ‘Talking A Lot About Feelings And Not Really Learning Anything’. That was the method of non-teaching favored by Sunday Schools and churches throughout the 70’s and 80’s. In the 90’s, a lot of ‘seeker sensitive’ churches sought to become more ‘culturally significant’ by abandoning any genuine study of Scripture at all: Bible texts became a pretext for whatever latest fad topic the speaker wanted to discuss, whether the verse or two which might be referenced actually pertained to the topic or not.
Hence, too many Protestant churches are completely ‘dumbed down’ to the point that most congregants not only don’t read the Bible, but assume that it is ‘too hard’ to read, even in translations simplified to a 3rd-grade or 5th grade reading level.
Laziness is another a cause of ignorance - it’s very easy to assume that one is going to be be spoon-fed the answers to one’s questions: Christianity is not an easy form of faith; it often requires a lot of hard work. There’s a point beyond which simplified Bibles become caricatures, so there is only so much that can be done to make it more digestible. Besides, its message is intended to change people - not leave them as they are. If the Bible really is “of God”, it’s going to tell people a lot about themselves that they are not likely to welcome. It can be very challenging.
By the way: Roman Catholics went through the same process. Folks my age or slightly older learned Catholic teaching by the memorization of large portions of a Catechism–usually the Baltimore Catechism. During the 1970’s and beyond, they too abandoned memorization for some other fast-and-loose pretence at religious teaching. Religious ignorance in the RCC compounded at the same time it did among Protestants. Fortunately, a few folks in both camps figured out that ‘Inductive Learning’ and similar schemes are a fraud and have gone back to actually teaching instead of playing at religious education.
OH AND ME OF COURSE
