E-Reading and the Christian Bible

Introduction

The Christian Bible has risen in recent years to become one of the more high-profile success stories of the e-reading marketplace, finally achieving mainstream press attention in the summer of 2013. E-reading has attracted considerable academic attention for decades, charting its rising popularity and comparing the merits of paper and screens as reading tools (Rainie et al., 2012; Noyes and Garland, 2008), but researchers have only just begun to extend this work to examine the intervention of screens in the relationship between religious readers and their sacred texts. This article is a contribution to an awareness of that new frontier in the study of reading, introducing a body of new empirical evidence on religious e-reading practices and assessing that evidence in the context of existing research. Our study is based on a relatively small sample, so conclusions should be understood as suggestive rather than representative or statistically significant, but it is hoped that this preliminary work will inspire other researchers to undertake further, more extensive explorations of religious e-reading in future.

Computers have been used to analyse the Bible since the early 1950s (Ess, 2004). A small industry of Christian computing companies in the 1980s and 1990s produced digitised commentary texts, analytical software, early e-reader devices and eventually websites, seeking to take advantage of emerging digital technologies to encourage greater access to the Bible and invite an increasingly computer-literate society to take an interest in the Christian message. These enterprises stand in a long tradition of Christian media activity, including enthusiastic and creative uses of printed books and pamphlets, radio and television as tools for education and persuasion. As late as 2004, however, sociologist Charles Ess (2004) and biblical scholar Eep Talstra (2004) could criticise the Bible software market for being unambitious in study tools, clumsy in proselytism and limited in the range of texts it could publish.

Today, the most successful digital Bible product has been installed on over 180 million devices worldwide (see www.bible.com for the latest count). YouVersion is a free mobile app created by the American megachurch Life.Church (formerly LifeChurch.tv), an organisation noted for its many innovations in digital software and broadcasting (Hutchings, 2011, 2014). YouVersion has received front-page coverage in the New York Times (O’Leary, 2013), been promoted as the “Official Bible App” of the hit US TV series “The Bible” (YouVersion, 2013a), featured in advertising for the Hollywood movie “Noah” (YouVersion, 2014a) and earned its CEO a recent meeting with the Pope, at which he presented the pontiff with a latest-model iPhone 6 pre-loaded with YouVersion products (YouVersion, 2014b). The app now includes 1000 different versions of the Bible in 700 languages, augmented by annotation tools and encouragements to share favourite verses through social media. YouVersion also offers hundreds of reading plans with automated reminders to encourage frequent reading, and badges awarded for completion. According to YouVersion, these persuasive strategies are highly effective: a striking 77% of users in a recent survey claim to “turn to the Bible more” because it’s available on their mobile device (YouVersion, 2013b).

YouVersion is only one example in an increasingly crowded and diverse marketplace. In Apple’s App Store, Christian apps related to the Bible number in the thousands, including audio and video versions, commentaries, study tools, apps designed for specific Christian churches or denominations, selections of inspirational verses, trivia quizzes and Bible games. Some of these Bible apps are offered for sale, like the Life Application Study Bible ($15.99), produced by a major Christian publisher (Tyndale House) as the app version of a best-selling print Bible. More commonly, Bible products like Olive Tree are offered free of charge with options for later in-app purchases of additional material. Beyond the app store, commercial software designed for the tablet or desktop, such as Logos and GloBible, offer wide ranges of texts and multimedia interpretation aids, while long-running websites like Bible Gateway offer quick free access to different translations. Digital Bible technologies have also been developed by Christian missionaries, who have incorporated digital tools into the work of translation (Riding, 2011), developed new devices and strategies for communicating the Bible to non-literate groups through audio and video (Williams and Gray, 2010), and created reading software designed for secret use in contexts where Christian activity is dangerous (Dyer, 2012).

This paper analyses a survey of Christian users of “digital Bibles,” with particular attention given to their perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of religious e-reading. I will begin by surveying recent research into Christian and non-religious e-reading, before introducing the methodology of my survey. I will then briefly describe my 257 respondents, to give some context to their answers, and undertake a more detailed exploration of their responses to one open question included in the survey: “In what ways, if any, have digital Bibles changed your relationship with the Bible?” Of these respondents, 201 answered this question, contributing almost 6800 words of text between them, and analysis of this collection of writings allows us to suggest some tentative findings. Themes identified in this preliminary analysis will be used to propose questions and hypotheses for more detailed future study.

E-reading and the Bible

Recent academic studies of this new field of digital Bible reading remain few, but offer some initial starting points for our discussion. Rachel Wagner argues that religious mobile apps “place control in the hands of individual users” and thereby “redefine authenticity,” shifting authority from the institution to the individual (Wagner, 2013: 202). At the level of content, Wagner argues that “the market” will defeat any attempt at institutional control by offering religious practitioners “a never-ending stream of new and unsanctioned religious applications, many encouraging experimentation and exploration of new religious ideas.” At the level of technology, offering access to a sacred text through an app forces the user to make choices, and that changes how practitioners conceptualise their relationship with the text. Users are encouraged “to see sacred texts themselves as selectable apps … that users have freedom to run, ‘play’ with and in a sense control” (Wagner, 2013: 200). Wagner also argues that digitisation will expose more practitioners to the idea that the Scriptures found within a traditional Bible have been selected from a wider range of texts, a discovery that she expects to be revolutionary: “the Bible itself has become fluid, its fixed covers dissolving into a host of linked sites that describe competing biblical histories, alternate non-canonical gospels, and previously unavailable literature” (Wagner, 2012: 22).

Hebrew Bible scholar Wido van Peursen agrees that the digital medium could undermine conceptualisations of the Bible as a single, complete text with fixed covers, but argues that we should not overestimate the novelty or significance of this shift. “The printed book, containing the Bible from cover to cover … was just a phase in the history of the Bible” (van Peursen, 2014: 56). “The Bible started without covers, so why should we worry about losing them again?” (57).

Reflecting on the technology of electronic reading, van Peursen proposes five other areas in which we may expect Bible-reading to change: a shift in textual medium may change human capacities and habits; the meaning of a text is not independent from its formal presentation; digital reading encourages scanning, rather than close attention; digital devices encourage distraction; and “the consumption of digital text is defined in terms of access rather than ownership of the physical carrier” (58).

For literature professor Alan Jacobs, the single-codex Bible is not just a historical phase but a theologically profound decision, shaping Christian thinking by emphasising the integrity of the canon of Scripture as a single and sequential whole (Jacobs, 2011). Considering the likely impact of digital screens on Bible reading, Jacobs distinguishes between dedicated e-readers like the Kindle and the multi-purpose screens of mobile phones and overhead projectors. E-readers encourage sequential reading, Jacobs argues, just like a paper codex, and will change very little. Jacobs is much more concerned about mobile phone screens and the big screens used to project Scripture verses in many church services: these tiny screens and giant screens both “reduce” the Bible to “chunks of one or two verses,” isolating quotations from their wider context. Christian practitioners who use these screens will develop “a theology shaped by the screens on which they have encountered the Word of God – and in some cases by the controllers of those screens: those who determine what is seen, and what remains invisible” (Jacobs, 2011). Jacobs and Wagner both agree that digital Bible apps fragment the canon of Scripture, but their interpretations of the resulting shift in theological authority are quite different.

An alternative approach focuses not on arguments about social trends but on how specific digital Bible products are designed to encourage particular kinds of use. Paul Teusner and Ryan Torma demonstrate that the producers of the iPhone version of YouVersion’s Bible App “have made design decisions that are based on their knowledge of the affordances of the [iPhone] device, their ideas about how consumers will use their applications, and their own motivations for connecting with users” (2011: 152). In particular, Teusner and Torma argue, the Bible App makes multiple translations of the Bible easily available in a lightweight iPhone device and uses a touch interface to allow the user to scroll through and interact with small sections of text, displayed as plainly as possible. These decisions entail sacrifices. First, “the visual and tactile aesthetics of reading a printed Bible were overlooked in favour of a greater desire to connect users to literal text and, ultimately, other users” (152). Second, by leaving out footnotes and other explanatory resources the Bible App can “obfuscate” details of meaning that the original translators of a particular text wanted to make clear (147). My own research has expanded this focus on design by interviewing designers to find out more about their motivations, analysing digital Bibles as persuasive technologies designed to promote particular reading practices favoured by particular Christian traditions (Hutchings, 2014: 13ff).

Within the Christian community, arguments over the impact of digital reading include additional, explicitly theological considerations. Baptist seminary professor Matthew Barrett wrote a blog post in 2013 titled “Dear Pastor, Bring Your Bible to Church” (Barrett, 2013). Barrett argues that a printed Bible symbolises “God speaking to his people”: “carried by Pastor Steve into the pulpit, this large, even cumbersome book, reveals he is ready to bring to the people a message from God himself.” Displaying the paper Bible also symbolises Christian commitment to the value of embodiment, and communicates a visible badge of Christian identity for the benefit of non-Christian onlookers. In response to Barrett, Tim Bulkeley – a biblical scholar working for a seminary of the Churches of Christ in Australia – proposes an alternative symbolic argument: perhaps “claiming that using a tablet to read Scripture connects the biblical text to everyday life, while using an archaic delivery technology … disconnects the Word from the modern world” (Bulkeley, 2014: 57).

E-reading in Non-religious Contexts

These academic and theological studies of Christian Bible-reading have focused on four main themes: the tension between individual and institutional authority; the impact of technology on the idea of canon; the role of design; and the symbolic significance of materiality. To make sense of the rising trend of Bible software, we must also take account of the extensive research that has already been undertaken on e-reading in non-religious contexts. This section will offer a brief overview, looking for relevant parallels with the Bible debates outlined above.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number of adult Americans who had read an e-book in the previous year rose to 23% of the population by February 2012 (Rainie et al., 2012: 3). By January 2014, that figure had risen again to 28% (Zickuhr and Rainie, 2014: 6). The proportion of print book readers, meanwhile, remained fairly constant between 2011 and 2014 at around 70%. Women were more likely overall to read than men in both print (78% to 68%) and e-book (33% to 23%) formats (Zickuhr and Rainie, 2014: 6), but among those who actually did read, the proportion who had read an e-book was the same (Rainie et al., 2012: 40). Among those who had read in the previous year, almost half of those aged 18–30 in 2014 had read an e-book, a sharp rise from 2012, compared with only 17% of over 65s.

Almost 30% of e-book readers read books on their mobile phones, but this figure had remained stable since 2011 while the proportion of e-reader users rose sharply. The proportion using a phone to read on a weekly basis remained low, at only 12% of 2014 respondents (Zickuhr and Rainie, 2014: 11) – a particularly interesting finding, given the popularity of YouVersion and other mobile apps designed for regular Bible-reading. Despite Jacobs’ fears (2011), readers of the Bible are apparently more willing than readers of other books to experience the text in small segments on a small screen.

According to Pew, “those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers” (Rainie et al., 2012: 3). Compared with readers of other kinds of books, they read more books, more frequently, and are more likely to buy books; 30% of those who read books, newspapers, magazines and journals electronically report that their reading has increased since they began using digital formats, and men are slightly more likely to report an increase than women (33% to 27%) (Rainie et al., 2012: 43). This figure is even higher for readers of e-books (42%) and for owners of tablets and e-readers. “The longer people have owned an e-book reader or tablet, the more likely they are to say they are reading more” (p. 4), rising to more than 40% of people who have owned either device for more than a year. These figures are much lower than the 77% of users claimed by YouVersion (2013c), but without access to the sample size or methodology used in the YouVersion study it is not possible to draw conclusions about the accuracy of that statistic. Nonetheless, the Pew findings do offer support for YouVersion’s argument that digital accessibility encourages more frequent reading.

According to Pew, very few e-book readers are abandoning print books: almost 90% of e-book readers had also read paper books in the previous year (Zickuhr and Rainie, 2014: 8). Different contexts and purposes are perceived as better suited to print or screen reading: “people prefer e-books to printed books when they want speedy access and portability, but print wins out when people are reading to children and sharing books with others” (Rainie et al., 2012: 6). These contests were strikingly one-sided, with more than 80% preferring paper for children and e-books for speed, and around 70% preferring paper for sharing and e-books for travelling or commuting. When asked why they like to read, however, only 2% mentioned the feel or smell of a paper book. These findings may suggest some comfort for van Peursen and Barrett, who have suggested that e-reading will diminish personal connection to and public visibility of the Bible; if religious e-reading follows the non-religious model, it seems likely that paper Bibles will not be replaced.

A number of academic studies have tried to assess the relative merits of e-reading and paper reading. According to a review of this literature by Jan Noyes and Kate Garland (2008), studies in the 1980s and early 1990s tended to report that test subjects were slower and less accurate when using screens for reading, writing and problem-solving and performed worse in tests of reading comprehension compared with their performance using paper (Noyes and Garland, 2008: 1357; see also Dillon, 1992) – supporting van Peursen’s argument that digital reading changes our learning habits and encourages scanning rather than close attention (van Peursen, 2014: 58). Noyes and Garland note that interface design and screen quality have improved over time, leading to “greater equivalence” between page and screen, but these differences were still being found in studies in the 2000s. Recent studies have also found that reading on screens is more tiring and stressful than reading on paper (Noyes and Garland, 2008: 1361).

Studies of e-reading have also considered the significance of medium and interface for the reader’s memory of the text. According to Anne Mangen, research to date suggests that “knowledge seems to be better assimilated and more readily retrieved when presented in paper format” (Mangen et al., 2013: 62). One factor, she suggests, is that “the intangibility of the digital text might have challenged the readers’ mental reconstruction of the physical layout of the text, which in turn might have impeded their overview as well as ability to access, locate and retrieve required pieces of textual information” (66). “Readers often recall where in a text some particular piece of information appeared (e.g., toward the upper right corner or at the bottom of the page),” she argues, and this kind of “spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text” supports understanding and memory (65–66). Readers of electronic texts also construct these “structure maps” (Payne and Reader, 2006), but paper allows the reader to see the whole page, feel its texture and assess the physical size of the whole book, providing a wider range of fixed cues to the location of passages of text (Mangen et al., 2013: 66). Moving the text by scrolling through it risks disrupting the mental map even further (Mangen et al., 2013: 65). These arguments are of particular relevance for Jacobs’ critique of the fragmented nature of digital Bible-reading (Jacobs, 2011), suggesting that displaying the text on a screen has consequences for the reader’s memory as well as contextual understanding.

Methodology

This article so far has considered recent debates in Bible and non-religious e-reading, identifying some common themes and differences between these two fields of research. E-reading is rising in popularity, but mobile phones seem particularly well suited to Bible reading. Both Christian and non-religious organisations have reported that e-reading increases the frequency of reading, but Bible publishers have claimed a much more significant effect. Christian commentators are concerned about the symbolic significance of paper Bibles as objects to be owned and displayed, but recent e-reading reports suggest that paper books are not being abandoned. Studies of e-reading have reported that paper books help readers’ comprehension and memorisation more than screens, supporting Christian concerns about the possible disadvantages of digitised Scripture.

In search of further evidence to support or question these theories, this study draws on data collected from a 6-page, 12-question online survey designed using SurveyMonkey and distributed in 2013. This survey was intended to collect basic information about who was reading the Bible online, where and when, and included one open question asking what differences practitioners had detected in their relationship with the text.

I designed this survey primarily to serve as a tool to help recruit participants for subsequent interviews. I intended to promote the survey online, include a question asking respondents if they would agree to an interview, and then select a sample of interviewees from this pool of volunteers. The survey could be completed anonymously, but anyone interested in an interview was invited to leave their email address. This approach was intended to overcome some of the limitations of snowball sampling, by allowing me to contact a larger number of respondents and then stratify my sample to balance gender, age, denominational affiliation and nationality.

My survey proved more popular and analytically valuable than anticipated, gathering 257 responses in two months from February to April 2013. More than 200 respondents answered the open-ended question, writing a total of almost 7000 words between them. I went on to interview a sample of respondents by telephone and face-to-face, but in this article I have chosen to focus on my survey – particularly the open question – as my primary source of data, indicating interesting themes that will merit more detailed future study.

The advantages of an online survey are considerable. My survey was quick to design, cheap to maintain and free to distribute, and respondents from around the world were able to access it easily. There are limitations to any sampling methodology, however, and the approach I have chosen for this study is no exception. The problems with online, self-selected surveys are well known (Couper, 2000). For example, such studies are likely to attract respondents with higher than average levels of interest and investment in the topic. In this case, we might expect to receive responses from individuals who use digital Bible software frequently and, perhaps, with high levels of enthusiasm. This survey also relied on respondents’ own reports about their activity, and this is also problematic: respondents were asked how often they read the Bible and how often they went to church, for example, and we have no way to check either their memory or their honesty. Finally, this survey was conducted only once. As we shall see, some respondents do state that their reading habits have changed, but rigorous investigation of these changes would require a long-term study with repeated questioning.

The survey was initially introduced in a post I wrote for the widely-read “BigBible” blog, maintained by the CODEC Digital Theology research centre at Durham University (UK). BigBible is aimed at a non-academic Christian audience, and has often proven a valuable space for me to share findings of my research projects with an interested, critical audience of religious practitioners. In addition, I promoted the survey myself through Facebook and Twitter, encouraging my contacts to circulate a link and invitation to their own online networks. I also printed business cards featuring the URL of the survey and the BigBible blog post, which I used as a convenient introduction to the project, and I handed out these business cards in person to anyone I met in churches or at Christian conventions who mentioned using a digital Bible.

In terms of numbers of respondents, the most useful promotional strategy was endorsement on social media by well-connected Christian organisations. The survey received 97 responses in the first week after my BigBible post was published, and an additional 50 responses in one day after a link was tweeted by an American Christian Bible programmer with 3500 Twitter followers. A large charismatic evangelical church in Durham with a focus on student ministry also published tweets and Facebook messages about the project on a number of occasions, and 27 respondents mentioned this church as their place of worship.

Online sharing of my survey by Christian organisations increased the number of survey responses, but affected the demographic and ideological make-up of my sample. As we shall see, survey respondents were more likely to be male than female, and reported strikingly high levels of commitment to churchgoing and regular Bible-reading. These features may reflect the kinds of audiences exposed to the survey through social media endorsements by Christian organisations, a point discussed in more detail below.

I used an iterative thematic approach to code the 201 answers to my open question, reading through the data several times to identify what appeared to me to be the most common and significant themes. My findings therefore reflect one coding of the data, one possible way to divide up the answers. Other researchers, motivated by different theoretical interests, might well find new and different themes to draw out of these responses. As I have stated above, this study is preliminary, designed to provoke future work by identifying questions and hypotheses that merit closer attention.

The Survey: Describing the Sample

As previously noted, the 257 respondents to this survey do not allow us to make general claims about the population of digital Bible readers as a whole. Survey respondents are geographically concentrated in the UK and US, relatively few in number and – importantly – self-selected, in response to my online promotion of the survey. However, we can still find some interesting information in the self-descriptions of these respondents. Describing the sample allows us to give some context to their open responses (considered in the next section of this essay), and will give future researchers an opportunity to contrast this study against their own. There are also, as we shall see, some unexpected imbalances among survey respondents, particularly in gender distribution, and these features of the sample at least raise interesting questions that will merit future investigation.

Of the 227 respondents who stated their gender, 61% (139 individuals) were male. This figure surprised me, since women read more e-books and own more e-reader devices (Rainie et al., 2012: 22, 31), and women typically make up the majority of Christian church congregations (Bruce and Trzebiatowska, 2012). So does the proportion of male respondents reflect a wider trend among digital Bible readers, or is this a distortion encouraged by my own sampling methodology?

At least some of this gender imbalance appears to reflect the demographics of the audiences exposed to the survey: the proportions of male and female respondents fluctuated over time, rising to 75% male among the cluster of responses to the American programmer’s endorsement. These unequal proportions of male and female respondents may reflect levels of participation in online technology discussions, which can be highly gendered spaces – as is the technology industry, particularly in Christian contexts (Fenimore, 2012). On the other hand, the percentage of male respondents never fell below 58% during the period of data collection, regardless of how the survey was advertised and shared, suggesting at least the possibility that more men really are using digital Bibles.

Not only are men more numerous than women in my survey sample, but they also claim to be using their digital Bibles in different ways. When survey results are separated by gender, some striking differences emerge: as we shall see, male respondents claimed to read their Bibles more frequently and with greater use of study tools. Evangelical Protestantism has a long history of support for male leadership, like many other Christian traditions, and we may see echoes of this gendered context even in the small sample size of this survey.

Statistics on the demographics of digital Bible users are limited. YouVersion, for example, does not ask users for their gender. With no evidence regarding the overall population of readers of digital Bibles, the gendered nature of the survey data cannot be conclusively explained, but the role of gender in digital reading practices certainly merits more detailed future study.

The 257 respondents to the Digital Bible Survey were – or at least claimed to be – regular readers of Scripture. Asked “How often do you read or listen to the Bible on a digital device (like a computer, tablet, mobile phone or mp3 player)?” 39% responded “every day,” while another 44% responded “every week.” Men in this survey sample were more frequent readers than women: 44% read every day (compared with 36% of female respondents) and 47% read every week (compared with 40%). Respondents were also frequent churchgoers: 34% attended at least twice every week, and another 56% attended once per week.

Only 130 respondents identified their location; 35% of these were based in North America, while almost all of the other respondents were based in the United Kingdom. Only 3.5% of respondents were younger than 20, but 31% were aged between 21 and 29; 28% 30–39; 20% 40–49; and 12% 50–59; 6% were aged over 60. This division by age may reflect a lower level of interest among older churchgoers in the specific online networks used to publicise the survey, but also echoes Pew’s findings that e-reading is most popular in the 18–30 age category (Zickuhr and Rainie, 2014) and that users of e-readers tend to be under 50 (Rainie et al., 2012).

Some respondents used their digital Bibles while on holiday (38%), at work (43%) or on the way to work (20%), situations in which the portability and discretion of a digital device might be expected to offer an advantage over a relatively large paper book; 34 respondents identified “other” reading locations and were invited to write an explanation. The longest response posted to the category of “other” focused on the convenience of a digital Bible as a way to fill time in public places: “When I’m not at home but have some down time. Like waiting for an appointment or for a table at a restaurant. Small moments where I have to just wait, I spend the time (or maybe its waste the time) browsing the digital bible.” Other respondents also emphasised the value of a digital Bible as a way to occupy time during periods of waiting or of mentally unchallenging labour: “on the train,” “at the gym,” “Audio: working in the yard; putting kids down for a nap.”

Interestingly, the largest response categories referred to locations in which paper Bibles are likely to be available: in church (63%) and at home (78%). Male and female responses were similar for most categories, but men were more likely to use a digital Bible at work (48% compared with 35%) and in church (67% compared with 53%); 18 respondents listed some kind of small group gathering, such as “when the church meets in my home for prayer meetings, bible study, etc.” Here again it seems that digital Bibles are being selected despite a likely availability of paper Bibles.

The survey also asked respondents what kinds of digital resources they had used to help them read the Bible. Two-thirds (66%) had used a reading plan, 58% had added highlights and bookmarks and 53% had used an online commentary. Other categories received fewer responses: 44% had visited “a website that explains the Bible” and 44% had shared verses on social media. The distinction between male and female respondents here was particularly striking: men were more likely to use a digital commentary (62% compared with 38%), add highlights and bookmarks (66% compared with 43%), and to use a reading plan (70% compared with 60%). The only category in which women were more likely to express an interest was the use of a website that explained the Bible, and here the difference was only slight (47% compared with 42%). These gender differences in the use of tools and resources suggest the possibility that male and female users may tend to favour different motivations for their digital reading – another possibility that merits attention in future studies.

Electronic Reading and the Reader’s Relationship to the Text

The Digital Bible Survey included one completely open question: “In what ways (if any) have digital media changed your relationship with the Bible?” This question was designed to be as broad as possible, to encourage respondents to share their own perceptions: 201 of the 257 respondents (124 men, 77 women) answered this question, with replies ranging in length from 440 words to one (“No”). In total, these 201 responses amount to almost 6800 words of text, and analysing these contributions suggests a number of intriguing themes.

Entering this block of text into Wordle generates a visual representation in which the size of each word indicates its frequency of use (see Fig. 1). The most common words, of course, are “Bible,” “bible,” “read” and “reading” – but these are closely followed in size by “easier,” “always,” “find,” “access” and “accessible.” Even at first glance, this image suggests that convenience is likely to be a major theme in these written responses; 19 respondents (9.5%) stated that their relationship with the Bible had not changed – “none,” “not at all” – and 39 respondents (19.5%) suggested that reading a digital Bible had had effects they perceived as negative; these responses will be discussed in the next section. Most of these respondents also went on to mention an advantage to digital Bible-reading, however, even if they felt their overall relationship with the Bible hadn’t changed, and only 12 respondents (6%) said nothing positive at all. For the remaining 189 respondents (94%), digital Bibles contributed something positive and valuable to their religious reading, in one or more of four areas: ease of access, ease of study, encouragement to more frequent reading, or social interaction.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

“In what ways (if any) have digital media changed your relationship with the Bible?” Wordcloud image of 201 responses, created using wordle.net.

Ease and convenience were by far the most common themes of these positive responses: 116 (58%) suggested that a digital Bible was easier to access, most often because it was always available. According to one respondent, “I never forget to have a Bible with me. When I’m rushing off to Church, I know I have it with me because I have my phone.” For another, “It makes it much easier to get into the Word because I always have it with me.” For some, this new closeness to the text of the Bible conveyed powerful theological meaning: “It makes me feel close to god [sic] all of the time.” According to another respondent, “The Bible has become part of my life. It’s there to guide me through every day-to-day situation.”

A digital Bible can also be easier to access for users with restricted sight or learning difficulties. According to one, “with my eyesight slowly deteriorating […] when I’m tired or light is low I can zoom in to read more easily.” Another user identified herself as dyslexic, and explained that “Having access to the Bible and to Bible commentary in audio form makes it possible for me to study the Bible with much less strain.”

There were 74 respondents (37%) who claimed that a digital Bible was easier to study, mentioning the opportunity to compare translations and access other resources. “I used to have a concordance,” one woman explained, but now “I regularly look things up online where I have access to numerous free resources including articles and blogs, an interlinear text with a dictionary and audio clips of words in Greek and Hebrew. This makes me feel much closer to the original text.” Eight respondents mentioned using their digital Bibles as a concordance, and the improvement in accessibility and ease of use was a common theme: “Being able to search the Bible without having to wrestle a huge paper concordance is brilliant,” one woman enthused. Digital resources were also of value to respondents who felt less confident with the text: one man made frequent use of online commentaries for “preliminary” answers to questions that arose during his reading, explaining that “The Bible seems less intimidating when I have the tools to interpret it as soon as I open it.”

One particularly committed male user of digital Bibles claimed that the power of digital scholarship is actually prophesied in the Bible itself. “I personally believe that digital Bible media is THE fulfillment of Dan. 12:4” – which states, in the King James Version, that “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” As he explained, “with just a few clicks I can go ‘to and fro’ through dozens of resources (I currently have over 6,500 resources in my software library), all of them hyperlinked, and knowledge definitely increases. This verse is obviously NOT about planes, trains, and automobiles, or the scientific revolution.” The book of Daniel is an important text for Christians interested in biblical prophecy, full of cryptic references to the end-times that can – for some readers – be interpreted through careful attention to present-day events. When this user reads Daniel as a prediction of digital Bible study, he is joining a debate that has lasted for many centuries and is now flourishing online (Howard, 2011).

There were 26 respondents (13%) who stated that they read the Bible more frequently now it was available to them in a digital format. Most cited accessibility as the key factor encouraging their reading: “I am more likely to grab my phone & read the Bible since I always have my phone with me”; “I can look up a quick reference if I am out and about (whilst walking in particular) so I read it more often.” Others credited their increased reading to a YouVersion-style digital reading plan that suggested readings, tracked their progress and sent automated reminders. According to one user, “having a reading plan that sends me push notifications on my phone keeps me accountable to keep up with the reading goals I have set. Thanks to my Bible app, I read the Bible much more consistently and purposefully.” According to another, “getting reminders to keep to the reading plan is like having another person telling you to do it so you feel bad if you don’t!” These responses echo the findings of increased reading frequency published by YouVersion (2013b) and the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Rainie et al., 2012). While I am not discussing my interviews with digital Bible users in this article, it is worth mentioning here that interviewees in conversation frequently complained about disliking the intrusiveness of automated reading reminders, even though some survey respondents mentioned this as a positive experience.

There were 13 users who mentioned the opportunity to introduce a social dimension into Bible reading, sharing and discussing their reading with others. One user expressed concern that “this generation does not take the word of God seriously,” and praised the opportunity to “use social media to share verses and God’s word with ALL 600+ friends on my page.” According to another respondent, “Bible tweets have changed my life!!!” Other respondents found digital Bibles useful in face-to-face interactions. One claimed that his audio Bible had “increased discussion with family who overhear and share questions and thoughts.” Another, apparently working in Christian ministry, considered a digital Bible preferable for her professional activities: “it’s less off-putting to those unused to a conventional bible when you’re visiting in a pastoral capacity.” As noted above, Pew reported in 2012 that 70% to 80% of American e-book readers preferred to use paper when sharing books with other adults and children (Rainie et al., 2012). For this Christian worker, on the contrary, the visual distinctiveness of the Bible acts as a barrier, and a generic digital reading device does not.

A very small number of respondents mentioned that this social dimension of digital media brought them into contact with new ideas, giving some limited support to Wagner’s (2013: 202) argument that digital media encourage theological and textual experimentation. According to one respondent, for example, “I like to read the verse someone has posted [on Facebook] and look at the responses both the negative and positive to see what I agree with or don’t agree with as well as considering views I hadn’t taken on that verse before.” Another claimed that “discussing what some passages mean in an on-line community has made me far more liberal in my interpretation of the bible, whether paper or digital.” A third respondent stated that a digital Bible “allows different insights, particularly from a range of different voices who allow me to see parts differently”, while a fourth complained that digital media “opens one up to ‘odd’ theology!”

There were 39 respondents (19.5%) who claimed that digital Bibles could have negative effects, expressing concern for their own Bible reading or for the fate of others who might be less careful or well-informed. These responses reflect three themes: the meaning of screens, the geography of the text, and the personal significance of the book as a material object.

For a few respondents, reading the Bible on a screen implies that the Scripture is no different from the other contents displayed on that screen. According to one, “I have found through my own heart and others I have spoken to, that we must be deliberate and careful not to allow God’s Holy Word to become just another app” – suggesting recognition of the possibilities raised by Rachel Wagner (2013). Another respondent believed that her screen was too closely associated with a different, unspiritual kind of attention: “when I’m using my digital Bible I’m less likely to just read and meditate on a passage (lectio divina) because I’m sitting at my computer and my brain is in WORK/STUDY mode, not PRAYER mode.” A third argued that this blurring of religious and non-religious activity encouraged distractions: “It’s hard to be disciplined with device-based Bible reading, because the Bible is just another app among apps or an e-book among e-books. Notifications about e-mails, etc., can easily distract from reading.”

A more common complaint argued that digital text encourages the reader to access isolated verses on demand, without attention to their wider context in the Bible – one of the concerns expressed by Alan Jacobs (2011). One user admitted that she was still “undecided” about the value of digital Bible-reading: her Bible was now more accessible and portable, but “it can mean I read the Bible in a very disjointed way. I.e. Quick snippets here and there rather than taking extended time over an extended passage or book.” Other respondents argued that digital Bible reading “loses the sense of physical location of a text within the whole bible”; now it was possible to click on books, one respondent had started to forget their order. Anne Mangen (Mangen et al., 2013) argues that the physical layout of text is important for memory and comprehension, and some survey respondents shared this concern: “I think it’s made my bible knowledge weaker – I used to know verses by heart and where to find them – now I just use the search function on my bible app!” On the other hand, one respondent claimed that forgetting the text could actually be an advantage: “I am more likely to search for what a passage says, as opposed to relying on my poorly recalled alternative – hopefully making sure I am more accurately understanding scripture.”

For some, understanding the physical layout of the text is essential not just to memory but also to correct interpretation. “I can no longer easily imagine the different books,” one respondent claimed, “and therefore I tend to appraoch [sic] on-line Bible passages alike, without thinking ‘what type of literature is this?’” Traditional printed Bibles include paratextual elements to guide interpretation, and these can also be missed in a digitised version: “I’m not sure if I take it in as well as I do if reading from a traditional book version […] – it is easier to flick your eyes over the page and see title headings […] and get a better overview and feel for the text.” These problems of memory and comprehension persisted even when the frequency of reading actually increased: “I probably read the Bible more (more often) but possibly less deeply.”

The third common complaint cited by survey respondents focused on the Bible as a physical object. This is what James Watts (2013) has referred to as the “iconic dimension” of a sacred text, its material form as a book that can be displayed, touched and possessed. One respondent spoke of carrying the paper Bible as “a witness tool” to be seen by non-believers – the symbolism argument proposed by Matthew Barrett (2013). Another response was more personal: “I feel more distanced from it [when reading on a Kindle] and frustrated at not having the personal contact of the paper and print.” For another, “there is just a special connection being lost when you come out of the tangible Book itself!” A third response valued close familiarity with a specific paper copy: “[my digital Bible has] helped me to read it more frequently […] However, it’s also reaffirmed my love for a physical Bible which you can learn to know and love (not idolising the physical but a copy which is yours).” This shift away from the idea of a Bible as “yours” is one of the five changes suggested by van Peursen (2014). A Bible app may offer access to the text of the Bible, but it does not allow the sense of personal history and ownership that can invest a material object with additional layers of meaning.

These complaints must be understood in light of one particularly striking feature of these survey responses. According to Pew’s 2012 and 2014 reports, e-reading does not replace paper reading: 90% of e-book readers had also read a paper book in the past year, and overall, e-book readers read more books more often (see Rainie et al., 2012; and Zickuhr et al., 2014). Users of digital Bibles, however, frequently asserted that they had almost or even entirely stopped using and carrying their paper Bibles, and this reliance on the digital intensified their concerns. According to one, “I now rarely take a paper copy of the Bible out of the home” – and because that old copy was no longer in use, “I’ve lost something of the familiarity I used to feel with the specific layout of a paper version.” These survey responses suggest that Bible readers may be unusual among e-readers in their willingness to abandon paper, a possibility that merits further study.

Conclusion: Questions for Future Research

These survey responses echo some aspects of the e-reading debates outlined above, but also suggest areas for future research. To summarise briefly, my survey respondents identified five positive effects of digital Bibles and three negative effects: the Bible is now more convenient, easier to access, easier to study, open to online conversation, and at least some read it more frequently, but a significant minority felt their Bible had lost its status as a unique and sacred object, worried that they were beginning to read isolated verses without understanding their wider context, and regretted the loss of a meaningful relationship with a physical object. We should remember that almost all of these respondents were frequent users of digital Bibles, so former users who had tried a digital Bible, disliked it and given up are under-represented in this study. These negative effects were reported by users who perceived digital Bibles as dangerous but still worth the risk.

To some extent, these results echo existing debates in the literature on religious and non-religious e-reading. More frequent reading has been reported by religious and non-religious studies, although the size of this claimed effect varies greatly. Concerns over the fragmented nature of text read on a screen and its effect on memory and comprehension are common in e-reading studies (see, for example, Mangen et al., 2013) and have been voiced by Christian commentators (Jacobs, 2011). The responses reported in this article show that many Christian users share these concerns, although a follow-up study would be needed to look for any measurable effects on users’ understanding of the Bible. On the other hand, Christian critiques of the symbolism of the material artefact of the Bible have been more likely to focus on its status as a symbol of faith, rather than as a symbol of the family relationships and life experiences associated with a particular object. Future work could look more closely at the way digital or paper Bibles materialise and preserve social meanings.

My survey respondents showed a number of gender differences, with men more likely than women to respond to the survey, more likely to use a digital text at work and in church, and more likely to use commentaries and reading plans and to annotate the text. Further work is needed to assess the role of gender in digital Bible reading, starting with a larger survey. It should be noted that leadership and teaching roles in many Christian churches remain male-dominated, with women excluded altogether in some cases. Male use of Bible study technologies could reflect enthusiasm for new study tools among those in leadership or training, or more general understandings of gender roles within church communities. Mia Lövheim has drawn attention, in a recent edited volume (Lövheim, 2013), to the failure of the field of religion, media and culture to attend properly to questions of gender, and future study of reading practices should take this provocation to heart.

Age and religious expertise are also matters of interest for future research. My survey respondents were almost all frequent churchgoers and frequent Bible-readers, and their use of digital Bible technologies must be understood in the context of extensive religious experience. Studies of non-religious e-reading have frequently focused on school- and college-aged users, and this remains a gap in our understanding of religious e-reading. It is very possible that reading on a screen could have different effects for a user who has not already been trained to use and understand a paper Bible. Publishers and Christian organisations are increasingly investing in mobile apps and online game environments that promise to teach Bible stories and Christian values to children, and study of these and other resources used by young Christians would be fascinating.

This article has briefly reviewed the existing literature on Christian and non-religious e-reading, introduced empirical data from a recent survey, and proposed some areas of overlap and difference worthy of future research. The Christian sector is one of the most lively, creative and successful areas of digital publishing, and closer study of the designs, debates and effects emerging in this area should produce findings of great interest to scholars of reading as well as researchers in the field of religion, media and culture.