Bibles, Books, and Brain Rot

On the vibe shift and the progressive squeeze

Three stories caught my attention over the past week.

The first is Oxford’s word of the year for 2024. Ready for it?

Brain Rot

Oxford defines Brain Rot as:

(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration."

If you would like something a little more concrete than that, well, here you go. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you look back at the most recent Oxford words of the year, you’ll notice that they tend to name a word of the year when its trendiness is moving just beyond its peak. No one is saying “goblin mode” anymore, which was the word of the year just two years ago. If that’s right, that a word being selected as word of the year should be generally seen as the beginning of the end of a trend, then “brain rot” being chosen should be surprisingly comforting. It’s discouraging that it’s reached the cultural saturation point to be chosen, but it’s encouraging to think that this might mean there is a collective exhaustion of brain rot content. People feel as though their brains are thoroughly rotted. I’m hoping this signals a generational gasping for air in a media environment that has been suffocating them.

I’ve been saying for a long time now that social media is a distortion zone. No matter how you feel about the recent election, it seems to have proven that point. I consistently noticed that the narrative in most corners of social media was that the race was going to be close and/or Harris was going to win. And yet that obviously is nowhere near what happened in real life. There were signs pointing that way the entire time, but if you got most of your information from social media, you would have missed them.

It seems that the massive swing-and-miss of predicting this election on social media has served, at least for some, as a wake-up call to social media’s distorted reality. It’s a rude awakening for lots of Millennials and Gen Zers to find out that the online world is minuscule compared to the offline world. But there is a real opportunity here. There are people to the left and right of Christianity who are starting to bonk their rotted brains on the imminent frame and wonder if there is something more to all of this. The actual Good News is that there is. I’ll come back to that.

Books

The second data point is that Barnes & Noble, which was on the road to bankruptcy just six years ago, is about to finish opening sixty new stores this year. But it’s not just them. Indie bookstores are also on the rise again with 290 stores opening last year. Part of the reason for this, ironically, is BookTok, which is sort of a weird snake-eating-its-tale phenomenon where social media ends up driving rising book sales which leads to demand for more bookstores. There’s plenty of debate about whether BookTok is actually good for reading or not (the points made in the video linked are incredibly valid and worth considering), but the point stands that demand for books and the activity of reading is trending up, even if the quality of books isn’t what some would hope for. If social media can push people to read Bad Books, can Bad Books eventually lead people to read Good Books?

In fact, in the Morning Brew article I linked in that paragraph, they make a connection—even if just tongue in cheek—between rising book sales, new book stores, BookTok, and people’s desire to stop rotting their brains.

And while Americans are reading less than they did a generation ago, instead choosing to stare at brain rot on their phones immerse themselves in digital activities, indie bookstores have found an unlikely ally: TikTok.

Even if Morning Brew was joking, I think they’re right. BookTok is an organic example of the rare phenomenon where social media trends actually push people off of social media and into the physical world in a healthy way. People are taking up reading again to escape brain rot and it’s creating demand for more books and bookstores. Even though it might be a minority, and we still have to deal with the problem of kids barely being able to read at all, it might not be a stretch to say that we could be seeing a reading revival. I can only think that’s a good thing in the long run, if for no other reason than a collective return to reality, and how it opens up the doors for people to recover many cultural artifacts and ideas that seem to be on the verge of being lost.

Bibles

Which brings me to my third, final, and probably most exciting data point: Bible sales rose by 22% this year. Here is a line from the Wall Street Journal report on this trend:

Cely Vazquez, a 28-year-old artist and influencer who has appeared on the reality TV show “Love Island USA,” recently bought her first Bible—one from the “She Reads Truth” line—at Barnes & Noble.

That line was written last week. A 28-year-old influencer and contestant on Love Island bought her first Bible, a CSB, from Barnes & Noble and documented it on her TikTok. Does anybody else read that and feel like we stepped into a weird time machine or is it just me?

This is my favorite line from the article:

The demand for Bibles is rising despite evidence that the country is growing increasingly secularized.

I’m getting shadows of the election here. Look on social media and people seem to be secularizing. But look under the hood a little bit and you’ll find a completely different story.

They go on to share the actual numbers:

The Pew Research Center found that about 28% of adults in the U.S. now consider themselves religiously unaffiliated. Yet Bible sales rose to 14.2 million in 2023 from 9.7 million in 2019, and hit 13.7 million in the first 10 months of this year. Readers are also stocking up on related titles that provide guidance, insights and context—even sets of stickers to flag particularly meaningful passages.

What happens a few years from now after roughly 14-15 million people bought Bibles, many of them for the first time, for two years in a row? Reading might not be the only revival we’re on the cusp of.

Now, as Alan Noble recently pointed out, there are reasons to temper some of our hopes. Maybe people are being more attracted to the vibe of Christianity than to the substance of Christianity. Some people might be looking more for a counter-cultural lifestyle to add to their curated identity and for some, being a Christian is a way to rebel against the excesses of our woke culture. Fair enough.

That said, I’m still hopeful. I have no problem with people being attracted to the vibe of Christianity if we have healthy churches that are willing and able to move them from the shadow to the substance, from the image to the reality. I readily admit that is a big If. It seems like finding a good, healthy church is like finding a needle in a haystack. Lord, help us. There is always the chance (and current reality) that a lot of churches just red-pill themselves and become seeker-sensitive for tradwives or whatever. They capitulate to the New Vibe instead of being “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom treasures new and old” (Matthew 13:52). That would be a shame. But if these new seekers can find themselves in good churches that are ready to shepherd them well, and if churches can bring themselves to resist (or repent and abandon) the performative temptations and actually care for and disciple them, good things are ahead.

When you combine these three data points, you’re looking at people who are tired of their brains being rotted by social media, deciding to pick up books and read, and some of them are deciding to pick up the Bible for the very first time. It’s like they bumped their head on the glass imminent frame in their pockets one time too many and it finally cracked, letting a little bit of God’s transcendent light in for the first time, or at least for the first time in a long time. I’m always looking for a reason to be hopeful, and this gives me hope.

Bewilderment

I want to add one more, and slightly more specific reflection on this, and it is about progressive Christians and the deconstruction conversation.

As I lay out in my forthcoming book, there are many reasons why deconstruction happens. But bound up with all of it is the church, Christian culture, and of course, the Bible itself. Deconstruction essentially begins to occur when there is enough cognitive dissonance between the stated beliefs of one’s environment and the person’s lived experience and observations in that environment. Their “world” starts to fall apart. A lot of this has to do with culture adopting some of the virtues of Christianity but divorcing them from the reality of Christianity so that, as Chesterton wrote, you end up with the “old Christian virtues gone mad.” So when the church abandons it’s virtues and the culture adopts but distorts its values, there is a significant amount of confusion that happens that basically breaks someone’s categories and they have no idea what to do.

So what a lot of people do is leave the church they view as compromised and join the culture that appears to be virtuous but actually is “gone mad.” This is why some people talk about “leaving the church to find Jesus” even though that’s categorically impossible.

But if these trends hold (which isn’t guaranteed by any means) what you’re going to see is the culture going back to church. Which means that the people who left the church to join the culture will be left by the culture when it goes back to church.

And it will be very, very—I have no other word for it—weird.

It will be weird when the exvangelicals who left the church for the culture in the name of justice are left by the culture for the church in the name of righteousness.

Those who spent all of their energies deconstructing with no intention of reconstruction and who set themselves on abandoning orthodoxy are going to find themselves in a tight squeeze. Even if it is nothing more than a vibe shift, it will be a vibe shift away from the progressive transgressiveness they left the church for and back toward more religious attitudes. How much more so if there is any substance at all that comes from this vibe shift?

It’s possible none of this plays out. But this is something I have my eyes on. Will the tarot cards and the witchcraft books on the Barnes & Noble shelves be slowly phased out and replaced with devotional books over the next 5 years?

I have no idea.

But I’ll be watching.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.