Heather Bellamy spoke with the Bible Society about their findings in a recent poll

Rachel Rounds

During questions to Church Commissioners in the House of Commons the Labour MP for Huddersfield Barry Sheerman asked what steps the Church of England was making to increase Bible literacy amongst school children. Mr Sheerman followed up this question to the Conservative MP for Banbury Tony Baldry by asking whether Mr Baldry was also worried about the Bible Society's recent poll which showed the low level of biblical knowledge amongst children and parents. To discuss this Heather Bellamy spoke with Rachel Rounds, who is head of media at the Bible Society.

Heather: So let's start with this poll you commissioned YouGov to do: who was it studying and what was being asked?

Rachel: It was studying both parents and children and it was a broad-brush analysis of quite literally how much parents and children knew about Bible stories across the country. It produced some not entirely surprising results - some quite shocking results I think - such as nearly half of parents never read the Bible to their children, over half of children didn't know that Jonah and the Whale was from the Bible, a third didn't know the Nativity or the Good Samaritan came from the Bible. And then there were other ones that you had to laugh at really, but essentially are not funny - but nearly 20% thought that Harry Potter was a Bible story and a third thought that The Hunger Games was a plot from the Bible. So you can see that biblical literacy in this country is certainly not as great as it used to be and that's something that the survey also pointed out, that there was a generational shift.

Heather: So what made you commission this poll?

Rachel: I think it was really anecdotal evidence at Bible Society that we'd received from parents, children and teachers. I think probably the best example I could give from myself is that we'd done some work with Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, a few times in the past. I was having a conversation with him and he said to me that he teaches undergraduates at Royal Holloway College in London. And he said: "Do you know these are really bright, four As at A-level students and we do Milton Week - and during Milton Week we study the most important poem of his which is 'Paradise Lost'". And he said: "Do you know what, Rachel, I would say just about half of all those students didn't know who Adam and Eve were".

Because I know my Bible you kind of assume that other people do - and I just thought that is shocking!

He's said publically in interviews that if he had to choose the Bible or Shakespeare as a subject taught in schools he would always pick the Bible because its relevance to literature is so much more important. And that's the nub of the kind of worries that we had around biblical literacy and why we decided to conduct the survey.

Heather: So not even just from a faith perspective but what would be being lost from a literature perspective?

Rachel: Oh gosh, where do I start, Heather? You couldn't really be an English Literature student or you'd be a very poor one. You couldn't understand TS Eliot, Tennyson, and Milton: oh, the references to the Bible are just littered through our greatest prose and poetry. You can't understand so many of our laws. I mean, you look at history: Henry VIII, the Civil War, and Cromwell. The Bible is just so imbibed in our culture. Think about all the phrases that we use and we don't even think about: 'all things to all men', 'the blind leading the blind', 'can a leopard change its spots?', 'the fly in the ointment', 'the writing on the wall'. As a new mum myself we've all been saying, 'I've bought a Moses basket for my child'. And the problem is that in five, ten years from now, if we carry on the way we're going, people will have no idea why it's called a Moses basket. And those are the things that they're so much part of our culture that we don't realise what happens as we begin to lose it - and lose it we will and it would be an absolute tragedy.

Heather: So if Bible literacy is so low, what are Bible sales like in this country?

Rachel: Well it's still the bestselling book in the world - but that unfortunately isn't really the same tale in our country because we have become a very secular nation. Although our research would show that probably about half the families in the UK do own a Bible - but owning a Bible and reading it as we know are two different things. And of course everybody in this country has access to a Bible: you just go to your local library or go online, so access here in the West is not a problem as it is in countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran. But it's just Bible credibility: it's the fact that people almost take it for granted. If you've got something that you can access, people are just not very interested, unlike in countries like China where the growth of the Bible is absolutely phenomenal. We are involved with the biggest printing press in the world, Amity, and they've given out 50 million Bibles just to people in China, so there's a great hunger there. In this country I think we rest on our laurels and think: Well, you know, the Bible is always there, I can read it if I want to - but actually people don't and don't engage with it and that's what the campaign is encouraging people to do, to give every child the opportunity to engage with the Bible.

Heather: So what are your main concerns, then, about the low level of Bible literacy? Is it just from the literature perspective and the history of our nation, or do you have other concerns about the low levels?

Rachel: Yes, I think the Bible is just a very rich and wonderful book. We're not a proselytising organisation in that sense, so all we would say is that we want to offer the Bible to the world. So we say: Here is this book, it's the Bible, it's an amazing book but we want you to try it for yourself. So we offer it to people. Now I can't force anybody to believe in God - nobody can, that's up to that person and God - but what we want to do is just to make it available and credible and to encourage people.

If you did a straw poll in Sainsbury's or down the pub and said to people, 'What are your thoughts about the Bible?', you'd pretty much guarantee that 99% of people would have an opinion about it - but then when you say to them, 'Have you actually read it?', then most people would go: 'Well, no, not really'. So that's the bit where we come in, because we say: How about having a go, reading it, trying it for yourselves: you may be surprised.

Heather: I mentioned earlier about some MPs talking about your poll in a debate. Has there been much response to your findings politically?

Rachel: Yes. We do the National Prayer Breakfast every year, which is held in Westminster Hall, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke and both David Cameron and Ed Miliband were there this year. Christians in Parliament do a lot of work in Parliament and we work with them and so a lot of Christian MPs were given the report and I think that's how the questions in Parliament came about. But we're hoping to have a debate in the autumn in the House of Commons, obviously not in the chamber, but with some leading secularists and some leading proponents of the importance of teaching sacred texts in schools. We're going to have a debate around that, because the whole discussion about faith schools and the Trojan horse, Birmingham schools: it's all very topical at the moment. I think it's a really important issue that again many parents haven't really thought about and thought it through and I think it's going to become a much more important issue as time goes on.

Heather: Finally, as well as the debate in the autumn, is the Bible Society planning anything else in response to the poll?

Rachel: We are. At Easter we launched the Bedtime Bible App, which if you have an iPad you can download for free on iTunes: it's called Bedtime Bible App. Its five Bible stories for children between about the ages of five, eight and nine. It's a fantastic book: it's got Jonah and the Whale, the Prodigal Son, Adam and Eve and the Easter Story in two parts, with beautiful illustrations. It's a really fun, good read and really written with children in mind. We've had lots of parents and children reading them - and the idea is to encourage parents to read with their children. We think the app's great and the feedback we've had has been absolutely fantastic.

If any of your listeners are in Western-super-Mare between the 26th, 27th, 28th August, that's just after the Bank Holiday, we will have a 50' inflatable whale in which children can climb inside. There'll be a circus troupe and we're going to be sharing the story of Jonah and the Whale from Jonah's point of view, sitting in the whale's belly. Then next year we'll be hopefully launching a booklet to go into schools and libraries which will have five retellings of Bible stories from authors including Anthony Horowitz and Sir Andrew Motion who is going to do a poem for us. The lead cartoonist on 'The Beano' comic is also going to do a comic strip of a Bible story, so we're really excited about that.

So please do go to our website because there's lots of information about what we're doing and what's coming up at www.biblesociety.org.uk.