In Front | The Bible and Literacy

The British author Richard Dawkins once claimed that, “A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”

Even as an outspoken atheist, Dawkins supports the idea of putting a King James Bible in every English school. In his own time, T. H. Huxley, the man who was known as Darwin’s bulldog and who coined the term “agnosticism,” also recommended the Bible as a mandatory subject for elementary school children. Both men viewed the Bible as a landmark in literature and essential to literacy in English.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New England was the most literate part of the world because it was illegal not to teach children to read. People were taught to read so they could read the Bible. And the language of Bibles like the Geneva Bible and King James Bible went a long way in shaping English as a popular language.