Our culture is being destroyed by being dumbed down, and by allowing the vital arts of reading, thinking, and reasoning to be dispensed with.…It is thinking Christians who will help save the day, not dumbed-down and illiterate ones.

I write a lot. And a lot of folks copy, share, reprint and republish what I write. Sometimes they do it without me even knowing about it. Sometimes they ask me first. But either way, I am increasingly finding that some of these folks want to take some heavy-duty liberties with my pieces.

Now that can be a good thing—I am not the world’s greatest writer. But too often they are doing radical changes for various reasons, including the desire to greatly reduce the length of what I have written, in the interest of keeping the attention of contemporary readers.

They want everything REAL short and sweet. And worse yet, they think that relying on AI is a great step forward. I beg to differ—big time. I have had to tell some of these folks that I am not a fan of chopping things down to hyper-short pieces and relying on machines to do the dirty work.

I am seeing this editing trend more and more in various Christian circles, and I have had to respond to some of these folks as well. To be honest, I have very real concerns about all this. Here are a few key things that I believe must be said—and carefully considered—about this.

Sadly it seems that too much of this is simply an accommodation to the surrounding culture. Instead of challenging it to excellence—including intellectual excellence—we are willing to dumb ourselves down to accommodate it. Whether that actually means we are helping it or reaching it better is not at all clear.

We keep being told that we must keep everything short. Nothing over 400 words. Keep it down to a 2-minute read. Use videos and pictures, etc. But there are significant problems with this approach. Most folks today have the attention span of a goldfish. I for one do not think we should cater to this, or in effect promote it. Our culture is being destroyed by being dumbed down, and by allowing the vital arts of reading, thinking and reasoning to be dispensed with.

That is a great way to help destroy Western civilisation, so it is odd that conservative Christian groups would more or less give it a hearty imprimatur. It is thinking Christians who will help save the day, not dumbed-down and illiterate ones.

And related to this is how we demand everything in an instant. Christians are increasingly not reading books anymore. They are not even reading serious articles—they prefer a 2-minute YouTube video or a 20-second TikTok offering. If a sermon goes over 10 or 15 minutes, they get restless and reach for the car keys. I do not want to contribute to this downward trend.

I suspect most believers today have a hard time reading the Bible for more than a few minutes a day—if they do in fact read it daily at all. I suspect they would prefer the Readers’ Digest version of Scripture, or a cartoon or video version. Again, I do not think we should cater to that or encourage it—we should instead resolutely stand against it.

The push to have really short articles, and to only have one-sentence paragraphs grates on many writers, including myself. Paragraphs exist for a reason, and eliminating them for whatever reason is far from ideal. Why put up the white flag of surrender here?

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