The Work of Post-Literate Religious Revivals

A year or so ago in this space, I argued that genuine universal literacy was never really tried. Drawing on Adam Fox’s Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, I made the case that our supposed “post-literate” condition looks less like a fall from some idealized state of grace and more like a worsening of the dismal always-already historical norm: most people across most of history, including right now, have absorbed information orally, visually, and socially, with text serving as one strand in a larger web of communication that the majority of the population never bothered to engage with directly.1