Secular Humanism is responsible for the sagging sales of books, not declining literacy.
There may or may not be fewer readers today. There are, however, fewer buyers. The explosion of the Internet in the last ten years has certainly altered the reading patterns of literate, connected people (the only people who ever really bought books to begin with), but people have stopped reading novels largely because writers have stopped writing novels worth reading.
Writing programs have largely failed writers (with a few exceptions) because they've become preternaturally occupied with mechanics and the superficialities of writing. Certainly grammar is important to a new writer, but even more important than understanding the purpose of a prepositional phrase is understanding what makes people tick. If you're going to write something worthwhile--something that sells well and speaks to people on many levels--you have to write something theologically and mythologically substantive.
The Marxists and Atheists of all stripes that are running our universities simply reject the well-roundedness of a classical education in favor of the specificity of a technical college. Bible as Literature classes are a joke because they bring the Bible in as a cute little plaything, pat it on the head nicely, and tell it to go play with its toys. If you're a writer and trying to write a believable bad guy, you have to understand why people do bad things. Psychology doesn't tell us this because it's not theology so it doesn't care about the "why", only the "how". You can't hope to write a believable bad guy until you've figured out how to distill down what makes some people bad and articulate that back to your audience.
Writers should be, by nature, observers of human nature and curious about people in general. Every writer of consequence I know can reconstruct a situation that draws into focus human behavior that they have personally observed in others. This is the essence and the distillation of writing. It's not nearly so much about sentences and plot and proper grammar. Those things are all important, don't get me wrong. But let's look at Star Wars as an example:
Watching the original movies again this weekend made me realize how horribly-written the first two movies are. The dialogue is largely atrocious and the acting (outside of Alec Guiness and Harrison Ford) is mediocre at best. But anyone who's a student of storytelling knows that George Lucas used Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a framework for telling that epic story. Certainly the novelty of the special effects was an element in its popularity, but just like Harry Potter decades later, it's the mythological and theological aspects of the story that made it so phenomenally popular. As a Christian, I can't recommend the theology of Lucas' movies because they are so clearly Eastern in their mysticism. But the fact that they are theological at all is the point here. Of course Darth Vader is dressed in black. He's the bad guy!
Post-modernists may have successfully neutered literature (a la Phillip Roth and Cormac McCarthy) and they may dance around the May Pole in narcissistic adulation for slaying the great dragon of Modernism, but they have only ensured that future generations will forget them as naive naysayers. It's the writers who tap into the mythological and the theological and who do it in a way that's both unashamed and understanding that will thrive in a new literary ecology that demands products be made of hardier stock than the soulless drivel that publishers keep getting back in the form of returns.
If you really want to make your writing career an important one that contributes something to history, go to seminary and get an M.Div. instead of an MFA.
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