Well that’s really weird! Why are sales rising? And why is literacy conversely falling?
A guy named Timothy Beal wrote a book with a slightly-misleading title
The Rise and Fall of the Bible which attempts to investigate this odd phenomenon. Just to give you an idea about how much money Bible publishing makes nowadays, I quote him:
The biggest Bible publishers in this highly competitive business guard their sales data closely, but reliable industry sources estimate that 2007 saw about 25 million Bibles sold, generating revenues of about $770 million in the United States alone. That was an increase of more than 26 percent since 2005, which saw U.S. sales of about $609 million. In fact, the Bible-publishing business has been enjoying a healthy compounded growth rate of close to 10 percent per year for several years. Even during the high point of economic crisis in late 2008, when other book sales were hurting badly, Bible sales continued to boom, with an estimated $823.5 million that year. Indeed, Bible publishing tends to thrive during times of war and financial disaster. Although it’s too early to know for sure as I write, it may well turn out that the latest economic bust will be another boom time for Bible business.
He is of the opinion that this oxymoron of high Bible sales and low biblical literacy could be attributed partly to ‘biblical consumerism’ replacing biblical literacy:
Could it be that biblical literacy is being replaced by biblical consumerism? In today’s consumer culture, we are what we buy, wear, and carry. We identify ourselves by our patterns of consumer choices, by the market niches we buy into. It’s gone beyond that post-Cartesian proof of existence, “I shop, therefore I am.” Today, it’s closer to “I shop for what I am.” The culture industry makes and markets identities. I want to be outdoorsy, so I buy a lot of Gore-Tex, some “Life is good” shirts, and a Yakima rack for my Subaru. High school and college students identify the cultures on different campuses by brands: this school is very Hollister; that one’s more American Apparel.
At the same time, we consumers are convinced that the shortest route to self-improvement is through new products. Products change lives, right? My big New Year’s resolution might be to become an organized person. So the first thing I do is go to the home store and buy a bunch of plastic boxes. Never mind the empty ones in my basement that I bought a year ago.
Or say that I want to strengthen my identity as a Christian and grow deeper in my faith. I want a more God-centered life. I want to be “in the Word.” I feel like I should be reading the Bible a lot more than I do. After all, like most people, I believe that the Bible is God’s Word, that it’s totally correct in all of its teachings, and that it holds the answers to all of life’s most basic questions. So what do I do? Buy a Bible. Or, more likely, buy another Bible. A marketing executive at a major evangelical publishing company told me that, according to their research, the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year.
The funny thing is this. Many people (especially Christians) buy a Bible, but apparently relatively few ever actually get the guts to read through it. Beal attributes it to the fact that the ‘cultural image’ of the Bible as this self-explaining “book of clearly-defined solutions” is not what people see when they crack open its pages. Let’s be honest: far from being a book of ready-made, black and white answers, the Bible is really a library of endless questions upon questions and a fount of ambiguity and ostensive ‘contradictions’, many of them not so easy to reconcile at first glance. (As a Catholic, this is where I can’t help but grin at the Protestant - more specifically ex-evangelical - Beal pointing out something the Church knew all along:
Scripture never pretends to interpret itself or be easy to understand.
) Confronted with this, readers are thus discouraged from going any deeper. They don’t feel that this Bible gives them what they expect - they go off and buy another one, rinse and repeat.
This is really what the modern Bible publishing business gets into: it knows that there is a huge market of people who hold this cultural stereotype of the Bible and want to experience it for themselves. This is why there are countless Bibles of every size and shape: different translations, different editions, different media. A quick look through Bible catalogues show that a variety of items are all being marketed as “the Bible,” many equipped with different aids that purport to speak for and supplement the Text but in most cases practically supplanting them. These ‘values-added’ Bibles help give the public a feel of ‘reading’ the Bible without being confronted by the actual text itself: these supplements are often designed to grab the reader’s attention, effectively becoming the Scripture
in place of the Scriptures.
- must get into the hands of as many people as possible. This so-called ‘Puritanic biblicism’ gave rise to 
At least, the old me. A couple of really good scripture study guides and involvement in an enlightening study group is helping to knock this habit down. I’m embarrassed to say how many Bibles I have in my house, but let’s just say the ‘average of nine’ makes me feel a little bit better.
It is really the latter idea that I’m going with here.
And I can sympathize: I mean, imagine opening a Bible and finding that the very first page you’ve flipped into is Leviticus. 