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Today's Topic:
A recent news headline proclaims "Bibles Are Booming!" Which certainly seems like very good news indeed. However, a closer analysis of why the sales of Bibles have increased, to whom and the type of Bibles being sold may result in a far less enthusiatic reponse to the headline.
A recent Wall Street Journal article stated; "Always a dependable seller, the Bible is in the midst of a boom. Christian bookstores had a 25% increase in sales of Scriptures from 2003 to 2005, according to statistics gathered by the Phoenix-based Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, a trade group. General-interest bookstores, while declining to give figures, have also seen increasingly strong sales. "Bibles are a growth area for us and we're giving them more space in our stores," said Jane Love, religion buyer for Barnes & Noble."
What is interesting to us is the comment that she adds to this statement; ""It's partly because of the way they've evolved over the last three or four years."
"For a long time the Bible was just the Bible," noted Kevin O'Brien, director of Bibles at Tyndale House. "You put it out there and people bought it. They didn't ask about the options, because there weren't any options. But now, especially in evangelical circles, people are seeing their lives not just in color but high-definition color, and they want the Bible to fit in with that. This is not your mother's Bible."
"What people are saying is 'I want to find a Bible that is really me," noted Rodney Hatfield, a vice president of marketing at Thomas Nelson. "It's no different than with anything else in our culture."
In an article published in The New Yorker entitled "The Good Book Business" Phyllis Tickle, a former religion editor of Publishers Weekly and the author of popular prayer books, writes, “There’s a certain scandal to what’s happened to Bible publishing over the last fifteen years.” Tickle is contributing to a new Bible paraphrase for Nelson called “The Voice,” which is intended for the progressive emergent church, so she is not entirely opposed to modern repackaging. The problem, as she sees it, is that “instead of demanding that the believer, the reader, the seeker step out from the culture and become more Christian, more enclosed within ecclesial definition, we’re saying, ‘You stay in the culture and we’ll come to you.’ And, therefore, how are we going to separate out the culturally transient and trashy from the eternal?” The consumerist culture in which BibleZines and the like participate is, to Tickle, “entirely antithetical to the traditional Christian understanding of meekness and self-denial and love and compassion.” In Tickle’s view, reimagining the Bible according to the latest trends is not merely a question of surmounting a language barrier. It involves violating “something close to moral or spiritual barriers.”
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