Bible consumerism

[mindstalk]

Long but amazuing article on bible sales in America.

Some quotes:

"the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year"

"forty-seven per cent of Americans read the Bible every week. But other research has found that ninety-one per cent of American households own at least one Bible—the average household owns four—which means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has."

"Have you ever had a white stain appear underneath the arms of your favorite dark blouse? Don’t freak out. You can quickly give deodorant spots the boot. Just grab a spare toothbrush, dampen with a little water and liquid soap, and gently scrub until the stain fades away. As you wash away the stain, praise God for cleansing us from all the wrong things we have done. (1 John 1:9) "

'“2:52 Boys Bible: The Ultimate Manual” promises “gross and gory Bible stuff.” In the “Rainbow Study Bible,” each verse is color-coded by theme. “The Promise Bible” prints every one of God’s promises in boldface. And “The Personal Promise Bible” is custom-printed with the owner’s name (“The LORD is Daniel’s shepherd”), home town (“Woe to you, Brooklyn! Woe to you, New York!”), and spouse’s name (“Gina’s two breasts are like two fawns”).'

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Great news, 47% of all Americans read a book every week! ,-)

Seriously, while I'm not Christian I don't understand the idea to sell the Holy Scripture. If it is so important, shouldn't it be given away? Surely the Churches have loads of money and Bible Dispersal ought to be the way to make people believe? (Okay, I've read the Bible - I have three at home - and it didn't convince me...)

[lyceum-arabica.livejournal.com]

there are groups that give it away... the hotel bible people (begins with a g?) do.

as far as reading it every week... i suspect they're counting the tiny snippets you recite together in church. somehow i doubt 40% of america seriously sits down and studies that book each week. (if they did you'd think they'd have noticed more of the ridiculous parts...)

and i have to admit i've got three copies myself (maybe five, actually... i kept collecting copies of the little green ones they hand out for free on campus. proverbs are entertaining :-) ). The only one i paid for myself is the size of my thumb, and it got it 'cause. well. it was a bible the size of my thumb. I'm not sure i've really read any of them.

(shrugs) I don't know. If someone handed you a book and said "here. whether or not the people around you still believe in it, this book has been cited as a major foundation of your culture for the vast majority of the past 1,000 years", you'd probably pick yourself up a copy and flip through it, just out of curiosity and a sort of general respect for your ancestors. The stats don't necessarily imply that we all worship the bible and trust it implicitly. Just that we think it's worth looking at.

[saganhawk.livejournal.com]

The Gideons International. According to their website, they distribute more that 63 million scriptures each year.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

I don't buy the respect for one's ancestors argument. Chances are good your ancestors didn't have much of a choice about having to follow the interpreters of the Bible, and chances are also pretty good the Bible itself doesn't deal with your ancestors but with ancestors to those who follow the Torah or Quran instead. Even if your ancestors didn't have the alternatives of "Christianity" or "Death" they probably had very strong surrounding social pressure and childhood socialization into accepting the Bible.

Worse, the actual dedication to the Bible isn't a constant and frequently unknown. I've heard - but I can't prove this - that Americans in the latter half of the 19th century and early half of the 20th were _less_ religious than today. So if we want to respect such ancestors...

Second, the Bible _isn't_ particularly great.

Sure, there are good bits and even a few great bits but 80% of it is boring, ranting, silly or outright offensive. And some of the good bits become a bit more suspicious when taken in context. It is no wonder a lot of "christians" never have managed to get through the book which should define their faith, or that direct quotes are so much more popular than the overall message.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

hotel -> The Gideons

Yeah, 40% seems high too. Someone else suggested lying to pollsters to feel better. I didn't think of church; I was thinking vaguely of calendars with inspirational snippets on them. As for ridiculous parts... they may just consistently look at a subset. Also see opinions about how some evangelicals seem to attend more to Paul and Revelation than the Gospels (not to mention the Bible Belt having the highest divorce rates in the country.)

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Heh. But probably not all churches have tons of money, and anyway which Bible? You've got the deep issue of which translation, plus Catholic or Protestant? and more shallow issues of stuff mentioned in the article, highlighting and such, and intermediate issues of notes and glossaries or whatnot -- stuff I'd never thought of, but I've only seen an old KJV and the Gideon I took from a hotel.

Hmm, my atheist family owns 2 or 3 Bibles between us, possibly one per person. That's including the one or two with my parents (at least one inherited, I think); I just have the Gideon. Useful for religious arguments.

And yeah, the Books of God all need an editor, badly -- I've found fantasy religions tend to be distinguishably by making more sense than real ones -- but KJV at least shows where a lot of literary references come from, and all that Jewish alleged history in the bulk of the Old Testament I haven't read might be good for something histori-culturally.

But the Personal Promise Bible... *shakes head*.

[pompe.livejournal.com]

I don't want to think about how many Bibles my father own, but it has to be _many_. Old, mostly. And another huge slew of Lutheran traditionals. He belongs in the category of Very Religious-Historical Interested Atheists of the kind priests hate, the kind who questions if it is possible to be Christian without believing in Satan, as an example. I like to think I have a better selection of Communist dogmatics, though.

My own Bibles include one old standard I think I either bought for 1SEK at a yard sale or actually got from school in some sort of mishap, one little Gideonite green one - New Testament only - we got in the military and which I took home because I didn't want to have it around nor wanted to throw it away and one of the newest, annotated translations - the "2000"-version - I of course got as a present from Dad. And I have the KJV in electronic text format on the computer.

I think the issue of which translation makes it important to churches to hand them out freely so potential converts and current believers get the "best" version. Some people will pay for more elaborate versions, but they should be willing to pay a lot. I mean, a decent family bible of impressive size should cost at least as much as an impressive atlas, and people shell out hundreds of euros for those. But such a Bible is a generational investment, nothing people buy every decade or so. I think the family Bible my mother inherited is at least 150 years old and my father's is older than that.

[fanw.livejournal.com]

Um, the publishers still sell lots of bibles even if they are given away for free by the charities that buy them. It's BIG business if you can get somebody to give it away to their 10,000 TV constituents!

[pompe.livejournal.com]

Churches have a fine tradition of printing and publishing themselves, and not too unsurprisingly my most recent Bible is indeed published by a publishing house owned by two churches (and specializing in x-tian literature, of course) and translated by a joint-church Commission.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Anyway, as noted some people *do* give Bibles away. But there's no reason for that to stop other people from selling them with some profit-enhancing spin, if people will buy, which apparently they do. All Hail Mammon!

[fanw.livejournal.com]

I'm basically atheist, well, agnostic, well Unitarian... um, you get my drift... and I own a King James bible, the book of Mormon, and a copy of the "standard" Apocrypha. (I store them right next to my Bulfinch's Mythology, Norse Myths, and the Nibelungenlied.) At some point I just came to the decision that I should be able to get the ubiquitous media and literary references even if I don't believe anything in there. I once had a Revised English version, but I wanted all the "thee"s and "thou"s. If it's not Handel's bible, all the quotes seem wierdly off. And I still am kicking myself for not picking up the $2 thick gilt German edition at a garage sale years ago. It's the closest I'll ever get to a "first translation". So I can absolutely believe the numbers for "average bibles per household". It's still a bit shocking though!