What soaring Bible sales reveal about the liberal cultural experiment

Bible sales are booming.

New sales data from Circana BookScan shows that Bible sales have increased 22% through October of this year compared to the same period last year, the Wall Street Journal
reported. In the first 10 months of the year, Americans purchased 13.7 million Bibles, which means Bible sales are on track to surpass last year’s 14.2 million.

Here’s why that matters: Over the same period of time, print book sales increased less than 1%.

The fact that Bible sales are outpacing other print books at a significant rate raises an important question: What is driving more Americans to purchase Bibles?

Even more important: The WSJ reported that first-time buyers are contributing significantly to the Bible-buying surge. Why, at this specific moment in time, are non-Christian Americans turning to the Bible?

The answer, according to the Wall Street Journal, is that more Americans are looking to the Word of God for hope in a chaotic and disordered world — and they’re finding answers in the Bible.

“People are experiencing anxiety themselves, or they’re worried for their children and grandchildren. … It’s related to artificial intelligence, election cycles…and all of that feeds a desire for assurance that we’re going to be OK,” Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, told WSJ.

“They’re looking for hope with the world the way it is, and the Bible is what they’re reaching for,” explained Bethany Martin, a Christian bookstore manager, of first-time Bible buyers.

The Bible gives a very specific picture of what the good life is — and it’s diametrically opposed to the ‘good life’ that modern Western culture promotes.

But it’s deeper than anxiety or hope-searching.

I think many Americans, especially younger ones, are grappling with the rotten fruit of our postmodern, progressive, and liberal culture in which every person gets to be, essentially, their own God.

This is what American culture says today: You are the designer of your own life. You choose your identity. You can be whomever or whatever you want, and your desires are not bound by the limits of reality or truth. In fact, there is no truth at all. The only truth that exists is what you decide internally for yourself, “your truth.”

Relativism, of course, is not limited our cultural philosophy.

Over the last several generations, morality has become completely subjective. No longer does our culture believe in transcendent moral principles. Today, the prevailing moral framework can be summarized in the abortion rallying cry “my body, my choice.”

With the rotten fruit all around us — broken families, addiction, the mental health epidemic, hyper-individualism, the culture of death, consumerism, tribalism, a loss of the sacred, busyness, etc. — it seems that Americans are turning to the word of God as the antidote to an anti-human way of life.

That’s because the Bible tells a much different story.

In the Bible, the Creator God is God of all creation — everything that exists. The Bible says there is objective truth, and God is the arbiter of it. The Bible says that humans have a specific role and function in the world, and deviations from that vocation lead to chaos and destruction. The Bible, moreover, gives specific moral guidelines for humans; deviations from those principles, which Jesus upholds, lead to chaos and destruction.

Overall, the Bible gives a very specific picture of what the good life is — and it’s diametrically opposed to the “good life” that modern Western culture promotes.

In other words: The liberal cultural experiment is failing. Americans, then, are turning to the Bible and God because they’ve learned that whatever bill of goods modern culture sells them, it doesn’t lead to the good life.

Now they’re searching for true life — and they know where to find it.