AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Americans may be watching how much they're spending these days given how the cost of goods and services have gone up. But that seems not to be true when it comes to Bible sales. This is curious given how frequently we hear that Americans are not as religious now as they've been in the past. What's going on with this Bible boom? Joining me now is national reporter Bob Smietana of Religion News Service. Welcome to the program.
BOB SMIETANA: Oh, thanks so much for having me.
RASCOE: Can you give us some numbers? What does this Bible boom look like?
SMIETANA: Sure. So so far this year, about 18 million Bibles have been sold, which is about 11% up from last year. What's interesting is last year, sales were up 20% from the year before. So we're in - for the last four or five years, we've been in kind of a Bible-selling boom. And kind of one reason is that there are just a lot of different kinds of Bibles to buy.
RASCOE: Is it then maybe not that more people are buying Bibles, just that people are buying more than one version of the Bible?
SMIETANA: That, I don't know. I know that there are a lot of different kind of Bibles being sold. That's the one thing I do know. So there could be both things going on. One of the things I did while working on this story was just call up a Bible seller. What are you seeing? And she said to me - told me a couple of things. One is, she's got some folks who are younger, maybe in their 30s and 40s. They dropped out of church. Now they're starting to go back and they need a Bible, right? One woman said, hey, Charlie Kirk just died, and I want to go back to church. But then there's other older folks who are buying it for their kids or they're buying for their grandkids. So there's a kind of whole range of all kinds of different people buying Bibles.
RASCOE: What are some of the most popular versions of the Bible right now?
SMIETANA: The best-selling is the paperback version of the English standard version. You get it for about six bucks, and people buy it in bulk at churches. Another one that's really popular is called "She Reads Truth." It's part of a Bible study for women. There's a great Bible called the "Grace Bible For Kids." It's a Bible that is for kids with dyslexia. It's really different colored and it has different kind of print. Parts of the font make it easier for kids with dyslexia to read. And that thing sold so many, they couldn't keep it on the shelves.
RASCOE: There's so many different translations of the Bible. Do you think that plays into this?
SMIETANA: So one thing about the Bible is this - it's written in Hebrew and Greek. So you translate that into English. Well, English changes all the time, right? Words mean different things. So you can have a word-for-word translation that doesn't get the thoughts in mind. So there's translations that are word-for-word. There's some that are thought-for-thought. There are some that are paraphrases.
And then the Bible is complicated, right? It's 2- or 3,000 years old. You hear some king's name. You hear them putting on sackcloth and ashes or whatever they're doing, and you think, I don't know what's going on. And so sometimes there'll be notes, but also an easier translation can make you understand, oh, that's what they mean.
RASCOE: This Bible boom - it's coming at a time when organized religion is declining. Are people maybe reading or studying on their own? Like, what might this bit of sales data tell us about how religious Americans are, at least in regards to Christianity?
SMIETANA: So one thing we know is that people who aren't part of a house of worship or they don't identify a particular religion - they're still spiritual, so you could have some folks who are reading on their own and not going to a church service. You also could have people who are just anxious. We have had war, political polarization. We have everything going on immigration. There's a lot of tension. So people might be looking for kind of peace and answers.
RASCOE: That's Bob Smietana, national reporter for Religion News Service. Thanks so much for talking with us.
SMIETANA: Glad to be here.
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