2024 Sees Bible Sales Soar as Professing Believers Plummet
In a surprising turn of events, Bible sales are up 22% in 2024, a sharp contrast to the rest of total U.S. book sales, which have been flat with less than a 1% lift in the same period.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, 9.7M Bibles were sold in the United States in 2019, compared to 13.7M in the first 10 months of 2024. This comes at a time when the number of people who say they are religiously unaffiliated is at an all-time high, with 23% citing a lack of faith in a 2023 Gallup survey.
Several Christian bookstore owners have suggested much of the growth comes from a mix of first-time buyers, with a smaller percentage being current Bible owners wanting to diversify and add new versions to their collections. For the former, these include people who pick up the scriptures after seeing social media influencers sharing their faith.
Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, told WSJ, “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.”
Similarly, popular Bible app YouVersion says engagement with their software is at an all-time high, citing Philippians 4:6 (“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”) as the most searched-for verse. CBN reports:
“Every month of 2024 became the highest month in YouVersion for both app installs and daily use…YouVersion saw an average of 11.2 million new device installs per month and about 14 million people engaging in the Bible every day.
Conversely, J. Mark Bertrand, founder of Bible design website Lectio.org, was more pragmatic in his assessment of why folks were picking up new Bibles: “I’d like to say there is a craving for knowledge of scripture, but a lot of smart people are thinking about Bible marketing and catering to every whim for Bible study.”
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