Bible sales are up! Pray people read them
October 2024‘s Bible sales rose 22% as compared to the previous year. Circana Bookscan industry analyst, Brenna Connor, stated, “The religion book market has been a bright spot of growth. … Bibles are leading that growth, [and] subjects like Christian Life … are also up, reflecting increased interest for Christian subjects in the U.S.”
Briana Fitzpatrick, a New York-based artist, decided to purchase her first Bible after she and her father watched the documentary about the “Duck Dynasty” star, Phil Robertson, entitled, “The Blind.” Fitzpatrick stated, “[Phil] pulled out his Bible and… you could tell he’d had it for decades and decades. It was … held together with duct tape.” She expressed she wanted her own Bible to pass down for generations, filled with highlights and notes her children could read and “see how the Lord spoke to me through it.”
With Bible sales booming and more people realizing their need for a personal relationship with God, there truly is hope for America.
On Oct. 11, 1798, John Adams, American Founding Father and second president of the United States, while president, wrote to the Massachusetts Militia and said, “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale gets through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [Emphasis added.]
The looming question is, “Are we still a moral and religious people?”
Brett Waite of Hillsdale College wrote, “In the Founders’ understanding, they believed that government ought to support true morality and virtue. That is, morality and virtue grounded in the laws of nature and nature’s God, from which they derived man’s natural rights and duties. The Founders also believed that the laws of nature and of nature’s God, along with the natural rights and duties derived from them, were in accord with their Christian beliefs. Government therefore ought not to be hostile to Christianity, but rather should support it with laws that are friendly to it and encourage its flourishing among the citizenry.”
If our nation’s Founding Fathers based our founding documents and laws upon morality and virtue that was in accordance with their Christian beliefs, perhaps the United States should consider doing what the Continental Congress did on Sept. 12, 1782. On that date the United States Congress approved and endorsed the printing of the King James Bible, with the intention of giving a copy of the Bible to every immigrant entering the country. This Bible is called the Aitken Bible and was known as “The Bible of the Revolution,” as it was small enough for soldiers to carry in their pockets, which they did. It also is “the only Bible to receive Congressional approval,” according to WallBuilders.com.
While the original Aitken Bible is a very rare book, you can purchase a reproduction on Amazon.
This was an effort by the United States Congress “to make the Bible accessible to all Americans.” Congress approved the purchase of 20,000 Bibles.
Dr. Stephen Flick wrote an article on Christian Heritage Fellowship in which he quoted Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer.
“After presenting more than 80 pieces of evidence of America’s Christian origin, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer – writing the majority decision for a unanimous court – arrived at this same conclusion in 1892: ‘… many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declaration to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.'”
Benjamin F. Morris, in his classic work, “The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States,” discusses the numerous rulings and studies of the Supreme Court, Congress, and other governmental agencies that clearly recount these institutions’ advocacy of Christianity, resulting in the conclusion that America ‘is a Christian nation.'”
Noah Webster, known as the “Schoolmaster of America,” on page 299 of “History of the United States,” wrote, “By the principles of the Christian religion we are not to understand the decisions of ecclesiastical councils. … No; the religion which has introduced civil liberty, is the religion of Christ and his apostles, which enjoins humility, piety and benevolence; which acknowledges in every person a brother, or sister, and a citizen with equal rights. This is genuine Christianity, and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.”
America was once called the “Great Melting Pot,” where many cultures were melded together to form one great nation. Today that does not seem to be the case in our country, as many cultural groups are staying divided. So, what is missing? For the things in a pot to meld together, it took heat. I am convinced that the heat of the “Great Melting Pot” was the flame of Christian evangelism. That is what it is going to take to meld this country together – the flame of Christian evangelism – to make us “one country, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
The book of Ephesians in the Bible, in chapter 4 and verse 13, teaches us that the Bible brings us into “the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God.”
Robert Winthrop, a politician representing Massachusetts in the United States House and Senate from 1840 to 1851 and who was the 18th speaker of the House of Representatives, spoke of the importance of the Bible in our society when he declared, “Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled by a power within them or by a power without them; either by the Word of God or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”
Our nation not only needs more Bibles distributed among its people, but it needs more of its people reading the Bible.