The Good News: Bible sales soaring, led by Gen Z 

Bible sales are up 22% year over year through the end of October, according to figures by a leading book sales tracker. 

That compares with overall book sales which are up less than 1% during the same period, reports the Wall Street Journal, which cited the data from Circana BookScan.  

The boost in sales has been attributed to “disproportionate [interest] among Generation Z and, more specifically, among young men,” said Everett Piper, a columnist at the Washington Times.   

Some are hailing the sales boom as part of an overall return to the foundational Christian beliefs of the civilized West. That’s because the sales results contradict what the progressive left has described as the shrinking of Christianity in America.  

The Pew Research Center and the Public Religion Research Institute have helped leftists celebrate what Pew calls the “shrinking share of young adults who were raised Christian (in childhood) [and] have retained their religious identity in adulthood over the past 30 years.”   

But Piper notes the dramatic increase in recent Bible sales could mean that Gen Z is sick of the previous generations’ “self-centered, godlike hubris.”  

“Stop and think about it,” writes Piper. “Today’s kids have been exposed to some of the craziest navel-gazing nonsense one could imagine. For decades, we’ve told them global warming will destroy the planet, only to repeatedly move the date of Armageddon when our climate priests prove to be false prophets.”  

Piper counts religion-like ideologies of LGBTQ and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as other false prophets that have led Gen Z’s older brothers and sisters astray.  

“Do you think that maybe, just maybe, today’s 20- and 30-year-olds are buying Bibles because they might instinctively know that ideas that have stood the test of time for some 2,000 years are likely better than the dumb ideas their teachers and school principal came up with about five minutes ago?” asks Piper.  

The answer for one Minnesota Catholic bishop is a resounding and historical “yes.”  

“Let’s face it: The Bible has been – certainly for Western civilization, but even all over the world – the main source of meaning, purpose, value,” Bishop Robert Barron told Fox News. “I think people are turning back to the Bible in greater numbers because they’re looking for that, and they realize instinctively they’re going to find it [in the Bible].” 

Bishop Barron should know, since the publishing house he started in order to sell his Word on Fire Bibles has been blazing a trail. Targeted at first-time Bible readers, unbelievers and searchers for the truth, it contains illustrations and commentary on the Bible from Barron and some of history’s great Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and G.K. Chesterton.  

“We ordered 50,000 copies, which to us seemed like a lot, and we expected those would last for at least a year or two,” Brandon Vogt, senior publishing director at Word on Fire and general editor of the Word on Fire Bible series, told the Catholic News Agency. 

“Shockingly, we sold out the leather copies within 24 hours and most of the hardcover and paperback editions within a few weeks. Sales haven’t slowed since then.”   

Barron said the embrace of the Bible as a self-help book by popular culture figures such as Dr. Jordan Peterson also has fueled interest in the Good Book.  

One first-time Bible buyer testifies to it.  

Artist Briana Fitzpatrick tells Fox News her father used to use a family Bible to read to her. And while she was more or less spiritual, it wasn’t until she saw Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson read from his old, taped-together Bible that she felt the need to have a family Bible of her own that could show her children “how the Lord spoke to me through it.”  

Robertson “pulled out his Bible and … you could tell he’d had it for decades and decades. It was just held together with duct tape,” Fitzpatrick says.  

In its religious research Pew notes, a little glumly, that Christian identity “still is the stickier affiliation for older Americans.”  

But the latest Bible sales trend shows Christianity could be a “stickier affiliation” for a rising generation of Americans who see the time-tested Word of God, in Piper’s words, as “a lot better than the banality of the religion of the rainbow and its alphabet soup of CRT, DEI, BLM and LGBTQ.”