Why Do American Protestants Own So Many Bibles?
(ANALYSIS) I grew up very evangelical in a very evangelical time. A Southern Baptist born in 1982 and raised in a family where going to church wasn’t just something you did a couple of times per year, it was a regular rhythm of the week.
It just so happened that evangelicalism hit its numerical peak in the United States in the mid-1990s, right when young, impressionable Ryan was entering a youth group for the first time.
I am pretty sure I spent time at First Baptist Church of Salem, Illinois three days a week during my high school years. I was at Sunday morning and Sunday night worship. I went to youth group during the week and I often was part of a Bible study as well.
The Bible was such an integral part of my upbringing that it’s hard to describe. We did Bible quizzing drills and scripture verse memorization. By the time I got my driver’s license, I had a pretty good grasp on the meta-narrative laid out in the 66 books that make up the Old and New Testaments. I had Bibles from all kinds of translations, too.
Of course, the old stalwart was the New International Version (NIV), but I also had the ESV and the NRSV on my bookshelf. I even remember getting several copies of Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” Bible as swag at a conference I attended.
You don’t know what’s weird until you see your life through someone else’s eyes, though. I distinctly remember that I had one of my friends come by my house when I was a junior in high school. He walked into my room and the first thing he encountered was my book shelf. It had a full row of Bibles.
He looked at me with the most puzzled expression on his face and said, “Why do you have SO MANY BIBLES?” I was completely dumbfounded by this question. I knew my buddy was a Christian, a Catholic more specifically, so I just didn’t know where he was coming from.
I asked him how many Bibles he had. His answer was simple, “I have one and it was given to me by my grandma when I had my First Communion.” I just didn’t even know what to say to that. Protestants (and more specifically evangelicals) love the Bible. They are instructed to read it daily, to memorize the words, and to constantly wrestle with it throughout their lives. Other traditions just don’t have that same emphasis.
This is where a very smart theologian would go into a discussion of Sola Scriptura and authority and all that. You won’t get that from me. You get graphs. So, let me show you the genesis of this entire post and how it got me thinking very carefully about how Catholics think about the Bible compared to Protestants.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.