The Bible Is Like an Owner’s Manual In New Demand

Why The Bible is suddenly selling out with the most popular ones back-ordered through August

A State of Michigan ad shows doctors handing parents a newborn baby with an owner’s manual. Takeaway: “Babies don’t come with manuals — so try government services.”

Novelist Anne Lamott echoes this attitude: “Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual.” Except humanity does have an owner’s manual, and interest in that book has soared since the Pandemic began.

• Bible sales began jumping during the depths of March 2020. By January 2021, the №1 podcast (of all podcasts) was on the Bible.
• The Bible in a Year podcast went to №1 in January 2021, beating all podcasts, with more than 4 million cumulative downloads in the first two weeks. The related Great Adventure Bible is now sold out and back-ordered through August.
• The Christian Post similarly reported a 44 percent jump in sales of the Life Application Study Bible and a 60 percent increase in the sale of their Immerse Bible after the Pandemic began.
• New Bible Study groups are forming at churches nationwide and via Zoom and YouTube. With Bible sales booming, marketing is ramping up for a host of new versions of the Bible, including a new Divine Mercy Bible and a Word of Fire Bible.

“The rise in prayer intensity supersedes what the world has seen for years,” Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, an associate economics professor from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, concluded.

“Google searches on prayer skyrocketed during March 2020 when the COVID-19 went global,’’ she reported. “Using daily data on internet searches for prayer for 75 countries, I find that search intensity for prayer doubles for every 80,000 new registered cases of COVID-19.”

Humanity began assembling a type of “owner’s manual” more than 3,500 years ago. History’s best-selling book of all time includes thousands of years worth of accumulated wisdom on the best way to love and live your life.

“God’s Word is your owner’s manual for life,” Pastor Rick Warren explains. “It contains principles for health, finance, marriage, other relationships, business, and much more.”

More importantly, the Bible is the story of God and His children: History (aka His Story), and our story rolled into one book of stories within the greatest story of all time.

The trouble with owner’s manuals? We don’t tend to read them until something needs immediate repair

Father Mike Schmitz started the Bible in a Year podcast because he realized nearly all the content he saw online and in mass media “lacks a Biblical worldview.”

More worrisome, he realized he himself was mainly using the Bible like a manual, using it as a resource book to look up information for homilies, talks, inspirational quotes, pearls of wisdom, or even “for our own edification.”

So Schmitz went to fellow Minnesotan Jeff Cavins to design the podcast to allow members to go through the entire Bible in a year while developing that “Biblical worldview.” Cavins is a former evangelical pastor who returned to Catholicism, developing the Great Adventure Bible project.

Father John Riccardo, the executive director of Detroit-based Acts XXIX, almost simultaneously released The Christian Cosmic Narrative: The Deep History of the World, telling a summary of the Bible’s story over just 150 pages.

Riccardo writes, “many Church-going Christians have never heard the gospel, at least not in a compelling and life-changing way. And, until we do, nothing will really ever make any sense. We don’t understand why we’re here, where we’re going, or how to get there.”

The Old Testament includes the Bible Jesus and His followers read, the roots of Western Civilization, culture, law, and social norms. Even if you aren’t a believer, reading this historic book helps you understand where our society came from, how culture and institutions evolved through today.

Al Kresta, president of Ann Arbor-based Ave Maria Radio, adds, “If we want to keep the commandments, we must recover the story behind them. Story enlivens our imagination and sense of moral purpose. Knowing our story establishes our identity, and, in this age of identity politics, we need to enter into that story or be at the mercy of the scores of distorted stories about the history and shape of the world.”

The trouble with any owner’s manual? Humans tend to “wing it” and not spend much time “going to the manual” until something is broken:

• We owned a 2003 Honda Accord for 14 years, looking at the manual twice a year, dog-eared to the same page to figure out how to change the time on the clock during the switch to and from daylight savings time.
• Our 2015 Chevy Camaro and 2019 Buick Cascada have clocks that automatically update, and the cars never break down, so we haven’t looked at either of their owner’s manuals even once.

But in the 1970s, when cars were less reliable, people looked at owner’s manuals far more often. They looked at the Bible far more often as well: every hotel and doctor’s office used to have a Bible, so it was often the only book to look through in an unfamiliar place.

Now, people go to their phones for their preferred content, arguing we live in a “post-Christian culture.”

Fueling Bible boom? 77% say Americans have an “existential crisis?”

When something is broken, and you know you “have the manual,” people return to them, especially when they have “why” and “how-to” questions.

The demand for that “owner’s manual” just hit a new high as 77 percent of Americans told the OnePoll survey Americans had an “existential crisis” of meaning.

Cavins said after studying the Bible for more than 43 years, he can still go to a Bible study and “learn something,” even in the smallest group from a “babe in Lord new Christian” reading the Bible for the very first time.

Cavins says our current era reminds him of 587 BC Jerusalem (when the city and temple were destroyed). Eventually, the people “were allowed to return” with the ancient Jews seeing the need for three things needed then and now: new worship/sacrifice, time to learn the Word of the Lord, and time for rebuilding a true community of believers.

“People love things that age, that tell their story,” Cavins said. “A Bible becomes an heirloom they can pass on to future generations. Paper stocks are going up. People want a personal letter.”