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• Michelle Legro

  Psalm Pushers

  Tags:

  Bible,

  documentaries,

  publishing,

  religion,

  selling out

  

  Like Shakespeare productions which throw Lear on a cruise ship or Ophelia on the moon, the Bible has been getting freshly updated for increasingly smaller audiences. For eco-conscious liberals, the Green Bible highlights the passages “that speak to God’s care for creation” and a freshly conservative edition scrubs out all the liberal bias accumulated over the past thousand years (avoiding “gender-inclusive language,” “liberal wordiness,” and changing any use of the word “comrade” to “volunteer.”)

  The history of the Bible publishing industry, outlined in the February issue of Reason, traces the translation of the Bible into English, prohibitions on its printing, its relative unavailability in colonial America, and how an eighteenth-century Bible famine turned into a nineteenth-century Bible feast. “Business analysts describe Bible publishing as a mature industry with little prospect for strong growth,” the Boston Globe reported in 1986, but the growth of the industry is less important that its staying power, which is formidable. But how do you continue to sell something that is widely available, whose plot is unsurprising, and whose author needs no introduction?

  The Bible publishing industry exploded by lowering the price point of the book, with Bible societies giving it out for free and then diversifying and personalizing the product. (This technique may sound familiar to anyone who has used the internet in the past five years.) A 2003 survey of American households by Zondervan publishers, the largest Christian publisher in the US, determined that there were 3.9 bibles per household. (One per room? One per child? One per limb?)

  The 1969 Maysles brothers documentary Salesmen followed four Bible pushers as they traveled through New England and Florida. The group blows into town in a convertible, each with a street-tough nickname like a pack of G-rated reservoir dogs. Selling Bibles isn’t that different from selling knives or cookies. It’s not something everyone needs or necessarily wants, but much like the bestselling report on the 9/11 Commission, it’s comforting to have on a shelf. And the Bibles hawked by the salesmen are weighty, gilded family affairs, like a big shiny car you park in the driveway. The Maysles caught these salesmen on the edge of obsolescence, but what’s obsolete is the sell, not the product. That’s still huge.

  The Greatest Business Story Ever Told [Reason]
  The Good Book Business [The New Yorker]
  Salesman (1969) [Wikipedia]

  January 20, 2010
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