The Unread Bestseller - Part Two: The Book that Built the World
Why the Bible Gathers Dust in the Age of Distraction
In the last post, we briefly highlighted the Bible’s impact across Western civilization—justice, democracy, human rights, and even the weekend.
However, there is a strange irony about this fact:
The book that built the modern world now sits unopened on most shelves, bedside tables, and coffee tables.
If statistics are kept on this sort of thing, it is likely the least-read, best-selling book on the planet.
To Russia with Love
Years ago, the church I served as founding rector, Christ Church, formed a friendship with a small Orthodox congregation in Russia. This was just after Perestroika, when Soviet walls began to crack open and Western relationships became possible. Leaders from their community (Kungur, Russia at the base of the Ural mountains, 1,000 miles east of Moscow) came to visit in Texas, eager to connect across cultures, commerce, and faith.
As part of our welcome, we gave them a gift—a Russian-language Bible, beautifully bound and presented in a box.
They were touched. Grateful. Truly honored to receive it.
Two years later, I traveled with a small delegation from our church to visit them in return. It was a warm reunion. Familiar faces, shared meals, clumsy Vodka toasts, and a deepening sense that we belonged to something greater than politics or nationality. There was a fledgling common faith we shared: The Christian faith.
That first night, after dinner and speeches, we exchanged gifts again.
I brought them a few tokens from our church. They gave us some keepsakes from theirs. Then, perhaps too casually, I asked where the Bible was—the one we had given them.
Their faces lit up. “Ah, yes! The Bible from Plano!” the host said.
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He excused himself, then returned with a small step-stool. He climbed up to a tall shelving unit near the family room, reached behind a few boxes, and carefully retrieved a white, embossed gift box. He opened it with reverence. Inside was the Bible we had given them, wrapped in the same thin rice paper we had used to wrap it two years earlier.
He opened the box to show us as if it were a treasure chest. Pulling back the tissue paper, there is was:
Untouched.
Unsullied.
Unread.
Why Just a Souvenir?
They kept it as a souvenir. Elegant, foreign, but off-limits. Not for reading, just for safekeeping—maybe hidden like a treasure, maybe forgotten too. The Word, untouched, was treated more like an antique than a living text.
This isn’t just a Russian habit. It’s ours too.
Cranmer gave us the phrase: “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.” Most Americans might stay with the word “own.”
Strange but true: the Bible is the bestselling book in America and also the least read.
Why is this? A few things come to mind.
Five Reasons Why the Bible is Seldom Read
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