The Bible is still widely described as the best-selling book of all time. Guinness World Records identifies the Christian Bible as the best-selling non-fiction book, with an estimated five billion copies sold or distributed. Recent figures also suggest renewed interest in Britain: SPCK, using Nielsen BookScan data, reports that UK Bible sales rose by 134 per cent between 2019 and 2025.
Yet buying the Bible is not the same as reading it. A ComRes survey for the Bible Society and Scottish Bible Society found that 46 per cent of respondents thought the Bible was important, even though they did not read it very often; only 8 per cent said they read it regularly.
That makes me wonder who is actually reading the Bible. In my own circle, very few people seem to know much about what is inside it. When I mention reading the Bible, the response is often either horror or mockery, as though I had confessed to some strange intellectual lapse.
So few people are prepared to engage seriously with the Bible today — ironically, perhaps, because of Christianity itself. Many have been driven to seek meaning elsewhere, often in Eastern religion, meditation, myth, archetype, inner transformation, awakening, consciousness, or spiritual paradox.
Christianity preserved the Bible, translated it, preached it, copied it, canonised it, and carried it across centuries. But it has also made many thoughtful people unwilling to read it, because they associate the Bible with dogma, guilt, institutional control, anti-intellectualism, sexual repression, hellfire, or moral bullying.
That is not to deny the sincerity or goodness of many people within the Church. It is simply to recognise that the institution can sometimes stand between the reader and the text.
So the Bible is often rejected not because people have read it closely, but because they think they already know what it is. It appears dead, authoritarian, or morally compromised before it has even been opened.
Yet the Bible itself, especially the Gospels, is not dead in that way. It contains dream, symbol, psychological drama, moral reversal, inner awakening, prophetic rage, existential fear, tenderness, betrayal, blindness, healing, death, and transformation. In many ways it is exactly the kind of text spiritually curious people ought to be able to engage with, if they could get past the Christian packaging.
At the same time, many of us still want to call ourselves Christian, though we neither go to church nor read the Bible. We inherit the name while avoiding the sources. The result is a strange distance: many of us remain what Richard Dawkins has called “cultural Christians” – attached to Christian inheritance, but often detached from church, doctrine, and the Bible itself.
The problem is not only unbelief. It is prior injury. Many people have been inoculated against the Bible by bad religion.
The Bible is important not because it must be accepted uncritically, but because it should not be rejected unread. It is one of the great sources of Western moral and symbolic life. To read it is not necessarily to submit to Christianity; it is to encounter the text from which Christianity drew its language of sin, mercy, judgement, forgiveness, sacrifice, redemption, and inward renewal.
The tragedy is that many people reject the Bible because of what Christianity has made them feel about it, before they have discovered what is actually there.
