BONUS: Are gen Z buying more bibles?

This bonus episode of Still Unbelievable! is the audio part of a video uploaded to the ReasonPress YouTube channel. All episodes of Still Unbelievable now also get uploaded to YouTube, and as a bonus, we also do a few videos that, for practical purposes, are available on YouTube only, link in the show notes. As a special treat for this easter, there will be additional videos on our channel addressing issues with the Easter story.

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Episode Transcript

(00:08):
This is Matthew. This bonus episode of Still
Unbelievable is the audio part of a video I have uploaded to
the Reason Press YouTube channel.
All episodes of Still Unbelievable now also get
uploaded to YouTube and as a bonus we also do a few videos
that for practical purposes are available on YouTube only.

(00:29):
Link in the show notes. As a special treat for this
Easter, there will be additionalvideos on our YouTube channel
addressing issues with the Easter story.
Are Gen. Z buying more Bibles?
You may have seen reports that Bible sales have increased

(00:51):
significantly, like 87% significantly.
Christians obviously love stories like this and they waste
no time at all repeating them. But are they guilty of sharing
things without checking what is actually being said?
See this example tweet from Justin Brierley, who has been

(01:11):
beating the drum of Christian revival for the past few years
and chasing every hint, desperately wishing it was a
true sign. Ashbury 2023 anyone?
Yes, everyone else has forgottenabout it too, but I digress.
See how Justin is excited about this sales increase in sales,
apparently driven by Gen. Z.

(01:34):
Let's see what the article says.Notice how the article talks
about the increase in terms of sales value, the amount of money
spent, and not sales volume. The article does not mention how
many buyables were sold, only how much were sent.

(01:56):
This is suspicious. Maybe the sales volume isn't
that impressive and the increasein money spent is down to price
rises. Let's do some investigation.
Notice how in the first paragraph it states that the
publishers have credited Gen. Z for this increase?
Nowhere in this article is any extra information given, so we

(02:19):
don't know why Gen. Z are credited.
We're just told that they are. Well, that may be true, but
evidence free claims don't impress me much.
Moving on, the next paragraph says that 2019 to 2024.
So an increase in sales of to 87%.

(02:39):
But no word on sales numbers, nomention on how much Bibles have
increased in price during that time.
Seems that would be important information because if the price
of a Bible has doubled in those five years, then the sales
volume has gone down. Let's see if we can find more
information. It says here that the

(02:59):
information is from Nielsen BookData and reported by Christian
publishers SPCK. Sadly the Nielsen data is only
available to subscribers so I amunable to get access to that.
But I did find this page giving news on Christian reporting and

(03:21):
it gives some additional information which seems
appropriate and confirms my concerns.
Note that religion grew 4% year on year from 2023 to 2024.
Now this is only one year of sales, not five years, but it is
still a long way off 87%. It also registers growth in the

(03:42):
religion category, not just Bibles.
So we need more information. What does the publisher SPCK
say? They proudly shout about who has
repeated the story. Which itself is interesting.
A couple of Christian outlets, Christianity Today and Premiere.

(04:03):
Then we have the usual hive of right wing shitiness here.
And then a couple of slightly less city but still right biased
news articles. That in itself tells its own
story. Ah, why are young people turning
to the Bible? So they have an idea of the data
and what it shows. Do they?

(04:24):
Well, not so fast. They reference a report here
that shows that Gen. Z are more likely to report as
spiritual. And then they make the leap from
that, that they must be the oneswho are buying the Bibles.
Yeah, when I say that Christianshave a poor relationship with
evidence, this is the sort of thing I mean, come on, people,

(04:44):
do better. Despite further attempts, I
could not find anything that gave me reliable sales volume
data for UK Bibles from 2019 to 2024.
What I can do is find viable prices for that period by
checking Amazon price history and doing some maths.

(05:04):
Thankfully there is a helpful website where I can track
historical prices for certain products on Amazon.
The caveat being that these products must have been for sale
for that period. Here is an example NIV Bible.
We can see that the price in 20/19 was 5 lbs and it is now

(05:25):
£8.27. We can assume these prices as
average prices and then use those against the original sales
figures and calculate an approximate volume.
It goes like this. So there's the original sales
figure divided by the original price in 2019 and we have a

(05:46):
total approximated of 538,000 sales.
We can then get the higher salesfigure with the current price
and we get an approximate volumeof 607,000.
We can then do some additional maths with those numbers and we
get an estimated price increase of, or rather sorry, an increase

(06:14):
of sales volume of 12.8%. Oh, but that's nowhere near 87%.
OK, shall we try a different Bible here is a King James
Version Bible, not so popular inthe UK but we can still use it
to give a base figure which we can use to compare against the

(06:35):
one that we've just done. We can see that in 2019 the
price moved a lot more. So I'll take the average one, a
nice easy mathematics 1 here of £10 per Bible and the current
price is 1255, a lower difference.
So it will come out at a higher percentage volume sales.
So it will be a good comparison.I love Wolfram alpha.

(06:59):
Any mathematical issues? I recommend Wolfram Alpha.
So we have 269,000 sales there and then with the higher figure
we have 400,000. OK.
And if I run the mass on that one for the percentage increase,

(07:20):
we get a volume increase of 48%,significantly higher, but still
nowhere near 87.5%. So as always, be careful with
numbers, be careful of what's reported.
Pay attention to what isn't reported because as we see this
shouting about of an 87% increase is not volume, it's

(07:41):
value that makes a big difference.
And until next time.