Bible sales in the United States are soaring—up 22% compared to the same period last year. By contrast, all other total U.S. print book sales rose by less than 1% in the same timeframe. I don’t think this sharp rise is just a quirk of consumer habits; I believe it’s a symptom of something deeper. As Americans wrestle with anxiety over artificial intelligence, political polarization, and a world that feels more dangerous by the day, many are turning to scripture in search of meaning, stability, and hope.
But why now? Why this surge in interest in the ancient texts of the Bible?
Some point to the collective anxiety of our time. Jeff Crosby, president of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, suggests that “People are experiencing anxiety themselves, or they’re worried for their children and grandchildren.” Others, like 28-year-old artist Cely Vasquez, see the Bible as a source of comfort. “I felt something was missing,” she says. “It’s a combination of where we are in the world, general anxiety, and the sense that meaning and comfort can be found in the Bible.”
Yet this cultural moment is about more than fear or nostalgia. It reflects a broader fracture in American society, where questions of truth, morality, and reality itself are pulling the nation apart. Like the Soviet Union before its collapse, America is splintering—not along geographic lines but along ideological and moral ones.
The Soviet Union, as journalist Timothy Burke observed, failed because it never integrated its diverse cultures and peoples into a unified national identity. Its “peripheries were ready to peel away” the moment central authority weakened. Similarly, America is experiencing a kind of ideological secession. Once united around shared ideals like constitutional law, objective truth, and a common moral compass, the country now finds itself divided into competing factions, each claiming its own version of reality.
This division is not for lack of laws. America has enacted a staggering 300,000 federal statutes, alongside countless state and local regulations. Yet crime persists, morality erodes, and social cohesion falters. The law, no matter how comprehensive, cannot reach into the human heart. It can dictate behavior, but it cannot inspire virtue. It can punish injustice, but it cannot foster a genuine love for justice.
The Founders understood this limitation. John Adams famously declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” They believed that a society’s strength rested not on its laws but on the character of its people. Laws can restrain evil, but only a shared moral foundation can cultivate good.
That foundation, however, is crumbling. Postmodern relativism has jettisoned the idea of objective truth, leaving morality to the whims of individual preference. In this new reality, truth is subjective, morality is negotiable, and shared values are dismissed as outdated. Without a unifying belief in something greater, America’s ideological “peripheries” are peeling away, leaving behind a fragmented and increasingly unstable nation.
This crisis of cohesion explains, in part, the rise in Bible sales. The scriptures offer more than comfort; they provide a fixed point in a world unmoored from certainty. The Ten Commandments, for example, don’t just regulate behavior—they point to a higher truth about human relationships and the divine. They remind us that morality isn’t a human invention but a reflection of something eternal.
In a culture where laws have multiplied to the point of absurdity, the simplicity of ancient scripture is profoundly appealing. The Bible doesn’t try to legislate every detail of life; it calls for internal transformation. Its message is clear: true change comes not through coercion but through a willing embrace, agreement of what is right, good, and true.
Yet even as some turn to the Bible, others reject the philosophical notion of absolute morality or ethics altogether. For them, ethics and truth are fluid, a spectrum of experiences and feelings, rather than a fixed standard. These competing visions—one grounded in eternal principles, the other in individual autonomy—are the fault lines of today’s America.
And so the nation fractures, not because of external threats but because of internal divisions. Like a mosaic shattered into a thousand pieces, each fragment reflects a different ideology, a different vision of the old line from the Superman TV series “truth, justice, and the American way” essentially, of what it means to be American.
The question that remains is whether these pieces can be reassembled. Can America find a new common ground, or will its ideological peripheries continue to splinter, leaving the nation divided and weakened?
For now, the surge in Bible sales at least suggests a yearning for unity, for meaning, for hope for something to settle the personal and national spirit. Whether that yearning will translate into a renewed moral foundation—or simply another point of division—remains to be seen.