THE REVIEW
“What hath God wrought — and who edited the final draft?”
Nineteen Million Bibles and a Whole Lot of Questions
A special Valentine’s Day edition on America’s complicated love affair with scripture
This week, your correspondent set out to write a simple story about Bible sales and ended up neck-deep in a swamp of prepositions, chatbot theology, orphaned translations, and a media company that publishes both the Wall Street Journal and the best-selling study Bible in America. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Here is what we found: Americans bought 19 million Bibles last year — more than at any point in two decades — while simultaneously telling Gallup pollsters, in record numbers, that religion doesn’t much matter to their daily lives. A 14-member committee in Wheaton, Illinois, recently changed a word in Genesis, changed it back, declared the text permanent, un-declared it, and changed it again, all without explaining why. Artificial intelligence chatbots are dispensing scripture interpretations with the confidence of a tenured seminary professor and the theological range of a fortune cookie. And mission agencies are producing Bible translations so fast that some communities are requesting emergency repairs before the ink is dry.
None of these stories, taken alone, would justify ruining your Saturday. Taken together, they describe something worth sitting with: a system in which every link between an ancient text and the person reading it on their phone is under simultaneous, quiet stress. The translators work in closed rooms. The publishers optimize for solitary readers. The algorithms flatten out the hard parts. The scholars publish behind paywalls. And the feedback loops connect all of it in ways that nobody planned and nobody controls.
We have tried, dear reader, to make this journey bearable — even, in places, fun. The facts are serious, but the ironies are magnificent. We trust you’ll find both.
— The Editors
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America Bought 19 Million Bibles Last Year. It Also Stopped Going to Church.
The best-selling book in history is having its best year in decades — and nobody can agree on what it means
Americans purchased 19 million Bibles in 2025, a 21-year high, while fewer than half told Gallup they consider religion important to their daily lives — a 17-point plunge since 2015. The Barna Group reports weekly Bible reading jumped from 30 to 42 percent in a single year, led by Gen Z surging to 49 percent. The YouVersion app passed a billion downloads. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Americans now claim no religious affiliation at all. These are not contradictory findings. They are the same phenomenon viewed from different angles.
Bible sales climb as religious importance falls; trend lines crossed around 2021. Source: Circana BookScan, Gallup 2025.
HarperCollins Christian Publishing reports 84 percent of its Bible sales come from backlist titles — not new translations or theological breakthroughs, but existing texts repackaged in journaling editions, aesthetic covers, and formats engineered for individual use. Publishers invest in solitary-reader products because solitary readers are their growth demographic. Those products further decouple scripture from congregational life. That decoupling accelerates the institutional thinning that makes individual-use Bibles attractive in the first place. The loop feeds itself.
“Engagement is outpacing conviction. People are opening the Bible more often, but they’re still wrestling with what they believe about it.” — David Kinnaman, CEO of Barna Group
Daniel Cox of the American Enterprise Institute calls it the “illusion thesis”: the remaining faithful becoming more visibly devout rather than new believers entering the system. The Barna data contains its own quiet contradiction — while 42 percent read weekly, only 36 percent believe the Bible is “completely accurate,” down from 43 percent in 2000. And in perhaps the most striking outlier, young men in Gen Z and Millennial cohorts have surpassed young women in reading rates. Baby Boomers have dropped to the lowest engagement levels at 31 percent. This is not the profile of a conventional revival. It is a market event.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO "Statistics Can't Capture Spiritual Hunger" — Brown
Asbury University president Kevin Brown argues the data misses embodied commitment: 30,000 baptisms in a single month, stadium worship events, and a generation investigating faith on its own terms. Source: RELEVANT Magazine (October 2025)
CON "Deinstitutionalized, Downloaded, and Personalized" — Mac Ghlionn
John Mac Ghlionn writes in The Hill that the Bible boom is a consumer event, not a spiritual one — faith decoupled from community, repackaged as aesthetic self-expression. Source: The Hill (February 2026)
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Fourteen People Changed a Word in the Bible. Nobody Was Told Why.
Inside the quiet, unaccountable world of Bible translation committees
Sometime in 2024, a committee of 14 people in Wheaton, Illinois, decided to change a preposition in Genesis. Again. If you missed it, that’s because they didn’t tell anyone why.
The English Standard Version — the second-best-selling Bible translation in the United States, with 315 million copies in print — rendered Genesis 3:16 as “Your desire shall be for your husband” when first published in 2001. In 2016, the same committee changed it to “contrary to.” They then declared the text permanent. Weeks later they reversed the permanence declaration, calling it “a mistake.” Nine years after that, in February 2025, they changed it back to “for.”
No public comment period was held at any stage. No external peer review. No published explanation of reasoning. The committee is a standing body of the Crossway Board of Directors. It operates without denominational accountability, and Crossway — the publisher that profits from the output — funds the operation.
The ESV’s Genesis 3:16 through six editions in 24 years, each change made without public disclosure.
“Six text editions in 24 years is objectively excessive. Either the initial work was hastily and poorly performed, this Crossway board really is that fickle, or — and I sincerely hope this is not the case — it is financially motivated.” — Puritan Board commenter, February 2025
The 2016 change was not a minor philological adjustment. The Hebrew particle ‘el is genuinely ambiguous — it can mean “for,” “toward,” “to,” or “against” depending on context. By choosing “contrary to,” the committee codified a specific complementarian theology within the translation itself. The 2025 reversal was effectively an admission that the 2016 decision overreached.
That closed governance is not the only model is demonstrated by the Berean Standard Bible, released to the public domain in 2023 with fully transparent translation tables showing every interpretive decision. It cost roughly 10 million or so for a major publisher’s translation. It commands a fraction of the ESV’s market share. Transparency, in this market, is a competitive disadvantage.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO "The ESV Is Updating Again, and Other Needless Hype" — Davis
Bible reviewer Kevin R.K. Davis argues the changes are minor and the committee is faithfully doing its job. Source: Kevin R.K. Davis Blog (February 2025)
CON "They Said Their Translation Would Never Change. Guess What Changed?" — Dee
The Wartburg Watch chronicles how the “permanent text” reversal demonstrates theological overreach by a committee accountable to no one outside its publisher. Source: The Wartburg Watch (February 2025)
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Ask a Chatbot About the Eucharist. You’ll Get One Answer. The Wrong One.
A new study finds AI Bible tools overwhelmingly default to U.S. evangelical theology — and users don’t know it
When researchers at the Bible Society asked five popular AI chatbots about the Eucharist this January, the word “sacrament” appeared exactly three times across all responses. Real presence, transubstantiation, mystery — the doctrines that have defined Catholic, Orthodox, and Lutheran theology for centuries — appeared zero times. What appeared instead was confident, fluent, and overwhelmingly American evangelical Protestant interpretation.
“AI tends to flatten out differences.” — Pete Phillips, Bible Society researcher
The bias pipeline: how training data skew becomes theological monoculture. Source: Bible Society UK (Jan. 2026), Zhang et al. (Nature, 2025).
A landmark 2025 study in Nature Scientific Reports by Zhang, Song, and Liu deepened the concern. Working with 1,005 participants across 12 regions, they documented how AI doesn’t merely reflect bias — it amplifies it through feedback loops. Users who seek validation get validation. The AI learns to serve their preferences. The result is what the researchers called “information cocoons.”
The problem gets worse at smaller scales. Benjamin Kaiser’s study of LLM Bible recall found that small models (8 billion parameters) — the kind most likely to be deployed on mobile devices in the Global South — hallucinate scripture entirely. Only the largest models achieve near-perfect recall. At the cheap end, it’s not theological smoothing. It’s textual fabrication.
One countermodel exists. Timothy Beal’s “Face of the Deep” project at Case Western Reserve uses AI to make the translation process visible rather than invisible. In Egypt, the Dar Al Ifta issued a fatwa in January 2026 categorically banning AI for Quranic interpretation.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO "AI Chatbots Cannot Replace the Community of Church" — Ramirez
Writing in America Magazine, Charles Ramirez acknowledges AI’s usefulness as an entry point but argues technology “cannot embody the mystery of faith.” Source: America Magazine (January 2026)
CON "Filtered Faith: Religious Freedom in the Age of AI" — First Liberty
First Liberty Institute argues the real danger is platform censorship and algorithmic suppression of religious content. Source: First Liberty (August 2025)
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They Translated Four Bibles in Four Years. Then They Asked for Help.
How the race to bring scripture to every language on earth is producing text faster than anyone can check it
In Madagascar, a team of local translators used modern computer-assisted tools to draft four complete Bibles in just four years — a pace that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The result was not celebration. It was a quality crisis so severe that the teams immediately requested outside assistance to repair the work. Speed, it turns out, is not the same thing as done.
AI drafting speed (100x) overwhelms the verification pipeline (2x). Source: Wycliffe Global Alliance, All-Nations BT (2026).
The Madagascar case is a microcosm of a global problem. In 1999, the Wycliffe Bible Translators launched “Vision 2025” with a goal: start a Bible translation project in every language that needed one. At the time, new projects launched at about one every two weeks. By the campaign’s conclusion, the pace had accelerated to one new project every 14 to 17 hours. Translation work is now active in over 3,500 languages. But 1,712 of those languages don’t yet have a single verse actually translated.
“Will we actually have a translation project started in every needed language… or have we just redefined ‘project’?” — All-Nations Bible Translation, reflecting on Vision 2025
The math creates a structural inevitability. AI has increased drafting speed by roughly 100x. Verification has improved by perhaps 2x. The pipeline floods with unaudited text. The concept that captures this failure is the “orphan translation” — technically complete text that sits unused because the people it was made for weren’t involved in making it theirs.
One structural fix is gaining traction: the “theological bug bounty,” borrowed from the software industry. Biblica has reportedly begun piloting the concept — paying indigenous theologians specifically for finding errors rather than producing new text.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO "Accelerating Bible Translation With AI" — Lausanne
Lausanne Global Analysis offers a cautiously optimistic assessment, noting AI drafts produce “greater naturalness” and framing the verification gap as solvable with the right investment. Source: Lausanne (November 2025)
CON "2025: A Year to Remember" — All-Nations BT
A frank critique from inside the mission community asking whether “projects started” is a meaningful metric when 1,712 languages have no verses translated. Source: All-Nations BT (January 2026)
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The Best Bible Scholarship Is Behind a Paywall. The Worst Is Training Your Chatbot.
Why religious institutions are responding to AI bias by making it worse
The core texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are free. The Hebrew Bible, the Greek New Testament, the Quran — all in the public domain. But the layer that makes bare text usable as scripture — the study notes, cross-references, commentary, historical context, and exegetical analysis — is copyrighted, paywalled, and increasingly locked behind digital rights management. This is the layer that AI systems need and cannot get.
The enclosure paradox: protecting scholarship guarantees its absence from the AI systems that need it most.
The result is a paradox elegant enough to make an economist weep. AI chatbots, trained on freely available internet text, produce theologically shallow outputs because the good scholarship is locked away. Institutions recognize this and respond by locking their scholarship tighter. This guarantees that AI systems are trained on even less authoritative material. Nobody’s stated interest is served.
“Our consultations with Christian ethicists concluded that most Christians would not regard the New Testament, and translations thereof, as too sacred to be used in machine learning.” — Meta, 2023
Whether Christians “regard” their text as too sacred for machine learning is not the same question as whether the machine learning produces faithful outputs.
Corporate ownership adds a final structural layer. HarperCollins Christian Publishing — which produces the NIV — is a division of HarperCollins Publishers, owned by News Corp. The same company that publishes the Wall Street Journal publishes the best-selling study Bible in America. The Berean Standard Bible’s public-domain model proves that high-quality translation can be produced cheaply and distributed freely.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO "Ancient Texts and Modern Tools" — Beard
Pitts Theology Library researcher Brady Beard outlines how AI tools like “Face of the Deep” can make translation visible, and argues the scholarly community should engage. Source: AI and Faith (June 2025)
CON "Warning of US Evangelical Bias in AI Chatbots' Bible Interpretations" — The Tablet
The Tablet finds that when ChatGPT was asked the same question in Italian, it emphasized Catholic tradition — suggesting bias is baked into language-specific training data. Source: The Tablet (January 2026)
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EDITORIAL
The Friction Was the Point
There is a temptation, when surveying the landscape described in this edition, to look for a villain. The committee that changed a preposition. The chatbot that erased transubstantiation. The mission agency that shipped text nobody checked. The publisher that locked its commentary behind a paywall. The tech company that scraped the Gospels and called it progress.
Resist the temptation. These are not villains. They are rational actors responding to the incentives in front of them.
The problem is not bad actors. The problem is feedback loops. Each rational decision, taken in isolation, makes the next link in the chain worse. The publisher’s paywall means the AI is trained on the least reliable material. The AI’s shallow output means users trust it too much. The mission agency’s speed means the verification pipeline floods.
“The text is liquid in 2026. The question is who’s building containers.” — The Editors
What every link in this chain has in common is the removal of friction. Faster translation. Smoother AI output. Easier individual access. The entire system is optimized to deliver scripture to the individual user with the minimum possible resistance.
But sacred texts were never designed to be frictionless. They were designed to be argued over, wrestled with, and read in the company of other people who disagree with you. The friction of communal interpretation — the inconvenient questions, the stubborn misreadings, the cultural contexts that challenge your own — is not a bug in the process. It is the process.
The Septuagint was not produced to be convenient. The King James was not commissioned to be fast. The Vulgate was not translated to be smooth. Each emerged from slow, contentious, communally embedded struggle. The struggle was the mechanism of meaning.
Nineteen million Bibles were sold last year. The question is not whether people will read them. The question is whether anyone will argue about them — slowly, impatiently, in the company of strangers who read the same words and see different things.
For Further Reading: Perspectives
PRO "Are We Seeing the Next Great Awakening in America?" — Standing for Freedom
Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center argues the Barna data points to genuine spiritual renewal, with 66 percent of adults claiming a personal commitment to Jesus. Source: Standing for Freedom (April 2025)
CON "Religious Revival in America? What the Data Really Says" — Burge
Political scientist Ryan Burge finds no sustained, measurable rise in attendance. “It’s a narrative that has somehow made its way into the zeitgeist for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.” Source: Deseret News (January 2026)
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Production Note: This edition of The Review was produced through collaboration between a human editor and an AI assistant (Claude, Anthropic). Core content was drafted from a research synthesis compiled Feb. 10, 2026, drawing on sources including Circana BookScan, the Barna Group, Gallup, the American Enterprise Institute, Pew Research Center, the Bible Society (UK), Nature Scientific Reports, Crossway, and the Wycliffe Global Alliance. All cited sources and links were verified at time of original research compilation. Opinion pieces in the “For Further Reading” sections represent a range of perspectives and do not reflect the editorial position of The Review. Your skepticism remains appropriate and encouraged.
Coming Next: Algorithms are now preaching sermons, writing prayers, and counseling the grieving. We examine the congregations that said yes — and the ones that said never. Also: the story of a $6 paperback ESV that has outsold every other book in America for three years running, and why nobody in publishing wants to talk about it.
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Editor: The Review Editorial Board | Submissions: letters@the-review.example
Actually generated: Feb. 10, 2026