Bible sales have surged in the UK, amid a broader cultural change pointing to an awakening in society. With church attendance seemingly stagnating, Sam Richardson says many are turning straight to scripture to answer life’s deepest questions
New research carried out by our team at SPCK shows that the number of Bibles sold each year in the UK has increased by 61 per cent between 2019 and 2024, having been flat for many years before that.
We analysed data from Nielsen Bookscan, looking at sales of over 1,000 different printed editions of the Bible to provide the most robust research for many years into UK Bible sales. This also tallies with trends that are being seen in the United States.
So what’s going on here? I think there are a number of factors at play, but we can’t ignore the timing of the uplift with the Covid-19 pandemic. This was not just a challenge to society but has challenged many individuals to reconsider their worldviews.
During the pandemic itself we saw an increase in sales of things like horoscopes and wicca titles, but this trailed off quite quickly. Now we are seeing a much more sustained increase in sales of Christian books in general (separate research from Nielsen has shown that religious books was the fastest-growing non-fiction category of 2024) and Bibles in particular.
I hope and pray that people are finding answers to their big questions in a way that they didn’t from the often-sinister world of ‘mind, body, spirit.’
In a world where the internet is driving us into the shallows, the Bible offers authentic answers to life’s deepest questions. Long may its sales revival continue.
A cultural shift
So there is now a curiosity about Christianity. While the Christian faith may no longer be the first thing that people turn to, there is no doubt that younger generations are less closed to Christianity. Another piece of recent research showed that young people in Generation Z are less likely to be atheists than their parents.
The intellectual climate reflects this. In the wake of Richard Dawkins’ 2006 title, The God Delusion, the new atheists held sway for a generation. But a new generation of intellectuals including Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson are showing themselves to be much more open to Christianity. Justin Brierley has argued there is a surprising rebirth of belief in God underway, led by secular thinkers – even Dawkins himself now identifies as a “cultural Christian.”
Straight to the source
However, this isn’t reflected in the church pews, where for the most part numbers remain stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels. Instead, in a world where church leaders (and indeed ‘experts’ in general) are increasingly mistrusted, the curious are going straight to the source – the Bible – to search for their own conclusions.
The Talking Jesus research, published in 2022, ranked reading the Bible right up alongside going to church in terms of where people would go to find out about the Christian faith, and this peaked for 25-34 year-olds. The research also suggested that for people who have become Christians, reading the Bible was the number two factor (24 per cent) after growing up in a Christian family (34 per cent).
This knowledge may have played a part in increasing the confidence of church leaders to place Bibles in people’s hands – some of the bestselling editions in our analysis are editions like the ESV Economy Bible and the ESV Church Bible which are generously priced to be used as giveaways in evangelism.
Taking to the traditional
The number one Bible edition in 2024 however was a King James Bible, which may come as a surprise. The enduring popularity of the KJV tallies with a trend called the ‘weirdness’ of Christianity – a phrase used by recently Tom Wright in the foreword to Justin Brierley’s book, and by Tom Holland who enjoys the traditional Anglican worship offered by St Bartholomew the Great.
More traditional-looking and sounding flavours of Christianity such as high Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy seem to carry a more authentic resonance today than the inoffensive ‘seeker sensitive’ Christianity offered in recent decades.
Other more traditional-sounding translations such as the English Standard Version (ESV) and the New King James Version (NKJV), have also shown the strongest growth in our data. These translations have benefited from improved supply chains from the USA, where the economies of scale enable a much wider range of editions to be kept in print. Increasingly, UK Bible readers want to choose an edition with the size, price point, features and design of their choice - and are willing to put up with American English in order to achieve this.
One final factor that may be at play among Christians is an increased awareness of the problems that come with reading the Bible on a mobile device, such as distraction and loss of context. In a world where the internet is driving us into the shallows, the Bible offers authentic answers to life’s deepest questions. Long may its sales revival continue.
