Bible importance just can’t be measured by surveys or box office – Tennessean

Ray Waddle| Special to Nashville Tennessean, USA TODAY NETWORK newsrooms in Tennessee

The closest Ive come to hearing a booming celebrity voice from the Bible was on the phone with Charlton Heston. He famously played Moses in the 1956 Ten Commandments movie. Some years before he died in 2008, he was in Nashville, and I interviewed him. We started with Second Amendment politics but ended on faith and films. As a bonus to me he recited some dialogue from Planet of the Apes (1969). He signed off that day with a nice bit of non-denominational wisdom: Do your best, and keep your promises.

Its a strange marvel how the Bible plays out in the imagination of modern entertainment media and how public tastes and technologies change. Ten Commandments was a 1950s blockbuster (using 14,000 extras and 15,000 animals). Then big-screen biblical epics fell flat in the 1960s. American spirituality was fragmenting. Religious attendance entered a decline. The cinematic sweep of the Exodus story gave way to narrower themes, notably apocalyptic speculations better suited to books like The Late Great Planet Earth. The last big Bible movie was Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ nearly 20 years ago.

Its tempting to regard a box office smash, or the absence of one, as an ethical index of biblical influence, or its eclipse. But this is elusive stuff. Bible interest today is dispersed, entrepreneurial, harder to gauge than ever, especially amid the traumatic disruptions of a pandemic.

Polls and surveys keep trying. Last year the American Bible Society reported increases in Bible reading during the COVIDcrisis. Fifty percent of Americans were Bible users meaningthey read it at least three or four times a year outside of congregational settings, according to the State of the Bible: USA 2021 study. That percentage has been steady for a decade. Last year, though, one in six adults reads scripture most days during the week, a 12% increase over 2020.

The survey identified sources of comfort during COVID. Family members topped the list, followed by prayer/meditation, food and exercise. Bible reading was ranked seventh, ahead of alcohol. Among Black Americans, Bible reading was in the top three.

The study warned that Gen Z youngsters inhabit a very different informational world from their elders, and new models of discipleship are needed to engage teens questions about the sacred. Surely this is always the case. Adults have worried about the Bibles cultural decline ever since the first generation of Mayflower Puritans, who fretted about their children going morally slack.

Unpredictable times dont change a daily truth: Even in group study or congregations, the Bible is pondered one reader at a time, usually under the radar, undetected. Scriptures social mandates and political consequences are real, but the words are first encountered by the individual open to its meanings, whether through crisis, gratitude, or a vision of public reform.

The Bible carries a secret, poet Richard Howard once said: It is addressed not to everyone but to each one. In every line, the Bible hints at something that it does not reveal but that tempts us, arrests us, fascinates us all the more, he said in a 1996 lecture.

When I read from Ecclesiastes or Jeremiah or the Gospels late at night, while the pandemic burns I think I see what he means. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (First Corinthians 13:12)

Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean reporter.

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Bible importance just can't be measured by surveys or box office - Tennessean