Bible societies mount effort to revive view of scripture as source of ancient wisdom

One of the biggest ever research projects into scripture is looking into how people use the Bible and what it means to them—an attempt to understand why, in a time when 90 percent of the world’s population has access to the Christian sacred text, relatively few consider it a foundation of their lives.

The study, with more than 90,000 interviews conducted so far, was commissioned three years ago by an international group of Bible societies, which publish and promote Christian scripture in hopes of encouraging people in historically Christian regions of the globe to rediscover it as a source of wisdom and universal truths.

“Bible societies are heavily invested in translating the Bible into many different languages,” said Richard Powney, one of the senior researchers on the project. “But that is not the final frontier. We want to understand more about how people engage with it in different parts of the world. If there are cultural gaps opening up between people and the Bible we want to unpick that and work out why.”