Recently I accepted what I thought was a pamphlet from a middle-aged, well dressed man on Willoughby Street. Whatever he was distributing, he was clearly doing so as a volunteer, rather than as paid employee, one of the army of the poor who hand out flyers advertising fast-food restaurants or retail outlets selling discounted designer clothing. He was giving away, it turns out, a small, green and white, hard cover book, entitled New Testament Psalms & Proverbs. I wondered if the omission of the comma was deliberate - the title should have read New Testament, Psalms & Proverbs - but I decided it was simple carelessness, after another man, distributing the book further down the street, called out to me, “Bible, sir?”
This bible was published and is being distributed by The Gideons International, “an association of Christian business and professional men, banded together in more than 185 countries for fellowship and service.” They’re the folks who place bibles in your hotel room, taking up space in your bedside table.
Will the distribution of these bibles change the attitudes or behavior of those who read them?Will they comfort, console, encourage, or convert? I’m reminded of a lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences that I attended years ago. It concerned a program to educate doctors in training about the varieties of sexual experience, so that later they wouldn't be shocked by what they found in their practices. We saw some of the short films that were shown to them: men with women, men with men, and women with women, some indoors, others outdoors, all the participants young, lusty, and beautiful, illustrating, among other things, some exotic uses of the body's orifices. At the conclusion of the lecture, one member of the audience asked the presenter about the effectiveness of the program. The lecturer said it was effective but it soon became clear that he had no hard evidence to support this view. In that high temple of the social sciences, of course, such a stance was heresy, and the members of the audience let him know it.
The Gideons International is probably much like that lecturer, believing in the effectiveness of its efforts without much evidence other than anecdotal. The society claims, based on hotel industry sources, that a quarter of hotel guests read the bible in their rooms, and the society’s website provides a handful of testimonies from men and women who were helped by reading a Gideon bible. But of the almost 79 million copies distributed from June 2010 to May 2011, how many people have been changed by reading them? To be fair, it would be hard to find out.
In a previous post, I wrote that missionaries are murderers of souls. Indeed, one meaning of Gideon is destroyer. I haven’t changed my mind, but in this case I don’t think there will be many murders on Willoughby Street. The print in the book these men were distributing is so small, few are likely to make a serious effort to read it. Chances are that readers are already Christians, at least nominally so, baptized at birth or as a child. I would be surprised if the efforts of these conscientious Gideons resulted in a single conversion of a non-Christian passing by. Still, they would probably consider helping lapsed Christians return to the fold as a worthy objective. Whether these bibles will do even that is an open question. It seems that the Gideons’ belief in the efficacy of their work is no less a matter of faith than their belief in the supernatural.
2010-2011 Anchises-an Old Mans Journal All rights reserved
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