“The Bible remains nearly ubiquitous in American public life,” notes Mark Noll in the final chapter of this wide-ranging study (331). Yet, as the editors note in their introduction, there has been little systematic study of how and why that should be the case. The Bible in American Life thus offers “the first large-scale investigation … of the Bible in daily American life, outside services” (xix). Collectively, the twenty-eight chapters seek to address what scholars might consider to be the basic, yet underexplored, questions: “how, where, when, and why Americans use the Bible” (xix). The driving force behind the chapters is data obtained through a major new survey of public opinion, achieved by adding questions to the 2012 General Social Survey and the National Congregations Study III which asked participants about their attitudes towards, reading of, and choice of Bible. This alone makes this book and its findings important for anyone interested in American Christianity. The first chapter introduces the results and identifies key trends; subsequent sections place those trends in historical context (chapters 2 to 16) and explore in more detail the significance of many of the key findings for contemporary Americans (chapters 17 to 27).

If many of the study's findings are unsurprising to scholars of religion in the United States, to have broad evidence supporting what those scholars have before now only observed in smaller, focussed studies is, as many of the authors here note, clearly important to a better understanding of the nature of American religious (particularly Christian) life. The most unsurprising results, those that show correlations between the frequency of Bible reading and race, gender, region, education, and age, thus sit alongside data which show more unexpected results, including regular Bible reading among those who self-identify as having no religion, greater than expected Bible reading among Catholics, the continued popularity of the King James Bible despite the massive growth in variety of available Bible translations, and the ways in which the digital age is impacting reading practices. The subsequent chapters of the volume explore the meaning of these results, either by placing them in their historical context or by delving further into the views, ideas, and practices identified by the survey data.

The Bible in American Life certainly does not lack ambition. Intending the book to act as the starting point for further academic debate, the scope and breadth of the chapters collated by the editors reveal just how many aspects of American life and history can be engaged through the lens of the Bible and its use. Beginning with the first translation of the Bible into a Native American language in 1663, the fifteen chapters which comprise the historical section of the book cover events up to debates about the Orthodox Study Bible at the end of the twentieth century. The eleven chapters on contemporary events cover topics as diverse as children's bibles (chapter 18), representations of bibles in evangelical literature (chapter 26), Bible-inspired theme parks (chapter 25), and the connections between biblical literalism and legal originalism (chapter 19). Scholars of race, gender, technology, social reform, and publishing, among others, will find material of interest to them here, whether their focus is religious or secular. There really does appear to be something for almost everyone in this book: quite a remarkable achievement in under five hundred pages.

But the book's breadth is also its most significant weakness. While the historical chapters cover more than three hundred years of American history, of necessity they do so in piecemeal fashion, often with a narrow focus. These are snapshots across time rather than a history of the Bible and its use. Read as a whole the disconnections and time jumps between the chapters become more obvious and jarring. At the same time, the vast number of chapters, and the undoubted need to keep down the page count, mean that the chapters are brief – outside chapter 1, they range from six pages to twenty-two with most near the lower end of the range. Many read as if introductions to larger studies. While this has the effect of potentially spurring the reader to seek out additional work (or perhaps even to undertake further research), it also means occasional frustration about what remains unsaid or unexplored on the page. The lack of available space at times also means that those chapters which delve into complex theological disputes or which rely heavily on the technical language of the field of study (see chapters 3 and 13, for example) have little opportunity to explain key ideas or concepts, and thus speak more to those already familiar with the field; newcomers are likely to struggle. In general, then, The Bible in American Life might best be approached as a reference book, where individual chapters are useful at different times. Read as a whole the variety and scope can be distracting, but that breadth also means that there is something of interest for almost everyone.

“Our goal,” write the editors, “was a more complete understanding of the many ways Americans engage the Bible in their everyday lives” (xxi). The Bible in American Life is largely, although not completely, successful in achieving that goal. The brevity of some of the chapters means that there is not always great depth in analysis and the full significance of the trends observed here remains for scholars to explore further. But in its scope, the book successfully demands that we recognize the variety and complexity of the ways in which Americans engage with the Bible, and that is a significant achievement.