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It is usually found in a hotel room’s bedside drawers. The Gideons International Organization distributes the text to hotels at no cost. Each text is assigned to a hotel room, but remains Gideon property1. The cover displays the Gideons’ logo: a clay jar with a lighted torch inside. This logo refers to Gideon’s unlikely victory over a large Midianite army, as described in the Book of Judges. An index lists useful Bible passages for readers in distress, seeking guidance, or explanations of Christian virtues. One section prints verse John 3:16 in English and in twenty-seven other languages.
Following the Protestant tradition, Gideon editions offer the Testaments ‘without note or commentary’, leaving readers to interpret the texts freely.2
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Practical Evangelism
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The Gideon Bible is an object designed and deployed to reach the Gideons’ most important population segments in the most effective ways possible. Like other Bible associations, the Gideons want to ‘sow the Christian Word’ in all parts of society3. However, they leave more visible forms of evangelism to other organizations, taking more discreet approaches that reflect the organization’s roots. They began as a traveling businessmen’s Christian group, and their core membership is still based on professionals in business today (women are only admitted if they are wives of Gideon members, and only into an Auxiliary group4). Members prefer to evangelize casually, in conversation with the various people they encounter while working.5 Bible distribution is only one more tool in this evangelism.
Gideons view the hotel as one of several human traffic lanes in a society where people are found on the move.1 It is a convenient site in which to spread the Word: the hotel room is a well-maintained space in which a Bible stands out. In a 1995 report, Gideons estimate that one hotel Bible is read by 2,300 people during its six-year shelf life.1 Ease of Bible access even trumps religious solemnity: Bibles sit in hotel rooms where pornography is offered on demand. The text can be vandalized, discarded, and taken from a hotel room without any penalty: these can be replaced.
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A Gideon member replaces a Bible in a hotel room.
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Reconfiguring the faithful
Marvin notes that ‘a new (innovative) apparatus intended to streamline, simplify, or otherwise enhance the conduct of familiar social routines may so reorganize them that they become new events.'6 The Hotel Bible is one such innovation, intended to reshape Christian social routines. The Gideons originally intended to strengthen and increase church membership among the business classes. This resulted in a better religious life for the businessman, but it also meant that churches benefited from a greater patronage of economically powerful people. The book discreetly alters the possibilities of a hotel room: it could be a site of religious practice or religious discovery, instead of being a neutral place, or a place of illicit activity.
The Gideons’ tools for evangelism are also continually reorganizing. The Gideon Bible app overcomes the prior spatial and economic limitations of paper tools. It includes multiple versions of the Scriptures in 18 languages, as well as the ability to annotate, share and record passages instantly.
Notes:
1. ^From [1], page 98.
2. ^The Gideons and other Bible societies have followed this core principle from early on in their history.
From the constitution of the Philadelphia Bible Society, 1809:
"I. The Bible selected for publication or distribution shall be without notes; copies of it in all the languages in which it is calculated to be useful, shall be distributed when deemed necessary by the Society."
3. ^From [1], page 21. The 'scattering seeds' metaphor applied to hotels and taverns early on.
From the Twenty-sixth annual Report of the American Bible Society (1842), p. 139:
"A third object in view is to scatter Bibles all along the path of the traveller so that he may find God's lamp to enlighten his way in every steamboat he enters and every tavern where he lies down to sleep. In relation to taverns, the ladies in Keene have set an example worthy to be imitated With the consent of the owners or occupants they have furnished every sleeping room in seven public houses with a Bible The Bibles are still their property."
4. ^From the Gideons' Constitution and Bylaws in [1], page 37, 39.
5. ^From [1], page 23.
6. ^From [2], page 190.
References:
[1]Henderson, M.A.. Sowers of the Word: A 95-year history of the Gideons International. The Gideons International. 1995.
[2]Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press USA. 1988.
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