Thanksgiving is once again upon us and with it the official start of the busy holiday travel season that extends through Christmas.
As Americans continue to cope with the ongoing pandemic, travel has seen a steady increase once again. That means packed airports and bumper-to-bumper traffic on most major highways starting Wednesday. It also means more people will be staying in hotels.
This brings us to an interesting and highly symbolic news story, one that deserves coverage.
I have done my share of travel — both in the United States and internationally — over my two decades working as a journalist. The few things you could always count on for much of that time was a newspaper at the front desk, usually USA Today, and a Bible in your nightstand.
Not anymore. Print is slowly dying, and newspaper readers have migrated to the internet in recent years.
What about those Bibles?
They, too, seem to be slowly disappearing. I noticed this past summer, while on a trip to Washington, D.C., that there was no Bible in my hotel room.
The phasing out of Bibles in hotel rooms is actually part of a steady trend across the country over the past few years. In 2016, Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, typically supplied both a Bible and Book of Mormon in its rooms. But the company decided that forgoing religious materials was the way to go at two of its hipper hotel brands such as Moxy and Edition. Note that both of these chains target younger guests.
Bibles used to be ubiquitous in hotel rooms. A 2017 survey by STR, a hospitality analytics company, revealed that 79% of hotels had religious materials in their rooms — a notable decrease from 95% of hotels surveyed in 2006. Indeed, as America becomes more secular and laptops and cellphones become more common, the need for a physical Bible inside your nightstand drawer is growing more obsolete.
Travel and Leisure reported that a majority of hotel franchises “allow individual hotel owners to decide whether or not to stock their drawers with religious scripture. And as more hotel chains aim to attract Millennial travelers, they are taking Bibles out of their rooms.”
Here is another newsy discussion point: The Freedom From Religion Foundation, back in 2015, sent a letter to major hotel chains across the U.S. requesting that Bibles be removed from rooms. On its website, the group, which advocates for atheists and agnostics, said, “Many of your guests are freethinkers — atheists, agnostics, skeptics or ‘nones’ — who are deeply offended to be charged high fees only to be proselytized in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Not only that, the Bible calls for killing nonbelievers, apostates, gays, ‘stubborn sons’ and women who transgress biblical double standards.”
Why are here Bibles inside many hotel rooms? It was in 1908 that The Gideons International — the evangelical Christian group — decided to provide hotels with the Holy Book.
The group, on its website, recalls how the tradition got started: “The Gideons International is the result of a meeting between two men who wished to band commercial travelers together for evangelism. What began in 1908 as an Association of Christian businessmen placing Bibles in hotel rooms has evolved into an expanding mission to provide Scriptures to all people in nearly every facet of life. Today, we have taken more than two billion Scriptures in more than 95 languages to 200 countries, territories and possessions across the globe.”
Gideons International said it has donated more than 1.4 million King James Bibles to hotels around the world between June 2018 and May 2019 alone. Of those, some 650,000 were in the United States, the group added.
Other denominations, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — commonly known as Mormons — followed suit and also started stocking rooms at hotels, motels and bed and breakfasts with their own free religious literature. Some, like Trump International Hotel in Washington, also provide guests with the Talmud, Quran, Gita and Avesta.
These days, guests have many online choices. Free Wi-Fi in rooms, for example, allows them to read whatever they want on their phones, tablets or laptops. As a result, Christians also have many online choices when it comes to religious literature. Gideons International has an app, while one of the most popular podcasts of the moment on Apple is a daily Bible reading by Catholic priest Mike Schmitz.
Can you take home a copy of a hotel Bible should you come across one?
CONTINUE READING: “Why Bibles Are Disappearing From Hotel Nightstands” by Clemente Lisi, at Religion Unplugged.
FIRST IMAGE: From a feature — What’s the Next Gideon Bible Idea? — at PhilCooke.com