A bible aimed at millennials
BRIAN Chung still remembers the first time he attempted to read the Bible.
A 20-year-old college student at the University of Southern California at the time, he had recently converted to Christianity and was eager to plunge into the scripture that he’d heard so much about.
There was just one problem, Chung recalls: “I didn’t want to read it.”
The text was small and seriouslooking, each line corralled inside densely packed, numbered columns devoid of imagery – like citations at the end of a biology textbook. Inside, the pages were toilet paper thin. Outside, the cover was solid black and intimidating.
For an artistic college student studying communications, design and advertising, the “good book” looked surprisingly bad.
“There were 20 pages before you actually got to Genesis,” Chung said, remembering how impatient he felt. “As an artist and designer and a reader, I was thinking, ‘This is not good design’.”
Over the past 2 000 years, scholars say, no other book has been reimagined and reinterpreted as many times in history as the Bible. Each iteration – from early translations in Greek to the King James edition – was created to reach a new audience.
Five hundred years after the modern printing press spread biblical text worldwide, the book is struggling to reach one of its toughest audiences yet: Millennials, a generation of expressive, digital natives who are increasingly likely to read on a tablet than open a book. They are also far less likely to read or trust the Bible than older generations, surveys show, and their skepticism is at the forefront of the deteriorating relationship with the ancient text.
Now Christian publishers are scrambling to repair that relationship by making the Bible more accessible and attractive to a generation of young people for whom the written word no longer resonates as strongly.
A decade after his failed attempt at reading, Chung has turned his early aversion to the Bible into a growing business. He’s one half of a duo attempting to make the Bible “millennial-friendly”.
To do that, his Los Angeles-based start-up, called Alabaster, places the full text of each biblical book inside publications that resemble chic, indie lifestyle and design magazines. Alabaster uses the New Living Translation of the Bible.
Negative space is plentiful, and the text is a stylish Sans Serif font, dwarfed by the kind of moody, still-life images that proliferate on Instagram. The Bible may be a holy book, Chung realised, but it’s also a “content-rich lifestyle brand” – one in desperate need of a modern upgrade.
“Visual culture is everything for millennials,” Alabaster co-founder Bryan Ye-chung said.
The start-up is not without competition.
Instagram has helped turn megachurch pastors like Carl Lentz and Steven Furtick into fashionforward “influencers” with millions of followers. The number of people who have downloaded mobile apps offering thousands of biblical translations, texts and access to podcasts is now in the hundreds of millions.
Ancient manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls have been digitised for online consumption, and anyone with internet access can listen to
Bible readings in the book’s original languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Why read about the Holy
Land when you can strap on a virtual reality headset that offers 3-D tours of sacred Christian sites? If VR isn’t your thing, you can download apps that pair smartphone photos with Bible verses, creating shareable content for social media. If you don’t want to read the Bible, then Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, can do it for you.
The digital products may be new, but the sensibility is not, according to Matthew Engelke, a professor of religion at Columbia University.
The Protestant impulse has always been to expand outward, Engelke said, finding new ways to engage new groups of people. The rise of digital culture over the past 20 years has heightened that impulse, he said.
Companies like Thomas Nelson, the largest Christian publishing house in the world, say the appetite for physical copies of the Bible remains strong, but customer expectations are rapidly changing because of digital culture. No longer interested in their grandparents’ plain black Bibles, younger customers have begun requesting books with sewn binding, environmentally friendly paper, gold gilding and pricey goatskin covers.
“It’s a renaissance in craftsmanship,” said Daniel Marrs, publisher of Thomas Nelson Bibles.
“It’s all about the experience,” said Doug Lockhart, senior vice-president of Bible Marketing and Outreach at Harper Collins Christian Publishing. “Even the packaging of the premier collection bibles, the unboxing experience is similar to an iphone experience.”
Last year, Alabaster sold about 10 000 books, netting $318 000 (R4.5m) in sales. It was enough for Chung and Ye-chung to quit their jobs to focus on Alabaster full-time. Their customers, they said, were primarily women, 21 to 35 years old.
“We’ve become a culture that cares about beauty and visual stimulation,” Chung said. “We want to use that to create a dialogue and a fresh perspective of the scripture.”
| The Washington Post