I was searching the drawers for a notepad to write something when I pulled opened the drawer to the nightstand in the room at the Charlotte, NC, hotel. There, placed neatly and squarely next to the Yellow Pages was a Gideons Bible.
When was the last time I’d seen either of those in a nightstand? Ages ago, I believe. Both seemed to be anachronisms now, replicas of a time when religion was pervasive and the Yellow Pages were required.
I was particularly surprised by the Bible because I didn’t remember seeing one at the last hotel – in Asheville – where my friends and I had stayed on a trip to western North Carolina. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, since I was in evangelist Billy Graham’s hometown and in the midst of the Bible Belt.
I also didn’t recall seeing the Bible during any other hotel stays over the years, even the trip down the New England coast last year. Or maybe I didn’t have a need to search for a notepad in a drawer and never bumped into one.
The Gideons Bibles were once ubiquitous in hotels, and you had only to reach for the nightstand drawer to find one. Seeing this one got me to thinking about how many hotels still made them available. Googling, I found a steady stream of information about Gideons International, its Bible distribution, testimonies by people purporting to have been saved after reading the Bible, and those who just wanted it out of their rooms.
I’ve never picked one up and read it. I just leave it in its place, much like the shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom. I consider the Bible a higher form than those mere products, but I figure it’s there for people who need it. These days, though, it may not be alone in its coveted space: some hotels also carry The Book of Mormon, along with literature on the teachings of Buddhism and the Church of Scientology. I don’t recall encountering either in hotel rooms before.
The Gideons, however, have more than a century of Bible distribution in their history. The idea for the organization originated in 1898 when two traveling businessmen, John H. Nicholson and Samuel E. Hill of Wisconsin, found themselves sharing a room for the night at the crowded Central Hotel in Boscobel, WI. Both Christians, they prayed together.
A year later, they formed an organization for traveling businessmen like themselves and called it Gideons, a name taken from the sixth and seventh chapters of Judges in the Old Testament, according to its website. In 1908, the Gideons decided that they could be more effective evangelists if they put Bibles in hotel and motel rooms in the United States where they spent so much of their time. So, the Bible project was born.
The first Bibles were placed at the Superior Hotel in Superior, MT, by a member named Archie Bailey, a regular at the hotel. He got permission from the operator to place 25 Bibles in the rooms on Nov. 9, 1908, paying for them himself. The original hotel burned down in 1940, but a plaque marking the location is nearby.
Since then, the Gideons have distributed 1.8 billion Bibles in 90 languages to more than 190 countries worldwide, according to the website. The organization spends about $5 for each Bible, and it posts its financial statements on its website. The most recent, for 2012, noted that of the $128.8 million it took in, $120.7 million was spent on its Bible project.
The Bibles are also given to students in grades 5 and above; prisoners; police, fire and medical personnel; the military (including veterans hospitals), and are placed in such places as hospitals, convalescent homes and medical offices, according to the website.
The Gideons used to uniformly hand out the Bibles directly at U.S. schools, a practice that has spurred controversy for decades – and still does. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana) ruled in 1993 that distributing the Bibles in fifth-grade classrooms or setting them outside a classroom door as encouragement was unconstitutional.
The case had been brought against the Rensselaer school district in Indiana, where the group was giving out Bibles to fifth-grade students. The school district won the case in U.S. District Court but lost in the federal appeals court. The U.S. Supreme court refused to hear the case, and the appeals court’s ruling stood. The high court had done the same in a 1953 case in New Jersey.
Despite the rulings, the issue does not appear to have been resolved. Most recently, the ACLU in August warned some public school districts in Kentucky that it would sue if they did not ban the Gideons from distributing Bibles in the schools, contending that the practice is unconstitutional. An opposing Christian group has countered that it is not.
In some instances, hotels have removed the Bibles. Last year, a 40-room hotel in Britain replaced it with the best-selling novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” but made it available for those who requested it (the manager got some backlash). Another 148-room British hotel experimented with providing it on Kindle.
The Gideons see the Bibles as a form of evangelizing, with each reaching up to 2,300 people during its six-year life, according to the website. Hotel research showed that about 25 percent of guests read the Bibles in their hotel rooms, according to the website.
Some people apparently do more than read the Bibles; they actually take them home.
The organization is based in Nashville, TN, and its members are active and retired business and professional men aged 21 and older who are Protestant. Women can only be auxiliary members. It has 300,000 members worldwide, according to its website, and new members must be recommended by their pastors.
Other blogs posts from my North Carolina trip:
Discovering grits, black history & the ‘big house’ in NC
A taste of Appalachian culture in the Blue Ridge
