After the assassination of Christian political activist Charlie Kirk, Bible sales surged in the U.S., adding to an already growing demand for Bibles among young and old.
September showed a 36% increase in Bible copy sales in comparison to September 2024. Some 2.4 million Bibles were sold in September 2025, up from 1.5 million in August. Through August, each month in 2025 had ranged between 1.2 to 1.6 million sold, book tracker Circana BookScan found.
Mark Schoenwald, president and chief executive of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, is one of the book publishing experts attributing the sales to Kirk’s death.
He says Kirk’s shooting “awakened a lot of people.”
“They started to think about what they believe and why,” Schoenwald told The Wall Street Journal.
HarperCollins Christian Publishing, which calls itself the largest commercial Bible and Christian book publisher in the U.S., reported that people aged 18-34 comprised a large portion of the purchasers.
Brenna Connor, an analyst at Circana BookScan, explained that “September brought a wave of troubling events—violence, geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty—underscoring a pattern: In times of crisis, more people turn to faith for comfort and support.”
A Christian bookstore in Vineland, New Jersey, saw an increase in not only Bible sales but other Biblical resources.
“Ever since the Charlie Kirk shooting, there has been an awakening, not only with Bibles but with all Christian-related items,” Cornerstone Christian Bookstore owner James Borrero said. “Even people like my father, who never knew about him, were affected by his death.”
Borrero attributes widowed Erika Kirk’s statement to the charged killer Tyler Robinson—“I forgive him”—at the memorial service as what “really sparked something” in the U.S. population.
The increase reflects what Erika stated in her speech at the memorial service.
“This past week, we saw people open a Bible for the first time in a decade,” she said. “We saw people pray for the first time since they were children. We saw people go to a church service for the first time in their entire lives.”
In recent years, publishing companies in the U.S. have been seeing Bible sales increase year by year.
From January to September, Bible sales increased by 11% in comparison to the same period in 2024. And in 2024, the January through October period saw a 22% increase in Bible sales compared to 2023.
