How the Gideon Bible became a symbol of America’s roadside culture

SALISBURY, Md. (AP) — “Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, only to find Gideon’s Bible.”

Paul McCartney explained those famous lines in the song by The Beatles, saying these Bibles “were in every hotel in America.” He’d never seen something like that in England.

For more than a century, countless have found it in the bedside drawers of American hotel and motel rooms. It has become a symbol of America’s roadside culture and Protestant tradition. It’s mentioned in lyrics, films, Broadway shows.

“The Gideon Bible is a peculiarly and amazingly American object,” says Lori Anne Ferrell, author of “The Bible and the People.”

It began with Gideons International, an organization of evangelical business and professional men founded in 1899.

One of its members, working on a railroad expansion project, gets off the train in the town of Superior in western Montana, and checks into a hotel. He asks the owner if he can place a Bible at the front desk. She responds with a more ambitious proposal: Place a Bible in each of the hotel rooms.

The group says that it has distributed more than 2.5 billion Bibles worldwide since that day in 1908. It was the year that Ford Motor Co. began manufacturing the Model T, the first low-priced car that introduced motoring to the masses.

“All of a sudden, we have the road culture, the interstate culture, we have motels, and we have, for the first time, people leaving home,” Ferrell says. “There’s a story about America with the Gideon Bible that you can’t tell with any other Bible because it’s distributed everywhere, and it represents the movement of people across the country.”

Gideon Bibles have been distributed in prisons, military bases, hospitals, even the White House. In a 1971 ceremony, the group presented its 100 millionth Bible to President Richard Nixon.

“It’s an expression of biblicism — the idea that the Bible it’s from God to you. And it’s all you need … and that biblicism is a deep element in American culture,” says Timothy K. Beal, author of “Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith.”

Over the years, its distribution in schools faced challenges. Its presence diminished as the number of U.S. hotels that offer religious materials in their rooms dropped.

Still, it remains the religious book that quietly seeks to provide comfort in the most secular of settings — and that, even with the advent of the TV and Wi-Fi, sits in motel nightstands across America and endures.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.