This sounds like start of a joke, but it’s not.
An atheist walks into a hotel room. He spots something next to the bed and freaks out.
Is it a tarantula? A severed head?
No!
It’s a Bible, which brings us to this week’s Ask Orlando question.
“Do hotels still have Gideon Bibles? I don’t think I’m seeing them as much as I used to.”
The reader’s observation is correct. Hotels still have Bibles, but the Scriptures are getting harder to find. That means a lot less reading material in Orlando, which has approximately 2.4 billion hotel rooms on International Drive alone.
Marriott International’s policy is to place Bibles and the Book of Mormon in almost all its rooms. Other major chains leave it up to individual franchises.
That makes it hard to say exactly how many rooms have gone religion-free. But a survey of 2,400 hotels by the hospitality analytics company STR might make Joel Osteen jump off the balcony of his $10.7 million mansion.
About 95 percent of U.S. hotels offered religious material in 2006. That plummeted to 48 percent in 2016.
Why?
There’s “a need to appeal to younger American travelers who are less devout than their parents or grandparents, and to avoid offending international travelers such as Muslims or Buddhists,” said Michael “Doc” Terry, an associate instructor at UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management.
John Nicholson and Samuel Hill didn’t anticipate those trends when they shared a hotel room in Boscobel, Wisconsin, in 1899. The traveling salesmen were God-fearing types, but they couldn’t locate a Bible.
Long story short, they started an organization, named it after ancient Israeli leader Gideon, and tried to make darned sure every traveler who needed a Biblical pick-me-up could find it.
Gideons International has placed more than 2 billion Bibles since its founding, most of them in hotel rooms. Marriott International founder J. Willard Marriott was a devout Mormon, so the Book of Mormon is also placed in most company rooms.
The Marriott empire has almost 6,500 hotels. Its newest chains — Moxy and Edition — don’t have Bibles. They are geared toward obnoxiously hip millennials.
Note: All millennials are not obnoxiously hip. You just wouldn’t know it by the marketing.
The Moxy website features a photo of six millennials piled on top of each other on a couch, drinking, laughing, munching on snacks and admiring each other’s obnoxiously hip hair.
Two of the men aren’t wearing shirts. I’m not certain one is even wearing pants.
Another photo shows two millennial males playing foosball, though it must have been difficult since a millennial female is straddling the table.
In short, this doesn’t look like a crowd that goes back to the room for a few verses from Deuteronomy before turning in.
At least everyone is fully clothed on Edition’s website, which says “each property is designed to give guests a curated taste of the locale, reflecting the best of cultural and social milieu.”
Hint: If you use words like “milieu,” you are obnoxiously hip.
Another reason for the Bible’s decline is many new hotels have shelves instead of nightstands with drawers.
“A copy of the Scriptures on a bedside shelf makes a more pronounced statement than a Bible slipped into a drawer,” Terry said.
And who would be bothered by such a statement?
Obnoxiously hip atheists, of course.
They’ve politicked for years to have religious material removed from hotel rooms. A 2015 statement from the Freedom From Religion Foundation called Bibles “an invasive species.”
It said Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” should be placed in hotel rooms.
That’d be fine by me.
If you don’t like what’s in the nightstand drawer, ignore it. Nobody is requiring guests to memorize John 3:16 in order for their HBO to work.
And of the 2 billion Bibles the Gideons have placed, I’d bet at least two or three hotel guests found a bit of comfort and inspiration.
So to answer this week’s question, yes, Bibles are still available in Orlando’s hotel milieu. But if you want to make sure you find one, check out the game room.
If an obnoxiously hip millennial is straddling the foosball table, chances are you should move on down the road.
“Ask Orlando” is a weekly feature intended to solve local mysteries and enlighten readers. If you have a question about anything Orlando, send an email to dwhitley@orlandosentinel.com.
