One major reason why the extent of religious publishing goes unnoticed is the policy of the secular press not to count sales made in religious bookstores when compiling the best-seller lists. If we truly want to know what Americans read, the policy has done a considerable disservice. There are over six thousand Christian bookstores across the United States, mostly affiliated with the Christian Booksellers Association that was formed in 1949. Gross sales approach two hundred million dollars. An astonishing number of the book titles deal with prophecy and the final days before Christ's Second Coming. If it is at all plausible to imagine that people take what they read seriously, we probably have as a proportion of the population as many Americans anxiously awaiting the end of the world in the 1990s as in the heyday of the Millerites.

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