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Monday Miscellany, 4/13/26

Monday Miscellany, 4/13/26

Last updated on: April 13, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany, 4/13/26 2026-04-10T17:08:23-04:00 Gene Veith

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Bible sales are soaring. Big study finds that “gender reassignment” wrecks mental health. And the “shrinking middle class” is due to the rising upper-middle class.

Bible Sales Are Soaring

Book sales were down in 2025. But Bible sales went through the roof.

According to Publishers Weekly, 19 million Bibles were sold last year. That’s a 21-year high. It builds on a trend, with sales up 12% over 2024. That’s double the number sold in 2019.

The CEO of Bible publisher HarperCollins (KJV, NIV, NRSV, NAB), Mark Schoenwald, is quoted as saying that his company has seen three years of double-digit growth in “all formats, from kids’ Bibles to pew Bibles to complex study Bibles.” He added,

“We just surpassed 10 million units of the NIV Study Bible. What that tells me is people are not just buying Bibles, but they’re actually trying to read them and understand them and then apply them to their lives.”

The Bible-buying surge is also happening in the UK, where sales are up 27% over the previous year. Compared to 2008, sales are up 134%. Interestingly, the biggest selling translation in that country is now Crossway’s English Standard Version (ESV). For a good modern translation to outpace the venerable King James Version suggests to me that British readers want to read and understand the Bible, not just have it on their shelves.

The biggest selling Bible in the U.S. is the NIV translation, but the ESV is close behind. The ESV, widely used in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, has sold or been given away to the tune of 315 million copies worldwide since it was introduced in 2001.

Big Study Finds that “Gender-Reassignment” Wrecks Mental Health

Lawmakers, judges, activists, and doctors trying to justify “gender-affirmation” treatments in children have been using the argument that the scientific consensus supports their and that failure to offer them risks serious psychological harm to children in need of them.

But now a major, large-scale medical study from Finland–which is definitely not a conservative bastion–shoots all of that down. This is high quality research, not only because of the sample size and the long term monitoring but because, following the scientific method unlike most such studies, it was a controlled study. That is, it compared the results of individuals who got the treatments with those who did not get the treatments.

Here are some of the findings, from the study itself, Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019: A Register Study, published in Acta Paediatrica (my emphasis):

Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%). Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral. Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

In other words, young people who seek treatment for gender dysphoria tend to have other psychiatric problems (particularly, as the study says elsewhere depression and anxiety), and those problems increase after they get treatment. Those who have medical interventions–that is, hormone treatments and sex-reassignment surgery–have increased psychological problems.

But what about those other studies that purport to show how helpful these treatments are?

The bulk of the literature on adolescent GD [gender dysphoria] suffers from two very common shortcomings: A lack of control groups, making it unfeasible to estimate truly excessive morbidity, and small sample sizes that leave room for chance variation. . . .

Medical GR [gender reassignment] is often suggested to be beneficial, even vital, for the mental health of adolescents suffering from GD, but the evidence supporting subsequent improvements in mental health, quality of life or functioning is very limited. Many of the studies in this field are cross-sectional and unsuitable for assessing developments. The few longitudinal studies have been of low quality and provided inconsistent results. The sample sizes have been small; there usually has been no control group, follow-up periods have been short, and the measures of assessing changes in mental health have varied. Loss to follow-up has often been substantial.

So let’s follow the science.

The “Shrinking Middle Class” Is Due to the Rising Upper-Middle Class

Both the left and the right have been complaining about the “shrinking middle class.” The middle class is indeed shrinking, but not because more Americans are falling into poverty. Rather, because more Americans are rising into the upper-middle class!

This is the finding of a study from the American Enterprise Institute by researchers by Stephen J. Rose and Scott Winship entitled The Middle Class Is Shrinking Because of a Booming Upper-Middle Class.

Based on various measures and considering only income, not investments or assets, they came up with the following economic levels:

In 1979, 36% of American families belonged to the core middle class. Over half, 54%, fell short of that income level. Only 11% were above that level. And 30% were “poor or near poor.”

As of 2024, the core middle class had shrunk to 31%. “But the better-off set had tripled in size, while the worse-off group had shrunk dramatically,” according to the researchers. “For the first time in American history, more families in 2024 were above the core middle class threshold (35 percent) than below it (34 percent).”

As of 2024, not counting the “rich,” the upper-middle class has gone from 11% to nearly a third of American families (31%), the same size as the core middle class. And the percent of “poor or near poor” has fallen from 30% to 19%.

To be sure, say the researchers,

The share of income received by the core middle class fell, as did the share received by poorer groups. But those declines largely reflected the groups’ shrinking share of families. Family incomes rose significantly across the entire income distribution, pushing more families into higher income categories.

Furthermore, “There was no net movement of families downward out of the core middle class.”

Instead, the entire shrinking of the core middle class came from net movement upward. The upper-middle class was home to 10 percent of families in 1979, 22 percent of families in 2001, and 31 percent of families in 2024. This tripling of the group left it as large as the core middle class and nearly as large as the poor or near poor and lower-middle class combined. Back in 1979, those two downscale groups were a majority of Americans, and there were five times as many of them as there were families in the upper-middle class. Even in 2001, nearly twice as many families were in the two poorer groups than in the upper-middle class.

What we see, then, is not a hollowing out of the middle class but a booming upper-middle class. It is simply inaccurate to characterize the “shrinking” middle class as reflecting diminished economic security rather than material progress.

And yet, the well-to-do don’t always feel well-to-do, due to high prices and other economic pressures. As Wall Street Journal reporter Rachel Louise Ensign observes in her article on the study,

Many families are surprised to find that they have moved into this new economic tier, and see themselves as comfortable, not rich. They tend to have jobs that are white collar but not flashy—think accountants, not tech founders.

This doesn’t mean that all Americans are climbing the ladder. Entrenched inflation and higher prices on major necessities have pushed many families closer to the financial edge, or locked them out of homeownership. Those costs weigh on high-earning families too, and for many are the reason they don’t feel wealthy.

The point is, the American economy is doing better than we realize. And Americans, on the whole, are doing better financially than they realize.

So, despite what both the far left and the far right are saying, this is not a time to give up on free market capitalism.

American social mobility

Bible sales

Bible translations

transgender research

transgender treatments and mental health

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