Kenneth A. Briggs has been on the “Godbeat” for years, as a religion reporter for Newsday, as religion editor at The New York Times and now as a contributor to the National Catholic Reporter.

In that time, the lifelong Methodist has seen the Bible “become a museum exhibit, hallowed as a treasure but enigmatic and untouched,” he writes in his book “The Invisible Bestseller: Searching for the Bible in America.”

And so Briggs set out on a two-year, cross-country journey to investigate the Bible’s disappearance from public life and see where he could find it still. He’s documented that journey in “The Invisible Bestseller,” released this month by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Along the way, he met a homiletics professor who encouraged her students to explore the text by exchanging roles with the characters in biblical accounts, and he came across professors at evangelical colleges surprised by how little their incoming students knew about the Bible. He attended a meeting of Bible promoters in Orlando, Fla., worried nobody was reading their tomes; the academic Society of Biblical Literature convention in Chicago; and a traditional Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. He was deeply moved by his visit to a federal prison in upstate New York, where, he said, the inmates knew the Bible better than he did.

Briggs spoke with RNS about what he learned. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: When you say the Bible is disappearing from public life, what do you mean?

A: Well, people aren’t reading it very much, and it just doesn’t show up in – as they love to say – public discourse. It doesn’t really make many appearances, and it is not in the public consciousness. The Bible is kind of off the public grid in a way I’ve never experienced before.

Q: In all your travels and all the the different places you went looking for the Bible, was there any place where you were expecting to see the Bible where it wasn’t?

A: In the mega-type churches – the churches that were really heavily loaded with the visual and the audio and the rest of the electronic stuff, the music – I was really stunned by what I saw as that alternative verson of Christianity being delivered through those means. I didn’t consider it biblical in the fullest sense. I thought it was highly stylized – the versions of Jesus, who Jesus was, being filtered through these videos – and, in some way, I found almost shocking in how they seemed to vary from the much fuller picture that exists in the New Testament. So I was surprised by that.