[PAR35]

Others were puzzled to hear Romney say he reads the Gideon Bible—a version popular with evangelicals: Mormons uniformly study the King James version,

The Gideon Bibles are KJV without any theological footnotes. A fact that the reporter would know if she ever bothered to read a Bible in a hotel nightstand.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Indeed. And I suspect the comment was meant more in terms of saying he liked it when he found Gideon Bibles in his hotel rooms — a sideways criticism of the move by many hotel chains to ban Gideon Bibles to avoid offending non-Christian guests.

[Wallace T.]

The Gideons use both the KJV and the New King James Version of the Bible (NKJV), a modern language translation based on the same manuscripts that the translators of the KJV used. In most cases, the NKJV is the one placed by the Gideons in hotels and distributed to students, medical personnel, members of the military, etc. By and large, evangelicals have abandoned the KJV for modern language versions, most prominently the New International Version of the Bible. The largest area of KJV support can be found among fundamentalists, who differ from evangelicals in their belief in “secondary separation”, i.e., at least some degree of cultural, as well as religious, separation from the secular culture. Fundamentalists are most prevalent among independent Baptists, but may also be found in very conservative congregations of a Reformed, Wesleyan, or Holiness background.