(RELIGION TODAY) A Bible giveaway gave a cereal maker indigestion.
General Mills apologized last week for packing CD-ROM versions of the New International Version of the Scriptures, along with computer games, inside 12 million boxes of Cheerios, Chex, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The NIV is the most popular version among evangelicals.
"It is the company's policy not to advance any particular set of religious beliefs," Minneapolis-based General Mills said in a statement. "Inclusion of this material does not conform to our policy, and we apologize for this lapse."
But the apology came too late. The boxes of cereal with the CD-ROMs are headed for grocery store shelves across the country and will be distributed through August.
Giving away Bibles on CD-ROMs that also include computer games and dictionaries is a $10 million marketing idea that soured.
General Mills' partners in the promotion spent a year working on a strategy to include the Bible in the cereal boxes without causing controversy. There is no mention on the outside of the boxes that the Bible is on the CD-ROM, the Detroit Free Press reported.
General Mills says it didn't know the Bible had been put on CD-ROMs, and that it was slipped in "without our knowledge," the company said in a statement.
That is "a flat-out lie," Gregory Swann of Rhinosoft Interactive, a Wisconsin firm that helped create the CD-ROMs, told the News.
General Mills "got spooked with the idea of the Bible in their boxes," Phyllis Tickle, an editor at Publishers Weekly, told the Free Press. "There would have been some controversy, but this probably would have been a very popular idea."
Swann, an evangelical Christian, developed the idea of marketing the Bible as part of a "reference library" for computers, including a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia. He said his company thought the cereal box idea "was going to be very popular with millions of Christians."
Controversy arose in March when Disney Interactive, whose computer version of the television game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" is included on the CD-ROMs, told Swann that the Bible was too controversial and demanded it be taken off the "Millionaire" CD-ROMs. That held up production, software developer Ken Patterson told the Free Press.
It also left the NIV Bible, published by Zondervan Publishing, on only 12 million boxes featuring the CD games Clue, Carmen Sandiego Word Detective, Lego Creator, and Amazon Trail. Zondervan had given free licenses for software copies of the NIV.
Tom Mockabee, a Zondervan vice president, told Religion Today the promotion "made good sense in light of our mission" to make Bibles available to people, but that he respected General Mills' policy of sensitivity to people of different faiths.