Why Bible Literacy Matters (and Why it Shouldn’t)

One of the things that Lionel Trilling always argued for was to look carefully at arguments that go against what we believe. Once we become too certain in our stance, our ability to learn and change diminishes. Good advice, but not easy to do. Recently I’ve been exploring the idea of anti-intellectualism in America, primarily found in the religious right and conservative politics. So, in deference to Professor Trilling, I picked up a copy of The State of the American Mind, an anthology of essays by right-wing intellectuals, in order to gauge my stance on the subject as accurately as possible. The first essay that I wanted to take a look at is by Daniel L Dreisbach, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington D.C. The title is “Biblical Literacy Matters,” something that I believe in very strongly, but not for the reasons Dreisbach lays out in his piece.

Dreisbach begins his essay with the inauguration address by George W. Bush, which he describes as “rich with Biblical language and allusions.” Unfortunately, the fact that Bush was arguably the dumbest individual to ever hold the office tends to undercut his argument from the outset. It’s widely known that Bush allowed his religious zeal to subsume what minimal intellect he possessed, and so the fact that his speechwriters made references to Biblical passages should not have been a surprise to anyone. But in saying that in one of those allusions Bush pledged “a national commitment to serve those in poverty” is laughable, especially after his financial policies resulted in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. Perhaps what he meant was that Bush was committed to putting the nation itself into poverty and serving us then, because he nearly succeeded in that. The fact that a CBS analyst “didn’t get” some of the allusions isn’t surprising either, considering the impoverished nature of our public education system. And that’s just the first paragraph.

Next Dreisbach spends some time trashing Democrats who made gaffs because of their unfamiliarity with the Bible. So what? Apparently in their eagerness to demonstrate that they are as “religious friendly as the Republicans” they couldn’t help but display their ignorance. But what, exactly, does “religious friendly” mean? The implication that Democrats aren’t friendly to religion is patently false. There’s a distinct difference between respecting someone’s religion and aiding and abetting their efforts to foist their religious beliefs on a secular country by enacting laws to coerce the rest of the citizens into behaviors they find acceptable and punish them for ones they don’t. But perhaps I’m quibbling. Nevertheless, there is a distinct undertone of righteous superiority in Dreisbach’s argument, though at this point it’s not clear exactly what his argument even is. He seems to want to spend an awful lot of time hammering home the fact that previous presidents frequently alluded to or mentioned biblical passages. And again, it’s unclear what that’s supposed to imply. This is one of the problems I see with conservative writing in general, an assumed moral superiority that is somehow supposed to translate into unquestioned veracity. In a sense, they always seem to be preaching to the choir, and that’s no way to win converts.

Moving on he states that, “Americans, apparently, have long been more biblically literate than their European contemporaries,” and demonstrates this with an anecdote from Ben Franklin who felt he had to annotate a sermon that he wanted to reprint in England because Britons wouldn’t understand the biblical references. But why “apparently?” The fact is, Europe has obviously had a much longer Christian tradition than America, by a couple of millennia. The Puritans who first came to this country were from Europe, bible-obsessed fanatics who left because England wasn’t fundamentalist enough for them, so naturally American writing is going to be imbued with more religious sentiment. Again, what’s the point? Finally, he gets to something we can all agree with: “That Americans from the colonial era to the twentieth century were biblically literate is no surprise because they lived in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture. Protestant theology reveres the Bible as the revealed word of God and emphasizes its role as authority in all matters of faith and practice . . . One would expect the Bible to occupy a place of prominence in such a culture.”

From here Dreisbach launches into a history lesson about the influence of biblical thinking on New England law and government and then finally gets to his thesis:

          Because of the Bible’s role in shaping people’s thoughts and speech during the forming of
          our nation, it matters deeply that Americans today know so little about the Bible and its
          influence on their culture . . . The Bible has informed diverse aspects of the culture, and the
          Bible continues to influence culture in innumerable ways. To understand themselves and
          where they come from, Americans must know something about the Bible.

While this initially sounds like a credible argument, it’s actually completely wrong. What is important in understanding American history is the influence of the people on our culture, not a book. Early Americans were informed and motivated by their religious beliefs, and yes, those beliefs were associated with the Bible, but so were dozens of other Protestant religions as well as Catholics and Anglicans. When looked at from that perspective, it is the specific Calvinist beliefs of early Americans that are vital to understanding where we came from and why we still behave the way we do. But you can’t get that from looking at the Bible.

Dreisbach cites sociologist Robert N. Bellah who states, “The Bible was the one book that literate Americans in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries could be expected to know well.” Of course, which is why presidents like Washington and Lincoln, and political figures like Patrick Henry and William Jennings Bryan would have used that knowledge in their speeches. What the Bible gives us today is a key to unlocking the biblical language that was used in the past, in order to understand the points that authors were making. In that sense, the Bible is like a translation guide that allows us greater insight into those works. But it’s not an end in itself, and it certainly doesn’t inform us about the motives behind the actions of historical figures as much as their religious dogma does. Washington, as well as many of the men who helped to found this country during the revolutionary period, were Deists. They allowed that there was a god, but in no way attributed to the deity direct intervention in human affairs. In the words of English professors Barbara and George Perkins, “For the confirmed Deist, God was the first cause, but the hand of God was more evident in the mechanism of nature than in scriptural revelation; the Puritan belief in miraculous intervention and supernatural manifestations was regarded as blasphemy against the divine Creator of the immutable harmony and perfection of all things.” So, while both Puritans and Deists used the same Bible, their motivations and actions were very different and the Bible itself isn’t going to tell us that.

Nevertheless, Bible literacy holds immeasurable benefits as an analytical tool to help understand what authors meant when they were making biblical references. In the last thousand years Euro-American thought has been directly tied to Christianity, and the ability to make sense of biblical allusions is crucial to a analyzing much of the literature coming out of American and Europe during that time period. As an example, just such an allusion appears in the poem “White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling. It was written during the Spanish-American war to encourage Americans to participate in the same kind of colonial imperialism in the Philippines that the British had been engaged in for centuries. Toward the end of the poem Kipling uses sarcasm to express why our “new-caught, sullen peoples” might resent being controlled by a foreign power.

          The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
          “Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?”

The light, in this instance, is the enlightenment of Western Civilization being foisted upon a people who were getting along just fine without it for thousands of years. The fact that they are dragging their heels “(Ah, slowly!)” should not at all be surprising. Then, using quotation marks, Kipling puts words in their mouths, to the effect that they prefer the bondage of their “loved Egyptian night” to the obviously superior civilizing influence of the West.

The biblical reference here is to the Jews being enslaved in Egypt. What Kipling is saying is that the Filipinos have the opportunity to be brought into the enlightening embrace of Christianity in the same way that the Jews were liberated from the bondage of their Egyptian masters by trusting god. Kipling’s attempt at sarcasm comes from the assumption that by throwing off their Spanish overlords the Americans are assuming the role of Moses and leading them to the promised land of Western thought and culture. But I use this example on purpose, because Kipling’s narrator doesn’t realize the irony inherent in the fact that colonialism by any other name is still bondage. Despite greater economic freedoms they might have obtained, to the Filipinos the Americans were no different than the Spanish, and the imposition of Western culture upon them was no less a cultural bondage than a physical one. In essence, it’s the same kind of cultural bondage that fundamentalist Christians want to impose on the rest of this country. Knowledge of the Bible, in this case, not only helps us understand Kipling’s meaning, but also shows his unconscious bias and allows us to get a complete picture of this work in a way that we couldn’t otherwise. And this, I’m guessing, is not exactly what Dreisbach had in mind.

He continues his argument with the dominance of The New-England Primer in early American education. Again, the underlying assumption is that because children of the past “learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and civics through the lens of the biblical text,” somehow their education was better, or that our children are suffering from the lack of that lens today. An example he uses from the book to support his argument, “In Adam’s fall / We sinned all,” could not be more poorly chosen. The doctrine of original sin is one of the unfortunate vestiges of our Puritan past. Dreisbach claims that this instilled in the early settlers a “view of human nature and the necessity for imposing restraints on civil magistrates through a variety of checks and balances.” Wrong again. Christian distrust of government came from their experience in being controlled by a monarchy in their civil lives and Rome in their religious. What New Englanders were after is participation in their own government, taking their cue from Martin Luther, who said, “Neither Pope or Bishop nor any other man, has a right to impose a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his consent.” The assumption in this statement is that Christians are going to behave morally as a result of their belief system, and therefore do not need guidance from outside. If laws are going to be made, they must be with the consent of the people. Now that is important in understanding our beginnings, not the Bible.

Dreisbach goes out of his way, however, not to call this early schooling public education, because from the beginning the federal government refused to fund religious education, leaving it up to the states and local districts to finance schools that promoted religion. In point of fact, it was Christians themselves who were responsible for the secularization of public schools in the early eighteen hundreds. This is something Susan Jacoby points out in her book, The Age of American Unreason.

          [Conservatives] frequently suggest that religion in public schools was taken for granted in
          the early decades of the republic, when the population was overwhelmingly Protestant. In
          fact, the secularization of common schools was initially a response to growing religious
          pluralism among Protestants . . . With Baptists and Congregationalists and Unitarians
          sending their children to the same schools, it began to seem imprudently divisive to favor
          any one religion.

From here Dreisbach recounts the liberating influence of the Bible in Protestant religions in freeing themselves from Catholicism and mandatory church hierarchies, especially when it came to reading and interpreting the Bible. He also cites the ability of most individuals in the colonial period to read because of the importance of the book in their religion. True enough, but it’s unclear how this relates to current public education woes that revolve around the lack of higher level thinking skills. Teaching the Bible doesn’t seem to be the answer. Then he brings in the idea of “civic virtue” as a driving force in a functioning democracy, that “the founders believed that religion must play a vital role in the polity, either for genuinely spiritual or utilitarian reasons.” And though he quotes such luminaries as John Adams and John Dickinson and their enthusiasm for the Bible, he presents no evidence to demonstrate that a secular state is any less moral than a religious one. Given the West’s struggle with Middle Eastern theocracies in the twenty-first century, it’s pretty clear there isn’t any. But on we go.

“Biblical literacy still matters because the Bible not only offers insights on and enriches an understanding of American history and culture but also provides a shared cultural vocabulary that facilitates broad social engagement and conversations on a wide array of religious and civic concerns.” Now we’re getting somewhere. While the study of the Bible has already been shown to be negligible in terms of understanding American history, the phrase “shared cultural vocabulary” is one that has much more relevance. Unfortunately, Dreisbach lapses back into Old Testament justifications for America’s independence from Britain, one that would be more persuasive if American’s themselves had not enslaved Blacks and attempted to persecute the Native American population into extinction. And as was also demonstrated earlier, the Bible itself is not the culprit here, it is the interpretation of the Bible manifested in the deeds of its believers that offer far more genuine insight into history. When Dreisbach claims, “From the Pilgrim Fathers to the Founding Fathers, and even to the present day, Americans have seen themselves reliving the exodus story,” his argument implodes. Which Americans would those be? Black Americans still attempting to overcome four hundred years of state sanctioned hatred against them? The few Native American tribes that still cling to a decimated way of life, herded onto reservations that were originally designed with the express intent of killing them off with diseases like small pox to eventually get the land back? Mexican immigrants that Christians want to send back across the border to “Egypt?”

Or could it be that Dreisbach is speaking of white Christians, who have used the Bible to justify a persecution complex that came over to this country on the Mayflower, and can be directly linked to white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, groups that can only be called Christian terrorist organizations. Yes, the understanding of biblical metaphors is instructive, but the underlying assumption of Dreisbach’s argument where he takes for granted the Bible’s moral importance for today is not only false, but belied by the amoral behaviors of many people professing themselves as Christians and no doubt indoctrinated through a devout study of the very Bible he is advocating for. Dreisbach goes on to cite research done into the frequency of biblical references in the works of American authors over references to secular authors. Again, this is not news. Bible literacy is actually vital in understanding those writings, as was demonstrated by the analysis of Kipling earlier. Beyond that, however, its relevance for today is minimal. The author’s insistence on American exceptionalism and continued biblical justification for “manifest destiny” and “global missionary outreach” is actually insulting to those who, like Kipling’s “new-caught, sullen peoples,” don’t want Christianity bullying its way into their lives. And it should be equally insulting to the rest of us who grant religious freedom to Christians in this country, only to have them attempt to deny our freedoms and try to shove their beliefs down our throats.

In the most ironic statement of the entire essay, Dreisbach claims that “In America, the biblical presence has run so deep that the deterioration of biblical literacy amounts to a deterioration of civic discussion, a cognitive failure on all parties to communicate.” In reality, it is the deep-seated biblical obsession itself that accounts for the failure of believers to understand that this is not a Christian nation, and it has never been. Christians claim that the rest of us need an understanding of the Bible in order to get along with them, but what they really want is conversion to their particular cult so that they can have everything the way they want it. Where are the calls for Christians to read the Koran so that they too can participate in the elimination of the “failure on all parties to communicate?” Many Christians in this country don’t want Muslims here, and even the coopting of the Old Testament from the Jewish faith for their own purposes hasn’t stopped anti-Semitism by Christians. And the list goes on. “Every educated mind in the United States--Jews, Christians, other religious believers, even atheists--must be acquainted with the basic stories, themes, claims, and symbols of Christianity and its sacred text, the Bible.” A more hypocritical statement it would be difficult to find. The only thing that the Bible has produced in the last fifty years is a fully justified and rationalized hatred of anyone else who doesn’t believe as Christians do. I wonder what Jesus would have to say about that?

The practical, literary uses of the Bible are all that really matter in the end, and I agree that many Americans are left in the dark if they don’t understand them. When Dreisbach states that, “Familiar idioms, figures of speech, symbols, and proper names in Western cultures have biblical origins. Without knowledge of the Bible, it is difficult to appreciate the works of the greatest artists, writers, and composers in western history,” it is the most cogent argument in the entire essay. Without a working knowledge of the Bible it would be impossible to make sense of much of the great art, literature, and music that has been produced in the last millennium and our lives will all be the poorer for it. But Dreisbach can’t leave well enough alone, and returns to his insidious insistence on Bible education as a substitute for education itself. “Declining biblical literacy rates in the twentieth- and twenty-first century America have accompanied the increasing secularization of culture and a general decline in educational standards.” It certainly has, but to imply a causal relationship between the two is disingenuous at the very least.

Early on in his essay, Dreisbach quotes Frederick Douglass, the former slave, abolitionist, and intellectual leader in the free black community of the North after hearing President Lincoln’s second inaugural address. “After hearing the president’s brief speech in which he mentioned God fourteen times, quoted the Bible four times, and referenced prayer three times, Douglass famously quipped that Lincoln’s ‘address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper.’” But if one is going to use an oppressed minority to make an argument about the moral implications of Bible literacy, one must be prepared to hear the whole story. Douglass, of all people, recognized the inherent hypocrisy of the metaphors of slavery used by the Founding Fathers when at the same time they allowed slavery to flourish in the country they created. In a speech on the Fourth of July, 1852, nine years before Lincoln’s first election, he had this to say about the complicity of the church in maintaining slavery in the South.

          Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name
          of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the
          constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question
          and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate
          slavery--the great sin and shame of America! . . . The American church is guilty, when viewed
          in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed
          in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission
          as well as of commission.

Clearly a thorough knowledge of the Bible did nothing to prevent its being used to bolster the claims by slave owners that slavery was not a sin, just one of many crimes performed in the name of Christianity throughout the centuries. The interpretation of the Bible, not the Bible itself, is the key to understanding American history and all its imperfections. The Bible as myth, however, is tremendously important for understanding the great works of the second millennium, just as the knowledge of Greek mythology is crucial for understanding the Iliad and the Odyssey. But let’s not kid ourselves that this study should be anything more than cultural anthropology. Once the intent of Bible literacy becomes an entry point for proselytizing and conversion, or even moral guidance, it has ceased to be meaningful. If history has shown us anything, it’s that the problems of today are ones that cannot be solved by religion, Christian or otherwise, and anyone who believes differently has bought into an even bigger fairy tale than the Bible.