The Bible in the Public Square

“Experts say Bible has role in American life,” ran the dog-bites-man headline in the Duke Chronicle. “Contrary to popular belief,” the article begins, “the Bible affects people’s everyday lives because of its influence on the political and social realm, experts said.” The experts were on hand for a day-and-a-half conference on “The Bible in the Public Square” sponsored by Duke’s Center for Jewish Studies (with help from the Religion Department and Southern Methodist University).

Panels ranged from The Bible and Popular Culture to the Bible and Middle East Policy. (All sessions were videotaped and can be viewed in their entirety on the conference website–eventually.) Jacques Berlinerblau, a wisecracking former jazz vibraphonist from Brooklyn who now teaches at Georgetown, opened the conference with a paper on the Bible and presidential politics, reminding us that how scholars read the Bible and assess Biblical literacy is very different from how politicians (and ordinary Bible-believers) read and deploy the Good Book. He also plumbed the mystery of why no one has succeeded in organizing a voting coalition made up of all the religious folk left out of the Religious Right—most Catholics, mainline Protestants, non-Orthodox Jews, Unitarians, Quakers, Pagans, seekers, and so on. These modernists would number some 90-100 million and be electorally decisive.

Politics was a concern throughout, from a session on the Bible and America’s Founding Era, which included a stem-winding talk from John Fea (Has this man ever considered running for office? He’s got the stature and vocal chops to make a fine congressman at the very least), who took on the work of David Barton, explaining that though the American Revolution was surely drenched in Biblical language the literalists were actually on the Loyalist side. Shalom Goldman delivered a paper on “God’s American Israel,” which detailed the centuries-long American fascination with the Hebrew language and tropes (not so much actual Jews), evidenced most strikingly in Mormonism. “If Israel hadn’t been created,” Goldman asserted, “the U.S. would have had to invent it.”
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