by Timothy Beal
Still, no one could have accused The Way’s creators of being motivated by personal gain. They didn’t make a dime on the project, and none of their names appear anywhere in it. Conservative critics were right, however, that it was a dilution and distortion of the Word—as they knew it, anyway. The fact that only the smaller, plain-font subtitle on the cover announced it as a Bible, and even then as The Living Bible Illustrated, suggests that even its publishers were a little uneasy on this front. It was indeed challenging commonly held standards for what is and isn’t the Bible.
In the decades since The Way, tensions have continued between evangelical and fundamentalist Christians concerning the extent to which Christianity and its Scriptures should be adapted to the mainstream. Indeed, these disagreements have intensified, as popular culture has really become synonymous with consumer culture. To make something popular requires making it appealing to consumers. Is there any aspect of popular culture that can’t be purchased or made into an object of consumer desire? If there is, it won’t remain so for long. In this cultural climate, the mission to popularize Christianity, especially the Bible, means promoting it within consumer culture, generating consumer desire for it. In today’s world, the mission of popularizing the Bible, of making it widely available, accessible, and attractive, is increasingly a marketing program. To popularize is to monetize. To spread the Word means to sell more of it.
The vast majority of people in Christian Bible publishing are wholehearted evangelicals who sincerely believe they are called to the work they do. The mission of evangelism isn’t masking a “real” motive of profit. And although most inevitably fall out of the dilemma on the side of popularization, many within the industry express concern about going too far. “There is a line, because it’s God’s word,” remarked Brian Scharp, vice president of Bible marketing at Zondervan, in a recent Los Angeles Times interview. He was referring to a 3-D pop-up Bible that the publisher had passed on. Still, he continued, “It’s hard to draw the line in any one place and say, ‘We’re never going to cross that.’”
To which fundamentalist-leaning Christians respond, “It’s a slippery slope!” If the Pauline mantra for neo-evangelicals who favor popularization is, “I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some,” the one for these more conservative Christians is, “Do not be conformed to this world.” As the leader of one Bible-study group explained to me, “Our goal is to live lives that are faithful to the instructions and principles of Scripture (and in contrast to our secular society).”
Indeed, most of these critics are quick to condemn the industry for already having slid far too far down that slope. Wondering how low it can go, one customer reviewer of Biblezines exclaimed, “What’s next? The swimsuit edition?” Beholding Becoming for the first time in a Christian bookstore, another woman reported that she and her husband were “deeply saddened and disturbed to find that God’s Holy Word had been placed within the pages of such immature chatter.” She continues,
Our society has become so dependent upon the visually stimulating that now even Christians aren’t satisfied with the pure Words of the Bible without being entertained and pampered while reading it. It’s not our place to attempt to "bring God down to the level of the world.” . . . When we try to paste beads, feathers . . . or fashion models on the sufficient Word of God, then we make a mockery of His power and the purity of His Word.
For critics like these, the Bible industry is not only selling itself out. It is selling the Bible out as well.
Although she and others sympathetic to her conservative critique wouldn’t put it in these religiously neutral terms, her essential point is that Bible publishers are selling off what I would call the Bible’s sacred capital. Let me unpack this statement.
Sacred, from the Latin sacer, means “set apart.” The sacred is that which is set apart from the ordinary, everyday, “profane” world of human existence. At the same time, it is what makes that everyday world meaningful. In Christian tradition, as in many other religions, that which is sacred is believed to be set apart, in some sense, by and for God.
Capital is accumulated value. It doesn’t have to be financial value, that is, economic capital. There are many kinds of social and cultural capital: memberships within certain organizations and social networks, both formal and informal, for example, as well as degrees and certifications from schools and other institutions. Some of these, like a clubhouse membership or a private-school education, may easily translate into economic capital. Others, like friendships with powerful and influential people, may not. In any case, part of what makes these forms of capital valuable is that they are perceived to be rare, not too readily available. Like the dollar, their value depends to a degree on controlling how freely available they are.
Like other kinds of capital, sacred capital may be accumulated, preserved, and spent down. In Christian tradition, taking care of what is valued as sacred, preserving and protecting sacred capital, is understood as stewardship. Stewardship is the opposite of sacred spending and consuming. It is the preservation side of the dilemma referred to earlier.
So let me say it again: Bible publishers are selling down the sacred capital of the Bible, inundating the market with a bewildering and unprecedented array of new editions and versions in an ever-growing variety of translations, layouts, and material forms. To the point that you could be forgiven if, standing in the Bible section of your local bookstore, you were to cry out in despair, “Where is the Bible?” As publishers lean ever harder away from preservation and toward popularization, the Bible is losing its set-apartness. It is being washed away in a market flood of biblical proportions.
Contrast this situation with how the more narrowly defined sacred capital of scriptures in other religious traditions is accumulated and preserved. A good example from Judaism is the Sefer Torah, a Torah scroll that is meticulously hand-copied according to strict scribal regulations on particular kinds of parchment made from kosher animals. Lovingly housed in the aron kodesh, or holy ark, in the synagogue or temple, veiled by an embroidered curtain, and adorned with a crown, breastplate, and bells, it is taken out and carried through the congregation to be reverently touched and kissed by members before it is read by a cantor who uses a little hand-shaped pointer called a yad (“hand”) so that her or his finger doesn’t touch its parchment. Through these various highly regulated methods of production, care, and use, the Sefer Torah accumulates sacred capital as the center of Jewish religious belief and practice.
Similarly, in Eastern Orthodox churches, the four Gospels of the New Testament are set apart in a separate book, the Gospel Book. Made and decorated according to elaborate specifications, it is believed to be an icon of Christ and is treated with great reverence during the Divine Liturgy as well as in other liturgies. During the prayer of consecration for a new bishop, for example, the Gospel Book is opened and placed, face-down, on the back of his neck. When he dies, he will be buried with it resting on his chest.
In both of these examples, we can see how a scripture’s sacred capital resides in a particular, highly regulated and carefully preserved combination of word, thing, and idea. Sacred capital resides not only in the words on the page, the literary content, but also in the thing itself, made a certain way with certain materials, and in the idea of it, the shared perception of it. The various ritual practices and beliefs that surround it are forms of stewardship that build and maintain that trinity of word-thing-idea. If one element of that triad loses meaning, the whole thing suffers a loss of sacred capital. Within such a closely regulated religious context of belief and practice, it would be difficult to convert sacred capital into economic capital.
In the biblical consumerism of American popular culture, by contrast, sacred capital resides in an idea that is being attached to a wider and wider variety of words and things, with no regulations other than the free market and the consciences of Bible publishers and consumers.
This situation is analogous to the
phenomenon of “brand dilution.” The cultural icon of the Bible is similar to a brand. It enjoys wide cultural appreciation akin to brand recognition. Brand recognition is a measure of the value that potential consumers perceive in a brand—how much trust they have in its value. When a brand has high value or “brand equity,” a company may want to extend it into other areas and products. It may want to use a strong brand as a vehicle for new or modified products or services. For example, Nike or Puma moves into clothing. Or Honda moves into chain saws. Or Sony moves into moviemaking. That’s brand extension. But how far can you extend a brand? How many different products can you attach to a brand before it begins to lose its meaning? That’s brand dilution.
One major difference between the Bible and a brand is that the Bible is not owned or controlled by a company or institution. It can’t be trademarked or copyrighted (although proprietary translations can be). No one can restrict its extensions in the consumer world. The only check on what new and modified products get attached to it is the market. Its “brand extension,” if you will, is a matter of consumer vote. And so the extension continues ad infinitum, to the point of absolute brand dilution. Biblical liquidation.
Type’s Setting
The larger setting in which all this is happening is the twilight of the bibliographic regime of print culture and the dawning of the digital revolution. Traditional books like the one you’re reading (if, in fact, you’re reading this book on pages bound between two covers) are losing ground as the dominant medium for reading and writing. In the context of the digital revolution, cultural understandings of literary media are undergoing radical transformations.
The digital revolution began with the convergence of three inventions in the 1980s. First, personal computers with common software platforms made sharing documents, software, and other content easy. Second, digitization brought together widely varied analog media (texts, sounds, still images, videos) into a common, easily interchangeable electronic format based on a binary code, allowing for the creation of new works that incorporate older media within them. Third, new communication technologies developed networks that connected computers to one another, to larger remote servers, and, most importantly, to the potentially limitless network of the World Wide Web, which runs on the Internet. Taken together, the convergence of these three inventions is radically transforming the ways we communicate and interact on every level, from the local to the global.
This media revolution means something much more significant for reading and writing than putting the text of books into digital form and reading it on a backlit screen. It’s not a simple conversion or supplement to print. What McLuhan wrote about the Gutenberg revolution is equally apt with regard to the digital revolution: it is no more an addition to print culture than the motorcar was an addition to the horse. Books within print culture fostered what Walter J. Ong described as a sense of fixity, closure, and self-containment. Once it appeared in a book, it had been finalized. In the emerging networked, digital media culture, by contrast, everything is editable, movable, cut-copy-and-pastable. There’s no reaching a state of completion. Moreover, the line between inside and outside becomes fuzzy, if it doesn’t disappear altogether. Texts are constantly being connected, disconnected, and reconnected to other texts. The word “hypertextual” aptly captures this new media experience: “hyper” means excessive, overflowing. Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is the language of interactive connectivity that allows Web designers to embed links and other objects into the main text. Thereby a text can become linked to other texts, and so on. The World Wide Web is fundamentally hypertextual, expanding and overflowing from link to link indefinitely. Reading and writing in this new media environment is open, interactive, and fluid in ways book culture could never be. Value is created not simply by individual authors but collaboratively by communities of reading writers and writing readers.
Suffice it to say that the end of print culture and the rise of a digital, networked media culture means the end of the book as we know it. And the end of the book as we know it cannot be divorced from the end of the Word, The Book of books, as we know it.
Distress Crop
There was a grand old grapefruit tree in the far corner of our backyard in St. Petersburg, Florida. Decades earlier, the land now covered in a patchwork of colorful little stucco houses had been a citrus orchard, and I’m sure that our old tree had been there since then. Its dark, thick limbs reached almost to the middle of the yard, and our kids played on it almost as much as they did on the swing set.
A couple years after we moved in, our beloved tree appeared to be getting sick. Its bark began to peel away. The leaves on many of its branches yellowed and fell. It produced fewer and fewer fruit each year. Still, it looked like its decline would be slow and gradual, and that it would continue to provide enough grapefruit to meet our daily allowance of vitamin C and keep us in happy hour cocktails for a long time to come.
Then, one year, it produced an unexpectedly huge load of fruit, several times even its healthiest yield. Clumps of grapefruits weighed down its tired old branches like giant clusters of yellow grapes. Our family couldn’t eat, juice, and give away enough to keep up.
A year later, it was dead.
I learned from my dad, a retired forester, that our tree’s huge, premortem crop was called a “distress crop.” When a fruit tree is under severe stress, whether in the later stages of disease or facing a fatal climate change, it puts out a distress crop before dying. Sick unto death, it redirects its resources from growth and foliage production to seed production, even to the point of depleting its own root system of necessary nutrients.
I suggest that something similar is going on with the Bible business. Its boom is not a sign of the survival of the old-growth book trade or the Bible as we know it, flying in the face of the fatal climate changes all around. It may look like a bumper crop of Bibles, but it’s not. It’s a distress crop.
To a point, fundamentalist-leaning critics and I agree about what the Bible business is doing to the Bible. By reinventing it in an ever-widening variety of things and words, all marketed as the one and only Word of God, these publishers are devaluing the very thing they’re selling. I disagree, however, about what exactly is being sold. As I argued in the last chapter, what the Bible business is trading on is not the Bible itself, but rather the cultural icon of the Bible. In fact, as we’ve seen, Bible publishers are distracting readers from authentic engagement with the Bible itself. It’s not about selling the Bible for all it’s worth but about selling the icon for all it’s worth.
Which is why I feel fine. I have no interest in rescuing the Word as we know it from the Bible business. I welcome publishers’ unwitting deconstruction of it.
In fact, I am an active contributor in that process. In 2009 I published a book called Biblical Literacy that was a cross between a Bible and a book about the Bible. About half of it is comprised of selections of the Bible’s “greatest cultural hits,” those stories from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament that enjoy heavy rotation in mainstream culture outside the church—the stories that everyone, religious or not, should know. The other half is my own writing—introductory essays, brief lead-ins to the selections, callouts, and other “extras.” But these various “supplementary” bits and pieces don’t serve to shore up the iconic idea of the Bible or preserve its sacred capital. Rather, they draw attention to those elements that call that idea into question. Is this book a Bible—the Bible? Sort of, but not really, I hope.
I welcome Bible projects that contribute even more ambitiously to its deconstruction. The best recent example is the Bible Illuminated, a large-format, glossy art-magazine Bible published in two volumes (Old and New Testaments) by a media-savvy Swedish company called Illuminated World. Started by advertising genius Dag Söderberg and a group of religiously diverse colleagues interested in exploring new formats that would attract a new generation of readers to the Bible and other ancient religious texts, the Bible Illuminated is
as far from Biblezines as Stockholm is from Nashville. The mission of this project is “to present traditional things in a non-traditional way” in order to “drive an emotional reaction and get people to think, discuss, and share,” and thereby to “trigger bigger moral questions.”
Bible Illuminated was first published in Sweden in 2007. It was hugely successful, expanding the country’s Bible market by 50 percent without cannibalizing traditional Bible sales. The first volume in English, titled The Book, New Testament, appeared in 2008, and the second, The Book, Old Testament, is planned for 2011. The text is the American Bible Society’s Good News Translation, printed four columns per page, without notes or commentary, and without verse numbers. Interspersed throughout its pages are visually rich, provocative photographic images.
The relations between the images and their biblical contexts are suggestive but not at all obvious. Sometimes, a nearby biblical passage, highlighted in a yellow box in the main text, will appear on the same page as the image, almost as a caption. Under an image from the 1970s of Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his bicep, for example, is a caption from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “You should not fool yourself. If any of you think that you are wise by this world’s standards, you should become a fool, in order to be really wise.” On another is a low-angle shot of a young boy pointing a handgun directly at the camera, accompanied by this saying of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the world. No, I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In its creative, provocative, often intensely ambiguous interplay of word and image, the Bible Illuminated undermines readerly expectations of the Bible. It “illuminates” in a way that turns the icon of the Bible inside out, provoking new questions about the Bible and, in the process, defamiliarizing readers with what has become all too familiar.