The most vivid instance of the appeal to scripture in support of the culture, however, is in America’s racial policies and its struggle, not yet by any means ended, between rights and right. Both slavery, and then segregation, were supported on the moral grounds of the Bible. Slavery, and then segregation, were not inadvertent in America; they were part of the divine plan. Many have wondered how southern Christians, far more fervent in the faith and visible in their Christian civility than others, could reconcile the apparent contradiction between their ardent profession of faith and their vigorous support of slavery and segregation. One must understand that southern Christians, by and large, saw no such contradiction at all, for it was all in the Bible. The southern way of life, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery, were divinely approved. More, perhaps, than any other charge laid against them, southern whites resented the charge that they were un-Christian and hypocritical because of their treatment of African Americans.
They knew their Bible, and they knew that the basis of the subjugation of the African was to be found in Genesis 9:18–27. This is the account of the debauchery of Noah, and the indiscreet discovery of his naked drunkenness by his son Ham. Ham told his brothers of their father’s condition, but they, averting their eyes from the humiliating sight, did not see what Ham had seen, and were therefore spared the curse that Noah laid upon Ham and his descendants. The curse on Canaan, Ham’s son, found in Genesis 9:25, was this: “Cursed be Canaan: a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” The Talmudic scholars from ancient times have wondered what it was that Ham had done to provoke so vicious a curse upon his posterity, and there are many speculations: that Ham had engaged in immoral sexual conduct on the Ark; that he had sodomized his drunken father; even that he had castrated Noah so that there could be no more heirs from his father’s loins. In various literatures Ham’s son Canaan is the father of the Philistines, the progenitor of cultic bestial and fertility rites, and the ancestor of all Africa. For the sin of his father, Canaan and his descendants are cursed to serve other races, are themselves to be regarded as suspect, and in sexual matters are to be restrained, as they are by nature potent and lascivious.
In the American South, as in South Africa, the two greatest fears of the white Christian population had to do with rebellion and the uprising of the sons of Canaan fueled by a long-standing thirst for revenge, and a sexual revolution in which the fabled potency of the black male would be used to seduce and overcome sexually unsatisfied white womanhood. These two fears, cultural phobias, we might well call them, were sufficient to keep the white Christian civilizations who shared them in a state of perpetual and militant vigilance against the black populations in their midst. It is only when we understand these phobias and their biblical basis that we can begin to understand the brutality to which the whites subjected the blacks, and to which they subjected themselves. The sanctions of scripture made it all bearable, and thus they need not wonder about their own morality or humanity, or about the values of the culture that they regarded as steadfastly Christian. In the American South in particular, it was Bible-reading, churchgoing Christians, chiefly Protestants and largely Baptist, who could and would lynch, castrate, and horribly mutilate errant black men on Saturday night, and pray and praise all day in church on Sunday, without a hint of schizophrenia or even of guilt. How could they sustain such a culture for so long? The Bible told them so.
The African-American theologian Howard Thurman wrote about his grandmother, who in her girlhood had been a slave, in his autobiography. She had been taught to read and write, and she had been taught the Bible, and she knew most of it by heart. It was she who had taught her grandson the scriptures. When he got to theological school he noted that his grandmother had never mentioned anything about Saint Paul. He asked her why. She replied that when she was a girl the black slave preacher always preached about Moses and Jesus, but that when the white preacher came once a month to preach, he always preached from Ephesians 6:5, where Saint Paul says, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ.” When she learned to read the scriptures for herself she took her scissors and cut out all of Paul’s writings from the New Testament, on the grounds that they were inconsistent with what Jesus taught, and that they therefore had no place in the Bible.
Farther on in this book we will examine in some detail case studies of America’s use and abuse of scripture, and the relationship between the Bible, which remains the same yesterday, today, and forever, and a culture that is forever changing and evolving. There we will see the dangerous consequences, both to culture and to the integrity of the Bible, of culturism as a means, however inadvertent, of sustaining and validating in the name of God the prejudices of a parochial human community. Of the three dangers and temptations to which I have referred in this chapter, this one is by far the greatest. Why it is so can be explained through an old aphorism that I learned from a friend who had first heard it many years ago, and could not remember its source.
“A surplus of virtue,” it says, “is more dangerous than a surplus of vice.”
“Why?” we ask naturally.
“Because a surplus of virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience.”
That is the powerful danger of culturism. In the American South of slavery and segregation, at least until the time of Martin Luther King, Jr., most people could not be appealed to on the basis of the constraints of conscience because they understood themselves to be good and faithful people who were simply doing God’s will. They read the Bible, they heard their preachers, they said their prayers, and they knew in their hearts that they were right and justified by the Bible in the cause that they sought to uphold by any and every means necessary. Yet the very gospel they used to maintain the status quo would eventually destroy that status quo, and that is the story that remains to be told.
Modesty, Fear, and Trembling
When we read the Bible we are looking at the result of a set of assumptions and ambitions which themselves are not necessarily made explicit or systematic, but which contribute to the construction of the Bible “as it is.” In fact, what makes the Bible “run,” or “tick,” if you will, are these assumptions and expectations with which it is constructed. We do not know all that we need to know. We do not know all that “they” knew. We do know, however, that what we have is what they have left to us, and that translating that treasure from their time into ours and back again is an enterprise that calls for patience, endurance, diligence, skill, and perhaps above all, humility. Arrogance in reading these texts is perhaps an even greater sin than unbelief, and for that arrogance that crowds out the spirit of God, Christians will be held to a strict account at the final judgment. Since discerning what God, in the Bible, means for us to hear and to do is a matter of life and death, we must approach the interpretation of scripture as we do our own salvation, working it out in fear and trembling.
Chapter 3
The Bible in America
JESSE Jackson and Patrick Buchanan would appear to have very little I in common except for a delight in addressing audiences. Their visions for America could not be farther apart, and yet both appeal to the vision of the Bible to sustain their own vision, and both regard the Bible as the moral platform upon which the well-being of the republic ought to be reconstructed. Buchanan argues that we once had that biblical basis for a civil society and have since lost it; and his goal is to revive a lost ideal. Jackson agrees that biblical ideals make for the best of civil society, arguing that we have not yet achieved those ideals, however, and that change, not revival, ought to be the order of the day.
Conflicting visions for America arising from differing interpretations of the Bible are nothing new; that conflict is inherent in the very nature of America and its historic intimacy with the Bible as America’s own book. Indeed, the first book printed in New England on the seventeenth-century press of Harvard College was the Bible. Our presidents are sworn into of
fice on the Bible, and oaths in court are taken on them. In the culture wars we argue about the place of the Bible in our civic society, and politicians quote from the Bible in justification of their policy positions on moral questions. The ubiquity of the Bible in American public life has long been an object of comment on the part of observers of the American scene.
The City Set on a Hill
The process began early. The English Puritans who settled the eastern seaboard did not suffer from modesty but saw themselves as the New Israel, heirs of God’s promises to the Jews of the Old Testament, and their leaders as reincarnations of the biblical patriarchs and prophets. They saw the New World as their own New Canaan into which they would enter from slavery in England, or “Egypt,” by means of the “Red Sea,” otherwise known as the Atlantic Ocean. Armed with these self-enabling metaphors, these English Puritans entered upon their destinies. The native inhabitants of the land also fit well into the biblical metaphor. They were the equivalent of the Philistines and the Canaanites, whose destruction at the hands of the Israelites is the substance of the early books of the biblical narrative.
When in 1630 the Puritan armada reached the outer waters of Boston Harbor, John Winthrop, leader of the colony and a lay preacher, delivered a sermon aboard the lead ship Arbella, which he titled “A New Modell for Christian Charity.” The ambition of the sermon was to establish the Christian basis for the new civilization to be established in what was then thought to be the “howling wilderness.” The basis of this society was to be Christian charity, where, on the basis of those principles enunciated in the Bible, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount, the strong would bear with the weak, the rich would relieve the necessities of the poor, and all would strive to construct an exemplary society that would be like a city set upon a hill. This was not meant to be only for the comfort and consolation of the inhabitants but a beacon to the whole world, to prove to the old and tottering kingdoms of Europe that it was possible to construct a Christian society that would work. New England was not to be a retreat from the world, it was to be an example to the world; and of the three hills upon which the city of Boston was built, the principal one was named Beacon Hill, for not only would the light on its summit guide ships into the harbor, but that light would illumine the Christian world. “The eyes of the world will be upon us,” Winthrop said. If the colony succeeded, the credit and glory would go, of course, to God. If, however, the colony and its Christian mandate failed, “Then,” said Winthrop, “we shall be a by-word among the nations,” a laughing-stock, another failed Utopia.
The vivid and explicitly religious sensibility in this founding metaphor has incorporated itself into the American sense of itself, and in various forms and transformations it has been at the heart of much of our psychic identity ever since. Our wars, including the Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, most certainly the Civil War, and the two World Wars of the twentieth century, are all in some sense Holy Wars, fought with God on our side, and in behalf of a divine mission. Our physical expansion across the continent in the nineteenth century, from sea to shining sea, was described as our Manifest Destiny, a mandate from heaven. America believes in God at a higher proportion of the population than does any other country in the West, and what is even more striking is that Americans believe that God believes in them! The literary critic Harold Bloom has written, “The United States is a religion-mad country. It has been inflamed in this regard for about two centuries now,” and he calls America’s intoxication with religion “the poetry, not the opiate, of the masses.”1
An American Book?
Is the Bible, then, an American book? Does it “belong” to us in the same way that The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, Gone With the Wind, and The Great Gatsby belong to us? If the Bible does belong to the American experience and defines and is defined by that experience, is there then an American way of reading the Bible? These are interrelated questions. One can argue that the Bible is an American book because it defines the American experience, and one can also argue that the American experience is biblical because only an understanding of the place of the Bible in the American culture will help in trying to understand that culture.
To fail to understand or to appreciate the religious dimension of the American culture is to be unable to read that culture or its nuances in any effective way. Religion in America is not a hobby or merely a private pursuit—it never has been—and the religious dimensions of our culture are not likely to diminish in the foreseeable future. To imagine that as our American culture matures and grows old and sophisticated, diverse and pluralistic, we will grow “out of” or “away from” religion, as, for example, France did after the Enlightenment and its revolution, or as we imagined that Russia did after its revolution and embrace of communism, is to be as wrong as wrong can be.
Seventy years ago, after the public relations disaster of the Scopes trial for conservative Christian religion in America, the considered opinion of the pundits was that fundamentalism was dead or was living in exile in the hill country of the Bible Belt. Fewer than forty years ago, at the high noon of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, these same pundits opined that the secular age was upon us and was here to stay. The “God Is Dead” theologians spoke of an age after God, Time magazine had as its 1967 Good Friday cover story “The Death of God,” and the Beatles announced that they were more popular than Jesus Christ.
Now, in the twilight of this century and millennium, these predictions seem rather out-of-date. We find ourselves in a social, political, and cultural environment where religion is not only an issue, but it is the issue; and our struggles, which used to be defined in America as battles for the “minds and hearts” of the people are today culture wars fought for the “soul” of America, and for the souls of Americans. This is not simply a shift in vocabulary, an appropriation of a new metaphor; it is a struggle for the reformation of our national character, a reformation as complex, ambitious, and destabilizing as any of those reformations that traumatized sixteenth-century Germany and seventeenth-century England. Marx thought that religion was the opiate of the masses: Harold Bloom sees religion as the poetry rather than the opiate of the American people. For so many Americans who feel dispossessed, disempowered, and victimized by the forces of change that intimidate them and seem beyond their control, religion is neither opiate nor poetry, it is fuel, a form of cultural adrenaline that gives would-be victims the courage to fight back, to reclaim what they believe to be a lost religious inheritance, and to insist upon much more than mere toleration. They want affirmation, recognition, and indeed restoration of what they believe was once their place in the cultural sun.
Change and Continuity
It is into this wellspring of frustrated, spiritually denied Christians that Pat Buchanan tapped in both his 1992 Republican Culture Wars address, and in his 1996 presidential campaign. The secular establishment, with its values-neutral morality, its distrust of religion as fundamentally divisive, and in consequence, its segregation of religion into the private sphere, has managed to do what a generation of revivalist preachers and evangelists could not do. It has fired up Christian America and sent it marching into the voting booths of the nation. First the Moral Majority, and now the Christian Coalition, command the allegiance of millions of frustrated American Christians who feel that not only their religion, but the country which their religion built and sustained, have been taken away from them. With nowhere to go they have determined to fight to retrieve what is for them the lost ideal of a Christian state, an ideal that is decidedly “conservative.” What we might call nostalgia with an attitude.
For many of the Christians who enlist in the current culture war, the struggle began with what they believe to be the secularists’ sustained attack upon prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. The separation of Church and State, they rightly point out, historically was designed to protect the vitality and integrity of the churches from either the favoritism or the hostility of the state. A nation whos
e chief legislature and highest court are opened with prayer, where the president is sworn into office on a Bible, and whose currency bears the motto In God We Trust can hardly be described as a secular state. Thus, to remove the symbols of public piety, and, we might add, the historic Protestant hegemony, from the civic culture of the schools was to betray an inheritance and offer an affront not only to God but to millions of believers in God and in God’s special relationship with the United States.
The symbolic potency of the Bible as an “American book,” that is to say, a book upon which Americans had a special claim and which had a special claim for America, cannot be overestimated. The present religious activism in America on the part of those who feel themselves estranged from their own culture is essentially the response, at a distance of three decades, to that cultural wound inflicted by the removal of prayer and Bible reading from the public schools. Just as historians now think of World Wars I and II as but two episodes of one great twentieth-century conflict with a brief interlude of an illusory peace, so may we regard the current culture war as a continuation of that post-1945 American domestic struggle to redefine the culture.
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