>> John Haskell: Good
afternoon, everybody.
Welcome to the Library
of Congress.
I'm John Haskell, the
Director of the Kluge Center
which sits right over
there through that wall.
And we have our conference today
exploring important questions
about the bible and
U.S. History.
I just want to let you know
that the program is being filmed
for the Library of Congress,
and Kluge Center websites,
as well as for the
Kluge Center YouTube,
and iTube -- iTunes channels.
Just a quick word
about the Kluge Center.
I know a lot of you
know something about it,
but a lot of you don't
know anything about it.
So, it was created 18 years
ago through a generous gift
from philanthropist
John W. Kluge.
The Kluge Center's purpose
is to bring together scholars
and researchers,
to distill wisdom
from the Library's
resources, and interact
with policymakers
and the public.
In the words of our charter,
the Kluge Center is here
to bridge the divide between
scholarship and policymaking.
The Kluge Center also
-- and this is a --
my timely announcement --
awards typically every other
year a $1 million prize
for achievement in
the study of Humanity.
The next award winner will
be announced on Tuesday
in a press release by Dr.
Carla Hayden, our librarian.
This will be her first selection
as the winner of
the Kluge prize.
So, I encourage you to go.
[ Background noise ]
Of course, it will be announced
on the Library's website,
but I'd rather you go to the
Kluge Center website especially
since if you look at the Kluge
Center website today you might
not be overwhelmed by
how up to date it is.
But we will have
a newly designed
and much more user friendly
website by next Tuesday.
And so, I hope you will consult
it not to just look to see
who the winner is, but
also for other purposes.
The panel we're hosting
today is a part
of the Annual Scholar's
Council meeting at the Library.
The Scholar's Council is a body
of distinguished scholars --
many of whom are here
today at this meeting --
conveyed by the Librarian
of Congress --
convened by the Librarian
of Congress to advise
on matters related to
scholarship at the Library,
as well as scholar selection,
and other issues at
the Kluge Center.
Mark Noll -- one
of our Scholar's Council members
sitting directly right here
to my left -- has
convened today's panel
on the bible in American
history.
Dr. Noll is the Francis A.
McAnarney [assumed spelling]
professor of History of
Merida's [assumed spelling]
at the University of Notre Dame.
His recent publications include
"In the Beginning was the Word:
The Bible in American
Public Life 1492-1783".
That was a 2016 publication,
Oxford University Press.
He also wrote "19th Century
American Biblical Interpretation
in the Oxford Handbook of the
Bible in America" in 2017,
and the Catholic Press "The
Bible and Responsibility
for the Civil War - Journal
of the Civil War Era" --
[ Coughing ]
-- September 2017.
And also, recently he wrote
"The Bible Then and Now"
and "The Bible in American
Life" Oxford University Press.
I'm going to turn this
over to Mark and he's going
to introduce the other
people on the panel.
Welcome.
>> Mark Noll: It's a
real privilege to be
at The Kluge Center,
the Library of Congress.
Once again, a real privilege
to introduce today's panel.
Library of Congress is
an ideal physical setting
to consider our subject
this afternoon.
Just to the west of
where we are now sitting,
Abraham Lincoln quoted four
spirit - scriptural passages
in his short, but incomparable
second inaugural address
which he delivered March
4th, 1865 on the east steps
of the Capitol building.
In addition, he explained
that the Civil War had
been especially grievous
because both read the same
bible and pray to the same God.
Nearly a center -- century
after Lincoln spoke these words,
Martin Luther King, Jr.
likewise put scripture
to use strategically in
his address on the March
on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom.
For King, speaking from the east
front of the Lincoln Memorial
on August 28th, 1963, quotations
from the biblical book of Amos,
"Let justice roll down like
waters and righteousness
like a mighty stream"
and the book of Isaiah,
"Every valley shall be exalted.
Every hill and mountain
should be made.
Built the high plant form
from which he could dream
about a more just nation."
The bible in American
history defines a subject
of great depth and complexity.
For countless Americans, high
estate and low, slave and free,
male and female, red and yellow,
black and white scripture
has been the doorway
to personal experience with God.
To these and many others,
the bible also has functioned
as a guide to life
sometimes with liberating
or comic effects, sometimes with
oppressive or tragic results.
Scripture's obviously
played a dominant part
in organized religious
activities all Christian
and Jewish traditions, as well
as with variations among
Muslims, and believers
in other sacred texts.
[ Coughing ]
As a tangible object,
it has been a ubiquitous
physical presence sanctifying
all manner of homes, but
also focusing rituals,
stimulating commerce,
distinguishing ethnic
communities,
and naming the landscape.
It is made an incalculably
large contribution
to the construction
of culture --
[ Clears throat ]
-- in vernacular and elite
speech, in political persuasion,
in iconic and literary
representation, and scholarship
in legal reasoning
and in entertainment.
It is no exaggeration to
claim that the bible has been
and by far the single
most widely read text,
distributed object,
and referenced book
in all of American history.
Today it's a real pleasure
to introduce the panelists
who will be examining what
might be considered tidbits,
but really interesting tidbits
related to this vast subject.
My introduction you've heard
and my subject will be Tom Payne
and the bible in the
early United States.
Our next presenter will be
Paul Gutjahr who is Professor
and Chair of the
Department of English
at Indiana University
though Paul has just told me
that he's been raised or
lowered into the Dean's office.
[ Laughter ]
Paul has produced a remarkable
array of insightful works
of publishing and
literacy in U.S. History.
He has edited or co-edited
books on typography
and textual interpretation
as well
as on 19th Century
American popular literature.
He has published, "The Book
of Mormon: A Biography"
with Princeton University
Press and Charles Hodge,
Guardian of American
Orthodoxy from Oxford.
For our purposes today,
it is most significant
that he is the author
of "An American Bible:
A History of the Good
Book in the United States"
and recently has edited
the "Oxford Handbook
of the Bible in America".
His subject today is the bible
and Noah's Ark in America.
Our next presenter is Valerie
Cooper, associate professor
of Religion and Society
in Black Church Studies
at the Divinity School
of Duke University.
Her teaching and
scholarship concentrates
on religion, race, politics --
[ Coughing ]
-- and other culture.
Along with published
essays on African Americans
and the holiness in Pentecostal
traditions, she's the co-author
of an essay on religion and race
in the 2008 presidential
election.
In 2012, she published
"Word like Fire:
Maria Stewart [assumed
spelling], the bible
and the Rights of
African Americans"
from the University
Press of Virginia.
She is currently at work
on "Racial Reconciliation:
An American Christian
Organization since the 1990's".
Her subject today is
"The Bible and the Rights
of African Americans".
Our last presenter is Lincoln
Mullen, Assistant Professor
of History at nearby
George Mason University.
Lincoln has pioneered in
the use of digital research
for exploring subjects in
law, politics and religion.
He's the co-author of a
recently published article
in the American Historic
Review on Digital Text Analysis
and U.S. Legal Practice.
His book, "The Choice
of Salvation:
The History of Conversion in
America" was published last year
by Harvard University Press.
Most relevant for today
is his forthcoming volume,
"America's Public Bible:
Biblical Quotations
in U.S. Newspapers".
His talk comes from
that project, the bible
and America's newspapers.
We'll proceed with
the four presentations
without interruption which
should I hope leave us plenty
of time for reaction
from you folks here.
So, "Tom Payne -- the
Founding and the Bible
in the Early United States" --
the history of scripture
in the early United States
flowed directly from its history
in the colonial and
revolutionary periods,
but with developments
of great significance.
In that earlier history,
a vast majority
of the continent's European
settlers treated the bible
as revelation from God
deserving highest respect.
During the intermittent imperial
crises of the mid-18th Century,
spellbinding preachers
like Samuel Davies
of Virginia routinely
defined that conflict
as an apocalyptic clash
between on the one side France,
Catholicism, tyranny and the
Pope over against Britain,
Protestantism, poverty
and the bible.
During the War for Independence,
a far greater host led
by clergymen, but
also reinforced
by [inaudible] substituted
for Britain.
For France, it once
again viewed the conflict
in apocalyptic terms.
Now it was Parliament,
corruption,
enslavement by Parliament
and a veno-anglican [assumed
spelling] church establishment
over against the
continental Congress, virtue,
liberty and the bible.
In those dramatic days,
no one had more effectively
enlisted scripture
for the patriot cause
than Tom Payne,
the peripatetic English
radical whose riveting pamphlet
from early 1776 "Common
Sense" galvanized opinion
against the Monarchy.
At the heart of this
incendiary work,
Payne included a
detailed exposition
from 1:Samuel:8 [assumed
spelling] in the Hebrew
or Old Testament scriptures.
This passage explained why
the Lord denounced Israel
for requesting a king
like all the nations.
Payne's reasoning
was remorseless.
Surely, if God himself
repudiated the very principle
of Monarchy so too should those
oppressed columnists who chafed
under Britain's corrupt rule.
But then with independence
secured, almost everything
in the new nation was still
up for grabs including general
questions about religion
and specific questions
about scripture.
Into that parlous
state of affairs,
Payne launched a second
literary bombshell.
It's title was, "The Age of
Reason Being an Investigation
of True and Fabulous Theology".
Payne wrote the first part of
this work published in 1794
as a prisoner of the French
Revolutionary government
which he had traveled to Paris
to support, but which had turned
on him as it did
on so many others.
He penned the second part
published the next year
in England where he had come
after an unexpected
rescue from the guillotine.
Furious controversy
followed the publication
of this second hyper
liberal protest
against despotic authority.
The consequences of this
controversy were momentous.
It hastened the emergence
of the United States
first political parties.
It shaped the evolving character
of American public discourse
and it directly stimulated plans
for universal primary education.
It also profoundly affected
the fate of religion
in the new Democratic Republic.
In Payne's mind, the new
work followed inevitably
from what he had
promoted before.
Early in the first
part he wrote,
"Soon after I published
the pamphlet 'Common Sense'
in America, I saw the exceeding
probability that a revolution
in a system of government would
be followed by a revolution
in a system of religion'."
With his great gift
for electric pros,
Payne boldly advanced
this second revolution
by denouncing foundational
principles
of the Christian faith and
particularly tacked difference
in scripture with the same
passion he had once attached
subservient to King George
III of the Old Testament.
Payne was utterly dismissive.
Let's see if we can
get this quotation,
"Whenever we read
the obscene stories,
the voluptuous debaucheries, the
cruel and tortuous executions,
the unrelenting vindictiveness
with which more
than half the bible is filled,
it would be more consistent
if we called it the word of a
demon than the word of God."
As for the New Testament, you
know, Payne found much to admire
in the character of Jesus.
He claimed that Christian
churches have set up a system
of religion very
contradictory to the character
or the person whose
name it bears.
Instead of childish adherence
to the Christian mythologists
who by exalting scripture
had voiced at yolk
of spiritual tyranny
on hapless believers,
Payne proclaimed a
more excellent way.
It is only by the
exercise of reason
that man can discover God.
Payne's vivid, demonic
prose ensured
that even the most marginally
literate had grasped his
central thesis.
The idea of verbal regulation,
the impedes [assumed spelling]
belief that God had spoken
to man was the prime cause
for the bloody persecutions,
and torches unto death,
and religious wars
that since biblical times have
laid Europe in blood and ashes.
In Britain, Payne had
already become notorious.
When he attacked
monarchy, histocracy
and hereditary privilege --
[ Coughing ]
-- in a dramatic literary
exchange with Edmond Burke
over the nature of
the French Revolution.
Now with the "Age of
Reason", Britain's booed.
Democratic radicals
cheered even as defenders
of the standing order mobilized
to slap him down once again.
It was different in
the United States.
When cheap copies of
Payne's work began to pour
from the presses,
consternation went much deeper.
Like Payne's British opponents,
also rushed to defend the
truths of Christianity.
Yet because the American
reaction came primarily
from figures who shared many of
Payne's political principles,
the result took a
different course
on this side of the Atlantic.
Among the many wall
hooks - you're going
to earn your independence.
The relationship to religion
or public life was
the most uncertain.
The majority of religious
disposition's a fairly narrow
British cast.
But even after the banishment
of the Protestant loyalists,
the Protestants who remained
embraced a great range
of footing religious
opinions as well
as equally conflicting
positions on public issues.
In addition, the new nation had
also repudiated the Christendom
that had long upheld
Europe's Christian regimes.
It's government at every level
now guaranteed a religious
liberty for all techniques
and practices
that did not endanger
the public sphere.
They had in other words
achieved a state of affairs
for which Payne praised
the French.
With only a little ambiguity,
the American states had
also forced worn government
sponsorship religion or at
least the coercive establishment
of only one Christian
denomination
as the official Church
of the Realm.
And despite much in the new
United States had fulfilled Tom
Payne's ideals for true liberty,
the new nation's religious
disposition opposed much
that Payne so colorfully
proposed.
Specifically, unlike the French,
American's exhibited
very little hostility
to traditional religion as such.
How could they since a robust,
biblical Protestantism had
so resolutely supported
the drive for independence.
Hence, the question
that Americans' faced
when they should show Payne and
when not European Christianity,
but rather how to maintain
Christianity once the props
of formal Christendom
had been kicked away.
Payne's "Age of Reason"
was published in almost
as many American editions
from 1794-1796 as his
"Common Sense" had
been published in 1776.
The great reversal
of the 1790's was
that nearly universal
condemnation replaced the
ferrous affirmations that had
greeted his patriotic call
to arms.
The nearly 70 refutations
that Americans prepared
themselves are republished
from Britain stimulated even
as they foreshadowed
three major features
of the bible's later
history in the United States.
First, was an exultation
of scripture
in public consciousness
that reached even higher
than in earlier decades.
In the new United States,
the political infrastructure
that has supported the bible in
European Christendom had shrunk.
While a public disposition
toward Christianity continued,
the formal church state ties
that officially supported
particular Christian traditions
did not.
That new situation with an open
religious marketplace made the
near unanimity in response to
paying even more consequential
than the parallel
outcry in Britain.
Three or four American
publications did embrace Payne's
radical deism.
But the overwhelming majority
which affirms scripture
as trustworthy divine
revelation came from all
around the theological compass.
To be sure, a majority of titles
and reprinted editions were
prepared by proprietary figures.
Remember it's either of
the Church of England,
Church of Scotland, or in
America Congregationalists,
Presbyterians, Episcopalians.
Such authors tended
to view the threat
of Payne's theological
hierarchy and the threat
of his political radicalism
as two sides of one coin.
Yet rushing to join these
traditional voices came also
unitarians including
interestingly enough Joseph
Priestly, the renowned
discover of oxygen, harsh critic
of Britain in its standoff
with revolutionary France
and friend of Thomas Jefferson.
Universalists, several
Baptists, one Jew,
one Sandemanian all wrote
against Payne's "Age of Reason".
In other words, he
stimulated a sharper, clearer,
and more widely shared
affirmation
of scriptural primacy than
Americans had inherited
from Protestant Europe.
If the United States was
embracing liberal democratic
and enlightenment principles, it
was not embracing the secularism
that accompanied these
principles in Europe.
[ Coughing ]
The second important result
of this controversy
concerned the means
that Payne's opponents used
to affirm the indispensability
of scripture.
Consequences flowing from
the general excitement
over Payne's infidelity have
been insightfully specified
by Historian, Eric [inaudible].
In particular, the challenge
of radical deism
created the playing field
on which Americans fashioned
two rules for organizing,
civilizing, and directing
their new nation.
Thus, the means used
to counteract Payne --
pamphlets, locally organized
societies, periodicals
and newspapers exalted
persuasive argumentation
as the prime means that
shape pacific order.
In the unfolding of the
American experience,
it was no longer top down,
state guided coercion,
but bottom-up citizen
directed mobilization
that would shape public opinion.
And if public's fear
defined by freedom of speech,
the radicals well-publicized
efforts which attacked scripture
as immoral and actually
dangerous had their greatest
long-term a pact -- impact when
they provoked a popular rally
around the opposite conviction
where the bible could be trusted
as the very word of God.
This way of linking
private religion
and public morality created
a situation for those
who would later contend over
slavery, women's rights,
and temperance were forced to
pursue absolute moral claims
in a political culture guided by
persuasion and public opinion.
Controversy over the age
of reason also anticipated
important developments
in education.
The broad American commitment
to a Republican understanding
of the world which assumed
that a healthy social order
required self-directed virtuous
citizens, almost inevitably
led opponents of deism
to propose innovative plans
for educating all children.
The overwhelming unity
that Americans displayed
in defending scripture against
Payne's attacks paved the way
for the Protestant sects to
subordinate their own conflicts
over biblical interpretation.
So, it was that when proponents
of public education saw
a universally respected,
but non-sectarian means of
promoting morality in schools
and thereby ensuring
public well-being,
their instrument
would soon be obvious.
It was the King James'
version of the bible.
In a word, the way
in which pone --
Payne's opponents defended
the bible cut the channels
in which later American
patterns of public advocacy
and public education flowed.
A third result -- and the most
important for the later hiss --
history of the bible came from
the fact that Americans united
in their defense of
scripture against the age
of reason continued to differ
on almost everything
else among themselves.
For the history of the
bible knows the visions --
knew almost as much -- as large
as the defense of
scripture itself.
Excellent scholarship when
efforts to combat deism
and fidelity or radical religion
in the early American
Republic has concentrated
on Payne's critics who linked
the defense of scripture
to the defense of social
and political order.
But two other broad
responses arose to response
of "The Age of Reason".
Some Americans agreed
with Payne's politics even
as they abhorred his religion.
And still, others ignored
Payne's politics in order
to advance in our political
understanding of biblical faith.
The contrast can
be oversimplified
into tri-apatite [assumed
spelling] question.
Did faithfully biblical
Christianity support a religion
of order?
Did it support a religion
of liberty or did it re -
support a religion of
disinterested piety?
Uzal Ogden [assumed spelling] --
not a common name in the Library
of Congress - was the Episcopal
rector [assumed spelling]
of Newark, New Jersey.
He spoke boldly for
those who regarded Payne
as primarily a threat
to public order.
His massive 1790 tone
Antidote to Deism" finally got
around to defending scripture
as such, but only after more
than 100 pages devoted
to his main concern.
In proportion as a neglect he
wrote, "As a neglect or attempt
of religion maintains,
dissoluteness
of morals will prevail
and when a people
in general become dissolute,
probing, and virtue,
public spirit and generous
concern for the interests
of the nation will
be extinguished."
For Ogden and others like him,
the bible is most important
for supplying the virtue without
which the Republic would fail.
This emphasis on the
bible usually mixed
with early religious concerns
decisively shaped much
of later American history.
It spurred the Herculean labors
of voluntary organizations
like American Bible Society
and American Track Society.
It inspired educational
reformers
and many theological varieties
to promote daily readings
of the King James version as a
mainstay of school instruction.
It fed into the emergence
of the Wig Party
and it would shape the efforts
of many consequential leaders
like the abolitionists
Theodore Dwight [inaudible],
Frances Willard, the founder
of the Women's Christian
Temperance Organization
and Daniel Alexander Payne
of the African Methodists'
Episcopal Church.
By contrast, a second group of
Payne's critics agreed with him
when he attacked
political elites
and traditional social
hierarchies.
For them, biblical religion
supplied the fortitude
to resist tyranny and corruption
without which the
Republic would fail.
A Virginia Baptist, Andrew
Broadus [assumed spelling] spoke
for this cohort when
he confessed that,
"Although I am disgusted
with Payne as a religionist,
I do admire Mr. Payne
as a politician."
In his book, Broadus summarized
the "Age of Reason" charge --
or "The Age of Reason's
charges against tyranny and vice
of traditional churches,
and then said
that he too abominated
national establishments,
pomp and reference, published
indulgences and all the rest
of what the bible is
an utter stranger too.
So, it wasn't Broadus
who defended the bible,
also endorsed Payne's
radical Republican approach
to formal establishment
structures
and informal church power which
she saw especially as exercise
by American Episcopalians,
Presbyterians
and Congregationalists.
With the influence of
Baptist convictions like those
at Broadus, a growing
number willing
to go further attacking any
kind of hierarchy, the emphasis
of those that have posed Payne
as a religionist
while following him
as a politician was
destined to grow.
Such ones would go on to
impact the reforming ambitions
of national voluntary
organizations
like the American Bible Society.
They would lien strongly to the
Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson
and its insistence of a local
control over local institutions.
But ironically in
an extreme form,
this kind of criticism
also infused the work
of David Walker's 1829
appealed to the colored citizens
of the world which level a
thoroughly biblical critique
against slavery and the
national institutions
that supported the slave system.
Critics of Payne in
other words who wanted
to defend the bible became
critics of each other
when they used the bible
to defend conflicting
interpretations
of Republic well-being.
The third group of Payne's
critics has received less
attention in part because they
did not want to have anything
to do with politics, but rather
hope to preserve the scripture
in a strictly religious book.
Such ones included David
Levy, a New York City Jew
for whom the text quoted
on his title page summarized
the entirety of his argument
against "The Age of Reason".
"The fool hath said in
his heart there is no God
and the wicked worketh a
deceitful work" both quoted
incidentally from the
King James version.
Similarly, David Humphries --
a Yale graduate and well-known
New Hampshire lawyer --
spent most of his attack
on Payne attacking those
who viewed Payne as
a political threat.
Humphries -- a follower of
the Sandemanian sect imported
from Scotland -- wanted an
absolute divide between religion
and anything corporately
perfect.
His stance moved him closer
to the anti-Payne-ites
who denounced American efforts
and created informal
Christendom's
to replace the formal
Christendom's of Europe.
But Humphries main
concern was not the future
of the American public, but
as he put it "the honor of God
and His saving truth".
The way that David Levi
and David Humphries defended
scripture would also have a
consequential future.
It was a stance their great
contemporary Francis Asberry
[assumed spelling] whose
single-minded devotion
to the salvation of souls made
early American Methodism the
most effective means of church
creation in American History.
Could it also be the
stance of some Baptists?
Some in the Disciples of Christ
Christian Church tradition,
many among the Adventists,
and some in later High Church,
Pentecostal and fundamentalist
movements.
It would guide the noteworthy
service of African Americans
like Richard Allen
[assumed spelling],
Harriet Jacob, and Amanda Smith.
It was also close to
the sentiments expressed
by Abraham Lincoln when
he referenced the bible
in his second inaugural address.
IN summary, responses
to Tom Payne's "Age
of Reason" are almost as
important for the unfolding
of American History as
the influence of Payne's
"Common Sense" had been for
the beginning of that history.
These responses insured that
the bible would remain an object
in merely universal respect.
They defined how religion would
relate to American public life.
And in their diversity these
responses also anticipated the
major fissures among the
many groups that could agree
with Elias [inaudible],
friend of George Washington,
President of the Confederation
Congress, founding President
of the American Bible Society
and dedicated Presbyterian
laymen who in his large response
to Payne called the bible
simply the most valuable book
in the world.
[ Applause ]
[ Background noise ]
>> Paul Gutjahr: Okay.
Are we on?
Okay. Good afternoon.
Thank you for all coming today.
I wanted to say if you can't
see a screen for this talk,
you may want to move to a place
where you can see a screen
because there's some
really nice pictures
of Noah's Ark coming up, so.
[ Laughter ]
I'd also like to thank Dan
[inaudible] and Mark Nowell
for putting this panel together.
Okay. Going to begin today by
talking a little bit about the
"Oxford Handbook of the
Bible in America" --
a volume which I edited and
was released last September.
The 700 page volume took
four years to complete
and involves some 45 scholars
writing on various aspects
of the bible in America.
In the end, these scholars
produced 42 chapters
on a wide variety of topics
-- the bible and politics,
the bible and African Americans,
the bible and art, the bible
and preaching, and the
list goes on, and on.
And one of the fascinating
things
about editing a collection of
essays like this one is the way
in which you have to
read, reread, re-reread,
often help rewrite various
essays and that gives ones --
one a bird's eye view
of the topic as a whole.
And in so doing, allowing one
to see how many different
chapters often speak
to one another.
I would like to spend my
time today with you talking
about just one set of
connections that became apparent
to me as I edited
this collection.
Namely just how present
the trope of Noah's Ark is
when it comes to the bible
and American culture.
I will spend my remaining
time speaking briefly
about five moments in
American history and culture
where the biblical story of
Noah's Ark has had a presence
in how the bible has been
used, viewed and interpreted
over the past 300
years in America.
The first moment
involves children's bibles
in the United States.
Not surprisingly, the story
of Noah's Ark plays an
absolutely central role
in how the bible was redacted
and simplified for children.
In fact, the story
of Noah's Ark is one
of the most commonly
included bible stories
in bible editions
specifically created
and marketed to children.
Just one of the interesting
facets of the Noah's Ark story
in such bibles is
how the emphasis
of the story has changed
over three centuries
of American Children's
bible editions.
When the story of Noah and
his ark was told in the 18th
and 19th Century, children
bibles, it was a tale
that concentrated on the
wickedness of men, and women,
and often used pictures of
people being left behind
to die outside the ark.
The emphasis was on the
plight of the wicked
and the righteousness
of God's wrath
as he punished those
wicked people.
Matching this emphasis, the most
common illustration accompanying
the story of Noah's Ark in
the 19th Century edition
of bible editions was
Gustave Dore's "The Deluge"
which depicts young
children on a mountaintop
about to be overcome
by flood waters.
The lesson to children
was clear.
Be good.
[ Laughter ]
Be obedient to God's commands
or suffer the consequences.
As one 1831 bible version
stated, "Oh, how dreadful it is
to dissipate -- disobey such
a powerful God who can destroy
in a moment if he please."
By the end of the 20th Century,
the main point of the Noah story
in children's bible editions was
something very different indeed.
Instead of a prod
toward obedience
and a nod toward
God's vengeful power,
these bibles portrayed a God
who is friendly and an --
and is intent on
keeping children safe
from things such as floods.
In these editions, Noah's Ark
is often pictured chalk full
of animals without
humans even being present.
When Noah does appear,
he is often portrayed
comically interacting
with his animal friends
or smiling at his readers.
The message here is not one
of obedience in God's wrath,
but playfulness in
God's kindness.
Let us move on to our
second Ark moment.
This time I turn
to American art.
Focus this discussion,
we will look
at the early 19th Century
folk painter and Quaker,
Edward Hicks [assumed spelling].
Hicks is most famous
for his 62 variations
of "The Peaceable Kingdom".
Renditions on the Isiah
Messianic [assumed spelling]
were the lion facedown
with the lamb.
Hicks did however, paint his
own version of Noah's Ark
and he based it on a lithograph
by Nathaniel Currier
[assumed spelling]
of Currier & Ives fame -- and
also of animals found in many
of the children's picture
bibles of the time.
Hicks however, took
the Currier lithograph
and changed it in
various respects.
He thinned the herd of
animals and focused the action
with such touches as having the
lion directly engage the viewer
as he marches to the ark.
But perhaps the most
interesting change can be found
in the background
of the two pictures.
Currier's lithograph
portrayed the art with the
to be expected Middle
Eastern domed buildings
in the background.
Hicks does something
revolutionary
in his portrayal of the ark.
He puts a New England
town in the background.
Some have argued that
he has placed the Ark
in Boston Harbor itself.
In Hicks' painting, Noah and the
animals are seen entering the
ark in order to flee
the wrath to come,
but Hicks' painting
is a commentary
on a disappointing America.
His Noah's Ark painting of
1846 comes at the same time
that his peaceful kingdom
paintings are also changing.
His lions in these pictures
become more decrepit,
and his animals are separated,
and no longer huddling
as peacefully together.
Hicks is undergoing
grave doubts period
about the future
of this country.
Two issues of much concern
to Quakers such as himself --
the displacement and poor
treatment of Native Americans
and the evils of slavery --
fill much of Hicks' pessimistic
outlook at this time.
The Quakers themselves are
also experiencing significant
doctrinal strife in their
own ranks in this period.
The once promised
peace of people
like William Penn
has seemingly receded
into the background making Hicks
wonder just how promising the
supposedly promise
land of America was.
Hicks own doubt about his
country and his hatred
of slavery points to the rising
power of contradictory theories
of race circulating
in the United States
before the Civil War.
[ Coughing ]
As the hotly contested
issue of slavery came
to an ever more fervent
boil in the years leading
up to the Civil War,
a host of proponents
of slavery articulated
their beliefs
with ever more sophisticated
arguments from the bible.
A key text in this regard came
from Noah's story in Genesis.
"And Noah began to be a husband
and he planted a vineyard.
And he drank wine
and was drunken.
And he was uncovered
within his tent.
And Ham [assumed spelling] --
the father of Cainon [assumed
spelling] then saw the nakedness
of his father and told
his two brethren without.
And Shem and Japheth [assumed
spelling] took a garment,
and laid it upon their
shoulders, and went backward,
and covered the nakedness
of their father.
And their faces were backward
and they saw not their
father's nakedness.
And Noah awake from his wine
and he knew what his
younger son had done to him.
And he said, "Cursed be Cainon.
A servant of servants shall
he be unto his brethren."
He said, "Blessed
be the Lord of Shem
and Cainon shall be his servant.
God shall enlarge jewfish
and he shall dwell
in the tents of Shem.
And Cainon shall
be his servant."
The pivotal point here is
that Noah curses his son,
Ham and all of Ham's
descendants.
Many biblical scholars
also declared
that the cursed dark skin
of Ham forever marking him
and his descendants in a way
that would underline their
darker hearts and their destiny
of servitude to the more
light skinned descendants
of Jeffith and Shem.
The Pro-slavery reasoning
for Noah's curse
on Ham has a long history.
In this history, usually
sexual themes dominate.
These theories have ranged
from Ham sexually
molesting his father --
he knew what his younger
son had done to him --
to a willful violation of Noah's
policy of celibacy on the ark.
Southerners extend Ham's
sin to the heinous acts
of achillea [assumed spelling]
disrespect - a respect that Shem
and Jeffith clearly show
to their father, Noah.
According to such reasoning, Ham
was not only a sexual reprobate,
he was a man without honor --
a terrible accusation
in the honor-based
culture of the south.
The fourth moment I would
like us to look at today is
of a more recent vintage.
The colossal art
constructed as a centerpiece
of an amusement park
and religious pilgrimage
location in northern Kentucky.
Set on 800 acres 40 miles
south of Cincinnati, Ohio,
the park's centerpiece
is an all-wooden built
to scale reproduction
of Noah's Ark.
Built to the specifications
outlined
in the text of Genesis 6:9.
At a cost of $172
million, the park known
as Ark Encounter
opened in July 2016.
The ark itself required
nearly four million total feet
of timber.
It stands 51 feet tall, 510
feet long and 85 feet wide.
It contains more than
$100,000 spare feet
of theme and living space.
It's important to note
that Ark Encounter's
from the first biblical
museum are a biblically themed
entertainment park fund
in the United States
or in American History.
It is simply one of
many such locations --
-- including some dozen
creation museums plotted
around the country.
Ark Encounter also
bears some similarities
to the Holy Land experience
edification park in Orlando,
Florida where visitors are able
to walk the streets of Jerusalem
and even eat at The
Last Supper with Jesus.
Ark Encounter is a sister park
to the Creation Museum located
roughly five miles to its north.
Both museums were spearheaded by
the famous biblical apologist,
Ken Hamm [assumed spelling].
An Australian born
speaker and scholar
who has built a worldwide
reputation
for defending literal
interpretations
of the biblical text.
Both museums stress an
immersive experience focused
on providing sophisticated
apologetic frameworks
for stories found in the bible.
Arc Encounter addresses
the plausibility
of Noah's mighty ark being able
to carry all the animals found
in creation and help them
to survive the flood.
It perukes of what one
might call a common sense
experimental apologetic.
Such an apologetic approach
reaches all the way back
to the 19th Century in America
when the congregational
theologian,
Edward Robinson spent much
of his career mapping
the land of Judah.
While us contemporaries
argued over issues
of biblical chronology,
theology and historicity,
Robinson emphasized the actual
existence of the Holy Land.
The very existence of
such sites is the town
of Bethlehem and
the River Jordan.
It still has evidence
that the bible was true
and the events recorded
in it actually took place.
Our encounter calls upon the
same type of argumentation
by using a full-scale
replica of the ark to testify
to the plausibility of Noah's
journey and saving action.
And in so doing, argues
for the plausibility
of the bible itself.
Both Edward Robinson and
Ken Hamm are interested
in bringing elements of the Holy
Land to America and in so doing,
showing the truth of the bible.
Finally, I wanted to touch upon
another aspect of the presence
of Noah's Ark in
American biblical culture.
In this case, I wanted to look
at how Noah's Ark is a metaphor
and a troupe that is
seen throughout much
of American religious history.
Just one case of this can
be seen in the preaching
of the famous 19th Century
publisher, evangelist
and educator, Dwight L. Moody.
Many know of Moody because of
one of his most famous sayings,
"I look upon the world
as a wrecked vessel.
God has given me a
lifeboat and said,
'Moody, save all you can'."
Here the world is
awash in sin and Moody
in Noah-like fashion is bent
on getting all that he can
into his lifeboat
with him to save him.
[ Coughing ]
[ Door opens and shuts ]
Moody often returned to
Noah's Ark in his preaching
and speaking about how
to raise Godly children.
He told his congregation,
"Every one of our children
can be brought into the ark
if we pray and work earnestly."
And in a famous evangelistic
sermon he delivered countless
times in his many
visits to England,
Moody explained his
experience by bringing
that experience to Noah's Ark.
I understand it now.
Christ is the ark.
He saves me and I
must get inside.
The self-[inaudible] trope
and those are a wide array
of American religious
traditions including the Mormon.
The first book in the Book
of Mormon tells the tale
of a righteous Jew by the
name of Levi - a revelation
about around 600 BC from the
Lord that you hear so much
about to be destroyed.
He fled into the wilderness with
his family and with his family,
he eventually built a giant boat
and sailed it on a long journey
to the western hemisphere
founding a new civilization
there in such a fashion
another ark saved human kind.
What I've tried to do
today is show just a little
of what I've learned about while
editing "The Oxford Handbook
on the Bible in America" -- a
volume that I decided to grace
with a cover of Noah's Ark.
The story of the - of Noah and
his ark is an oft repeated trope
in Christianity showing up and
it's everything from paintings,
to bilateral administrations
[assumed spelling],
to social theories,
to preaching.
In many ways, it is
an ancient story.
It is a story that an
American never seem
to tire of making new.
[ Applause ]
>> Valerie Cooper:
Good afternoon.
It is a hard truth, but
one that must be faced.
African Americans are a
people who were created
by the Atlantic Slave Trade.
There were Africans and
there were Americans.
But Africans in the Americas
mostly arrived on these shores
after having passed
through the middle passage
as through a terrible womb still
wearing the bloody afterbirth
of their singular
creation as a people.
In the main, Africans were
brought to the America's
to serve in chains and
degradation a system
that defined them as
chattel [assumed spelling],
not human beings.
As "Lift Every Voice
and Sing" --
the so-called Negro
National Anthem puts it --
"We have come over a way that
with tears has been watered.
We have come treading our path
through the blood
of the slaughter."
Even as Africans in the
Americas, were being introduced
to slavery, many were also
being introduced to the bible.
Indeed, for many, the bible
became this central tool
in the battle for
freedom in the New World.
In "The Talking Book: African
Americans and the Bible",
Allen Callahan wrote, "African
Americans are the children
of slavery in America and the
bible -- as no other book --
is the book of slavery's
children."
From its New Testament -- from
its Old Testament narratives
about freeing the Israelites
from slavery in Egypt
to its New Testament teachings
about freeing the believer
from slavery to sin, the
bible makes deliverance
from slavery one of
its central themes.
For African Americans,
the question remained,
"How can we be recognized
in the fullness
of our humanity however
degrading our condition
as slaves -- "
[ Coughing ]
" -- however terrible
our birth as a people."
One way they sought to define
themselves as fully human was
through an appeal to scripture.
Again, and again, during this
period and into the presence --
present, scripture continued
to be defined as that
which affirmed black
people's humanity.
From the earliest
slave narratives
to the more recent work
of liberation theologians
like James Cohen
[assumed spelling]
and Kelly Brown-Douglas,
African Americans have argued
that scripture is that which
declares God to be a liberator
and African Americans as
people deserving of liberation.
God is never understood
as an abstract concept,
but rather always seen in
relation to the people of God --
people like the downtrodden
and oppressed Africans
in the America's.
The history of African
Americans and their encounters
with slavery, with racism,
with oppression has shaped
black biblical hermeneutics
and interpretation in particular
ways to produce a reading
of scripture among
African Americans
that emphasizes their humanity
and celebrates their
particularity.
Understanding how African
Americans have wrestled
with the bible is essential to
understanding their formation
as a people and their survival
through the pains of slavery,
Jim Crowe [assumed
spelling] segregation,
and continuing race-based
oppression.
For evangelical Christians,
the authority
of scripture is the
central pillar of belief.
Historically, as Africans
in America overwhelmingly
became evangelical Christians
in the 18th and 19th
Centuries, their encounters
with the bible determinatively
shaped their interactions
with others.
They rejected biblical
texts that seemed
to favor slaving while
embrace -- emblaze --
embracing those that reinforce
blacks claims of humanity
and demands for equality.
Henry Louis Gates argues
that among the earliest
black writings
in English are five
slave narratives
that include a similar encounter
between a black slave
and the bible.
Based on the similarities
of these encounters,
Gates' calls this the trope
of the talking book and notes
that it's found in slave
narratives published in 1770,
1785, 1787, 1789 and 1815.
The first slave narrative
in which the trope
of the talking book
appears is in a narrative
of the most remarkable
particulars in the life
of James, Albert [inaudible],
an African prince related
by himself written by James
Albert [inaudible] and published
in at least seven versions
including a 1770, 1774, 1790,
1810, 1811, and 1814 edition.
[inaudible]'s narrative
is thought
to have been only the second
such slave narrative written
in English after
the 1760 narrative
of the incompetent sufferings
and surprising deliverance
of Britain Hammond [assumed
spelling], a Negro man.
Throughout his slave narrative,
[inaudible] is fascinated
with literacy and books.
But it is not until he
encounters a bible in English
that this fascination
comes to a head.
Having observed his
master read from the bible,
[inaudible] is shocked when
he is unable to hear anything
from the book himself.
"My master used to
read prayers in public
to the ship's crew every Sabbath
Day and then I saw him read.
I was never so surprised
in my life.
And when I took the - when I
saw the book take to my master,
for I wished it did
as I observed him
to look upon it and
move his lips.
I wished it would do so for me.
As soon as my master had
done reading, I followed him
to the place where he put the
book being mightily delighted
with it.
And when nobody saw me, I
opened it and put my ear
down close upon it
in great hopes
that it would say
something to be.
But I was sorry and greatly
disappointed when I found
that it would not speak.
This spot immediately presented
itself to me, that everybody
and everything despised
me because I was black.
The bible talked to him as a
consequence of his blackness.
However, by the end of his life,
he's become literate in Dutch,
and English, and conversant
with Protestant Christianity.
In the years following that --
the publication of
that narrative,
at least four other authors
would describe an encounter
with the bible that Gates calls
the "Trope of the Talking Book".
As each author took
up the trope,
he transformed it as he told it.
In a final version,
John Jay told the Trope
in his autobiography,
"The Life, History,
and Unparalleled
Sufferings of John Jay".
Although published in 1815,
Jay's narrative was thought lost
until rediscovered in 1983.
As a result, it does not appear
in many standard bibliographies
of black biographies
of the period.
Jay writes that his final --
his initial encounter with
the bible is very similar
to Breanna Shaw's
in its futility.
"I took up the book
and held it to my ears
to try whether the book
would talk to me or not.
But it proved to be all in vain
for I could not hear it speak
one word which caused me
to grieve and lament that after
God had done so much for me,
as he had in pardoning my sins,
and blotting out my inequities,
and transgressions, and
making me a new creature,
the book would not talk to me."
Nevertheless, Jay is
encouraged by God and decides
to devote himself to
prayer and supplication,
so that God will give him the
gift of literacy and in effect,
force the book -- the
bible -- to talk to him.
The Lord heard my groans and
cries at the end of six weeks
and sent the blessed angel
of the covenant to my heart
and soul to release me
from my stress and troubles
and delivered me
from all my enemies
which were ready to destroy me.
[ Coughing ]
Thus, the Lord was so
pleased in his infinite mercy
to send an angel in a vision
in shining arraignment,
and his counting, and shining
like the sun with a large bible
in his hands, and brought
it to me, and said,
"I am come to bless the and
to grant the thy request."
Thus, my eyes were
opened at the end
of six weeks while I was praying
in the place where I slept.
Although the place was as dark
as a dungeon I awoke
s the scripture said,
and found it illuminated with
the light of the glory of God,
and an angel standing beside
me with a large book open
which was the Holy bibl.
And said to me, "Thou
has desire to read,
and understand this book, and
to speak the language of it both
in English and in Dutch.
I will therefore teach
them and now, read."
Of the four authors who reused
the Trope of the Talking Book
in their slave narratives
-- John [inaudible],
John Stewart [assumed spelling],
Alonso [assumed spelling]
[inaudible] and John Jay --
none were content to leave
the trope as Breanna saw --
had presented it with the bible
having been silent before a
black supplicant.
Indeed, in Jay's narrative the
bible speaks to him in English
and Dutch precisely because
of his faithfulness in prayer
and supplication before God.
The bible recognizes and
affirms Jay's humanity.
It speaks to him as to others
as a result of sovereign
and miraculous acts of God.
God affirms Jay's humanity.
And so, the book -- the
bible -- speaks to him.
In these slave narratives
and in black preaching,
the bible is the bible because
it speaks to black people.
In "Notes on the
State of Virginia",
Thomas Jefferson --
oh, there it was.
I'm sorry.
I knew it was in
there somewhere.
Sorry. In "Notes on the State of
Virginia", Thomas Jefferson --
perhaps the preeminent
and enlightened thinker
on the America's --
wrote speculatively about
blacks' abilities concluding
that while in music they're more
generally gifted than whites
with accurate ears for tune and
time, he nevertheless lamented
that their gifts for
reason or literature were
in his view entirely absent.
But I -- but never
yet could I find
that a black had
uttered a thought
above the level of
plain narration.
Misery is often the parent
of the most effecting
touches in poetry.
Among the blacks
is misery enough,
God knows, but no poetry.
This is from his notes
on the state of Virginia.
He then goes on to misspell
Phyllis Wheatley's [assumed
spelling] name.
The fiery black abolitionist,
David Walker was affronted
by Jefferson's quest - comments
questioning black abilities.
Of Jefferson, Walker wrote,
"I say that unless we try
to refute Mr. Jefferson's
arguments respecting us,
they will only establish them.
Walker then undertook
to refute Jefferson
by presenting a reasoned and
well-articulated argument
for black equality in
America from the bible
and the federal government's
own founding documents.
In 1829, Walker published
his answers
to Jefferson's [inaudible]
in his book "Walker's Appeal"
in four articles
together with the preamble
to the colored citizens of
the world, but in particular
and very expressly to those of
the United States of America.
In his appeal, Walker attacks
Jefferson arguing slavery
and the general oppression
of black people was
a sin before God.
Including Jefferson among the
enemies of God, Walker predicts
that God's judgment will fall
upon those who oppress blacks,
and those enemies
who for hundreds
of years stole our rights,
and kept us ignorant of him,
and his divine worship.
He will remove.
Fear not the number in
education of our enemies
against whom we have to contend
for our lawful right guaranteed
to us by our maker for
why should we be afraid
when God is -- and will
continue if we continue
to be humble, to be on our side.
For Walker, slavery contradicted
scripture because it went
against the most basic
of Jesus' teachings --
the golden rule as
found in Matthew 7.
Our divine Lord and master said,
"All things whatsoever you would
that men should do unto you,
do ye even so unto them"
which is found in Matthew 7:12.
But an American minister with
a bible in his hands holds us
and our children in the most
abject slavery and wretchedness.
Now I ask them would they
like for us to hold them
and their children in abject
slavery and wretchedness?
"How -- " Walker asks, " --
could a Christian countenance
[assumed spelling] slavery?"
His answer is to approve of
slavery is to deny the bible.
Walker told of once traveling
to hear a minister preach
at a camp meeting
in South Carolina.
"Being seated, I fixed
myself in complete position
to hear the word of the save --
of my Savior and to receive such
as I thought was authenticated
by the Holy scriptures.
But to my no ordinary
astonishment,
our referend gentleman got
up and told us colored people
that slaves must be obeyed
-- obedient to their masters,
must do their duty to their
masters or be whipped.
The whip was made for the backs
of fools", etc. Here I pause
for a moment to give
the world time
to consider what was my
surprise, to hear such preaching
from a minister of my
master whose very gospel is
that of peace and not of blood,
and whips as this
pretended preacher tried
to make us believe.
For Walker, that could
not be the gospel
that was being preached.
David Walker declared that
this could not be the gospel
that was being preached
because it was antithetical
to Jesus' teachings
on love and justice.
For walker, such declarations
as "slaves obey your masters"
invalidated both the preacher
and his message.
Indeed, for Walker it was not
scripture unless it affirmed
blacks, humanity and
relationship with God.
In questioning this
preacher's use of scripture,
Walker was actually questioning
the man's identification s
a Christian.
Despite how this
pretend preacher --
as Walker called him -- might
have identified himself,
Walker argued that he cannot
actually be a Christian
if he fails to live and
teach the liberating love
at the heart of the gospel.
Maria Stewart -- David
Walker's protégé --
took up Walker's published
work after his death
and eventually published
her speeches,
and theological meditations in a
book in 1835 and again in 1879.
Stewart was believed to be
the first American woman black
or white to give a
political speech before a
promiscuous audience.
That's more interesting
than it sounds.
It just means an audience that
contains men and women in it.
[ Laughter ]
And to leave extended
copies of her text.
In addition to arguing as Walker
had that God would judge America
for the treatment of blacks,
Stewart also contended
that African Americans
were a people
of particular blessing by God.
They were children
of God's covenant.
Stewart's use of scripture seems
to invite endless examination.
But on almost every level
the meeting grows richer
as the scriptures comment
and illuminate the text
into which it has been set.
An example of this
is the elegance
of Stewart's masterful knowledge
of the bible and it's clear
in five little words which -
with which she powerfully frames
a new exegetical paradigm.
She states simply, "Of those
Americans who have grown rich
at the expense of the labor of
slaves and the oppressed blacks,
you fair sumptuously every day."
The biblical illusion is clear.
Stewart is quoting Luke
16:19-31 "The Parable
of Lazarus and the Rich Man".
In "The Parable", Jesus tells of
a rich man who dies after a life
of ease in which he faired
sumptuously every day only
to end up in hell.
While in torment in hell,
he looks up to heaven
and sees the old bag beggar,
Lazarus who used
to sit at his door.
Lazarus sits in Heaven being
comforted by none other
than the patriarch Abraham.
The rich man asks Abraham
to send Lazarus to Hell
to get him some water to drink.
Hell is apparently too hot
for the rich man and he's used
to being comfortable even at
the expense of other's comfort.
He doesn't seem to realize
that things have
radically changed forever.
Abraham refuses the request
noting the final ends
of the two men are justified
because of the lives
they lived on earth.
The text itself is
subversive and Stewart's use
of it's doubly subversive.
You notice we keep the rich
man's name just "rich man"
and Lazarus the poor man.
It's like we've forgotten
Kluge or --
[ Laughter ]
We've forgotten the wealthy
name and we kept Leroy, right?
In a further reversal of
the manifestations in life,
the poor man is comforted in
Heaven after a miserable life
on earth while the rich
man is tormented in hell
after a comfortable
life on earth.
Moreover, the rich man
believes even in hell
that Lazarus will still
fetch and carry for him
as the poor man did
when he was on earth.
But in Stewart's retelling,
in context it does not merely
describe a rich man punished
and a poor man rewarded,
but rather slaves in Heaven
and slave owners in Hell.
Stewart's words, "You fair
sumptuously every day" can be
taken at face value as
an indictment of those
who live well and
particularly those
in the slave-ocracy
whose leisure was brought
from the forced labor of others.
However, in the context
of Luke 16,
"The Parable" becomes a broader,
more stark and eternal judgment
against all of those who
lived well on the backs
of others who were suffering.
Since the Parable was set in
the context of final judgment
with the ultimate
consequence of Heaven and Hell,
Stewart's accusation that you
fair sumptuously every day
invokes recollection
of one earthly banquet
where Lazarus must
contend himself with crumbs
and a later celestial
banquet where he reclines
in Abraham's bosom
where the rich
and hard-hearted master's
thirst goes unabated.
As a result, Stewart's
invocation
of the parable carries
with it some
of the same apocalyptic
implications of judgment
and social reversal that
was central to its telling
in the gospel of Luke.
It suggests slave
owners forgotten,
and nameless slaves
comforted, and applauded.
The rich hungry, but
the hungry filled.
It suggests God's clear advocacy
for an ultimate rewarding
of Lazarus, the punitive
underdog of the story.
Here's Stewart's
words of indictment
against the slave
system, "We will tell you
that it is our goal that clothes
you in fine linen, and purple,
and causes you to fair
sumptuously every day.
And it is the blood of
our fathers and the tears
of our brethren that
have enriched your soil.
And we claim our rights."
Stewart is prophetizing
a radical reversal --
a come uppance for the wealthy
west and the vindication
for the suffering Africa
out of who's spilled blood
western wealth has flowed.
Yet she must say it in ways
that encode her meanings,
so that she's not killed because
of such incendiary words.
For example, she writes simply,
"You fair sumptuously
every day" quoting Luke 16,
but without giving the text
or the rest of the parable
which made me wonder when people
realized what bible verse she
was quoting.
I think she probably would've
preferred they got it the
ride home.
Stewart laced her
political speeches
with biblical illusions
weaving her way in and out
of the King James
version of the bible.
I'm going to move ahead.
Howard Thurman [assumed
spelling], who was Dean Ameritus
of Howard University's Rank in
Chapel described the attitude
of his grandmother who
had been born a slave.
He recalled reading
the bible to this woman
since she'd never learned to
read or write for herself.
Thurman's grandmother would ask
him to read the psalms, Isiah,
or the gospels, but never
the Paul line Epistles
with the lone exception
of the 13th chapter
of first Corinthians --
that chapter on love which
she permitted to be read
to her only very rarely.
Eventually when he was older,
Thurman got up the nerve
to ask his grandmother
why she was so particular
about which bible verses
she was willing to hear.
"With a feeling of
great temerity,
I asked her one day why it was
that she would not let me read
any of the Paul line letters.
What she told me I
will never forget.
'During the days of
slavery -- ' she said, ' --
the master's minister would
occasionally hold services
for the slaves.
Old Man McGee was so mean.
He would not let a Negro to --
Negro minister to
preach to his slaves.
Always the white minister used
as his text something from Paul.
At least three or four times
a year he used as a text,
"Slaves be obedient to those who
are your masters as to Christ'.
Then he would go on to
show that it was God's will
that we were slaves and
how if we were good,
and happy slaves God would
bless them -- bless us.
I promised my maker that
if I ever learned to read
and if freedom ever
came, I would not read
that part of the bible."
Howard Thurman's grandmother
refused to hear text
that even suggested her
enslavement was God's will.
Instead she rejected such texts
preferring to find as canonical
and authoritative only those
biblical passages that jived
with her own sense of humanity.
For African Americans, the
bible was a talking book.
It spoke to their humanity
of their covenant with God.
James Evans calls the
bible a text for outsiders.
As the ultimate outsiders,
Africans in the Americas sought
to make the bible their
own clinging to text
that affirmed their humanity
while rejecting all others
including other biblical
texts which seemed
to deny them full inclusion
in the human family.
If it didn't affirm them,
it wasn't scripture.
A southern folk song
put it quite strongly,
but for the purposes
of our discussion today I will
replace the more vulgar N word
that was found in the song with
a politer descriptor "negro".
"Negro never went to free
school nor any other college
and all the white folks wonder
where that negro
got his knowledge.
He chewed up all the bible and
then spat out the scripture.
And when he began to argue
strong he were a snorting raptor
[assumed spelling].
African Americans chewed up
all the bible and then spat
out the scripture in ways
that allowed them to survive
and to thrive in the Americas."
In the biblical text, they
found a narrative of liberation
that included them even
as others thought
desperately to exclude them.
They spit out scripture
in spirituals, and songs,
and sermons, and in
stories, and they survived.
In the end, African
Americans were so well versed
in the bible they had chewed
and so able to argue strong
for their humanity by the
means of that same scripture
that others were left to wonder
where that negro
got his knowledge.
Even when African Americans
were at their lowest,
even when they were not human
in the eyes of the world
and sometimes even in their own
eyes they clung to the bible
and an understanding of
scripture that called them sons
and daughters of Africa, and
sons and daughters of God.
In their encounter
with religious others,
African Americans have
tended to emphasize two ideas
from scripture -- that God
is a liberator and that God
who loves humanity
affirms their humanity.
If it attests to our shared
humanity, if it portrays God
as a liberator, and indeed
if the book talks to us,
then that book describes the
God they've come to know.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Lincoln Mullen: Good
afternoon, everyone.
I want to thank the
Kluge Center,
and especially Dan Druello
[assumed spelling] and Mark Noll
for the invitation to
speak to you today.
And as you'll see in a moment,
also thanks to the Library
of Congress staff who are
behind the Chronicling America
collection of digitized
historical newspapers.
I'd like to begin by asking you
to imagine three
different bibles.
The first bible is
somebody's personal bible.
As you flip through the pages,
you might notice
highlighting and underlining.
In many of the margins you'll
notice comments wrestling
with the text.
These marginal annotations
are a guide how
that reader interpreted
the bible.
You might quickly notice
that the reader did
not give equal weight
to all parts of scripture.
Some readers will favor the
psalms, others the epistles
to the romans, many
the prophetic passages.
We could learn a lot about how a
particular person read the bible
by looking at how
they marked it up.
Okay. Next, I want you
to imagine a bible used
by a particular church
or congregation.
Maybe one of those imposing
leather bound folios.
As far as I know, most
churches discourage you
from marking up the bible.
But using our historian's
imagination, we could figure
out other ways to
get a sense of how
that congregation
interpreted the scriptures.
Perhaps we could catalog all the
texts that the minister preached
from or that were
discussed at bible studies.
Again, not every text
would receive equal weight
and the members
of the congregation would likely
have differences of opinion
about the text that
they studied in content.
And we could find
those passages --
those patterns of
usage revealing.
By the way, let's move up one
more level of abstraction.
What might a bible look like not
for an individual or a church,
but for the public sphere?
Many scholars have demonstrated
the significance of the bible
for public affairs
in the United States.
So, what would a marked up copy
of America's public
bible look like?
Thanks to the National
Endowment for the Humanities
in the Library of Congress,
one place we could go looking
for America's public bible
is in "Chronicling America".
"Chronicling America"
is an amazing collection
of some 13 million
newspaper pages covering more
than a century and a
half of American history.
Now there are many digitized
newspaper collections available
from commercial publishers
mostly at a staggering expense
to universities, but
the publicly funded
"Chronicling America"
is something special.
Instead of being locked behind
pay walls and license agreement
that restrict most kinds of use,
"Chronicling America"
is truly free.
In the world of open source
software, they have a saying,
"Chronicling America is
free as in free beer --
" meaning you can use it
without paying for it " --
but it's also free
as in free speech."
Meaning that you can
use its open API's
and bulk data downloads to do --
well, whatever you can think of.
In 2016, I heard Mark Noll give
a paper at the American Society
of Church History
which he counted
which biblical texts were
using sermons after the deaths
of Presidents Washington,
Lincoln and Garfield.
It occurred to me then
that it might be possible
to do something similar
using a computer program
and chronicling America.
So, thanks for the idea, Mark.
[ Laughter ]
I wrote a computer
program which scans through
"Chronicling America"
looking for words and phrases
in the King James
version of the bible.
The program measures
certain things
about those matching phrases.
How many of them are there?
Are there phrases which are
distinct to the bible such as
"through a glass darkly" or are
they common phrases in English?
Are the matched phrases close
to one another on the page
or are they scattered?
[ Coughing ]
A machine learning model then
sorts through all of them
to decide which of these
actually genuine quotations
are illusions.
The result is a list of which
verses were quoted or alluded
to on which newspaper page.
Like the marginal annotations in
a personal bible where the list
of sermons preached
from a pulpit bible --
this list of well over a million
quotations and counting --
is one kind of evidence
for understanding
America's public bible.
When I go and read these
quotations in the context
of these newspaper pages
in "Chronicling America",
I'm consistently
surprised by what I find.
Let me give you a
smattering of examples
to show you what I mean.
This newspaper that's on your
screen is an 1852 South Carolina
newspaper which reprints
a sermon preached
at St. Paul's cathedral
in London.
The sermon was preached
against the idea that
"divided the human
race into separate
and distinct parentages
[assumed spelling]".
In other words, it was
preached against polygenesis --
the prevailing scientific
idea in the 19th Century
that said different races
had different origin points
or even the result of
different acts of creation.
Against this scientific idea,
it martialed Paul's text
from the book of Acts [assumed
spelling] that God has made
of one blood all nations of men.
The same text from Acts was
featured in an advertisement
for the New York Tribune
which circulated wildly
during the Civil War.
The Tribune or Republican paper
promised potential readers
that it was "Republican
in its hearty occasion
to the great truth
that God has made
of one blood all
nations of men."
From these two examples
we can observe --
as historians have pointed out
- that the bible was central
to debates about race and
slavery in the 19th Century.
And we can also notice that
the particular characteristics
of newspaper publishing --
such as advertisements
and reprinted articles --
shaped how frequently text
from the bible were quoted.
Of course, not all biblical
quotations were so serious.
Take this widely circulated
joke printed in a 1912 newspaper
in Oregon and it said that
up in the moonshine district
in East Tennessee a popular
minister has this inscription
posted on his door, "Jug
not lest ye be judged."
[ Laughter ]
You know, of course, that's a
reference to Matthew Chapter 5.
Many biblical quotations
in newspapers were jokes.
Being 19th Century jokes,
they're not particularly
funny most times.
But as Robert [inaudible]
pointed out in his essay
on the Great Cat Massacre, "If
we can understand the jokes,
then we are starting to
understand the foreign systems
of meaning in the past."
Quotations from the bible and
newspapers often chose passages
that were pithy,
programmatic or practical.
It would be a tautology
to say that the verses
which were quoted were quotable.
But it's worth mentioning I
think that newspapers tended
to engage with the
low-hanging fruit of the bible
such as the parables,
and the proverbs,
and mostly avoided any
kind of exposition except
in reprinted sermons and
in Sunday school lessons.
A large proportion of the uses
were casual rather than reverent
and used the bibles for
meanings which could be imposed
on rather than drawn out of it.
You understand that "a million
quotations" I'm painting
with a broad brush here.
Sometimes though newspapers
did publish lengthy excerpts
in the bible.
Here an 1872 newspaper published
without commentary all
three chapters on the sermon
on the [inaudible]
under the title,
"An original sermon
by the son of God".
[ Laughter ]
Initially, I thought that this
was just a newspaper man needing
to fill column inches.
But when I dug a little more
deeply into it, I asked, "What?
Which newspaper was doing this?"
It was the Weekly Caucasian
whose title page proclaimed its
stand for state sovereignty
and white supremacy.
Quite obviously, the bare fact
of quotation tells us little
and we have to go back
to the newspapers to ask
who quoted the text and why.
Quotations from the bible and
newspapers were often driven
by an effort to evangelize.
[ Coughing ]
There are relatively
few religious
or denominational papers in
"Chronicling America" relative
to their importance for 19th
Century newspaper publishing
in general.
[ Background noise ]
But many papers had regular
or semi-regular sections
with religious cults
like the "Sermon
on the Mountain [assumed
spelling]",
"The Weekly Caucasian"
that I just showed you
or in this feature from
the [inaudible] in 1912.
Now unfortunately, the big type
in this headline didn't make
it any easier for my algorithm
to find the quotation
and I'm not so sure
that non-Christian readers
would've found it so easy
to understand the sidebar which
consisted solely of quotations
about sin and hell from the
bible without any explanation
or text to glue them together.
But the fact of this bare
quotation which happens
in many different contexts
in the newspapers shows
at least the presumption that
the bible was a commonly known,
plainly interpretable text.
The bible was often used as a
political slogan quite on par
from any obvious
meaning in the text.
In the 1876 presidential
election
between Democrat
Samuel J. Tilden
and the Republican Rutter
[assumed spelling] B. Hayes was
hotly disputed.
It eventually went to a
congressional commission
which resolved in
favor of Rutherford,
but in that intervening period
the Democratic papers were all
sure that their candidate
had won
and frequently quoted the
verse, "The Lord called Samuel"
and added, "But not Rutherford".
[ Laughter ]
The Lord may have called Samuel,
but the Congressional
commission picked Rutherford.
Not all such political
quotations were superficial
slogans, however.
One of my favorite examples is
this retelling of the parable
of the "The Good
Samaritan" titled
"Reading Between the Lines".
The parable identified the man
who was injured by the thieves
as the people - the ones who did
the injuring as the Plutocrats,
those who passed him
by as the Democratic,
and Republican parties, and the
Samaritan who took care of him
as the Populous Party.
Here's an example from 1899
using a familiar passage
of scripture for its moral
authority in public discourse.
So, I want to suggest that
by using machine learning
to find biblical quotations
in "Chronicling America",
we can start to peace out what
this annotated marked up copy
of America's public
bible looked like.
These newspaper quotations
are like annotations
in a personal bible in that
they provide us with a clue
to how Americans read the
bible in a public sphere
and how they argued
with and about it.
Through these seven examples,
I tried to show you some
of the kinds of surprising
evidence
that we can turn up
using this method.
And that's one of the key
points that I want to make.
One of the things that I worry
most about as a historian is
that I only find evidence of the
things that I go looking for.
This is especially a problem for
large [inaudible] collections
where you can find it --
always find an example or two
of something in 13
million newspaper pages.
So, this computational approach
is my way of trying to get
around that limitation.
I think of historical
research --
the sort of historical detective
work that we do as swinging
like a pendulum between
two polls.
Sometimes historians
start with a question
that they want to answer.
Other times they go to the
archives or in this case
to the Library of
Congress' digital collections
to emerge ourselves
in the sources
and understand what was
important to people at the time.
The project I've been
describing is useful I hope
because it uncovers
the kinds of things
that I would never have known
to look for which I can then use
to form new questions
about the past.
The second point that
I want to make is
that this computational approach
lets us see large scale trends
that we would never have been
able to see while looking
at the individual newspaper
page which we might only begin
to intuit with a
life3time of study.
Now we come to the
audience engagement portion
of the afternoon.
Here is a blank chart for you.
Take this chart, for instance.
How would you fill it in?
From the 1840's to the 1920's
were there more biblical
quotations per newspaper
page or fewer?
Did the trend line go
up, or down, or sideways?
I'm going to show you the
answer in a few minutes.
But to keep you honest, I want
you to turn to your neighbor
and I want to tell you -- you
to tell him or her your guess.
[ Background noise ]
>> Okay. There's not going
to be a quiz on the way out.
Don't worry.
So, I didn't say
this to trick you.
I couldn't have filled in
this blank chart myself
until I did the research.
Here's what I found for
the bible as a whole.
Unless you knew what this --
unless you could guess what this
trend line would be in advance,
once you've seen a visualization
like this it's easy
to tell yourself
a "just so" story
and assume you can already --
you already knew
what the chart shows.
But I could not guess
this in advance.
The trend in quotations is
practically the opposite
of what I assumed it would be.
On the one hand, there is a very
steep decline from the 1830's
to the early 1840's, but I
don't think that's the most
important point.
For one thing, there are
many fewer newspapers
in "Chronicling America"
for that period,
so there's a lot
more uncertainty
about the trend line.
And also, the 1830's
and 1840's were a period
of especially high activism
among evangelical Protestants
and it wouldn't be too
surprising to see a higher rate
of quotation in that period.
What is interesting
is that the trend goes
up after the 1860's roughly
doubling from [inaudible]
in the mid-1860's to the peaks
of the early 1890's in mid-10's.
So, there's no easy narrative
of the secularization
of the press -- whatever
secularization might mean
in this case.
Such general trends
are suggested.
Why is there a peak in the
mid-1910's, for example?
The answer is almost certainly
that newspapers were publishing
material about the Great War,
and memorials of the dead,
and calls for sacrifice
lent themselves
to biblical quotations.
Now the trend for the bible as
a whole is much less interesting
than the trend line
for individual verses.
So, what verse would you guess
is the most frequently quoted
in "Chronicling America"?
Come on, you know you all
want to say John 3:16.
[ Laughter ]
That's what I would've
guessed --
John 3:16, "For God
saw that the world --
". But that text only became
popular at the beginning
of the 20th Century and
only managed to squeak
into the top 10 overall.
The most popular verse was Luke
18:16, "Suffer little children
to come unto me and
forbid them not."
Why was it so popular?
Because many newspapers
included Sunday school lessons
and they often included that
verse at the top of the lesson.
Coming in second was Matthew
25:21, "Well done thy good
and faithful servant" which
was a reliable quotation
for obituaries.
But why was Exodus 20:15,
"Though shall not steal"
suddenly so popular only
in the years 1912 and 1913.
It was not because the income
tax amendment was ratified
in 1913, though that's
a pretty good guess.
[ Laughter ]
After Theodore Roosevelt lost
the Republican Party nomination
to William Howard Taft,
he accepted the nomination
of the Progressive Party
otherwise called the Bull
Moose Party.
He'd previously quoted the 10
Commandments in his 1906 --
[ Coughing ]
-- speech "The Man
with the Muckrake".
And then, when he
accepted the nomination
of the Bull Moose
Party, Roosevelt declared
that his most important
principle went back
to Sinai [assumed spelling],
"Though shalt not steal."
"Thou shalt not steal
a nomination."
"Thou shall neither steal in
politics nor in business."
Thou shalt not steal
from the people --
the birthrights of the
people to rule themselves.
And newspapers launched
in a virtual frenzy
of quoting the verse
"Thou shalt not steal."
Progressives -- political
progressives insisted
that Capitol was
stealing the fruits
of labor whereas Capitalists
turned right around and said
that the Labor Union Movement
was trying to steal the due
that was owed to Capitalism.
The point is that the
frequently quoted text
which comprised America's
public bible changed over time.
When we look at the
biblical text
that were frequently quoted,
we find a lot of debate
about what they mean,
but the key text
that were debated also
changed over time.
One thing that I've been working
on is clustering the time
series for these verses.
In other words, I'm
trying to group verses
which had a similar trend line.
I still don't have all
the kinks worked out,
but here are a few examples.
Some verses were very popular up
to the 1860's and then declined
in popularity during
the Civil War.
Some verses were
very popular before
and after the Civil
War, but not during.
Take for instance,
Matthew 19:16, "So,
they are no longer two, but one.
What God therefore
had joined together,
let no man put asunder."
This verse was obviously
about marriage,
but it had political
implications during the
sectional crisis over slavery
and then again during
reconstruction.
But it must've had a bitter
taste during the Civil War.
Other verses had chewed
[assumed spelling] peaks
of popularity in
the 1870's-1900's.
Psalm 1:33:1, "Behold how
good and how pleasant it is
for brethren to dwell together
in unity" was a useful text
for healing the nation's
wounds after the Civil War,
but also for forgetting
about the promises made
to the freed people
during reconstruction.
And finally, some verses only
became popular in the 1920's.
Why did John 15:13, "Greater
love have no man than this
that a man lay down his life for
his friends" become so popular?
Because it became the
text that was quoted
in virtually every obituary
of a soldier or a sailor
who died in World War I.
Let me give you one
final example.
We're going to look at a verse,
acts 20:35, "Laboring ye ought
to support the weak
and remember the words
of the Lord Jesus how he
said, 'It is more blessed
to give than to receive'."
This verse is an
interesting case study
because it could be quoted for
either of those two phrases --
"laboring to support the
weak" or "It is more blessed
to give than to receive".
But looking over the 2,600
instances I found so far
in "Chronicling America",
we can ask why this first
became popular over time.
Was it the first part of
the verse used to critique
or emirate [assumed
spelling] capitalism
or was the second part of the
verse quoted more frequently?
There are a few dozen
examples where the phrase
"laboring ye ought to
support the weak" is used.
One example's a story
called "The Sacrifice"
which was circulated in western
newspapers in November of 1908.
The story featured two
penniless and hungry men.
When the first man
tried to rob the other,
the victim gave him the meal
he had earned from menial labor
and so saved the other
from a life of crime
by going hungry himself.
The phrase, "It is
more blessed to give
than to receive" was far
more likely to be quoted.
It was often used with
a request for donations
to churches or charities.
It was also used to
memorialize the dead,
to encourage selflessness
or praise generosity,
and to advertise life insurance.
[ Laughter ]
It was even used for jokes.
After one bout, the boxer
Jack Johnson was said
to have given more
than he had received.
[ Laughter ]
But the real driver
of the popularity
of this verse was Christmas --
specifically the growing
popularity of Christmas
as a consumer holiday.
Here's an advertisement from
the chain of department stores
that James Cash Penny [assumed
spelling] founded in 1902.
Now the day of rejoicing
has come to us for we have
in our own hearts realized the
truth that it is more blessed
to give than to receive.
By the early 20th Century,
newspapers have become
more dependent on revenue
from advertisers
and subscribers.
And so, under our
quotation of this verse
in large type the evening times
of [inaudible] instructed
readers, "Start now
and read The Times
advertisements closely
and constantly every day.
Then you will know where
to buy, and what to give,
and purchase all your Christmas
presents to the best advantage."
I would end with one
-- end with two points.
One is that in terms
of methodology,
this kind of computational
method is useful for
"stirring the archive" as Lauren
Cline [assumed spelling] has
put it.
To figure out how the verse,
"It is more blessed to give
than to receive" fit into the
public sphere, we had to look
at both the general
trend line --
[ Coughing ]
-- and then the context of the
verse in individual newspapers.
The second point
concerns the relationship
between the bible
and the newspaper.
The thing that I am struck
by is just how malleable
America's public bible was.
I thought that the debates
were going to be primarily
over the bible with text
martialed in one side
of a debate or another.
But at least for newspapers
in the 19th Century,
I would now say that
the debates tended
to happen through the bible.
That is to say that the
bible provided the language
for expressing ideas in
the public sphere even more
than it provided the
content for those ideas.
As a storehouse of commandments,
stories, and moral reflection
of pity [assumed spelling],
phrases, proverbs and parables,
the bible was a common
yet contested text
that provided much of the
framework for discussions
of wealth and capitalism,
marriage and family,
law and politics, and
even the occasional joke.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> John Haskell: I thank
all of you very much.
We have a few minutes
for questions.
And if you don't
have an opportunity
to ask your question, we do
have a reception afterward
and you might be able to
corner our scholars here, but.
So, indicate to me if you have
a question and we have folks
with microphones ready to --
>> Male speaker:
Thank you very much.
I enjoyed all the [inaudible].
So, I just want to do two
things to move the discussion
into other geographic
space which we have to do.
And second, to move it
to the zone [assumed
spelling] of non-believers.
Suppose I'm not a Christian.
Suppose I'm antagonistic
to the bible.
How do you fit that
into your conversation?
And I will do this by just
raising four good points
to allow us to talk.
One is the entire
concept of translation.
So, your presentations are based
on various English additions
because of your monolingualism.
So, I was introduced to the
bible via another language
and it is a document
that did a lot of damage
to [inaudible] languages
and [inaudible] --
incredible damage.
And I will give you one example.
I'm [inaudible].
We don't have a concept
of a Satan.
It doesn't exist
in the religion.
We have a concept of witchcraft.
So, in trying to resolve
this they joke a god
of the crossroads called
[inaudible] was a very
famous god.
It was like an intermediary
between all the divinities
and the [inaudible],
Satan because they're
looking for [inaudible].
But more so they are looking --
the critical problem they face
when they were doing this
project in [inaudible]
in the 19th Century is
what do you call God?
What is a name for God?
So, what they did is to
say, "We don't want the name
in association with Paganism."
So, then we credit the name
which now give God a
homeland with the heaven.
So, for instance, that's
my name, [inaudible].
But that alone is not
necessarily generic biblical
[assumed spelling].
But they couldn't just get
a name for it and they said,
"This big man who
lives in the sky."
[ Coughing ]
>> John Haskell: Could you
just still this to a question?
>> Male speaker: Yes.
>> John Haskell: Because I know
there's a lot of other people.
>> Male speaker: Yes, that's it.
>> John Haskell:
And we can get Mark
and the others to come and -
>> Male speaker: And
then, [inaudible].
>>John Haskell: Just a
quick question would be good
at this point because you've
already brought up enough
for these folks to chew on.
>> Male speaker: Wow.
Okay. Finally, on Islam.
Islam because there's
an extensive conserving
conversation in Islam
about the bible.
And when they're interrogating
the bible not as Christians,
and not within the
Christian space,
but outside of that space.
>> John Haskell: Okay.
Thank you.
Mark, do you want
to speak briefly?
>> Mark Noll: I just -- to
brief matters, first question
about the place in the
bible for non-believers,
it is an interesting reality
that in the 19th Century one
of the most able bible
quotes was Robert Ingersoll,
the public atheist and
he knew the bible well.
He actually recommended it to
people to study, but with a kind
of Tom Payne conclusion.
So, he had the Thomas
Huxley approach.
Huxley, the great
atheist/evolutionist wanted
to keep the King James
bible in English schools
because of its cultural place.
But the foreign matter
is a different situation.
You know the work of [inaudible]
and he's gone into a lot
of these more difficult
issues that I think are --
would pertain to non-English
speakers in the U.S.,
but not so much the English
speaking population here.
>> John Haskell: And if --
Lincoln, if you want
to say something?
>> Lincoln Mullen: I want to
echo Mark's recommendation
on [inaudible]'s work.
One of the interesting
things that I learned
from his work is the difference
between the way that protestants
and Islam treat the sacrality
[assumed spelling] of text.
So, my understanding
anyway is that in Islam,
only the original text is sacred
whereas American Protestants
very clearly treat the
English translations
as being the actual
word of God and may
or may not know anything --
>> Male speaker: Yeah.
>> Lincoln Mullen: --
about the Greek and Hebrew.
One of the things that I
definitely want to do is drawing
on the work of Peter [inaudible]
and others who have written
about biblical translations in
the United States to try to get
at these many sort of
different versions of the bible
to see how they come
to be quoted over time.
>> Valerie Cooper: It
seems to me that embedded
in your question is an
understanding that the text --
the biblical text can shape
culture and life even for people
who don't believe the miraculous
aspects of the stories
that are being told, right?
And so, it seems clear
to me that one of the way
to study scripture is
its impact on a culture.
And in the context of
West Africa, for example,
the ways that missionizing
then shapes
and ultimately perhaps
even distorts the cultures
that were existing there, right?
I mean, that's I think a very
appropriate way of thinking
about the biblical text.
Another way of thinking about
it is the ways that auth -
West African authors
often use the text, right?
Or speak to it, or
speak against it, right?
>> John Haskell: Do we
have any other questions?
Yeah?
>> Female speaker: This
question is for Dr. Mullen.
I really love your data sets
and I think it's innovative how
you're using original documents
and using quantitative analysis
to enhance the study of history.
Your time series -- the one
that's from 1840-1910 that talks
about the amount -- the number
of quotations of the bible.
Do you view that as a good
empirical proxy for the level
of religiosity in
the United States?
Would that be something that
other scholars could use
as a good proxy variable to
measure the wax and waning
of lignosity [assumed spelling]?
>> Lincoln Mullen: Thank you.
That's a very interesting
question.
And I don't think that
you could really use it
as a direct measure of lignosity
where we always have the things
that we can study and the
things we want to know about.
And there's a distance
between them
and I think we'd be too
many leaps away from that.
I think we'd be better off to
look at things like affiliation
and so on which is
difficult to do,
but is -- it's possible to do.
One thing I want to point
out about these charts
that may not be obvious
especially when they're flashing
by on the screen is that
the number of quotations
on newspaper pages is
large in the aggregate,
but the actual rate of quotation
is relatively low when you sort
of divide it by the
number of pages.
It's not so much like --
we can think of it in
very broad brush terms
as is it one quotation
per column?
Is it one quotation per paper?
Is it one per page?
Is it one per --
quotation per issue?
And I think it's more like one
quotation every other issue
or something like that.
So, it's actually a pretty
low rate of quotation.
[inaudible], folks.
[ Coughing ]
>> Female speaker: I wanted
to ask Professor Gutjahr
in particular, in
the United States,
of course there is often a
correlation between people
who consider themselves
biblical Christians and people
who don't take seriously the
threat of climate change.
So, perhaps that is --
ought to be sufficient
to answer my question.
Nevertheless, I'm curious as
to whether you've yet come
across any use of the Noah's
Ark story as a metaphor
for the kinds of choices
human beings may have to face
if climate change moves
forward, and other life
on this planet is tremendously
threatened, and imperiled
as it will be if we
don't deal with that?
>> Paul Gutjahr: It's --
that's a great question.
Okay. They --
[ Sigh ]
-- there's different
ways to answer it.
Perhaps the simplest one is
Noah's Ark gets invoked a lot
in popular discourse
and evangelical
environmentalism, okay?
But what --
[ Background noise ]
-- if you really want to look
at kind of scholarly treatments
of the passage or
not so much, no.
People really like it as
a trope, and you're going
to see it in popular talks,
and fundraising materials,
etc. But as far as the
scholar really, you know,
some kind of exogenesis [assumed
spelling] out of the article.
It becomes much more
of a metaphor for them
and if I'm wrong on that I'd
love somebody to point me
to stuff where it's more -- it's
been treated more seriously.
But Noah's Ark is -- -
I could've easily done a
sixth moment on Noah's Ark
and environmentalism because
there's just a lot of concern
that we're going to need an ark.
>> John Haskell: Okay.
Over here.
Gordon's got a question.
The mic's coming.
>> Gordon: I think one
of the themes that comes
through from these papers
is the tension that exists
between you might say
Democracy and religiosity
or I should say the
secularization
which is elite driven
and democracy.
Often, elitists are stunned by
the extent of the religiosity
that exists among common people
and I don't mean
just in the present.
I mean, 1821 Jefferson
commented to a friend,
"There's not a young
man now alive
who won't die a Unitarian."
[ Laughter ]
Well, how wrong could he be?
This is one of the factors
and the Methodists are
growing by leaps and bounds.
He simply did not
understand the middle
of the country if you will.
And so, I think there's
that tension
and certainly that's
what's happening.
The culture -- now there's
a cultural war that goes on.
It's going on in Europe and
they're far more advanced
in their secularization.
They're also less democratic
than the United States.
And I think that's an issue
that I'd be interested
in the panel talking about.
>> John Haskell: Who
wants to start on that?
Valerie, you had
something to say on that?
>> Valerie Cooper:
It's a great question.
I'm --
[ Coughing ]
Recent scholarship
has suggested though
that secularization is happening
here in the U.S. particularly
with the rise of the
nones -- N-O-N-E-S --
millennials and others with
no religious affiliation.
What's interesting to me --
and I have a colleague
who's studying these --
we think when you hear "none"
you think atheist or agnostic.
But some of these
are post-evangelical.
So, one of the consequences
perhaps --
it's very early days
yet to know --
-- this scholarship
is being done now.
But one of the suggestions
is that the --
perhaps a consequence of
the hyper polarization
of churches is that churches
are losing their young people,
right?
So, that we may have in the 2016
election exacerbated the growth
of the nones.
So, I'm not sure initially
that we are -- I mean, we --
certainly we're a very religious
people in our practice.
But I wonder if we will look
back 10 years from now and say
that this was a turning point.
[ Coughing ]
I was at the Kennedy
School of Government
and a presenter asked why I
thought it was that presidents
so rarely quote scripture.
And I had to think
about it for a minute.
It occurred to me that Pat
Robinson I guess had quoted
scripture at the
Republican Convention
that was - was that '84?
>> '88, yeah.
>>'88? Yes.
And he asked the question
why I thought it was
that people didn't get nervous
when black people
quoted scripture, right?
But they did get
nervous when for example,
Pat Robinson quoted scripture.
[ Laughter ]
And the reading that I had
of that was that people think
that when black people
are quoting scripture,
they're quoting scripture
about liberation and not
about social control, and
that they're concerned
about elites quoting
scripture is that it may be
about social control,
about taking away someone
else's rights, right?
I'm not sure that elites are
necessarily less religious,
but I think that there might
be some social pressure not
to show it in the
same sorts of ways.
>> John Haskell: Mark, did
you want to say something?
>> Mark Noll: The question
about demarketization [assumed
spelling]and public religiosity
is what drew me to Tom
Payne because you have
to have an explanation
that -- or it's good --
it would be good to have an
explanation for why coming
out of a Protestant sect --
common Protestant British stock,
you really do get a different
approach to public guidance
and persuasion in the
United States 19th Century
as opposed to Britain.
I think the reason is there
needed to be some kind
of adjustment after Christendom
of the Anglican sort was
dismissed for a religious people
to be religious and the way
that which it happened was
through the expansion of popular
persuasion, the proliferation
of newspapers, and the
publication of the bible
which in the U.K. remains
a royal copyright way
into the 19th Century.
In the United States, the
first printed bible --
the people who wanted to first
print the bible asked Congress
for their permission.
This was 1785-'6 or something
and the Continental
Congress is -- I don't know.
I mean, why are you asking me?
[ Laughter ]
And then, there's a good
publication rate in the 1790's.
[ Coughing ]
And then, after 1800 the
bible publication explodes all
over the country.
Overwhelmingly King
James version.
I mean, there's a few
[inaudible] versions
in the 1790's, but almost
nothing until the 1830's.
And so, it's the popularization
of publication going
with the popularization of
persuasion that I think makes
for American religiosity.
There's also a lot of pushback.
I mean, there are a lot of
Payne-ites who remain alive,
but they're always shouted out.
They're always shouted down.
>> Valerie Cooper: Let
me also say that in terms
of popular religious expression
in the U.S., it's interesting
that it produces a kind of
a political divide, right?
One of the easiest ways to
identify a Republican voter is
that he or she goes to
church more than once a week.
The easiest way to
identify a demo --
one of the easiest ways
to identify one of --
something like 90
percent, right?
One of the easiest ways to
identify a Democratic voter is
that he or she goes to
a black church, right?
So, they share the same
popular devotion to scripture
and they are radically
opposed politically, right?
So, when you talk
about popular devotion,
we have to acknowledge
the partisan divide
in popular devotion
today, right?
>> John Haskell: There's
even some data from Gallop
about people saying they go
to church, but actually don't.
[ Laughter ]
But that's important too, right?
It's listed along those lines.
If you feel the pressure to say
you go once or twice a week,
that's a significant --
that could be a significant
thing politically irrespective
of whether it's true.
This lady here?
You've got a microphone
coming right behind you.
>> Female speaker: Thank you.
I just had a question if --
I hope it's not too
much of a deviation.
But I am in the middle of
reading Tony Morrison's novel
"Beloved" and I was wondering
if you could connect the history
of the bible talking to what's
happening in that novel?
>> Valerie Cooper: So,
my favorite scene from
"Beloved" is Baby Sugs
Holy [assumed spelling]
and that service that she has
sort of in the hush harbors
that Historian, Albert
[inaudible] spoke
about where she says, "Out
there they don't love you.
They don't love your flesh.
You should love your flesh"
and she preaches essentially
a woman inspiration
and still sermon about
loving yourself despite -
[ Coughing ]
-- the difficulties of
living in the world.
Ultimately, "Beloved"
is a story about people
who have been haunted by
the legacy of slavery.
It takes place almost
exclusively
after slavery has ended.
But we learn of someone
who has scars on her back
like a choked [assumed
spelling] cherry tree, right?
She carries it -- these
scars in her body.
And the question
is how do you live
into liberation having
experienced what you did?
And Morrison wrote the
novel after having read --
I mean, as a -- after --
as a student at Howard
University learning
that it was a true story,
that a woman escaping
slavery was retaken --
or was about to be retaken --
and began killing her
children rather than allow them
to be taken back into slavery.
And she's literally the --
[ Coughing ]
-- in the course of the
novel, she's literally haunted
by the child she calls
"Beloved" -- the one she killed.
Presumably, she would have
been committed to Psych rather
than be retaken, but
they stopped her, right?
So, I would say that Morrison's
conception of scripture --
I would point you not only to
that one, but also to "Song
of Solomon" where the text
is used utterly randomly.
People get names
just by, you know,
open the bible and
poking at words.
I think that as a scholar --
as an author - Morrison
challenges perhaps some
of the devotion to
the bible that is
in the African American
community.
I think she challenges
us to ask the question,
"Is this text helpful
to the body politic
-- to the community?"
I think she would agree with
Howard Thurman's grandmother,
"If it's not life
giving, throw it out."
[ Laughter ]
And so, she gives us a
very progressive preacher
in Baby Sug's Holy who is not --
who is preaching a
text that is her body.
If "Beloved" is a text
about people whose bodies
bear the scars of slavery,
Baby Sugs is preaching
holiness out of her body.
She is -- if -- to borrow the,
you know, the movie's thing,
"If Jesus is an ark, I
should get in to", right?
She's embodying holiness,
the Holy Spirit,
the transformative power of God.
And so, Morrison makes the
point that she's unordained,
that she's -- that no one's
called her, but God which kind
of suggests I think perhaps how
lonely it is to get out there
and do that -- to preach that
against church traditions
that don't ordain women
against all of the difficulties.
Baby Sugs is out there
preaching life in the midst
of a text about death.
John Haskell: Thank
you all very much.
I want to draw your attention
to one event we have coming up.
I think a crowd like this might
be interested in a July 19 event
in Coolidge Auditorium
where our -
where we will be discussing
the history and relevance
of the American Dream with Ann
[assumed spelling] Compton of --
formerly of ABC News will
be moderating a discussion
with E.J. Deon [assumed
spelling] and Ross [inaudible]
of the New York Times.
And - with questions generated
by Ann, but also by students
across the United States,
but particularly in Hawaii
because the In A Way [assumed
spelling] Foundation is
supporting that event.
So anyway, I hope
to see you there.
You'll get, you know,
notification about it.
But thank you all
again very much.
This is a fascinating
discussion.
[ Applause ]