Values, Truth, and Spiritual Danger

Progressive Christianity and the Age of Trump

Edward G. Simmons

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666708868
  9781666708875
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666708882
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In a series of ruminations, Edward G. Simmons brings a lifetime's experiences, along with biblical and historical insights, to the ethical problems faced by Christians living under the impact of President Trump. Teaching values and respect for truth to college students and Christians of all varieties, he sometimes lectures on the Bible and sometimes writes sermons full of conviction. His combination of history, science, and biblical information is stimulating, encouraging, and often provocative for young and mature readers.

Part I: Genesis—Foundations and Beginnings

1

Scripture and Updating Authoritarian Religious Traditions

Few young people like reading books. Freshmen in my history classes prefer online assignments with video clips, diagrams, cartoons, and very short narratives. They like online textbooks with short chapters and links to interesting visuals. They read books only when they must. The Bible is something that hardly ever interests them at all. Having grown up a Protestant in the Old South’s Bible Belt, it’s hard to believe how knowledge of the Bible and Christian history have declined since the mid-twentieth century.

The first semester of world history covers the origin of major religions of the modern world and their scriptures. My diverse student population includes new arrivals from Africa and many whose parents came from an increasing variety of Asian, Central American, South American, and Caribbean nations. It is often easy to identify students who are Muslim, but not Hindus, or many variations within Christianity. Those from Central America, South America, or Caribbean nations are usually Roman Catholic. I must be careful not to imply a deep knowledge of scriptures of non-Christian religions or show knowledge of the Bible in a way that tends to privilege it over other traditions. Nevertheless, students often recognize a different approach to the Bible in my comments and ask to hear more about my approach as a historian and Christian.

The wisdom of many religions is found in ancient scriptures. Muslims are dedicated to the Qur’an. When asked to interpret or explain, they usually quote with the expectation the holy words stand alone. I have yet to hear students quote or refer to sacred writings of other Asian traditions. Except for Muslims and Jews, young Americans of non-Christian religions have shown little awareness of sacred writings of their traditions.

I have been astonished to see the extent to which students born in America and raised in apparently Christian traditions know very little about the Bible. The fact that twenty-first-century Americans must be sold on reading the Bible is shocking. This is especially true because of the variety of Protestant groups that still make the Bible an essential guide for their beliefs. Furthermore, this surprising reality may have existed long before the start of Gallup’s polling on religion. My impression of the extent of biblical knowledge when I was growing up in the mid-twentieth century may not be correct.

We know that Luther’s theses in 1517 struck a hole in the dam of the medieval church, bursting forth multiple streams of religious reform, thanks in part to the printing press spreading Bibles in vernacular languages. Protestant groups since then have claimed the Bible as central to Christian life. Nevertheless, we don’t have polling evidence before the twentieth century to verify widespread reading or knowledge of the Bible.

David Gibson described polling by Gallup and others in the article “We Revere the Bible . . . We Don’t Read It,” published at the end of 2000.7 The title was taken from George Gallup’s conclusions from a poll in October 2000, which found that only 59 percent of Americans said they read the Bible occasionally. They were mostly “women, nonwhites, older people, Republicans, and political conservatives.” Gallup noted this percentage represented a decline from 73 percent that was documented in the 1980s.8

How effectively Americans read the Bible was also called into question because half of Americans couldn’t name Genesis as the first book of the Bible, Jesus as the person who gave the Sermon on the Mount, or Easter as the holiday celebrating the resurrection. Gibson cited another poll: “A 1997 Barna Organization poll found that 12 percent of Christians think Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc. The poll also found that 80 percent of born-again Christians believe it is the Bible that says, ‘God helps them that help themselves.’ Actually, Ben Franklin said that.”9

Assumptions that earlier times would produce better results may not be well-founded. Problems existed in the 1950s when I was growing up in the Bible Belt.

As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically more religious than other parts of the developed world.10

If fewer Americans are reading the Bible and if even less know basic information from it, then why should they read and understand it?

A surprising answer is given by Richard Dawkins, the scientist known as a champion of the New Atheism. In his attack on all forms of religion, The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that religious education is a necessary part of Western culture. He preceded the above quotation about 1954 Gallup results by saying: “I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent decades than I was.”

Dawkins goes on to argue that the Bible is “a major source book for literary culture” because there are so many direct or indirect references to “biblical, or Bible-inspired, phrases, and sentences that occur commonly in literary or conversational English.” Then he provides two full pages of words and phrases to illustrate the point. He ends the discussion by referring to a book that counted more than 1,300 biblical references in Shakespeare’s works and a Templeton Foundation publication in which teachers of English literature argued that biblical literacy is necessary for understanding their field.

Gallup’s questions have been at a more superficial level than Dawkins’s reasoning as to what the Bible is good for. In the October 2000 poll, 65 percent of those responding agreed that the Bible “answers all or most of the basic questions of life.” This overall figure was then broken into 72 percent with a high school education or less and 46 percent with postgraduate degrees. Bible readers consider it a book of answers! In my opinion, the high percentage of people with postgraduate degrees who view the Bible at such an elementary level represents a dramatic failure of the quality of American education.

How is it that people who read the Bible, and those who don’t read it, consider it a book of answers to life’s questions? The problem lies in the perpetuation of attitudes reflecting the authoritarian societies which produced the Bible. Modern adoption of democratic governments transformed normal ideas of acceptable treatment of authority figures, yet everyday political behavior hasn’t transformed common attitudes toward the Bible.

Nearly all cultures before the Industrial Revolution were authoritarian, ruled by kings or emperors whose legitimacy was usually based on the right of birth as a form of divine selection for authority. Anyone who claims that Jesus’s authority depends on descent through the royal line of David is appealing to this ancient standard. Kings and priests, who were anointed to show God’s approval, gave commands that had to be obeyed.

Obedience to commands is at the heart of the Torah. Its origin was a command to leave Egypt for Canaan. During the journey, Israel received the Ten Commandments, which were elaborated into what are considered 613 commandments in Torah. Efforts to summarize the Torah led to the formulation of the golden rule by Rabbi Hillel and a reduction into commandments to love God and neighbor which Jesus affirmed.

The Christian belief that the Bible is the inspired “Word of God” conveys an emphasis on its authority, a divine guide to be followed without question. As the historical study of the Bible emerged from Protestant dedication to scholarship that began with the Reformation, some evangelical churches began to object to questioning biblical content in light of scientific and critical discoveries. The demand for literal interpretation became a modern effort to extend the authoritarian use of Scripture by denying the validity of scientific evidence for evolutionary discoveries of physics and biology. Many evangelical Christians believe they must accept a state of cognitive dissonance by enthusiastically using technological products of science while denying that old religious commands should be questioned or adapted to modern conditions because of science.

We live in an industrial-...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Prologue: Summing It Up
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction: Values, Beliefs, and Cognitive Dissonance
• Part I: Genesis—Foundations and Beginnings
• Part II: Exodus—Foreigners and Strangers
• Part III: Job—Tests of Faith and Suffering
• Part IV: Gospels—Jesus and Moral Issues
• Part V: Revelation—Warnings and Hope
• Afterword: Historians and the Beloved Community
• Bibliography