I'm happy today to guest post a dispatch from Elesha Coffman. Elesha is assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University, and in 2011-2012 she will be a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Her dispatch concerns one session at the just-concluded 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture. We'll have some other posts about the conference in the days to come.
Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible? (A dispatch from Indianapolis)
Elesha Coffman
Next time you’re trying to get religion scholars’ blood pumping during a post-lunch session deep into an academic conference, try this: Ask them if they have actually read the Bible.
This challenge arose at the penultimate session of the Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis last weekend, a roundtable on “Changes in the understanding and uses of scripture.” Scheduled to give a nod to the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible and to introduce a new project at IUPUI on Scriptures in America, the session included presentations by Charles Cohen, Kathleen Flake, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe. Following their brief comments, the audience was invited to jump into the discussion—except, initially, no one did. Whereas previous sessions had produced a pileup of voices vying for the microphone, this one seemed to have fallen flat.
I cannot explain what happened next. I do not remember who spoke first or what was said, but suddenly a gauntlet was thrown: All of the religion scholars in the room who had read the Bible cover-to-cover should raise their hands.
There was a collective gasp, a few tentative hands raised, and then a barrage of responses flying much faster than the microphone could travel. Old jokes about Catholics and liberal Protestants never reading the Bible mingled with personal reflections on Sunday school and the lectionary. One contributor insisted that you couldn’t learn anything by reading the Bible “cover-to-cover,” though she would not suggest an alternate reading plan. Attention to the uniquely Protestant concern behind the question was countered by the assertion that scholars of non-Christian traditions (especially New Religious Movements) consider grounding in those groups’ texts essential, yet some scholars of Christianity feel they can skip that step. Conversation eventually drifted to other topics, including boutique Bibles and scriptural tattoos, and the proposed straw poll never happened.
Struck nerves expose anxieties, and there were at least two types in play here. One is the anxiety that contributed to the separation of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, which was initiated by the AAR in 2003. If the AAR were a ship unfurling its sails to catch the winds of new methodologies and religious expressions, the SBL seemed like the ballast in the hull, bearing the weight of (mostly) Christian traditions and texts and reminding religious studies of its divinity school past. Of course, ballast comes in awfully handy in a storm, and the economic crisis buffeting academic publishing and university budgets helped change some minds among the AAR leadership. The reunification of the two groups’ annual meetings will hardly erase the unease, however. The religion scholars in Indy still seemed very jittery about the Bible.
Another type of anxiety exposed by the show-of-hands kerfuffle concerns the relationship between religion scholars and the subjects they study. Versions of the insider/outsider discussion arose frequently throughout the weekend, beginning with the first session’s extended debate about Richard Lyman Bushman (who wasn’t present) and culminating with Julie Byrne’s meditation on an “ethnographic uncertainty principle,” by which a scholar inevitably changes and might inadvertently destroy that which she seeks to understand. In the context of the Bible session, asking who reads what not only raised questions of scholarly preparation but also of identification with religious subjects—or, to put it in moral terms, humility.
Tacitly, the straw poll suggested, “Are religion scholars so arrogant as to think they can make pronouncements about American religion without even reading the Bible?” I think that’s the part that really raised hackles. And while it would be nice to relegate that strain of interrogation to the heat of a strange moment, it’s the kind of question that creates distance between scholars and the large, biblically inclined segment of the American public. The panelists’ calls to take scriptures more seriously, along with the upcoming IUPUI project and renewed conversations between AAR and SBL, could build some needed bridges.
Comments
The reluctance to read the scriptures raises interesting issues. It speaks of the heart of the scholar.
Well, that's all I have to say about this for now. I do think Todd make many observations and comments that are more eloquent than what I've stated. Thanks, Elesha, for your reportage. Glad it sparked such comments.
Curtis J. Evans
What fascinated me most was the way this question went dangerously close to the question-never-asked at these academic conferences: how do your personal experiences with faith and faith formation education inform how you study--and what you study--about the religions you study? My impression was that Professor Flake's question was intentionally trying to get up to that line without crossing over it. My impression (and once again, I am guessing) was that she was trying to challenge all of us to know what our religious subjects are talking about and experiencing in the ways that many of them would have experienced that religion. I really admired--and really saw the value in--this provocation. What fascinated me most about the response was the way so many scholars in the room didn't even want to entertain this question out loud.
As a person trained in social history, I come from a world where talking about identity politics at conferences is much more welcome. I study Christian Socialism, and pretty much every time I've presented on my work I've gotten questions about how I became a Christian/ Christian Socialist. (It is assumed that I identify somewhat with this group by the fact that I have dedicated myself to this project.) I get the sense that in the field of labor/social history, we assume each other's academic projects are an extension of our personal politics and that the scholar is happy to discuss how the two relate, because that intersection is in fact the scholar's "real" life project. (And, in the ethnographic sense, this discussion unveils some of our personal biases on the table and allows them to be part of the discussion.) It fascinates me how the field of Religious Studies deals with personal politics so differently. I suppose this is because so much of the discipline is rooted in sociology and the social sciences more generally?
Where I ultimately land is that everyone should read major sections of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, as well as the Qu'ran and the Book of Mormon. I say this not just because Scriptures are often very important to the subjects we study, but because Scriptures are often very important to modern day practitioners of the faiths we study, and it's important to ground our studies of the past in a respect for (even if simultaneous critique of) the people who continue to practice versions of that faith.
Ace, Todd. I would also add a familiarity with Scholasticism, which was not completely expunged by the Reformation and still underlaid via "natural law" Blackstone, Hamilton, James Wilson, and others. [Although one could cut to the chase with Grotius, etc., but the touchstone is probably Richard Hooker, so often cited by Locke.]
Also, agree that how the Bible was received normatively is the historian's concern, not the deep woods of theory and theology. But sometimes, the historian or the advocate-historian's ignorance of the Bible past the Sermon on the Mount is cringe-inducing, as though Christians believe[d] that Mighty Jehovah somehow mutated into Barney the Dinosaur at the Incarnation.