Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The bibliolatrous religious political right

The religious right is not the formidable political force in NZ that it is in the US, but it’s there lurking in the shadows and occasionally rears its head, such as when an election is coming up. 

We had the Christian Coalition in the 1990s and, more recently, the Destiny Party. I don’t know about you, but I found the latter positively scary – theocracies and me don’t get on. I gather they’re now back as Vision NZ. Not that they would ever gain a majority, but imagine a party like that holding the balance of power in parliament.

I allude to theocracy because that is what religious fundamentalists – ‘fundies’ for short – want to impose. The fundy case is that Western government and law arise from a Judaeo-Christian base, and so what we need to do to set everything right is to return to those roots. I have earlier poured cold water over the delusion that the law owes anything to divine revelation (“The non-religious origins of law”, Breaking Views 5 December 2015). I have also put the case that our systems of governance are far more consistent with a Graeco-Roman base (“The Cathedral of Notre Dame – part of humankind’s common heritage”, Breaking Views 4 May 2019). What have the fundies got to usurp the governmental and legal traditions we inherited from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire as the bedrock of our civilisation?

Answer: the Bible. It is, after all, the ‘Word of God’, and that trumps the ‘Word of Man’ any day, even if his name is Plato or Cicero. They worship it – this is called ‘bibliolatry’ (literally, the idolisation of a book). But what exactly are they placing their unconditional faith in?

‘Which Bible?’ is a fair question. There are versions that include whole books not encountered at all in the 66-book compilation most of my readers will be acquainted with, such as the deuterocanonical series (recognised by the Catholic Church) and ancient texts that never made it into the Western biblical compendium, such as the Book of Enoch. All up, the number of scriptural texts recognised by somebody somewhere in the Christian world – including the various branches of East Orthodoxy, the Copts, and the Middle Eastern ‘ancient churches’ – exceeds 80. It’s a bit presumptuous for a Western fundy to pat a 66-book Bible and say, “This is it.”

There are versions of the Bible most Westerners would not even recognise as such, like this Coptic one

Then there is the issue of translation. There are some very obvious translation boo-boo’s between the ‘original’ manuscripts (the inverted commas because between many and most of the documents in question are secondary, not primary, sources) and what ended up in print in different languages (English, for instance). I noted one of these in an earlier article (“Ode to the Methuselah generation”, Breaking Views 2 January 2017). Most of the ancients did not recognise the solar year and used other natural cycles, including the lunar month, to measure the passage of time. The translators, however, simply rendered the words pertaining to those units as ‘years’. Hence Methuselah, who almost certainly died at age 78 (969 lunar months), suddenly becomes a bloke who made it to almost 1000 of our years. There is also the contentious translation of the commandment pertaining to the taking of human life, usually rendered in English as “Thou shalt not kill”, that should actually read “Thou shalt not commit murder”, the difference being that it is an injunction against unauthorised killing. (It was clearly OK for the Hebrews to slaughter members of other tribes, such as the genocide of the Amelikites.) As another well-known example, the word referring to the status of Mary (mother of Jesus) has been a problem for a long time, many scholars claiming that it simply refers to a young woman not necessarily virgo intacta. Speaking of sex, parishioners were told for centuries that Paul’s advice that it was “better to marry than to burn” alluded to the Hellfire awaiting people who indulged in unauthorised pleasures of the flesh although the original text actually refers to being consumed with unrequited passion (‘burning with desire’). This problem was fixed in modernised 20^th century versions.

An interesting observation in this context is that a considerable number of real hard-case fundies in anglophone countries will tell you that the only kosher version of the Bible is the King James Version. There are shades here of the view that arose in the 16^th century, subsequently referred to as the ‘British Israel’ movement, that the Britons were the descendants of one of the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. The idea caught on among people of British descent in the US as well; Herbert Armstrong of ‘The Plain Truth’ was of this view. Or maybe it’s just the appeal of the aura of transcendent mystique imparted by the use of early 17^th century English.

“Most Englishmen are convinced that God is an Englishman, probably educated at Eton.” E. M. Delafield

Fundies are generally remarkably naïve with regard to the history of their holy book. Few appear to realise that there were embellishments during the long development process that led to the little black volume that they so cherish, such as the Ussher Chronology that supposedly dates the events chronicled. This was added by a Bishop Ussher in the 17^th century. Usher’s greatest contribution to world history was the discovery, through some esoteric mathematical manipulations, that the Creation week began on Sunday 23 October 4004BC.  Fundies will tell you that the Earth is just over 6000 years old “because the Bible says so”. Actually, it does nothing of the sort.

In the course of my varsity studies in Comparative Religion, I developed a healthy respect for people who devote their scholarly lives to unravelling the intricacies of scriptural writings. We are not talking theology here but about literary analysis. Most of us have difficulty reading Shakespeare’s works, written in English a mere 4 centuries ago. To really understand what a manuscript several times that old is on about, you need to be competent in the language in which it was written (which is usually either extinct or has changed so much as to hardly be recognisable) and well versed in the society and culture in which it arose. These are clever, highly knowledgeable people  who have done a sterling job in demystifying scriptural texts but will readily admit to being stumped by some of the challenges those writings continue to present. Your run-of-the-mill fundy is the antithesis of all that is clever and knowledgeable but will nonetheless tell you with that characteristic bombastic arrogance that he or she knows what it all means, and you ignore his/her erudite advice at your peril. Oh dear.

Part of an ancient biblical scroll. Fundies reckon they know and understand the Bible. Put some to the test by shoving this under their noses and asking them what it says, let alone what it means.

We can thank our lucky stars that our systems of governance are not based on the laws espoused by the Old Testament. We’d be living under autocratic regimes routinely engaged in genocide and watching people having bits of them cut off and being stoned to death for, inter alia, failing a virginity test in the case of young women (see my article “The rise and rise of the Sharia”, Breaking Views 2 January 2015). It would be like living under ISIS. As for the New Testament, it has little to offer in terms of government and law. On the contrary, the early Christians were Roman subjects who were exhorted to be good [Roman] law-abiding citizens.

Fundies say they believe in the Bible. They don’t. They believe in a caricature of one rendering of the Bible that they have created – a delusion  based on gross ignorance and a morbid dread of serious scholarship. They have idolised this fanciful image and pay homage to it to keep the real world – indeed the real issues that arise when trying to make sense of archaic manuscripts  – at bay. But their idol has feet of clay – hardly a foundation for 21^st-century governance.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek BA, BSc, BEdSt, PGDipLaws, MAppSc, PhD is an associate professor of education at the American University of Beirut and a regular commentator on social and political matters. Feedback welcome at bv00@aub.edu.lb.