Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible?

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 400^th 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.