Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Biblical literalists, especially half-baked ones, are fascinating to me. The old saying, “He knows just enough to be dangerous,” comes to mind. This fascination is rooted in my experience working with the English language and knowing that most people, even those with reasonably strong everyday language skills, understand very little about translation, linguistics, semiotics, symbolism, literary forms, and other aspects of scholarship that have carried the Bible’s messages across time and space to us. What I’m getting at is this: I’ve lived in Alabama my whole life – the Bible Belt! – and I’ve heard people call the Bible “the word of God” more times than I can count, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard an ordinary person even mention the Aramaic or Koine Greek languages, the story of the Septuagint, or the work of John Wycliffe and William Tyndale.

So I was interested to find the TIPS: Translation Insights and Perspectives project. I came across it last summer in an issue of The Christian Century and have been tinkering around with its search functions since. What piqued my attention in the article was this:

In the 1973 translation of the Psalms by the Jewish Publication Society, the preface acknowledges a problem that resonates with most biblical translators: “For many passages, our as yet imperfect understanding of the language of the Bible or what appears to be some disorder in the Hebrew text makes sure translation impossible.” The translators of the Swedish Bibel 2000 declared 69 Old Testament verses to be untranslatable and accordingly declined to translate them. In addition to the problem of not understanding the languages in which the Bible was written, Bible translators also face the reality that multiple manuscripts contain different versions of a single text, and sometimes there are disagreements as to which one is authoritative.

I would argue that the Bible is the most influential book in the American South, the culture that I am a part of. So what about the idea that we don’t actually know what it says? Not only are some portions “untranslatable,” scholars are not even sure which of the “different versions” has the right information in it. This poses real problems for not only the literalist, but any of the faithful.

I’m no Bible scholar, but I have been fortunate when it comes to this matter. First, I’m a life-long avid reader, and second, I was not raised going to church regularly. While that latter fact has its drawbacks, I also don’t feel hampered or stymied by the doctrines or dogma of my youth. I didn’t grow up surrounded by people who were telling me what to believe about the Bible. About the former – being a life-long reader – I’m someone who reads the Bible, thinks about what’s on the page, and only employs commentaries after I’ve read the text myself. Another bit of good fortune was taking Dr. Frank Buckner’s Old Testament and New Testament classes as a college freshman, and his insights were eye-opening for me. Though I won’t lie and claim to have read every word he assigned, Dr. Buckner carried us through the entire (Protestant) Bible that year. Because I had not been raised with unquestioned ideas, I came into his class with an open mind. (I also liked him as a professor.) For this GenXer in Alabama, the Bible had been a thing that adults waved at us kids when they didn’t like how we were acting, a tool used to enforce conformity. Dr. Buckner’s classes not only required me to read the Bible, his lessons threw cold water on that negative association.

So I have an unusual relationship to the Good Book. My family was just barely Baptist in the 1980s, and the Bible began for me as a thing that was flaunted by people I didn’t like or understand. Then I came to know it more clearly through intellectual and academic exercises at a Methodist college, considering it as a text that, for me, had cultural implications. Later, during my pursuit of an English degree in the early to mid-1990s, its content came up in classes as the source of allusions. I knew the Bible fairly well as a text before I thought much about it as a religious text. Then, in adulthood, I began attending Mass with my wife in the 2000s, which led me to become Catholic in 2012 in my late 30s. By then, I had already been teaching British and World Literature to high school seniors for several years, and referencing Biblical content was a regular part of our coursework.

This circuitous path has led me to wonder at two important aspects of the ways the Bible is regarded and used, and both involve this issue of literalism. The first of them is Martin Luther’s removal of seven Old Testament books: Baruch, Judith, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and the Wisdom of Solomon. I had no idea that this had happened until I became Catholic, since the King James Version and the then-new Living Bible were what I grew up with. In my experience, most Protestant Southerners don’t know those seven books even exist. Which points, in a way, to the second aspect: the widespread belief in the South that Catholics aren’t Christians. I faced this sometimes in my high school English classes and had to explain about this guy named Peter and what the word Protestant means. (A few hardened ones even declared things like “But I’m not Protestant, I’m Baptist.”) It also fascinates me how many Southerners have complete confidence in some local holy roller who starts an unaffiliated “church” in a strip mall, while those same people fall back on an equally complete disregard for the validity of the historical and global institution that formed the basis for their own faith. I guess it’s because they know Pastor/Cousin Earl from back in the day, but the Pope is some guy in Yurp who wears a dress and a funny little hat.

Considering the nuanced and complex aspects of human language – not just English, any language! – I have serious doubts that we can take anything completely literally. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from reading the Bible, it’s that God looks down at us and shakes his head a lot. He has tried giving us a few rules, a lot of rules, just one rule . . . He has tried to sending angels, messengers, prophets, even His own Son . . . His Son tried preaching, telling stories, setting an example, healing people, standing up to authorities . . . And despite it all, we humans still manage to foul it up. My favorite books in the Bible are Job and The KJV translation of Ecclesiastes; both emphasize that we should avoid being too sure of ourselves, since none of us see the big picture. None of us – not even those who harp on every single word in their preferred translation – know the whole Truth. Only God does.

Yet, many evangelicals – literalists among them – trudge forward with their agendas, insisting that we have to all follow their lead— because it’s in the Bible. Earlier in my career, doing Civil Rights commemoration work taught me that “movements are made up of people.” This seemingly simple assertion points to a more complex underpinning: to be a movement, there must be mass support, and within that mass support are usually disparate individuals and factions who don’t totally agree. It was true of the Civil Rights movement, and it is true of the evangelical movement. There is, today, mass support for the notion that American laws should reflect Christian values— well, some Christian values, not the ones about forgiveness or welcoming strangers or any of that. In Alabama, we saw the early days of this movement’s current incarnation when our state’s Christian Coalition halted progress on a state lottery in 1999, then again when Judge Roy Moore rose to prominence with his Ten Commandments monument in 2001. The coalescing factor in those calculated actions and in the evolving ones since: Because it’s in the Bible.

Despite the fact of religious pluralism in America, despite the glaring obviousness of religious freedom in the First Amendment, and despite the fact that the Gospels state that Jesus’s kingdom will not be a worldly one, we have a movement that is affecting laws in our states and in our country to align with . . . what? Essentially, their own sensibilities, which many of them believe are based on the “word of God.” What I see instead is a swell of political activism that is based on widely varying and highly individualistic combinations of Biblical literalism, selective attention, mild ignorance, cultural biases, political ideals, victim narratives, general intolerance, and unreasonable degrees of certainty.

Christianity will always be a political force in America, and its presence has been felt since the nation’s founding. One mistake made by secularists – those favorite opponents of the evangelicals – is seeking to have religion nullified or removed from the public sphere. Religious freedom can never and should never manifest as the absence of religion. But I don’t see how the modern evangelical movement can fully succeed, because their fervor is based on generalized principles that ignore too many facts, of their own religion and of the nation’s political system. First and foremost, if we are going to reform our government and our society to be in line with the Bible, the first thing we’d have to agree upon is . . . what the Bible actually says.