'America's Book' Review: The Word Out of Season
By: D.G. Hart (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Many Americans born after 1960 have trouble imagining that for much of the country's history the Bible was a chief source of national identity. Older Hollywood directors sometimes get it right. Take "Liberty Heights" (1999), written and directed by Barry Levinson (born 1942). The film explores relations among Jews, blacks and WASPs during the 1950s when Baltimore's public schools were integrated. In one scene the Jewish son of a burlesque-theater owner watches an African-American girl, the daughter of a surgeon, during their class's recitation of Psalm 23. They have different takes. He likens it to singing the National Anthem before an Orioles game. She says it provides a brief respite before a busy day of study. Whether ceremonial or therapeutic, Bible-reading in public schools was, by the 1950s, among the last uncontested conventions of America's Bible civilization.
Mark Noll's "America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911" explains how the Bible achieved this status. The new nation's rejection of European forms of Christendom such as sacral monarchy and state churches left the Bible to bear the burden of America's attempt to create a Christian civilization. A completely secular republic was never a possibility except for the most free-thinking of free thinkers. The Founders virtually to a man insisted that a republic depended on a virtuous citizenry, and that the best source of morality was religion. Despite the variety of Protestant denominations, church leaders and public officials agreed that the Bible was the best and most reliable guide for determining moral consensus.
“America’s Book” documents the extent of the Bible’s reach—from the printing and distribution of Bibles and the creation of Sunday schools to the intellectual dead ends into which unwise handlers of the Bible were led. The book’s breadth is a tribute to Mr. Noll’s career as an interpreter of Protestantism in North America, even if its encyclopedic quantity occasionally obscures the overarching argument.
One crucial component of Bible civilization, Mr. Noll explains, was the creation of public schools. Begun in Massachusetts in the 1830s to compensate for the commonwealth’s recent disestablishment of its state church, schools included the Bible to instill public morality and assimilate children (and indirectly parents) to civic norms. The heavy-handedness of Bible reading in public schools also generated lively political controversies—known as “Bible Wars.” Although many prominent Americans believed the Bible united the country—the founder Benjamin Rush, for example, and the education reformer and abolitionist Horace Mann—other groups, Roman Catholics and Jews among them, dissented. Tussles over the Bible in public schools became heated especially in places where Protestant elites squared off against non-British immigrants. In 1844 Philadelphia was the most violent front in these conflicts. Riots led to the deaths of 14 people and the destruction by fire of two Catholic churches.
If public-school controversies raised doubts about the Bible’s civic utility, the Civil War nurtured disbelief. Mr. Noll charts with great subtlety the range of pro- and antislavery arguments, chiefly from church leaders, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. For defenders of slavery, who were mostly silent on the race-based character of the institution, it was enough simply to observe the prevalence of slavery in human history, including in biblical times, and to point out abolitionists’ flimsy interpretations of Scripture. The antislavery side, preaching to its own choir, appealed either to the Golden Rule or to the spirit of ancient texts about freedom or equality. Rarely did minds change. In the process, inevitably, the Bible’s cultural authority diminished.
The political aspects of the Bible’s history in America are not simply add-ons to a narrative that is mainly religious. Mr. Noll attends as much to national themes as to the believers who drew instruction and inspiration from Scripture. Americans from the beginning used the Bible to name their towns: Zoar, Ohio (Genesis 13:10), Ruma, Ill. (2 Kings 23:36), and a thousand more. And their children. Ten of the first 16 presidents had biblical names (Thomas, Andrew, James, John and Abraham). On the first ladies’ side, 14 of the first 17 came from the Bible (including Martha, Abigail, Sarah, Elizabeth, Hannah, Anna, Priscilla, Julia, Rebecca and Mary).
The Bible also infiltrated Hollywood studios with such epics as “Ben-Hur,” based on Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel. His book generated four remakes of the first screen adaptation from 1907. With the Bible’s implicit blessing, the movie generated whole lines of branded merchandise: cigars, flour, bicycle wrenches, canned tomatoes, paddlewheelers.
As attentive as Mr. Noll is to the gimcrackery of Bible civilization, his eye is never far from the Bible’s importance in shaping Christian nationalism. Biblical and political ideals in the United States grew up together, married, and only began to spat during the Civil War. Here Mr. Noll is equivocal in passing judgment. He acknowledges that the Bible was a necessary ingredient, even if not always decisive, in exposing the wickedness of slavery and white privilege. African-American conviction that the Bible “proclaimed an undivided message of both eternal salvation and temporal redemption” prompts Mr. Noll to give Bible civilization a passing grade. Still, this judgment isn’t progressive or Whiggish; he is quick to observe that appeals to Scripture “easily encouraged the absolutization of public principle” and inevitably resulted in “the demonization of opponents.”
Since Mr. Noll’s book ends with the tercentenary of the King James Bible in 1911, “America’s Bible” offers little help in understanding why the vilification of political foes has increased even after America’s Bible civilization has lost its grip. Perhaps the Puritan mind, once installed as the nation’s operating system, makes it harder to load new moral apps. Whatever the explanation for both the left’s and the right’s ongoing moralization of policy and law, Mr. Noll’s book is a valuable reminder that conceiving America in Christian categories is not a product of the 2016 election.
Mr. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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