REVIEW: America's Book

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2017

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2018

This short article addressed to a broader readership investigates the impact of the King James Bible upon the American founding. In order to show that impact, the article's first half portrays the political context for the formation of the King James, charts the influence of the Bible upon early modern political thought, and then sketches the impact of the KJV upon the rhetoric and political thought of the Founders. The essay is accompanied by a timeline. Key Words: Authorized Version; King James Version; American Founding; Bible and political thought, religion and the founding, founders, Bible and intellectual history, Spinoza, Bible and constitution; Bible and democracy.

Early American Literature, 2020

conference presentation, 2016

This essay focuses on the Bible as material culture in the history American Protestantism, examining how it was handled, ritually deployed, commoditized, distributed, and displayed.

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism

The influence of the Bible in the shaping of American empire is rooted in the colonial era but is most clearly in evidence in the 19 th century. In the spirit of postcolonial frameworks, this essay seeks to lay bare some of the ways in which scriptural discourse undergirded the religious, political, and cultural power of Anglo-American settlers that legitimated the land dispossession of Native Americans and enslavement of African-Americans. The first part of the essay contrasts some alternative epistemologies about mapping land by colonial settlers, Native Americans, and Mormons. The second half of the essay evaluates the racialized interpretations of the myth of Ham that supported the southern plantation "slaveocracy" and some alternative scriptural interpretations offered by African-Americans in their aspirations for liberation from slavery and equal treatment in society.

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, 2018

The Bible has been tremendously influential in American politics by informing grand political theories and by justifying specific policy positions. This chapter analyzes the Bible's role in political metanarratives and its use in policy positions. From the Puritans' invocation of Exodus and the City on a Hill through Cold War evangelicals' interpretations of Revelation, political metanarratives have been animated by divergent and contentious readings of the Bible. Christian uses of the Bible to inform policy stances on slavery, economics, and sexuality have been similarly diverse and contested. Current scholarship shows welcome democratic impulses by challenging long-standing metanarratives and suggesting new policy positions.

Starting Points Journal, 2024

Most history textbooks trace American Revolutionary ideology to Enlightenment political philosophers and to republican principles drawn from classical history. This would strike Revolutionary Americans as odd, since hardly any of them could name an Enlightenment thinker or explain the basics of Roman republicanism, let alone explain how these relate to their support for the Patriot cause. Most Revolutionary Americans would point instead to the Bible as the source of their constitutional and political beliefs. Yet one is hard-pressed to find a textbook that identifies the Bible as a meaningful ideological influence on the American Revolution. This means that the most dominant force shaping Revolutionary Americans’ political convictions has become invisible to Revolutionary historians and students.

Scottish Journal of Theology, 1997