The Bible, Social Media and Digital Culture

Peter M. Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

This book centres on the use of the Bible within contemporary digital social media culture and gives an overview of its use online with examples from brand-new research from the CODEC Research Centre at Durham University, UK. It examines the shift from a propositional to a therapeutic approach to faith from a sociological standpoint.

The book covers two research projects in particular: the Twitter Gospels and Online Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It explores the data as they relate to Abby Day's concept of performative belief, picking up on Mia Lövheim's challenge to see how this concept works out in digital culture and social media. It also compares the data to various construals of contemporary approaches to faith performative faith, including Christian Smith and Melissa Lundquist Denton's concept of moralistic therapeutic deism. Other research is also compared to the findings of these projects, including a micro-project on Celebrities and the Bible, to give a wider perspective on these issues in both the UK and the USA.

As a sociological exploration of Digital Millennial culture and its relationship to sacred texts, this will be of keen interest to scholars of Biblical studies, religion and digital media, and contemporary lived religion.

1
The contemporary context of Bible engagement, especially in the UK and USA

The Bible has surely been one of the most iconic texts of any civilization. It stands alongside the greatest examples of world literature. Its existence and its use has changed the course of civilizations. An almost epic description of the Bible was once penned by Frank McConnell (1986, p. 4) and has been retold by scholars since:¹

The book has become an equivalent, in its sheer existence, to the salvation of the soul or of the people. This is a cultural phenomenon of the most cataclysmic order. … No book has exercised a stronger influence upon the whole course of Western writing. … And no book has been less a book and more a living entity in the evolving consciousness of [the West].

McConnell’s bigger point concerns the historical importance of sacred texts in general but especially of the Bible: they became epoch-changing, civilization-shaping phenomena. They become so much more than the sum of their parts. They become transcendent texts. It’s a kind of bibliocentrism – where the Bible becomes a core element of a culture, the foundational text. McConnell’s bibliocentricism stands for the West, for Christendom, but different cultures have different classics. As Homer offered a mythology, morality and transcendence for Ancient Greece, as Virgil’s Aeneid offered an epic identity for Rome in transition from Republic to Empire, so the two Testaments of the Bible arguably offered a new retelling of mythology, morality and transcendence for Christendom (Alexander, 2006). T.S. Eliot, in discussing the nature of a ‘classic text’ (1956, pp. 53–71), argues that the production of a classic text focusses subsequent literary attention on that classic – that future literature is a retelling or a renewal or an echo of the skill or artistry of that classic. The classic becomes universal and transcends the context and specificity of its origins.

The Bible resourced Christendom. It provided the moral, judicial and, often, repressive agenda for Western civilization. But it has also been (and continues to be?) an inspiration for the arts and creative industries. Biblical themes and tropes are scattered liberally through our culture in verse, prose, song, in paintings, films and ads. Indeed, the structures of Christendom and the reproduction and dissemination of the Bible through the monasteries provided one route to preserve Greco-Roman learning into the pre-modern era. The Bible, in these times, was still an inspiration to literature, art and creativity – as we see in the development of Gospels and Bibles as an art form from Kells to Lindisfarne and throughout the Christian world. Art, architecture, music and literature testify to the Bible’s central place at the heart of European culture, as well as in North Africa and Central Asia.

At the same time, most people could not have read the text. Despite recent research into the possibility of an education project within the early Church to ensure more and more people could read the Bible, most people across the years have heard the Bible or seen the Bible rather than read the Bible (Wright, 2017). Although Augustine may have been able to respond to the girl’s cry: “Tolle, lege” (“Take up and read”), there is no suggestion that for the vast bulk of the population for hundreds of years before or after him such a command would have made any sense at all. Global literacy rates are now good and improving further – and ironically in this era of literacy, the Bible is engaged with less and less.

Having said that, throughout the medieval period, more and more of the mercantile urban middle class were becoming literate – not least through the influence of guilds who taught their apprentices to read – by an age-old process of literacy being taught through engagement with the Bible dating back at least to Augustine, if not earlier. As such, the monopoly of the elite to determine the meaning of the text was beginning to be deconstructed by both non-literate engagement with the Bible and by ever increasingly Biblical literacy. This literacy created both the urgent need for the printing press as well as its main source of custom. Moreover, this literacy is part and parcel of the movement towards the translation of the Bible into the vernacular and the sowing of social discontent through the Lollards and Anabaptist sects.

Jeffrey Siker (2017, p. ix) opens up his book, Liquid Scripture, by citing a famous Johannes Gutenberg quotation taken from the work of Alphonse de Lamartine (1854, vol. 2, p. 287) – a politician/poet/writer in the mid 19th century. The quotation, which does not seem to pre-exist Lamartine, makes some bold assertions about the new press:

Yes, it is a press, certainly, but a press from which will soon flow in exhaustible streams the most abundant and most marvellous liquor that has ever flowed to relieve the thirst of men… like a new star it will scatter the darkness of ignorance and cause a light heretofore unknown to shine amongst men.

(de Lamartine, 1854, vol. 2, p. 287)

We might compare this to McConnell’s bibliocentricity or to Eliot’s concept of the classic becoming the central focus of subsequent literature. Did Gutenberg’s press provide a paradigm shift moment when suddenly the Bible became more available, more open, more popular? Certainly, the presses printed (and still print) many Bibles and many books about the Bible. But Christianity and the Bible have always been about much more than the book. Over the centuries the vast majority of Christians have heard the text rather than actually read it. In his reflections on Bible engagement in medieval Europe, Eyal Poleg (2013) talks of Bible mediation rather than Biblical literacy, focussing not so much on reading the Bible, but rather on the mediation of the Bible through liturgical processions, sermons and on the Bible as a talisman. He could have looked as well at music, poetry, art, architecture, literature, mystery plays and festivals.

The Bible, its translation into the vernacular and its distribution through the presses – all this was the desire of the reformers. But the Reformation also offers a good example of how the establishment (the Church) seized control of both the book and its interpretation (Poleg, 2013; Ferrell, 2008; Price and Ryrie, 2004). The reformers’ zeal to get the Bible into the hands of the common people was always challenged by the establishment. Erasmus himself argued that all people could become theologians by studying the text more, by encountering the text of the Bible itself: “It casts aside no age, no sex, no fortune or position in life. The sun itself is not as common and accessible to all as Christ’s teaching” (Erasmus, 1516, as cited in Olin, 1987, p. 101). Indeed, Erasmus goes on to argue that all need access to the text: “Christ wishes his mysteries published as openly as possible… even [for] the lowliest women… understood not only by the Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens” (ibid.).

Despite his opening rhetoric in the Paraclesis about universal literacy, Erasmus does not paint a picture of everyone sitting in Cambridge colleges editing Greek manuscripts. His vision is egalitarian and democratic: all can engage with his Bible. But as an important part of creating a scientific, rational approach to textual criticism and interpretation, Erasmus was part of a process of objectifying the text, of making the text a passive object to be ornamented and revered and then studied and dissected: the Bible became like a patient on an operating table waiting for the skilled surgeon to make it better or to perform an autopsy.

In such conditions, the Bible has increasingly become a closed text to many because of the increasing complexity of the hermeneutical process. Better to let the experts engage and leave the Bible to Sunday services than to try to engage with it from our own relative inexperience. So, Clive Field talks of the Bible as a closed text (Field, 2014) and remarks on the ideological shift away from the Bible as a text of authority and identity for our contemporary culture.

But did that shift start with the Reformation itself? Some might argue that there is an inherent contradiction in the reformers’ work. On the one hand, they speak of farmers singing songs, weavers humming psalms, travellers telling stories – of a mediated Bible as part of everyday culture (Poleg, 2013; Price and Ryrie, 2004). Indeed, it is this same Erasmus who will publish his own Paraphrases, ready-made sermon guides meant to bring the Bible alive to those who cannot read it. At the same time, the message had to be guarded by special people, usually European white male clerics. Indeed, whenever the Bible has found its own way out, leaking surreptitiously into public and private discourse, the Church and the establishment have often reacted disastrously. The Bible ‘in the wild’ seems to be a dangerous thing – whether it is the mysticism of Meister Eckhart and Hildegard of Bingen (or, now, the gracious inclusivism of Rachel Held Evans), medieval movements to translate the Bible into English, the diverse tensions within Protestantism, the revolutionary liberation movements in South America in the 20th century, or the rise of Asian and African Exegesis in the 21st.

Of course, the mediated presence of the Bible in contemporary societies goes without saying – but that presence is different in the Global South to the Global North, different in secularized Europe and globalized London (Davie, 2017), different in Brexit Britain from Trump’s America (Theissen, 2007; Bauckham, 2003; Bielo, 2009; Berlinerblau, 2008). In both the USA and Britain, most homes have a Bible (Field, 2014; American Bible Society, 2018) – but that Bible will, more often than not, stand on the shelf gathering dust. In both societies, the Bible is largely unread and the majority of people (54% in the USA, more in the UK) are disengaged from it as an actual text. It is both a reminder of days gone by, as well as almost a sacred presence within the home: a talisman (Phillips, 2018). Despite this, as we will see next, even as a talisman, the Bible remains important and, at times, authoritative: it is a voice to be brought out in important moments and to attract certain voters (Berlinerblau, 2008; Crossley, 2011; Goff, Farnsley and Thuesen, 2017).

When exploring culturally embedded Biblical literacy in Rethinking Biblical Literac y,, Matthew Collins comments: “Rumours of the Bible’s ‘loss’ to modern society are greatly exaggerated. It may no longer play such an explicitly prominent role in daily life, yet nevertheless continues to saturate our culture and heritage” (Edwards, 2015, p. 90). But that presence, which, in different ways, George Aichele (2001), Yvonne Sherwood (2000), Chris Meredith and Robert Myles (both in Edwards, 2015) refer to as ‘afterlives’ of the Bible, tends to focus on the transtemporal, transcultural effect of the text and on the cultural reception of the text in contemporary society. Such reception is a reflexive process. So, Aichele explores the concept of the Bible as a classic text, highlighting Eliot’s argument that classic texts have afterlives in which they become universal in terms of both space and time (Aichele, 2001, pp. 87–90). Aichele had already asserted that any reading of a classic – a canonical text – changes the essence or intertextuality of both the contemporary receptive reading and our understanding of the target text as well, thus making the classic itself the focus of future creativity, recasting it through echoes, imitations, allusions or parodies (Aichele, 2001, pp. 15–30; Eliot, 1956, pp. 63–65; Genette, 1997). Similarly, Yvonne Sherwood talks of how the book of Jonah survives its own potential demise through cultural re-appropriation – the book lives on within the very readings which seek to unpick it, poison it, drown it. She reminds us of Hugh Pyper’s exploration of the Bible as the memeplex, forcing itself upon its readership (Sherwood, 2000, pp. 176–209; Genette, 1997; Pyper in Exum and Moore, 1998; Stahlberg, 2008, pp. 18–37). Similarly, Chris Meredith explores how Eddie Izzard’s comic portrayal of the Flood narrative plays on both the audience’s knowledge of the Bible as an authoritative text as well as on their sense of awkwardness about mocking that ‘classic’ text (Meredith in Edwards, 2015, p. 194). Meanwhile, Robert Myles puts cultural reception at the heart of literacy, while reminding us (contra Eliot, Aichele and Sherwood) that: “afterlives of the Bible in popular culture typically remove the text from canonical control altogether” (Myles in Edwards, 2015, p. 146).

The work of Poleg (2013) and the authors of Rethinking Biblical Literacy (Edwards, 2015) take us away from the Protestant/Enlightenment love affair with ‘the word’ [of God] (logocentricism or even phallologocentricism) and instead remind us of the very material, sensual, visual elements of both the Bible and of Christian practice in its many forms and many versions. It explores the Bible as a fundamentally mediated text which remains at the heart of contemporary Western culture – the classic which so much creativity seeks to query, challenge, replace, but through such engagement that same creativity actually reinforces the text’s status as a classic within contemporary culture.

In focusing more on the ‘cultural reception of the Bible’ than on ‘Bible reading’, then, it can be argued, as Collins asserted, that Biblical literacy is not in decline, especially when we see the Bible still as a mediated text. Films, songs, theatre, art, sculpture – even architecture and advertising – carry echoes, afterlives of the Bible. I am reminded of Lady Gaga’s constant twisting of Biblical imagery (Gellel, 2013), of David Bowie’s Lazarus (Phillips, 2016), of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah – a film he referred to as the most unbiblical Biblical epic ever (Phillips, in press). Even playful rebellion against the Bible, in parody or in vitriol, seen from the mystery plays to Monty Python and Izzard, somehow works to reinforce the power that the Bible has within our society. Brian Malley (in Bielo, 2009), whose work I will discuss later, reminds us of this association of ‘the Bible’ with the wider concept of ‘authoritative discourse’.

The question is whether as Christendom crumbles this culturally embedded, mediated Bible, this ‘Bible’ in concept, will also crumble/dissipate, overtaken by different cultural texts. Just as Eliot’s arguments for ‘the classic’ seem widely divergent from contemporary literary theory, McConnell’s passion for the Bible’s importance to Western civilization has to be held in tension with the findings of academic research which demonstrate how little the Bible is known or respected among contemporary society (Wochlin, 2005; Field, 2014; Goff et al., 2017). In post-Christendom, the Bible’s influence and relevance as a classic seem to be waning, with an increasing sense that people are unaware of the Bible even when it the source for regular phrases people use everyday (Field, 2011). In more recent research carried out by the CODEC Research Centre at Durham University, in partnership with the Bible Society, we found that most Digital Millennials (18-to 34-year-olds who regularly use digital technology) were pretty indifferent to the Bible. They acknowledged its presence, even tending to call it the ‘word of God’, and they would show some unease when people seemed to be laughing at it – but overall the situation was one of qualified indifference. The Bible was not part of their own world or their experience (Ford, Mann and Phillips, 2019).

More widely, in 2014, Field published an article exploring all the evidence from British opinion polling about the Bible from the 1940s to 2013 (Field, 2014). Field argues not that Biblical literacy per se is in decline but rather that Bible-centricism is on the way out. The research is not so much about how often people read the Bible, but rather how people are losing the quality of ‘Bible-centricism’, which itself acts as a portmanteau term that includes Bible ownership, regular Bible reading, Bible knowledge, and belief in the Bible’s veracity and its influence in everyday life. As such, Field is looking for a pretty elite form of Biblical literacy and engagement, which he thinks should at least still be present within the Church.

The data for Field’s research consist of 123 broadly representative opinion polls, alongside 35 polls of adult religious populations. Field found overall that household Bible ownership has slumped (from 90% to around 67%); weekly Bible reading, never high, has fallen from around 16% to 9%; about 77% of the population rarely reads the Bible or has never read the Bible; and knowledge about the Bible has also fallen. He also finds that Bible belief has waned to such an extent that

only a small and dwindling minority believes the Bible to be true. … Key storylines in the Bible – Creation, Virgin Birth, gospel miracles, Resurrection – have been progressively rejected as historically inaccurate and/or understood in a figurative sense or disbelieved entirely.

(Field, 2014, 517)

Significantly, as CODEC found with the Digital Millennials, for around half of all adults surveyed between 2008 and 2011, the Bible has “absolutely no significance in their personal lives” (Field, 2014, 516). Field’s article is almost apocalyptic in tone, making the point that the Bible was not written to be “the moral framework of Judeo-Christian civil societies” but rather is meant to be “the cornerstone of the Christian faith, at once its inspiration, authority and evidential basis” (Field, 2014, 503).

We have already seen that there are alternative voices which are less apocalyptic. Rethinking Biblical Literacy (Edwards, 2015) contains numerous essays pointing to the persistence of a (mediated) Bible within contemporary society. Others have pointed out that the Bible assumed within contemporary British society is a ‘decaffeinated’ text, a text which fails to explore the radical edge of the Bible as well as some of the problematic teachings of the Bible for contemporary progressive societies. So, James Crossley (2011, p. 209) talks of the Bible assumed by contemporary society as reinforcing Western liberal capitalism: “a text of liberty, freedom, democracy, gender equality, and everything it is not”.

Field’s statistics and general anecdotal evidence show a clear decline in Bible literacy and engagement in the UK, despite ongoing representations of Biblical imagery within contemporary culture (contra Edwards, 2015). There are other possible explanations. The (continued) mediated presence of the Bible may represent (potentially diminishing) afterlives of the Bible, echoes of the Bible’s long-term status as an authoritative text within Western society. Or that same presence could perhaps point towards the (resurgent) globalized nature of contemporary British society and the (increasing) importance of cultural influences from global communities which have retained a more profound engagement with the Bible text – be that in the plethora of African, Asian and European indigenous churches flourishing in globalized London or in the cultural products of the American-dominated entertainment culture (Davie, 2017; Ford et al., 2019).

Christianity in the USA is, of course, a different kind of thing (for example: Gorski, 2010, 2017a, 2017b) and American Bible engagement remains considerably more robust than in the UK (American Bible Society, 2018; Goff et al., 2017; Bielo, 2009; Noll, 2015). In their annu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 The contemporary context of Bible engagement, especially in the UK and USA
• 2 The Bible, social media and digital culture
• 3 Popular Bible verses on social media
• 4 Analysis/reflection
• 5 Some potential contributory factors: performative belief, MTD and media ecology
• Conclusion: an ordinary canon within social media engagement?
• References
• Index