GetReligion
Sunday, April 06, 2025

Bible

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That question again: Where is the familiar faith theme in news about these civil rights events?

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Coverage continues of protests and other events linked to the life and death of George Floyd.

It’s impossible, of course, to read all of this material. But while reading what I can, I have continued to look for facts and images linked to what I think is one of the most interesting elements of this story — an angle readers might expect to be seeing, in light of the history of civil rights work of this kind.

The big question: Where are the African-American clergy in these news stories? I doubt they are sitting on the sidelines during this historic moment. This question is, of course, central to discussions of press coverage of religion in these events.

Did you see this material in Julia Duin’s fascinating first-person visit into CHAZ territory? See this post: “Seattle's de-policed CHAZ district is a religion-free zone, even in mainstream press.”

As my friends and I were arriving at CHAZ, there was a meeting of black pastors south of us who were trying to support the local police — who’ve taken a beating in all this. The police were forced to vacate CHAZ, even though the chief, a black female, told the media she has not wanted to leave. Mayor Jenny Durkan, who calls CHAZ a place with “a block party atmosphere,” overruled her. …

These black clergy clearly resent how the white Social Justice Warriors are taking over the debate. Wish a reporter could explore that angle more.

Once again, here is the question: Are black clergy attempting to play a leadership role in some of these discussions and (a) being shunned by other leaders? Or are the clergy there, as usual, but (b) not receiving any coverage? What’s going on?

In a way, this is a hard-news angle linked to questions that I raised the other day in this post: “Dramatic funeral service for George Floyd: Was there Gospel in it, or only politics?”

It is interesting that some reporters — in religious publications — took the time to dig into the live-streamed video of this funeral and note the Christian themes and content, especially in the music and biblical images.

Here is a must-read on that, care of Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today: “The Songs and Scriptures of George Floyd’s Houston Funeral.” Here is a crucial passage from this feature:


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Evangelicals know better: President Trump just doesn't know how to 'Billy Graham' a Bible

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Evangelicals know better: President Trump just doesn't know how to 'Billy Graham' a Bible

For generations, young Christians have learned how to hold and respect their Bibles during competitions known as "Sword drills."

The sword image comes from a New Testament affirmation that the "word of God is … sharper than any two-edged sword."

Drill leaders say, "Attention!" Competitors stand straight, hands at their sides.

"Draw swords!" They raise their Bibles to waist level, hands flat on the front and back covers. The leader challenges participants to find a specific passage or a hero or theme in scripture.

"Charge!" Competitors have 20 seconds to complete their task and step forward. For some, four or five seconds will be enough.

The key is knowing how to open the Bible, as well as hold it.

It's safe to say the young Donald Trump didn't take part in many Bible drills while preparing to be confirmed, at age 13 or thereabouts, as a Presbyterian in Queens, New York City. His mother gave him a Revised Standard Version – embraced by mainline Protestants, shunned by evangelicals – several years earlier.

President Trump was holding a Revised Standard Version during his iconic visit to the historic St. John's Episcopal Church, after police and security personnel drove protesters from Lafayette Square, next to the White House. To this day, evangelicals favor other Bible translations, while liberal Protestants have embraced the more gender-neutral New Revised Standard Version.

A reporter asked: "Is that your Bible?"

The president responded: "It's a Bible."

"Trump is a mainline Protestant. That's what is in his bones – not evangelicalism. It's clear that he's not at home with evangelicals. That's not his culture, unless he's talking about politics," said historian Thomas S. Kidd of Baylor University, author of "Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis."


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What explains Donald Trump's unusual and controversial brandishing of the Bible?

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Observers are still scratching heads over President Trump’s unusual June 1 walk alongside top administration officials to the arson-damaged and boarded-up St. John’s Episcopal Church, not to pray or speak to an anxious nation but simply to brandish a Bible for the cameras. Politically risky removal of nearby demonstrators preceded the walk, which provoked a media / military / political uproar.

What’s going on here? Much of the following will be familiar for religion specialists. But amid all the 2020 discussion of, say, suburban women or the race of Joe Biden’s running mate, political reporters should be alert to religious dynamics. A related event June 2 said much and deserved more attention as the President and First Lady paid a ceremonial visit to the St. John Paul II National Shrine, sponsored by the Knights of Columbus.

Simply put, Trump cannot win unless he maintains Republicans’ customary lopsided support from white evangelical Protestants. He also needs a smaller but solid majority of non-Hispanic Catholics, the more devout the better. Think Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.

Politico’s Gabby Orr nailed things in a May 22 analysis after the president prodded governors to reopen churches. “A sudden shift in support for Donald Trump among religious conservatives is triggering alarm bells inside his re-election campaign,” because a downward slide in their enthusiasm “could sink” his prospects.

The White House no doubt reacted to its own internal polls, but Orr especially cited data from the Pew Research Center (media contact Anna Schiller, aschiller@pewresearch.org, 202–419-4514) and the Public Religion Research Institute or PRRI www.prri.org (contact Jordun Lawrence, press@prri.org, 202–688-3259). These two organizations are important because their polls usually distinguish white evangelicals from other Protestants, and white from Hispanic Catholics.

Turn to the PRRI report on “favorable” opinion toward Trump’s performance — not respondents’ voting intentions — as of March, April, and the latest survey May 26-31.

Looking at Trump’s two pivotal religious categories, with white evangelicals his favoribility in the three surveys went from 77 to 66 to 62%, down 15 points. With white Catholics, the decline went from 60 to 48 to 37%, a heart-stopping 23-point change.


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Plug-in: Seven pop-quiz questions about Donald Trump's photo op with a Bible

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What’s left to say about the week’s biggest religion story?

President Donald Trump’s now-famous walk from the White House to the nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church literally broke the internet. Or at least it overloaded the Religion News Service servers. Credit an explosive report by national correspondent Jack Jenkins for that.

Rather than rehash the details from all the stories about Trump’s photo op, let’s see who was paying close attention.

That’s right — it’s time for a pop quiz. I’ll share the answers at the bottom of this column:

1. Did police really use tear gas to break up a peaceful protest so Trump could cross the street and pose with a Bible?

2. Who did authorities expel from the church’s patio before the president’s arrival?

3. What version of the Bible did Trump hold up?

4. Did the Bible belong to Trump?

5. When did the tradition of St. John’s Episcopal Church as the “church of the presidents” begin?

6. What well-known religion writer, in analyzing the president’s visit, wrote that Trump brandished “a Bible like a salesman in a bad infomercial?”

7. Did Trump emerge from the photo op looking like a thug or a hero?

Bonus question: What religious site did Trump visit the day after the church photo op?

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Trump pushes churches to reopen, but black pastors in hard-hit St. Louis preach caution: Hey, remember when the coronavirus pandemic was all we were talking about?


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Bible trivia time for hard-working religion scribes: What is a cubit? A shekel? An ephah?

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Bible trivia time for hard-working religion scribes: What is a cubit? A shekel? An ephah?

THE QUESTION:

Bible trivia: How long is a cubit? What does a shekel weigh? How much does an ephah contain?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

Readers of the Bible, particularly those wedded to the revered King James Version from four centuries ago, will keep running across esoteric words for weights and measures in ancient times. Many editions today help out by providing modern equivalents in the text or footnotes.

But don’t take those equivalents too literally. Specialist Marvin Powell’s advice is that “measures have always posed a special problem for translators.” He said it’s “almost impossible” to fix equivalents with much precision so we’re talking about rules of thumb — literally the thumb in one example below.

Ancient usage was approximate to begin with, and meanings varied by districts and eras. There appear to be differences before and after Israel’s exile in Babylon that began in 526 B.C., and between the Old and New Testament cultures. Powell figured that any proposed equivalents have a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent if not more.

This gets us into the development of metrology, the science of measurement. The Guy here relies especially on two historians of the ancient world, Powell of Northern Illinois University, writing in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, and D.J. Wiseman of the University of London, in the New Bible Dictionary.

Consider the Old Testament prophet Amos, who denounced corner-cutters who “trample on the needy” by dishonestly selling wheat so as to “make the ephah small and the shekel great” (8:5). That indicates measurements were inherently a bit flexible as tradesmen bargained over weights and prices in their ancient marketplaces.

The most frequent such term in the Bible is the famous “cubit,” which measured length.


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New Testament texts were handed down across centuries, so are they reliable?

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THE QUESTION:

Can we rely upon New Testament texts that were copied and recopied over centuries?

THE GUY’S ANSWER:

It’s hard to think of any question more central for the Christian faith than that. The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council and subsequent catechism proclaim that the New Testament books provide “the ultimate truth of God’s revelation.” The church “unhesitatingly affirms” that they “faithfully hand on” the “honest truth about Jesus” and the history of his words and deeds.

Yet consider this. If people were to be asked what’s their favorite saying of Jesus Christ, many would certainly choose his words while being executed upon the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” Luke 23:34). Equally cherished is his admonition to the mob preparing to stone to death an adulterous woman: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Careful Bible readers will note that most Bible versions on sale today, including those produced by conservative evangelicals, have footnotes stating in all candor that those two sayings are absent in early and widely recognized Gospel manuscripts in the original Greek language. That does not prove the sayings are not authentic but that it’s possible or likely they weren’t in the two Gospels as originally written.

The familiar King James (Protestant) and Douay-Rheims (Catholic) translations from centuries ago raise no such questions. But today’s Bibles note such findings from modern-day scholarship in the highly technical field of “textual criticism,” which seeks to get us as close to the original writings as possible. The fact we have around 5,300 surviving manuscripts and fragments, a few of them quite early (vastly more evidence than with other 1st Century writings), means experts must evaluate and choose from many variations.

This situation led to doubts about New Testament credibility from a respected textual critic, Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina, in a scholarly work, “The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture” (1993).


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What should college grads, and high school grads, know about world religions?

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What should college grads, and high school grads, know about world religions?

THE QUESTION:

What should U.S. college graduates, and high school graduates, know about religion?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

A Gallup poll for the Bible Literacy Project 15 years ago found only about a third of U.S. teen-agers knew about Islam’s holy month of Ramadan or that the Quran is the religion’s holy book. The youths generally did better on Christian questions, though only a third could identify the significance of the “road to Damascus” and a tenth couldn’t say what Easter is.

The Religion Guy guesses that, if anything, teens in 2019 would do worse, due to the increase of religiously unaffiliated “nones” in the younger generation. Meanwhile, religious illiteracy becomes a more important problem for cohesion and understanding among the American people as diversity reaches beyond the Protestant-Catholic-Jew triad of times past.

Concerned about this, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (established by the late industrialist, a Congregational preacher’s kid) sought help from the American Academy of Religion, a professional association of some 8,000 college-level religion teachers. The result was a three-year study that concluded Oct. 3 with the release of “AAR Religious Literacy Guidelines: What U.S. College Graduates Need to Understand about Religion.” Click here for the .pdf document.

What we do not get in this AAR booklet is answers to the question The Guy poses above, what information people should know by the time they have earned a two-year or a four-year degree. That’s not surprising, given the complexity of the field of religion.

Instead, we’re informed on what grads need to “understand.” Two major points from the AAR team are that religion is central for every human culture that has ever existed, and that therefore people need to have a good grasp of reliable, non-sectarian information in this field. It distinguishes academic study of religion, which is “descriptive,” from the “prescriptive” education that people receive from their faith groups.


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That John Harbaugh! The Ravens coach sure loves to read the Bible for some strange reason

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Are you ready for some real NFL football? It’s that time of year again. Which only raises another question, are you ready for some more haunted ESPN features about mysterious behaviors in the lives of religious people who happen to be coaches and athletes in the National Football League?

If you read GetReligion — and a handful or two of you care about sports — you know that there are almost too many of these stories for GetReligion to handle them, year after year. I tend to notice stories about the Baltimore Ravens containing God-shaped holes (click here for a sample) because that team commanded my loyalties during my D.C.-Baltimore years (and they still do, to be honest about it).

So ESPN recently served up a new story about the head coach of the Ravens with this headline: “John Harbaugh's T-shirt game is strong and motivating the Ravens.” Fans will recognize that this is the latest episode in the ongoing tale of journalists trying to grasp Harbaugh’s love of “mighty men” images. Here’s the overture:

OWINGS MILLS, Md. -- Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh loves a good T-shirt. So much so that he's got a guy on staff making custom designs for him.

At training camp last year, Harbaugh showed up with three words printed on a T-shirt.

Trying to set the tone after the 2017 season ended with a last-minute loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, Harbaugh wanted to move past one of the most gut-wrenching moments in team history and put his players in the right mindset.

At a team meeting, Harbaugh told the story of the biblical figure Benaiah chasing a lion into a snowy pit and killing it.

"If you want to do great things, you have to have courage,” said Harbaugh. "You got to know your moment.” And boom ... not long after that, Harbaugh later appeared at practice wearing a shirt reading, “Chase the Lion.”

ESPN noted that Harbaugh is the NFL’s fourth-longest-tenured coach at that he has a unique ability to find symbolic ways to motivate his troops. The coach explains that this is part of “culture-building” and establishing a “world view” for his team. The t-shirts — and the words on them — are part of all that.

Now, with the word “biblical” included in that overture, I thought that we were about to read an ESPN story that finally dug into the details of Harbaugh’s unique blend of Catholic faith and a muscular-Christianity style that is popular with modern evangelicals.


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What is 'fundamentalism'? Hint: Grab a copy of the Associated Press Stylebook

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What is 'fundamentalism'? Hint: Grab a copy of the Associated Press Stylebook

THE QUESTION:

What is (and is not) “fundamentalism”?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

One of The Guy’s weekly memos for getreligion.org recently proposed that “fundamentalism” has become such an abused and misunderstood label that maybe we media folk should drop it altogether.

The Guy was provoked to go public with this heretical idea when The New York Times Book Review assessed a memoir of life among Jehovah’s Witnesses. The reviewer, who teaches at Harvard Divinity School, said repeatedly that Witnesses are “fundamentalists.”

Ouch (see below). If the Ivy League elite and the nation’s most influential newspaper are confused, it’s time to consider scrapping such a meaningless word.

Not so long ago, most people understood that a fundamentalist is by definition a Protestant, usually in the U.S., and a strongly tradition-minded one with a distinct flavor and fervor. Some quick history.

The term originated with “The Fundamentals,” a series of 12 booklets with 90 essays by varied thinkers from English-speaking countries that were distributed beginning in 1910. Along with standard Christian tenets, the writers defended and the authority and historical truth of the Bible over against liberal theories coming mainly from Germany.

That founding effort drew support from “mainline” Protestants, “evangelicals” and proto-“fundamentalists.” Brothers Milton and Lyman Stewart, the Union Oil millionaires who funded the project, were lay Presbyterians. The authors were reputable scholars ranging from Anglican bishops to “mainline” seminary professors to Bible college presidents. The tricky issue of the creation accounts in the Book of Genesis was not assigned to an extreme literal interpreter but respected Scottish theologian James Orr.

The budding movement was further defined by insistence on the “five points of fundamentalism,” namely the Bible’s “inerrancy” (history without error) as originally written, the truth of biblical miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, his bodily resurrection from the dead, and “vicarious” atonement through his death on the cross to save sinners.

Notably, these points were defined by predecessors of today’s rather liberal Presbyterian Church (USA). After a dispute over clergy ordinations in New York City, the General Assembly of 1910 required affirmation of the five points by clergy candidates, and reaffirmed that policy in 1916 and 1923.


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