The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
May 2006
How Biblical is the Christian Right?
By Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago
1 Congressional Record, House, March 20, 2005, p. H1725, col. 2.
2 This is a rhetorical strategy DeLay has also had occasion to use in regard to himself as a “crucified martyr.” In the months since his sermonic peroration in the House he has lived into that job description even more. Jerry Falwell, Tony Perkins, and James Dobson (among others) have supported the former Majority Leader and decried “the dogs [who] ... yap at his heels” as part of a “seek-and-destroy politics.”
3 I would like to emphasize the limits of this definition, and hence the focus of this paper; I am not speaking about evangelical Christians en masse (there is overlap here but not simple identification), but of this specific political movement and its biblical interpretation.
5 M.M. Mitchell, “Patristic Rhetoric on Allegory,” Journal of Religion 85 (2005) 414-45.
6 First quotation from Cicero De inventione 2.43.125; the latter is a paraphrase of 2.2.43.120: “It will help greatly to show how he would have written if he had wished the opponent’s interpretation to be carried out or adopted.”
7 Cicero De inv. 2.44.128: “many disagreeable things would result if it is established as a principle that it is acceptable to depart from the written word” (H. Caplan’s Loeb Classical Library translation, adapted). Further, see 2.45.132: “the judges will have no rule to follow if they depart from the letter of the law.”
8 “the author of the law himself, if he should rise from the dead, would approve this act ... the reason why the author of the law provided for judges from a certain class and of a certain age was that there might be a judicial body able not only to read his law, which any child could do, but to comprehend it with the mind and interpret his intentions; again, that if the law-maker had been giving his law to ignorant men and barbarous judges, he would have written everything out in precise detail; but as he knew the quality of the men who were to judge the cases, he did not add what he saw was perfectly plain. For he did not think of you as clerks to read his law aloud in court, but as interpreters of his wishes” (Cicero De inv. 2.47.139).
9 “Then it may be argued that nothing at all could be done either with laws or with any instrument in writing, or even about our every day conversation and the orders issued in our own homes, if every one wished to consider only the literal meaning of the words and not to follow the intentions of the speaker” (Cicero De inv. 2.47.140).
11 The language here is that of Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La literature au second degree (Paris: Editions due Seuil, 1982), which I have learned through its appropriation by Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
12 See M. M. Mitchell, “Aramaica Veritas and the Occluded Orientalism of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” Criterion 43 (2004) 20-25, 38.
13 Prof. Craig Blomberg at Denver Seminary. The Council’s website is www.pureintimacy.org.
17 www.family.org/cforum/fosi/homosexuality/theology/a0037767.cfm, dated August 31, 2005.
18 “Climate Initiative is a Bad Idea,” Falwell Confidential, 10 February 2006 (www.falwell.com). The dualistic logic requires the ostracism of these fellow evangelicals. Hence it should not be not surprising that it is now being claimed that pro-abortion money, via the Hewlett Foundation, was behind them (http://www.baptistpress.com/bpnews.asp?ID=22753).
19 At the website with the modest url: www.cc.org, one finds a bold double banner: “Christian Coalition of America: America’s Leading Grassroots Organization Defending Our Godly Heritage.”
20 It does in the Twentieth Century New Testament (1904) and the New English Bible (1970).
21 http://www.family.org/welcome/aboutfof/a0000078.cfm.
22 The letter appeared on www.ouramericanvalues.org, but is apparently no longer available there as of this writing.
23 www.erlc.com/partner/Article_Display_Page/0,,
PTID314166%7CCHID599216%7CCIID1551834,00. html (the title is “on questioning
biblical submission”).
24 Apocalyptic Bodies (London/New York: Routledge, 1999) 1-12.
25 www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/chuckcolson.
26 I quote here from a news story that appeared on 17 October 2003 (www.cnn.com/2003/US/10/16/rumsfeld.boykin.ap/).
27 www.family.org/cforum/fosi/islam/essays/a0028249.cfm (“September 11 and the Mandate of the Church,” 8 October 2003, listed as “Anonymous”).
28 The key role this passage has played for the Christian Right, both before and after September 11, was insightfully analyzed by Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), esp. 36-46.
29 So Land, in an interview after Alito’s confirmation, approving President Bush’s pledge to appoint: “only ... strict constructionist, original intent jurists who would pledge themselves to interpret the Constitution and not seek to act as the country’s unelected legislators” (www.christianexaminer.com/Articles/Articles%20Feb06/Art_Feb06_19.html).
30 Zev Chafets, “Ministers of Debate,” New York Times Magazine, 19 March 2006, 52-57.
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