|  By
Margaret
M. Mitchell,
University of Chicago
Respondent: Randall Balmer,
Columbia University
This month, Margaret Mitchell leads us on a tour of the web sites
of several prominent, conservative Christian organizations, using
her findings to answer the question: “How do they use the Bible?”
With her research on ancient biblical commentators as a point of
reference, Mitchell analyzes the ways in which the Religious Right
employs the Bible in its cultural critique, political agenda, and
interpretation of historical events:
Even when the Bible is invoked on these web sites, only very
infrequently is a concept of inerrancy alluded to, and even then
rarely using that term. I do not think I ever have seen the word
“fundamentalist” in cruising these websites for the last year
or so. The word and commitment are submerged. Rarely do we even
see “literalist.” On average it takes two or three and sometimes
more links even to find a page that mentions the Bible or a biblical
verse. Instead, the first noticeable thing about the Christian
Right is that, even if they continue to read the King James Bible
(or perhaps the NIV or NLT [this is hard to tell, because they
rarely say]), they have been actively engaged in translation projects
of another sort. Instead of Biblical inerrancy, or biblical authority,
one finds a new, user-friendly and unifying lexicon: “family values,”
“traditional values,” “family-friendly,” “Judeo-Christian heritage,”
and a newfangled product called “the Christian world-view.”…As
I shall argue below, along with a polemical intent similar to
what we see in ancient commentators, what most characterizes the
Christian Right’s biblical interpretation is no single method,
but rather its selection of passages and topics.
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