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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
Bring a cultural-studies toolkit to bear on the world's most interpreted text The study of the Bible has adapted to the full range of analytical tools available to theologians, scholars, and researchers of every stripe. The marriage between cultural studies and Biblical studies has been especially fruitful, increasingly producing rich and provocative engagements with Biblical texts and contexts. Students of the Bible stand to profit significantly from a volume which illustrates the value of cultural studies approaches by putting these theories into practice. American Standard meets the needs of these students with a series of lively essays working through cultural-studies readings of specific Biblical texts. Drawing connections between the Bible and its modern settings, American popular culture, and more, it balances theory with direct close reading to provide an accessible introduction to the vast and varied landscape of cultural studies. American Standard readers will also find: * An invaluable literature review of core cultural studies texts * Detailed analyses incorporating fantasy gaming, the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, American diet culture, and more * An author with an extensive teaching and publishing history in cultural and Biblical studies American Standard is ideal for advanced undergraduate or seminary students taking courses in biblical interpretation, American religion, critical theory, or any related subjects.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Acknowledgments
1 A General Introduction to Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Bible
Spreading the Word: The Bible's Viral Encounter with US Pop Culture
Old School: Birmingham, Marxism, and Late Capitalism
It's in the Mix: Cultural Studies as Intertextuality
Assembling the Pieces: Reception, Deleuzian Machines, Affect
The Plan of This Book
Works Cited
Part I: From CCCS to Late Capitalism
2 Reading Readers
The Bible in Late Capitalism
The Bible, New and Improved
A Self‐Evident Book: The Bible and Nineteenth‐Century United States
The Rise of the “Value‐Added” Bible: The American Bible in the Age of Modernism
The American Bible in Late Capitalism
Are Bibles
Read
or Just Looked at?
Our Bibles, Ourselves
Works Cited
3 Graphic Bibles
Graphic Bibles
Robert Crumb on Genesis
“Translation” of Word into Image
The Reticence of Biblical Image
Conclusion
Works Cited
4 “Eat This Book”
The Bible and Cultural Studies
Defining “Culture” and the “Culture of Everyday Life”
The Biblical Scholarship on/and the American Diet
Biblical Eating
The Bible, Pop Culture, Food, and Consumption
Works Cited
Part II: The Intertextual Bible
5 The Ketuvim in the Coenim
What's in
Your
Bible?
The Coenim
Barton Fink
(1991)
Ladykillers
(2004)
Jews, and Jewish Bibles, in Hollywood
(Re)reading the Coen Bible
Works Cited
6 “Do Not Forsake Me”
First Verse (Précis)
Second Verse
Bridge
Refrain
Works Cited
7 God’s Dice
Dungeons
&
Dragons
and the Birth of a Genre
The Lore of the God‐Emperor:
Warhammer 40k
's Narrative Frame
The Devil in the Details: Satan and the Cosmic War Motif in
W40k and D&D
The “Satanic Panic” and the Dissonance Between
D&D
and Some US Religious Circles
The “Origins of Satan” and the Bible as Fantasy Literature
Playing (with) the Devil
Works Cited
Part III: Affective Machines: Deleuze, Cultural Studies, and the Next Wave
8 Mysteries of the Bible Documentary
Truth and Representation
Modes and Methods of Documentary
A (Very Brief) Introduction and Review of Bible Documentary
Mysteries of the Bible
From Jesus to Christ
Testimony of the Ark
On the Filming of Documentaries, There Is No End
Works Cited
9 “I (Want to) Believe, Lord; Help Me in My Unbelief”
The Beginning of the End
What the Bible Raëlly Says
Discerning the
Bak'tun
Converging Sight Lines
On Conspiracies of Affect(s) and Apocalyptics
Apocalypse: John's Vision of the (Sometimes Scary) Real World
Horror Movies:
28 Days Later…
and the Revelation of Rage
Conspiracy
Works Cited
10 Bespoke Words
Theoretically Naked
Boxers and Socks
Shirt and Trousers
Shoes
Jacket
Tie
Glasses
Works Cited
Conclusion
Prelude to a Riot
Race, Bible, Mass Culture, and US Politics
Bible, Culture, Race, and Scholarship: 2020 Correcting Our Vision
A Final Review
Works Cited
Index
Index of Biblical Citations
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index
Index of Biblical Citations
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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American Standard
The Bible in US Popular Culture
Robert Paul Seesengood
Drew Theological School
Drew University
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For Maisie Faye
Acknowledgments
This book took too long to write. When I began it, I was intending to produce a book on cultural studies and biblical studies that married the theory‐focus and consistency of a single‐author title with the breadth of content and cultural review that comes from multiauthor collections. I still like that idea, but now understand precisely how long it will take for a single person to acquaint themselves with such a huge array of theory. Even a meager volume such as this would not be possible without the generous insight and conversation of many scholarly friends. Most all these chapters first appeared as presentations to regional or national professional meetings and campus lectures; I benefited greatly from key questions, suggestions, and ideas from an array of collaborators and more. To mention just a few, I have serious debts to Rhonda Burnette‐Bletsch, Dan Clanton, Jr., Jason Cocker, Laura Copier, James Crossley, Steed Davidson, Scott Eliot, Rhiannon Graybill, Maia Kotrosits, Joseph Marchal, Stephen Moore, Brent Plate, Matt Rindge, Peter Sabo, Donovan Schafer, Greg Seigworth, Linda Schearing, Ken Stone, Hannah Strømmen, Jay Twomey, Richard Walsh, and Andrew Wilson. Some material was also read and reacted to by students at Albright College and in Kesher Zion Synagogue's adult education program. I'm grateful to all for the fine, honest questions they brought, as well. When I began this project, so long ago, I was faculty and administration at Albright College in Reading, PA. As I do final drafts and edits, I am administration and faculty at the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, NJ. Thanks are due to my colleagues in Religious Studies at Albright College for their unflagging support: Charles Brown, Victor Forte, Midori Hartman, Mel Sensenig, Andrew Mbuvi – and especially Jennifer Koosed, my colleague and partner in nearly everything. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude to my many fine colleagues at Drew, as well. I'm particularly grateful for my partners in Academic Affairs – Edwin Aponte, Tanya Bennett, Meredith Hoxie‐Schol, Kathie Brown, Hilary McKane, Beth Babcock, and Nancy Keats – as well as the always stimulating conversation partners among the faculty in Bible and Cultures – Stephen D. Moore, Danna Nolan Fewell, Melanie Johnson‐Debaufre, Kenneth Ngwa, Althea Spencer‐Miller, and Dong Sung Kim.
Previous versions of Chapters 3, 6, and 8 appeared as “The Bible as Graphic Novel: When the Word Becomes (Affecting) Image” (Bible & Critical Theory 14.1 [2018]: 87–101), “‘Do Not Forsake Me’: Biblical Motifs in Zinnemann's High Noon” (SBL Forum May–June 2009) and “Documentaries.” In: Biblical Reception in Film, Vol. 1 (ed. R. Burnette‐Blestch), 193–208. Handbooks on Biblical Reception, 2; Leiden: de Gruyter, 2016; and some paragraphs of “Publishing in the Bible and American Popular Culture.” In: The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Culture (ed. D. W. Clanton, Jr. and Terry Clark), 537–552. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; and “Wrestling with the ‘Macedonian Call’: Pauline Scholarship in the Nineteenth‐Century Colonial Missions.” In: The Colonized Apostle: Paul Through Post‐Colonial Eyes (ed. C. Stanley), 189–205. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011, reappear in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 10 was originally published as “Bespoke Words: The Bible, Fashion, and the Mechanism(s) of Things” (Bible & Critical Theory 16.2 [2020]: 50–58).
Finally, I need to thank Jennifer, Abby, Simon, and Ben for years of support, patience, love, and curiosity. I'm more grateful than I can ever express. This is what I was thinking about and working on all those times. I hope you like it.
For Maisie Faye
1A General Introduction to Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Bible
Spreading the Word: The Bible's Viral Encounter with US Pop Culture
During the pandemic of 2020, cloistered inside my “bubble” of immediate family, with my books, the internet and this (proto)manuscript as company, I was struck by a metaphor for the Bible's prevalence in US culture: its influence is actually, not metaphorically, epidemic. Thinking so much of contagion and transmission, I simply can't imagine a person living in the United States for a year without, at some point, physically encountering a Bible or spending 15 minutes in proximity of someone who owned a Bible. The Bible, like a cultural pandemic, ripples through nearly every aspect of US history, media, and society. Bibles can be found everywhere, even in a winterized, backwoods cabin in Centre County, PA, in dozens of translations and editions. Bibles and Bible commentary flood the internet. Even during a pandemic, copies of the Bible are given away on street corners by earnest missionaries on (even largely empty) college campuses and (surreally quiet) city streets. The Bible permeates not only America's mass culture, but even its physical space. It's physical presence, like a virus, both produces and testifies to the influence of its effectiveness.
Viruses, like Bibles, are strange. Viruses are the margins of matter and “living.” They are a complicated, though small, “text” of genetic code that, when “read,” replicates its message. As the novel coronavirus Covid‐19 has shown, again and again, a virus beguiles us into language of will and sentience (a “crafty” variation). Viruses, like Bibles, cannot travel alone; they need a host. But viruses, like Bibles, function by convincing their host to assist their spread. When one encounters a virus, “touches” it, the exchange – a moment of reading and interpretation and influence – begins.
I touch the Bible, open on the table beside me. It, like a virus, can be understood in a myriad of ways. One can trace its genealogy, its evolution, its mutations, its processes; it can be understood in its lexemes and grammar, in terms of its affinity – or uniqueness – to other books (ancient and contemporary), in terms of its bookishness or in terms of its history of transmission, transcription, translation. It can be read by the devout as a message of spiritual truth, of divine importance, or it can be read with detachment, in terms of its impact on individual readers or upon whole streams of culture, present or historic. It is a book one can touch with one's hand, a physical thing, but it is also a breathtakingly effective meme.
This book, American Standard, a title that blends reference to one of the first best‐selling translations of the Bible indigenous to the United States with acknowledgement of the Bible's central role in the US cultural repertoire, is in part an introduction to scholarship that blends biblical studies with the study of pop culture and mass media (particularly in a US context). The book offers both an introduction and theoretical framing for study of the Bible in/and/as popular culture, and a selection of essays performing that analysis in a variety of ways. For the critical theory, I have chosen to focus on classical and foundational authors and texts for the field of cultural studies. For engagement with popular culture, I have consistently erred to the side of accessibility, hopefully choosing moments of popular culture with sufficient cultural breadth and potential “staying power” to be recognizable to a wide variety of readers.
I am imagining readers who are trained in biblical studies meeting cultural studies, in an organized way, for the first time, but also readers well‐versed in cultural studies who might be curious about Bible. I will argue that biblical scholarship on cultural studies can be grouped into three methodological categories that emerge, roughly, sequentially from the mid‐twentieth century until the early twenty first, each in conversation with the one preceding it. I am arguing that the dialog between Bible and media/cultural studies both follow broader postwar transitions in humanities scholarship, moving from a defense of “high” culture to a sense of cultural Marxism then through into postmodern or late capitalist intertextuality and finally coalescing in affect studies and posthumanism. In this book, alongside this evolutionary taxonomy of method, I will present three sets of three essays, grouped and ordered to demonstrate those three methodological lenses (displaying both their independence and their inter‐animation with one another). American Standard is divided into three sections with three chapters each. This introduction provides an overview of the lens for each section in the triad that follows; the essays will be a demonstration or example of that lens.
The first methodological lens is the development of “culture” and “cultural studies” as typified by the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). This work (which I will discuss in Section 1.2 of this introduction) argued that popular or mass culture, previously seen as “vulgar” or beneath serious attention, was actually apt for serious scholarly critique. It further developed notions of how both “high” and “low” culture (and their designations) function(ed) to create hierarchies in culture, creating hegemonic systems with clear winners and losers. This work, in Britain, was heavily Marxist. As it migrated to the United States, and to the late twentieth century and “postmodern” scholarship, many of its themes and interests coalesce in Fredrick Jameson's “culture of Late Capitalism” which also marks a transition, in North American scholarship, to a sort of “postmodern” intertextuality. Section 1.2 of this introductory chapter will survey some examples of biblical scholarship in direct continuity with the Birmingham Centre and that resonate with Jameson's critique. Chapters 2–4 of this book will feature essays contiguous with this approach.
When cultural studies began to gain ground among US biblical scholars, it did so, as we will see, without the overt Marxist focus found in earlier British work. In Section 1.3 of this introduction, I will argue that, for American biblical scholars, intertextuality, as voiced for by Fernando Segovia, was a much more important, though often unacknowledged, influence. Much (I would argue, the vast majority) of US‐based scholarship on the Bible and popular culture unveils interconnections between seemingly disparate works, reveling in the productive comparison of art generated across vast differentials of time, culture, and community. Sometimes this unveiling is the articulation of ways the Bible or the cultural product draw directly upon other subjects. Within this broad intertextual set of readings lies yet another trend in scholarship on Bible and popular culture; reviewing contemporary (mass market) use of the Bible is, itself, a form of biblical interpretation, a type of biblical scholarship. This critical approach examines Bible in popular culture to see how contemporary people are (or have been) understanding – or better: creating – biblical meaning. In a few other cases, this examination of intertextuality is fully Kristevan – an exploration of how the modern reader (here, often, the scholar) creates (or discovers) meaning by the juxtaposition of the Bible and modern mass culture, interrogating the definitions of “author,” “reader,” and “text.” Section 1.3 of this introduction will survey some examples of this work in contemporary biblical scholarship. Chapters 5–7 of this book are examples of it as well.
Finally, work emerging in the early twenty‐first century is not only contiguous with these prior methodological lenses, but also reflects emerging interests across the humanities in post‐humanism (particularly new materialism) and in affect criticism. The Venn diagram of these two scholarly conversations overlap in the work of Giles Deleuze. Deleuze articulated the concepts of “the assemblage” and the book as “machine.” Both of these concepts are used by modern critics to discuss how the Bible (or culture) makes or manufactures “meaning” (among groups or for individual readers). Deleuze also developed the idea of juxtaposition and “becomingness,” of affect – the precognitive cognition of discovery and intersection. All of these concepts have been used by contemporary critics of Bible and popular culture. Section 1.4 of this introductory chapter will explain these ideas further and will cite some examples among modern scholars. Chapters 8–10 of this book will be essays examining Bible and popular culture through this methodological lens.
As a beginning reader of modern biblical interpretation quickly learns, the nineteenth century of biblical scholarship is synonymous with the growth of “higher criticism” among European (largely German) scholarship. The early twenty‐first century will be known for scholarship on the Bible and popular culture (its broader genus: “reception criticism”), particularly among Anglophone scholarship. Germanic higher criticism reflected larger academic and cultural values of its era; for example, a growing valuation of “scientific” or “reasoned” criticism in the humanities; assumptions about cultural evolution and social Darwinism; and the methodological refinement of supporting disciplines such as sociology, archaeology, linguistics, and philology. As I will argue, scholarship on Bible and mass culture reflects our (post)modern moment through shifting assumptions of authority and semiotic and literary “meaning”: analysis of cultural structures and power, keen interest in subjectivity and aesthetics, the sophistication inherent in consumption, and the assertion of complexity in what seems superficial and ephemeral. The study of Bible in/and/as popular culture is a hallmark of contemporary biblical scholarship.
The balance of this introduction is an overview of the origins of popular cultural studies, noting the broader transition of cultural studies from the late twentieth century until today, mapping briefly the intrusion of cultural studies into biblical studies, reviewing the migration of that work from British to US context, and exploring the Americanized versions, infused with intertextuality and affect, all set against broader intellectual trends at play in US academic work in the humanities. I want to proceed less as annotated bibliography and more as literature and contextual analysis. While I will offer an overview of the field (citing some representative examples), it is not a catalog of work that pretends to be exhaustive. In review and in example, I hope to trace what I would identify as three major theoretical foci of current work on Bible and pop culture. There are additional characteristics of US work that I will highlight.
Old School: Birmingham, Marxism, and Late Capitalism
Study of the Bible in/and mass, popular culture is a scholarly trend that presumes many (but by no means all) assumptions, methods, and queries from British‐style “cultural studies” of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as American interest in mass media and internet culture. Despite some notable exceptions (which I highlight subsequently), there is disproportionate attention in biblical studies to film, television, and visual culture and much less on other questions common to British‐style cultural studies such as material culture (or “new materialism”), race and ethnicity (until very recently), food culture, civic practice, family and community studies (beyond race, class and gender), affect criticism, or cultural ideologies. Publication and dissemination of scholarship in popular culture are, however, growing rapidly in biblical scholarship, with the support of major scholarly societies (such as the Society of Biblical Literature), the focus of several journals (many published only electronically), significant – and extremely ambitious – new reference works, and several new monograph series.
The critical field of cultural studies begins with the question: What do we mean by “culture” and “popular/mass culture.”1 Prior to Emile Durkheim, “society” referred to the economic and political elite, to “high society.” Durkheim transformed this term into our more modern usage of groups with common ideologies, technologies, etc. In a similar way, “culture” was redefined in the twentieth century. As the century dawned, “culture” referred to high art activities – say, opera, museums, serious plays and literature. Now, we understand culture to be ubiquitous, those elements of language, material, art, custom and values that are produced by, consumed by and defining of a given society (as per Butsch 1990 or Surdam 2015).
Culture is, indeed, difficult to define, largely because it is so encompassing. Kroeber and Kluckholm (1952, p. 104) describe it as a total system of negotiated interexchange – including language, religion, education, art, and more. Culture is material and systemic, but it is also ephemeral and ideological. It includes, as notes Schein (1984, 1990) broad values, norms, and assumptions alongside observable actions, legal and social bodies, and material objects. Tyler (1974), one of the originators of the concept, describes “culture” as a “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by Man [sic] as a member of society.” (1974, p. xx). Culture, by the late twentieth century, was understood as everything produced by humans, including scholarship of culture, which, as Culture’s product itself, adds to culture's complexity, ambiguity, and variation.
The definition of both “society” and “culture” did not emerge overnight, nor by happenstance. Further, the transition (fueled by a growing middle and university class, post World War II) brought debates over whether there was merit (or even sense) in the scholarly analysis of “low” or “popular” forms of culture – items (chiefly entertainment, media, and consumables) notable for their popular appeal, but deemed “lower” or less worthy of serious analyses or enjoyment by educated classes.
For example, in the 1930s, F. R. Leavis argued (persuasively at the time) that education should consist of cultivating “proper” leisure and exposure to the mainstays of western literature, art, or music. The properly educated person avoided crass “mass” culture (1930). Richard Hoggart's Uses of Literacy (1957) offered an alternative perspective. Hoggart analyzed how, where, why and what “working class” Britons read; he challenged much of the idea and content of “high” culture, celebrating instead working‐class values, even as he also challenged a singular, homogenous “mass culture.” Raymond Williams's Culture and Society took the argument further, arguing that differences between “high” and “low” culture are social norms designed to perpetuate and protect class divisions and distinction (Williams 1958; also of interest 1996, pp. 168–177). Understanding “low” or mass culture, they argued, was critically important, and popular or “pulp” culture was as worthy of rigorous scholarly attention as “mass” culture, and in many ways more revealing.
Hoggart founded the CCCS in the early 1960s to study, rigorously and seriously, mass culture as means of understanding present British society; the CCCS was led through the 1960s and 1970s by Stuart Hall (for an overview of Hall's tenure and perspective(s) on his influence, see Radway 2016, 2, pp. 312–321). In these years, general Marxist assumptions were dominant, as the CCCS tended to assume elite social classes (normally, but not exclusively, the wealthy) maintained their social privilege by the exploitation of the labor and productivity of lower classes and used popular media to either create or to perpetuate these systems (note the array of essays and influences in Munns and Rajan 1995). Embedded within popular culture were the structures, and sometimes the mechanisms, of class distinction and social inequity. The CCCS was exploring how these social divisions were reflected in ideas of “culture” and how “culture” worked to create and perpetuate these distinctions.
The work of neo‐Marxist philosophers Antonio Gramsci (particularly as represented in the collections Gramsci 1971, 1978) and Louis Althusser (most frequently engaging Althusser 1969 and Althusser and Balibar 1968) were particularly important. Gramsci argued for what he called cultural “hegemony” where subdominant social groups (the “subaltern”) participate willingly in the construction of systems that keep them oppressed (perpetuating, for example, systems of racism, gender control, religious persecution, etc.). Althusser argued that social structures called “institutions” (religion, family, the military, education) are constructed to perpetuate the social hierarchy on the whole. This of necessity means that they will perpetuate forms of social domination, and this domination was created, maintained, and mediated via the vehicle of “culture,” particularly mass culture (note, also, Adorno 1991, which assumes this, throughout).
In the 1980s the Marxist focus of cultural studies (as practiced at the CCCS) became more tenuous. There were three general reasons for this. First, politically, the United States and Britain, led by conservative neoliberals Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, were experiencing rapid expansion in financial markets with a rapidly growing difference in wealth, and, in both nations, there was less interest in traditional Marxist ideology. The “middle class” was going away, and wealth has a vested interest in perpetuating economic and political structures. There was also a rise in nationalism. Fewer academics were interested in exploring Marxist questions (or, perhaps more cynically: fewer academic programs, grantors and book publishers were interested in their faculty pursuing Marxist questions); those who were met frequent pushback. A second, more intellectual reason is the sudden growth of a global perspective facilitated by new technologies that, with the rising suspicion of simple explanation inherent in postmodernity, revealed that the equation of state‐vs.‐worker or bourgeoisie‐vs.‐proletariat were too simple. “Bourgeoisie” with respect to whom? Subaltern where? Simple Marxist systems did not work as readily in the emerging complexity of both perspective and structure that globalism created.2
Cultural studies has shifted intellectual focus from professional scholars to public intellectuals and from exclusive attention to elite “culture” toward functions of mass culture. It looks at widely popular expressions of culture (including, indeed often seeking out, the “vulgar”). These are then interrogated for how they construct/reflect (often at once) popular assumptions that empower/disempower (often at the same time) particular groups and how they perpetuate/refute (again, often at once) particular ideologies. In the case of cultural studies and the Bible: what, precisely, are we doing when we study “the Bible and cultural studies?” Are we studying the Bible, using the insights of cultural studies or mass use, or are we studying mass culture via analysis of how the Bible floats through its various strata? Certainly, the latter is possible. Few books have been more “popular” (in the sense of widely known) in western culture. The Bible is also used as an instrument of control and restriction (say, opposition of some clergy to LGBTQ issues) and as a basis for arguments of liberation (as by Martin Luther King, Jr.). It is used in/as a variety of forms of art. It is dominator and dominated at once. For many (using a division articulated by Durkheim who argued that “religion” is exactly and always opposite the “profane” or ordinarily secular) the Bible cannot be “mass culture,” but it is little else. The use of the Bible is always‐already a form of biblical interpretation. Its use reveals what someone wants or imagines the Bible to say and to be. In other words, observing the Bible in pop culture is the observation of significant and substantial political expression.
When cultural studies immigrated to the United States from the United Kingdom, it rapidly began to lose its historic connection to Marxism and theory even as it widely (and wildly) expanded its review of mass culture. Cultural studies is not a method, per se. In the diffuse context of America, it is also not really a common set of questions and assumptions. Instead, it tends to become a generic orientation (to revelation of systems of interpretation and structures that construct social organizations) turned to mass culture items. Cultural studies in biblical scholarship tends even further from political and theoretical analysis in recent literature, focused on questions of how/why biblical text, in its “use” in pop culture is a form of interpretation.
North American scholarship has tended to embrace the arguments from cultural studies regarding the dissolution of “high” vs. “popular,” formal vs. mass production of cultural artifacts and general art and literature. Cultural studies after the fashion of Hoggart, Hall, and others entered critical biblical scholarship in the 1990s. Ironically, however, biblical cultural studies very often moves on to critique the limits of the pop interpretation, implicitly re‐inscribing a hierarchy of “professional” vs. “mass” interpreter, of “right” vs. “wrong” readings (where more often than not professional interests and “right” readings perpetuate the systems that privilege the professional biblical scholar making the argument). In other words, the lack of attention to methodological history often ends up with the biblical‐cultural‐studies essay reinscribing systems of domination, privilege, hegemony, hierarchy, and ideological oppression that the discipline of cultural studies was initially designed to at least expose (if not correct).
The majority of the US contribution to cultural studies is interwoven with postmodern criticism and philosophy. The late twentieth century saw a transition away from modernity toward “postmodernity.” In simplest terms, “postmodern” as an ideology can be summed up in a deliberate turn from high confidence in the values and ideals of modernity. One philosopher, J. E. Lyotard, defined postmodernism as a “suspicion of all metanarratives.” (Lyotard 1984). By “metanarratives,” Lyotard meant the large stories we construct, as a society, to explain and understand reality.
Perhaps. Yet a clear and substantive description of what postmodernity is (apart from an articulation of what it isn't) has remained problematic. Most everyone concedes a definition of “modernity,” and most also acknowledge that by “post,” we mean we are in an era where the assumptions and assertions of modernism are under interrogation and reassessment. Yet there are real challenges to be made against assertions that postmodernity is a radical break. Perhaps a healthy suspicion of metanarrative is, itself, the apex of modernist thought; perhaps, far from being replaced, modernity is simply reaching its fullest expression.
In 1984, Frederick Jameson published an article, “Postmodernity: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which he later expanded and used as the central chapter of a book of the same title (Jameson 1984, pp. 59–92; 1991). Jameson accepts the view of thinkers such as Lyotard that the present moment does, indeed, seem to reject the absolutes of modernity. He also concedes arguments about the destabilization of confidence in large, systemic metanarrative. For Jameson, however, Lyotard's insistence upon rejection of all metanarrative doesn't destabilize confidence at all. We have not, really, rejected metanarrative. Indeed, much the opposite seems to be the case; we have radically proliferated metanarratives and often become polemic in our defense of them (certainly this describes twenty‐first century US social media). Late capitalism rejects exclusive metanarratives, but not metanarrative, per se. Multiple, even contradictory, metanarratives may coexist. Ideology does not cease in postmodernity; it becomes even more central and volatile. We chose ideology (or identity) from a marketplace of sorts. Epistemology and economics merge. For Jameson, these changes are the essential characteristics of “late capitalism.” The continuity with modernity results from capitalism's integral relationship to the products of modernism. The “post” results in the natural breakdown of confidence and continuity resulting from the types of changes that global capitalism produces. Jameson sees the culture of late capitalism as one that foregrounds superficiality. His book, after laying out his initial premises, explores postmodernity/late capitalism in broader ideology, video, architecture, literature, “utopian” expectations, critical theory (epistemology), economics, and film. Through the examination of popular and mass culture, Jameson argues for:
[T]he following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship with public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone – what I will call “intensities” – which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system.
(Jameson 1991, p. 6)
Postmodernity is, indeed, a move away from metanarrative, but the move is an intentional separation from previous systems of mooring. The postmodern is defined by intentional superficiality, and this superficiality, Jameson argues, is a direct result of “late capitalism.” Capitalism's ultimate expansion has, as we have seen, destabilized expectations of “truth.” It has also celebrated systems of competition which results in ethical strain and in a particular type of rootlessness where emphasis lies on result more than history or process. It has also, finally, resulted in expectations of consumption and, most critically, in choice. For Jameson, late capitalism and postmodernity are the rootlessness arising from dissolving confidence in metanarrative at the exact opportunity that consumption is most prized and most available. “Depth” is the antithesis of the postmodern.
Biblical scholarship that engages popular culture has expanded exponentially in the first decades of the twenty‐first century. Much of the early, critical work positioned itself as inheritor of classic, CCCS scholarship; much of the contemporary work sees itself as the natural outgrowth of postmodernity and late capitalism having their influences upon the field. Stephen D. Moore and Yvonne Sherwood have argued the present turn toward cultural studies by biblicists is the natural end of postmodern literary criticism in general and biblical studies, in particular; they also assert that, as a development, it is the future of biblical scholarship (Moore and Sherwood 2011).
At minimum, a cursory review of the shifting nature of biblical criticism reveals that some sort of encounter between cultural studies and modern, academic biblical scholarship would seem inevitable.3 Indeed, “reception critical” methodologies may be the capstone of modern, secular biblical criticism. Biblical scholarship that attends to or draws comparison with popular, mass culture is not the antithesis of “scholarly,” or “scientific” higher criticism; it is its perfection.
Late Renaissance/early Enlightenment scholars such as Hugo de Groot and Erasmus famously began to read the Bible according to the norms and standards of any other book from antiquity. The Bible was not read, primarily, as a book opened only via divine or supernatural guidance, read solely within the protected confines of dogma and community. Instead, it was subject to “normal” critical techniques of historical analysis and grammatical review. This seed germinated in the nineteenth century via “higher criticism” – where scholars intentionally set aside allegiances to faith and read the Bible as a historical text, asking sometimes rude questions about the Bible's historical reliability, textual integrity or even claims to authorship and authority. By early twentieth century, these secular critiques were assumed: the Bible was a book from history, written by other humans within history, and best read according to the norms of reading, more generally. Scholars sought the “meaning” of the Bible not in spiritual revelation or disclosure, but by painstaking reconstruction of content and what scholars posited that the original authors most likely intended the text to mean. Nearly from its beginning, then, critical biblical studies has focused, at least in part, on the interpreter, the history of text and scholarship, and the reception of biblical text. Reception criticism is modern, secular biblical studies. By mid‐to‐late twentieth century, schooled against high modernism's intellectual overconfidence in its own, purely rational dispassion, scholars were increasingly aware of the role of the interpreter's bias in any reading – including in the reconstruction of the historical context(s) and “meaning” of the Bible. No longer confident a text can “mean” what an author intended, scholars looked more and more into analysis of how culture and bias shaped Bible readers (or how the Bible was used to construct cultures or defend biases). Cultural studies informed biblical criticism and continues this late‐capitalist critique of Bible and its influence(s).
For example, Roland Boer's Knockin' on Heaven's Door (1999; a book in many ways prefaced by Boer 1997) was an early, full‐length monograph devoted to the study of the Bible in/and mass culture. Boer notes that a handful of volumes preceded his own work, largely edited volumes of collected essays that did not engage the broader history of cultural studies. Boer is a Marxist, arguing societies are divided, hierarchically, into categories of production and consumption where higher, more altern (to use Althusser's term) groups enjoy privilege and benefit from the labor and production of subaltern groups. The subaltern communities are often exploited, though, as Gramsci has observed, and often also are participating themselves, willingly, in the system(s) of exploitation.
Boer outlines the general history of cultural studies as represented by the classic CCCS literature. He notes that the academic field of religion, particularly theology and biblical studies, historically is mother to numerous other academic subfields, and these fields generated the field of cultural studies. Cultural studies was coming home. For Boer, biblical scholarship is (and always is) cultural studies. Boer seeks to undermine the “censor” of broader culture – the cultural norms (often driven by implicit metanarratives) that determine what is “high” and “low” culture, what is “vulgar” and what is “refined,” what is “correct” and “incorrect” in interpretation, what is “sacred” and what is “profane,” – as he reads the Bible alongside popular fiction, rock‐and‐roll music (including heavy metal), pornography, and the fast‐food industry.
Another significant scholar of this early work is Stephen D. Moore. Moore began his work exploring postmodern modes of reading, and as his work developed during his years on the faculty of the University of Sheffield, his interest shifted from analysis of language and theory of interpretation to exploration of popular modes of biblical appropriation and interpretation, with specific interest in cultural constructions of gender and power/hierarchy. Alongside editing two significant early collections of general scholarship on Bible and popular culture (Exum and Moore 1998b; Moore 1998b), Moore explored biblical depictions of the form/image of God and their popular appropriations in his (1996) God's Gym. His interest was how these images inscribe gender identity for God and how this inscribed gender identity appropriated by popular culture both created and perpetuated expectations of both divine and masculine power. Moore followed this with his 2001God's Beauty Parlor.4 Many of the same themes (gender, power, cultural constructions of hierarchy) persist in this work, as well. Moore's focus moves toward Jesus and toward explicit analysis of gender, sexuality, and sexual preference with a particular focus on what culture deems as “queer” sexual identity. Examining “queerness” reveals cultural modes of constructing “normal” identity and expression that, in turn, reveals systems of cultural domination. Moore's work is characterized by a relentless interest in and precision toward theory.
It's in the Mix: Cultural Studies as Intertextuality
In American biblical criticism on popular culture and cultural studies, it would be difficult to underestimate the influence of Fernando Segovia. Writing in 1995, he defined and defended cultural studies of the Bible, grounding it within traditionally “postmodern” and literary approaches to biblical criticism. For Segovia, cultural studies is an opportunity for the critic to examine her own context‐driven reading assumptions and investment(s).
It is the role assigned to the reader that, without doubt, most sharply differentiates cultural studies from other competing paradigms in contemporary biblical criticism. For cultural studies the reader does not and cannot remain … in the background, even if so wished and attempted, but is actively and inevitably involved in the production and meaning of “texts” and history.5
Segovia argued that cultural studies readings of the Bible expose the way systems and ideologies worked to create culturally altern groups – specifically via colonial engagement and race and ethnicity. Following the work of the CCCS, biblical scholarship has maintained a principal focus on contemporary popular culture (vs. examination of ancient mass culture, as one might anticipate among biblicists. Exum and Moore 1998a, p. 39; Moore 1998a, pp. 2–3). In part, I would argue that this is because of the way Segovia's seminal definition justifies cultural criticism by embedding it in the experience of the (contemporary) Bible reader, but also because his rationale, within the field of biblical studies, was itself an implicit rejection of traditional historical‐grammatical exegetical work (which often asserts that the reader/interpreter is merely a conduit, neutrally discerning “meaning” after scholarly reconstruction of both text and context).
Segovia was reflecting a long conversation in the humanities surrounding the growing complexity of thought regarding “meaning” in texts and language. Under modernism, structuralist approaches to language (and critical theory) sought out the inherent “structures” in language, literature, indeed even in human thought itself. Human communication (and culture) produced a series of signs and signifiers. The task of the interpreter was to deduce the Signified. This worked on macro level (to interpret a document, story, narrative, etc.) and on the level of individual word (or, indeed, any specific Sign). The process of encoding and decoding Signs and Signifiers revealed a universalism, a commonality in human cognition.
Reflecting, however, notions of the postmodern (such as Lyotard), poststructuralism emerged in continental philosophy and critical theory in the late twentieth century. Essentially, these approaches denied any sense of universality in cognition, meaning or communication, challenging systems that simplified signifier–sign relationships. “Meaning” was a process, a construction, that varied from encounter to encounter. What a Sign (or a text) might “mean” varied based upon the interpreter, who brought her own sets of skills, insights, information, ignorance, and agendas to the process of interpretation. Meaning was constructed and constantly varied.
The Russian linguist and critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin argued that language and meaning were dialogic. Bakhtin noted that words most commonly get their meaning from their use in context (much more than from their codification in “standard” lists or lectionaries. Indeed, good lectionaries collect usages and determine word definitions from those contexts). Bakhtin (see esp. Bakhtin 1994) argued that a sentence is a “conversation” between its words, larger (external) grammar systems, histories of interpretation, scholarship and more – these latter mitigated through the experience of the reader. In an act of interpretation, there are three “voices” in dialog – text, author, and reader – but each node of this conversation is, itself, enmeshed in a series of contexts and conversations.
Bakhtin was a key influence on Roland Barthes. Barthes famously wrote his pivotal essay “death of the author” (“le mort de l'auteur”) in 1967 (note as well Logic 2013 for helpful overview). This essay was originally published as a pamphlet in a “journal” that was really a series of items – of signifiers – collected in a box. Ironically, in its own context, Barthes's essay was the most conventional, at least in form. Barthes argued that authors (he preferred the term “scriptor”) vanish after writing. Meaning was a construction of the reader who brought their own experiences, insights, and ideas – including the influence of all other things, all other Signs and Signifiers, they knew and had “read.”
Julia Kristeva was a student of Barthes, attending his Paris seminar on Bakhtin. In her own work on Bakhtin (Kristeva 1969) she argued for interpretation as a form of “intertextuality.” A reader brings with her all the other “texts” she has encountered in her construction of reading. Signs (in our case, “texts” or items in culture) are actually vast networks of other signs (for us, other texts or items of culture) linked by the experience and engagement of the reader. Readers create meaning, but do so via the dialog of all semiotic exchange. For many biblical scholars “intertextuality” is reduced to an analysis of the ways in which one biblical text cites or quotes another text. An obvious moment would be the use of Hebrew Bible in the writings of Paul, or the use of written sources, such as Q, by the gospel authors. More subtle would be the appearance of Bible in subsequent western art, literature, film and mass culture. Such can be (indeed often is) little more than an analysis of where and how the Bible is cited (often with critique as to whether Bible is being used “correctly”). It may also, however, influenced by Kristeva and the conversation among poststructuralists before her, be an example of Segovia's challenge – where modern Bible readers are acknowledging that the “meaning” of a biblical book is constructed in the viewer via the interanimation of encounter – that the “signifier” and “signified” are dialogic. Many critics don't realize it, but they are doing an intertextual reading – pointing out how culture does or doesn't use the Bible, but quietly evaluating the same, generally based on the way they as interpreters have been trained to read, in order to produce readings of both Bible and culture that reflect their own roles as interpreters.
The changes to cultural studies among biblical scholars, which were anticipated by Exum and Moore, have been revealed to be the combination of Segovia's interest in the location of the reader (a reader herself embedded in, and influenced by, mass culture) wedded to work also drawing from Kristeva's notion of “intertextuality.”6 Moving beyond the individual and her role as reader (and the attendant emphasis upon contemporary culture), a second line of scholarship has focused on reception history or “biblical afterlives,” looking at systems of interpretation and ideological engagement with the Bible.
Kristevan “intertextuality” as a mode of scholarship on Bible and/in mass culture explores the inter‐animation of “texts.” Often highly disparate works – separated from one another by varied genre, chronology, language, or purpose – reflect or reveal a mutual interest in theme, ideology, and even structure. This may be because of intentional citation or allusion, but it is often via the analysis and close reading of a reader who brings her own interests and creates her own resonances and connections. Intertextuality is intentional “eisegesis” via comparative reading (though, most intertextual critics would argue all exegesis is, in the end, eisegetical). As intertextuality has entered cultural studies the meaning of “text” has been expanded to include recorded music, film, still image, web text, and more. Analogous to the knowledge potentially gained by comparative anatomy, the examination of moments of Intertextuality can reveal “this is that” analogies and parallels exposing implicit themes, ideas, or motives in both works; it can also clarify how more transparent structures “work” to create meaning. Intertextual approaches, rooted in scholarship of subjectivity, frequently took gender and feminist interests as a critical lens for examination of Bible in/and mass culture. Feminism has had a particular interest in the way images in general and film in particular construct and reflect popular ideas of the feminine ideal and gendered behavior, particularly asking (sometimes pointed) questions about the location of the viewer's “gaze.” Images of women both create and perpetuate cultural norms about feminine beauty, for example. Yet, these images, as images, also draw the viewer/consumer into participation in this construction. As we watch or gaze, we become collaborators with the perpetuation of these larger cultural norms.
Yvonne Sherwood's (2001) analysis of the “afterlives” of the biblical character Jonah – how Jonah's myth and image were used in later Judeo‐Christian art to create or reinforce ideology of later generations – is an example and early landmark in the formal development of “reception criticism” (on “reception history” note, to begin, England and Lyons 2015). Some key studies consider popular or mass cultural items from the past (See, for examples, Seesengood and Koosed 2013; Koosed 2011; Clanton 2006; Conway 2017). Reception criticism has become an increasingly broad approach to biblical criticism, generating major reference and research works such as The Blackwell Bible Commentary7 or the impressively ambitious Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception published by Walter de Gruyter and the SBL Press series The Bible and Its Reception.8
Work on the Bible in popular culture has expanded dramatically. The annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature now has several sections dedicated to popular culture, cultural studies, and the Bible in various forms of modern media. As I will discuss, several new monograph series with a focus on various aspects of Bible and popular culture/cultural studies have emerged. As this work has expanded, methodological structure has become even more diffuse, though still tending to orbit around issues of discovery of “meaning” and interpretation(s) of/in biblical text, the role of Bible in popular culture for the construction of identity (particularly gender), and center largely on visual images, film (including television), and music. This latter focus has foregrounded, for some, questions about the borders between work that is categorized as “high” and “low/mass” culture and the difference and similarity between “professional” and “popular/mass” interpretation.
On survey of some contemporary work in Bible and popular culture we find elements of “popular culture” examined by biblical scholars vary widely, but cluster (when they do) around (contemporary) mass entertainment. For example, Sawyer's The Blackwell Companion to Bible and Culture demonstrates the breadth of the influence of the Bible in various forms of popular culture such as film, literature, music, and the visual arts, but also theater, architecture, and the Victorian circus (Sawyer 2006). Timothy K. Beal (2012) has written on the Bible as a cultural and mass publishing phenomenon, and has also examined the Bible and its role in American folk religion and tourism (2005). These themes echo work on the current state of popular “biblical literacy” (Edwards 2015; note, as well, Elliott and Boer 2012) and in critique of the American Bible tourism destination without equal: the Museum of the Bible (Baden and Moss 2017). Scholars have examined the role of the Bible in popular political rhetoric in America (Berlinerblau 2008) and in England (Crossley 2014, 2018). The Bible's role in selling more than just political ideology – indeed, its place within the crass, very mass, world of modern advertising – has also received notice (Edwards 2012). Much work has been devoted to the Bible in various mass entertainment media, from comic books (Clanton 2012) to pop music (Gilmour 2005, 2004, 2009; Clanton 2009; Leneman 2007) but especially to film.9
Despite long‐running interest at Society of Biblical Literature meetings and conferences, little of this scholarship, to date, has trickled down into the society's premier journal: the Journal of Biblical Literature. A number of essays, however, have appeared in the society's monograph series Semeia Studies. Some significant journals that have been leaders in reception criticism and popular culture are Biblical Interpretation and Bible and Critical Theory. Surprisingly, much of the work on the Bible and popular culture appears in various monograph series. Indeed, these are, at the time of this writing, not only prominent but proliferating. Some series titles include Biblical Intersections (Gorgias), The Bible and Its Reception (Society of Biblical Literature), The Bible and the Moving Image (Walter de Grutyer), Biblical Reception and The Bible in the Age of Capital (Rowman & Littlefield) and The Bible in the Modern World (Sheffield Phoenix). In the late 1990s, major publishers included Routledge, T & T Clark, Continuum, and Sheffield Academic Press.
Assembling the Pieces: Reception, Deleuzian Machines, Affect
The first waves of CCCS and Marxist‐influenced Bible and cultural studies criticism looked at why the Bible was used in/as culture, at what was produced, arguing that the goal was creation and regulation of group status and systems of (hegemony) and control. Via attention to intertextuality, cultural studies has unveiled with increasing depth and acumen where and when Bible appears, noting how the juxtaposition is, itself, a form of interpretation and meaning making. An emerging body of work, focused upon affect and the creation of cultural meaning‐making “machines” has taken on the question of how these intertextual moments produce meaning.
“Affect” in cultural or literary criticism may, superficially, be taken to mean the emotional significance and impact of a given work. It is rooted, however, in psychology, particularly the work of Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins (Tomkins 1962–1992) identified a series of precognitive reactions, functioning as memes or ciphers for engaged thought. Tompkins would eventually collect his thinking into nine affects: distress‐anguish, interest‐excitement, enjoyment‐joy, surprise‐startle, anger‐rage, fear‐terror, shame‐humiliation, disgust, and dissmell (avoidance). These reactions are innate and from birth. They are not, in themselves, emotions or feelings; “feeling” is our term for our awareness of them. Awareness of affect (feeling) plus memory produces emotion. Affect is inherent in an object, as well. It is an involuntary response. Something has affected us, producing a cascading avalanche of affect‐memes, feelings, memories, emotions and finally thoughts (and actions).
Tomkins's work has influenced critical theory and the humanities via two general streams (see, in general Gregg and Seigworth 2009; Kotrosits 2016 or Koosed and Moore 2014b). The first, crystalized in the work of Eve Sedgwick, focuses on the psycho‐biological aspects of affect (esp. Sedgewick 2003). Her work, and those influenced by it, is particularly interested in the way we construct a sense of identity and self. Literary and cultural studies influenced by her (particularly biblical scholarship that engages pop culture) examine the way meaning is broader than “reasoned” or “rational” aware engagement – that bodies, traumas, memories, and emotions are both influencing us as readers and embedded in books and culture themselves.
A second is work drawing from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1980; seen by some as the natural extension of “postmodern” biblical criticism, e.g. Moore 2023). Deleuze concentrates on the moment of encounter and exchange between object and its perception – the potential in the moment of juxtaposition and exchange, the transfer of the affect. Appropriately, Deleuze has been quite influential on an array of work engaging the “posthuman” – scholarship that looks at how items in culture, cultural systems, and other “nonhuman” things (including, most obviously, the natural world and the animal) possess a form of agency and autonomy. Culture is produced by humans, yet it also, itself, produces humans – both making them, as an organism, “human” (as opposed to just another ape) and scripting to/for a culture what it recognizes and values as humane.
Three essay collections have been crucial to the introduction of affect criticism into biblical studies. Moore and Bray have edited a collection of essays by leading scholars in affect, encouraging each to think specifically about how their work intersects with religious studies (Bray and Moore 2020). Emerging from this theory work are two specific collections on affect in biblical studies – one edited by Jennifer Koosed and Stephen Moore (Koosed and Moore 2014a), the other edited by Fiona Black and Jennifer Koosed (Black and Koosed 2019; note also Kotrosits 2015).
Scholarship in posthuman studies has entered biblical scholarship initially via work on animals and animality (note, for example, Schaefer 2015
