Memorializing God's Word
Of course, the (white, male) "founders" of the United States were Christians of various stripes, who often chose to publicize their own personal relationships with the Bible in ways that also marked the relationship between new nation and venerable religion. When George Washington was sworn in as the first President under the new U.S. Constitution in 1789 he swore his oath on his personal Bible, a tradition followed by every subsequent President (some of whom also chose to use Washington's Bible).
After his own term as U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson in his retirement took a razor and glue to a copy of the New Testament to produce his Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually from the Gospel in Greek, Latin, French, and English, a "philosophical" version of the life of Christ in four parallel columns (Greek, Latin, French, and English). While the text was private during and soon after Jefferson's life, it was acquired by the Smithsonian Museum, where it is housed today (and available to view online here). A curious relic of the Bible in an age of "Enlightenment," the Jefferson Bible remains for some a monument to the nation's biblical founding while for others it proves that, even for those Christian founders, the Bible was viewed as a human text to be dissected and critiqued. Peter Manseau, in his "biography" of the Jefferson Bible, calls it a "an unlikely spiritual and historical Rorschach test."
In fact, the memorialization of the Bible—its embedding in the public commons—has always been an act of religious, political, and cultural contestation, open to interpretation. Moses and Solomon are included in a marble frieze of "ancient and modern lawgivers" in the U.S. Supreme Court; is their presence meant to show the inherent links between U.S. and biblical law or does their inclusion among so many other figures minimize those links?
Is the Gutenberg Bible on permanent display, in a special climate controlled (yet still ornate) case, at the Library of Congress as a display of national piety or because the National Archive likes to display its most valuable treasures?
The monumental Bible is, it seems, in the eye of the beholder.
For decades, evangelical Christians have sought out the monumental traces of Christianity and the Bible in order to reinforce a particular idea of "biblical" patriotic America. In 2011, child-star-turned-professional Christian spokesperson Kirk Cameron made a stirring film about the quest for the authentic Christian past of the U.S., seeking those material traces in Europe and the U.S. (He apparently also used to sell package tours, although that link on his website is defunct). As the trailer for his film shows, Cameron views the U.S. as at once exceptional (because of its biblical Christian roots) and at risk (because it is obscuring those roots).
In her excellent recent book, Saving History, scholar Lauren R. Kerby wrote about her experience as a participant-observer on Christian "heritage" tours of Washington, D.C., and the ways that the tour-goers frame Christian history as both the bedrock of the founding of the U.S.—visible in its stones and monuments—but also under siege from the impious government officials who control D.C.: biblical Christians, Kerby discovers, can understand themselves as "founders, exiles, victims, and saviors" all at once.
Other newsworthy attempts to memorialize the Bible in public space make these dual claims at the Bible's foundational and threatened status in the U.S. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the Cold War took on particularly religious resonances ("Christian West" versus "Atheist East"), the social group The Fraternal Order of Eagles, cooperating with filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille (who had recently released The Ten Commandments) commissioned dozens of stone monuments of the Ten Commandments across the nation, in state capitols and courthouses. One of these statues became the subject of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case: in Van Orden v. Perry, the Court ruled that the monument did not violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The majority opinion, while citing many of the pathbreaking religious separation cases of the 1950s and 1960s, nonetheless noted that "the role played by the Ten Commandments in our Nation’s heritage are common throughout America"; they even cited the image of Moses holding tablets in the south frieze of the courtroom as well as the plethora of biblical images found throughout the capital that were, even then, becoming objects of Christian heritage tours.
Part of the concurrence in Van Orden v. Perry relied on the longstanding nature of the monument, which was erected in Austin in 1961. More recent attempts to install such monuments, however, have met new challenges.
In 2015, the state legislature of Arkansas passed "The Ten Commandments Monument Display Act," which authorized the erection of a monument of the biblical Ten Commandments while noting in the statute that "The placement of the monument under this section shall not be construed to mean that the State of Arkansas favors any particular religion or denomination over others." On June 27, 2017, the six-foot tall monument was unveiled on state capitol grounds; the next day a protestor destroyed the monument by ramming it with his automobile. Funds were raised to reinstall the monument in 2018, but at that time a lawsuit was filed by the ACLU and other interested parties (including the Satanic Temple); as of March 2023 it remains before a federal court.
Undoubtedly the most spectacular biblical memorial is not a public monument but a private museum that was opened in 2017 just a few blocks from the public museums of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The Museum of the Bible is both private but also ostentatiously public: it soars up several stories, like a red-brick ark, and has huge gold doors that reproduce pages from the Gutenberg Bible. Owned and operated by the evangelical Green family, the billionaire owners of the Hobby Lobby craft chain, the Museum of the Bible officially disavows any official religious mission. Nonetheless, as the careful work of scholars like Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon has shown, the entire project of the Museum is entangled in desires for a self-evident Christian Bible which is unwavering evangelical, American, capitalistic, and conservative. The Museum defiantly asserts the centrality of the Christian Bible as much by its massive presence as by its artifacts and exhibits.
The memorialization of the Christian Bible—in vellum, marble, inscriptions, tours, and lawsuits—captures perfectly the Bible's simultaneous centrality and vulnerability in the U.S.
