Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Pam over at Pandagon righteously laments the fact that, according to Gallup, 1/3 of Americans believe that the “Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word.” Now, I guess secular liberals like me or supposed to think that this is some awful sign that 1/3 of Americans don’t have brains, or just refuse to use them on Sunday. But, I don’t find this all that distressing. First. 1/3 of a polled audience can believe all sorts of stuff us liberal secularists find totally wacko, like approving of Bush’s job in office. Secondly, in a country with such astounding religious illiteracy, it’s hard to say what the import of believing that the Bible is the inerrant, literal word of God is, when few actually know what it says.

Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount

AND

Approximately 75 percent of adults…mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” More than 10 percent think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc. Only half can name even one of the four Gospels, and — a finding that will surprise many — evangelical Christians are only slightly more knowledgeable than their non-evangelical counterparts.[emphasis added]

Many liberals are of the mark when they characterize certain conservative social and moral views as just taken straight from the Bible, and thus unworthy of our consideration. Instead, at least according to this data, that when one says they believe the Bible to be the inerrant word of God, it is more a way of signaling your belief in some sort of traditional, conservative, unchanging, “Christian” moral structure by which you live your life, rather than ascribing to any specific content of the Bible. The Bible is more of a symbol of your commitment to this traditional, unchanging moral vision than anything else. Not that many people are taking a Kierkegaardian “Leap of Faith.”

This fact makes the liberal struggle against conservative morality all the more difficult. If it were just that conservatives believed the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, the Bible is the inerrant word of God ergo I don’t support ENDA, repealing DADT, gay marriage etc, the struggle wouldn’t be all that hard. People used to say the Bible sanctioned slavery and laws against miscegenation. Another finding of the poll was: “a strong relationship between education and belief in a literal Bible” Since more and more people are going to college etc, literal religious belief should be going down, thus certain conservative moral views should also be descendant. But that clearly isn’t happening.

Liberals need to sack up and admit that our conservative opponents don’t just get their ideas from the Bible, but instead from a long-lived traditional moral structure. Many parts of this traditional moral structure strike us liberals as being discriminatory, bigoted and inhumane, and we should fight this traditional moral structure and realize that it isn’t just us vs the “word of god” but us vs a long, established tradition. It is going to be a long fight.