by Timothy Beal
In the aftermath of the Scopes trial, fundamentalism lost much of its former public respect. It began withdrawing from mainstream society and adopting a strongly separatist perspective, shunning the “worldliness” of modern liberal American culture. But it did not go dormant. Rather, it reinvented itself as a nondenominational grass-roots movement, built around newly formed Bible colleges and seminaries, radio broadcasts, Bible conferences, and networks of Bible-study groups, many of which operated as parachurch organizations, that is, independent Christian organizations that operate outside the structure and governance of a particular church or denomination. In the process of reinventing itself, moreover, the movement nurtured what historian Joel A. Carpenter describes as a deeply paradoxical sense of identity: on the one hand, they were outsiders, rejected by mainstream American society; on the other hand, they were the quintessential Americans, whose entitlement had been usurped by secular liberalism.
Needless to say, fundamentalism did not keep its light hidden under a bushel forever. By the late 1940s, it reemerged in the form of “neo-evangelicalism,” a media-savvy parachurch movement that saw American popular culture as its mission field. Still firmly rooted in the biblical fundamentalism that had always been its hallmark, neo-evangelicalism denounced separatism and recommitted itself to engage the mainstream with its mission “to restore Christian America” by bringing it back to the Bible.
Central to neo-evangelicalism was the Youth for Christ movement, which began as a series of Saturday-night youth rallies that attracted hundreds of thousands of young people in big cities across the United States. These rallies were led by young, energetic preachers like Billy Graham (the first full-time employee of Youth for Christ) and were modeled on the big shows popular in the emerging secular entertainment industry. Organizers produced slick ads and created media tie-ins with mainstream radio and television to sell their programs. Some of the evangelists went so far as to adopt the voices and styles of celebrities like Frank Sinatra. Others, like Graham, soon had found their own distinctive star power. Thus began a new era for fundamentalism, reinvented as an evangelistic movement that sought to bring its biblical-theological perspective to a new generation by meeting young people where they were. “Geared to the times, but anchored to the rock,” as the motto of Youth for Christ mixed-metaphorically puts it. Rather than rejecting mainstream popular culture altogether, they translated their message into its popular media forms. Same message, new medium. Thus was born the Christian entertainment industry.
By the early 1970s, neo-evangelical rallies were looking less like a Frank Sinatra show and more like an Aerosmith concert. In 1972 Campus Crusade for Christ, another parachurch organization much like Youth for Christ, hosted Explo ’72, a weeklong gathering of high school and college students in Dallas, Texas. The event culminated in what was later dubbed the Christian Woodstock, an eight-hour-long Christian rock concert in the Cotton Bowl that drew over one hundred thousand people. Controversial among more separatist-leaning fundamentalists, it is remembered above all for inaugurating rock music as a vehicle for evangelism.
At the same time, the big-rally approach to neo-evangelicalism was being supplemented by a new focus on creating local Bible-study clubs in high schools. Especially successful in this format was Young Life. Begun by a youth minister named Jim Rayburn in Gainesville, Texas, this evangelistic ministry treated neighborhood high schools as parishes, reaching out to kids in their own context rather than trying to bring them into the church. Central to Young Life were its weekly Young Life Club meetings, which integrated fun skits and games with more serious (if brief) prayer, discussion, and Bible reading. Kids who were ready to go more deeply into their faith became part of smaller core groups called Campaigners, who met in the morning or after school for more serious Bible study. Youth for Christ eventually adopted the Young Life model, calling its weekly fun meetings Campus Life Club, and supplementing them with more serious Bible-study meetings with student leaders.
Neo-evangelicalism reinvented fundamentalism by repackaging its fundamentals. It aimed to make its gospel popular—pop fundamentalism, if you will. It revised fundamentalism, but not its Bible. At the heart of this revival was the same iconic idea of the Bible as the literal Word of God that had been born in the Puritanic Biblicism of the early nineteenth century.
The Way of Salvation
This is where my own life in Bibles ties into the larger history of the rise of the Bible as a cultural icon. My dad grew up attending Youth for Christ rallies in Lewiston, Maine, in the early 1950s, and my mom, who was four years younger, became a Christian while attending lunchtime Youth for Christ Bible studies in her high school in Spokane, Washington. After college, in the early 1960s, she served as a full-time Young Life organizer and club leader for high schools in Portland, Oregon. When I was in grade school, she and Dad led weekly Young Life Campaigner groups in our living room. After moving to Anchorage, Alaska, which was Youth for Christ territory, they were closely involved supporters and sponsors of that organization. I was a committed member of my high school’s chapter of Campus Life, participating in club meetings, attending weekly Bible-study breakfast groups, and serving as a student staffer on Campus Life on Wheels long-distance bike tours. I also was a leader in our church’s youth group, and went on various evangelistic mission trips, including a boat trip to coastal villages in southeast Alaska along with a youth group from Wasilla High School. (For all I can remember, Sarah Palin, who graduated from high school the same year I did, might have been onboard.) All that to say, I was steeped in the neo-evangelical culture and its understanding of the Bible.
Like my peers, I believed that the Bible was God’s Word written down for me, answering all my questions about who God is and what God wants for my life, from the mundane to the ultimate. Or at least I knew that was what I needed to believe. But that was not what I found when I actually opened the Bible up and looked around inside. The most famous biblical characters, so often lifted up as models of faith, seemed just the opposite: Abraham, who, unable to trust in God’s promise, twice passes off his wife, Sarah, as his sister in order to save his own skin; Rebekah, who plays favorites among her two sons, helping the younger, Jacob, steal the birthright of the elder, Esau; King David, who repeatedly exploits those who love him, who takes whatever he wants, including women (married or not), who shows no remorse until he gets caught, and whose alienated son dies trying to kill him and take his throne; and Jael, Rahab, Ehud, and many other lesser-known biblical heroes and heroines who achieve greatness through trickery and betrayal. Often, “biblical values” struck me as foreign, as if they had come from a radically unfamiliar time and place. Which in fact they had. But that made me anxious. It worried me that I couldn’t get beyond the Bible’s strangeness to discover its purportedly timeless relevance.
Moreover, it didn’t seem like the Bible was always saying the same thing. One psalmist proclaims absolute confidence that all is right with the world and God is on his throne, while another cries out in despair, seeing nothing but chaos and divine absence (and that’s the kind Jesus quotes from the cross). One passage lays out a moral universe in which goodness is rewarded with blessing, while another asks why the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. Indeed, the very image of God seemed to change from one passage to another: warrior, mother, father, husband, rock, whirlwind, rarely omniscient, often uncertain, frightening as often as comforting, mysterious more than informative. Moreover, there appeared to be many inconsistencies: conflicting versions of key events in the Gospels, such as what happened at the empty tomb, for example, and different accounts of creation that were not easy to sync. I knew what Bible answers I was supposed to find. But actually opening and reading the Bible was undermining my belief in it.
I remember getting into a heated argument about the opening chapters of Genesis with one of my more secular-liberal friends while playing pool in his basement. He was pointing out a serious contradiction he’d noticed when reading Genesis for world
history class: in one, humankind is created last, and in the other, a single human is created first. “So which is it?” he asked. As I struggled in vain to answer, his smug grin grew. My blood began to boil and I almost threw the cue ball at him. At which point we both knew I’d been bested. I knew he was right, but I was not ready to acknowledge it consciously. Doing so would have threatened my whole belief in the Word—as I knew it.
I got my first Bible when I was five. It was my prize in Vacation Bible School for being the first to recite the names of all the biblical books in order. But the first Bible I really bonded with was one I got when I was in junior high. It was called The Way: The Living Bible Illustrated. First published in 1972, it was the result of an innovative collaboration between a new publisher, Tyndale House, and the editors of Campus Life magazine, a slick, popular publication of Youth for Christ.
In fact, The Way was the biblical flagship of the neo-evangelical Christian youth movement. Combining innovative form and content in a way that appealed specifically to the popular youth culture of the early 1970s, it was a breakout Bible. The floppy dark green cover of The Way looked more like a Doobie Brothers album than the Holy Bible: big groovy capital letters filled with photos of hip stringy-haired teens smiling and hanging out. Only the subtitle, in a much smaller, standard font, let on that this was “the Bible.” Inside were more images of young people, black and white, male and female, playing guitars, laughing and talking. Other pictures illustrated contemporary issues: a homeless man curled up on a sidewalk vent, a razor-wire fence, a garbage dump. At the beginning of every biblical book was a short introductory essay that spoke to concerns shared by many youth: poverty and homelessness, war and peace, love and marriage, making a living versus making a life.
Cover and introduction to the Psalms from The Way: The Living Bible Illustrated, published by Tyndale House in 1972. Combining a trendy, youth-oriented magazine style with the modern English paraphrase of The Living Bible, The Way was a neo-evangelical breakthrough in Bible publishing.
Its biblical text was that of The Living Bible, a hugely successful modern English paraphrase of the American Standard translation, done by Kenneth N. Taylor while he was working at Moody Bible Institute, a cornerstone school and publishing house of neo-evangelicalism in Chicago that gained prominence during fundamentalism’s separatist decades. During Taylor’s long commutes to and from work, he wrote what he called “thought for thought” paraphrases of the New Testament Epistles. When Moody and several other publishers declined to publish them as a book, Taylor and his wife, Margaret, created their own press, Tyndale House, named after the sixteenth-century English Bible translator William Tyndale, who was martyred for translating the Bible into a common tongue. The Taylors did not share Tyndale’s fate. Operating out of their dining room, they self-published Living Letters in 1962. A year later, the book won the enthusiastic endorsement of Billy Graham, who ordered more than half a million copies to offer to his television audiences. Taylor’s The Living Bible (1971), encompassing the entire Christian Bible, was an even greater success. It was the New York Times nonfiction bestseller in both 1972 and 1973. In 1983 Taylor presented the 28 millionth copy to President Ronald Reagan in commemoration of the Year of the Bible. As of 1996, The Living Bible had sold over 40 million copies.
I loved my The Way Bible. I took it to youth group meetings and read it in bed every night. By “read,” I mean I mostly looked at the pictures and read the introductory essays. These were the parts that appealed to me. They spoke to me in clear, engaging, contemporary terms. And they said the kinds of things I thought the Bible was supposed to be saying. Reading these extrabiblical supplements, I felt like I was reading the Bible.
Occasionally I would even dip into the biblical texts themselves, paraphrased in ways that made them much easier going than any of the English translations from Hebrew and Greek that I’d tried in the past. I realize now that they felt that way precisely because Taylor’s Living Bible not only down-converted the traditional American Standard translation to a junior high reading level, but also took pains to disambiguate biblical ambiguities and resolve biblical contradictions that are actually, literally present in the text.
So for a time, The Way saved me, or at least distracted me, from the growing doubts about my childhood faith in the Bible. That is, it saved my iconic idea of the Bible from the disillusion that came from literally reading it. Indeed, this was the true innovation of The Way: it offered a reading experience of the Bible that didn’t entail all the complexities and frustrations that came when I actually read the biblical text. It felt like what reading the Bible was supposed to feel like, even while it distracted me from the real ambiguities and uncertainties of the biblical text itself.
The Way sold an unprecedented 6.4 million copies. Although no one made a dime on it (the Campus Life editors took it on as a creative outreach project, and Tyndale donated all profits from sales to Christian missions), its huge success, along with that of The Living Bible, drew attention to the tremendous profit potential for publishers interested in reinventing the Bible in new, value-added forms. The publishers of The Way had discovered a market for updated, supplemented, and retranslated Bibles that soon became the cornerstone of the neo-evangelical Christian culture industry that is booming today.
So Long, Judas
In the long run, I didn’t turn out to be much of a biblical consumer. Although The Way sustained my iconic idea of the Bible for a few more years, the cracks in it eventually began to grow, and I found my journey with the Bible on a road less traveled. One crack I remember especially well was my discovery of another piece of 1970s pop Christianity, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. In fact, I owe this discovery to my parents. In 1973, a few weeks before we moved from Oregon to Alaska, their Young Life group gave them a copy of the double album as a going-away present. They warmly accepted it, of course. But later that evening, after the kids had shared memories, prayed together, hugged their teary goodbyes, and left, Mom confided to me that they must not have realized that the record’s representation of the Gospel story was considered blasphemous at some points. Not that my parents were the record-burning type. They always modeled a gracious, thoughtful open-mindedness to me. They had their opinions, but never made me feel like my soul was in jeopardy if I didn’t agree. Nor were they about to discard a heartfelt gift. So they slipped it in the back of their record case and soon forgot about it.
But I didn’t forget. A couple years later, when my folks got a new hi-fi stereo for the living room and I got the old one, I found the record and took it up to my room. Over the next several years, especially around Easter, I played it again and again. I was especially fascinated with the character of Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, as performed by Murray Head. I was blown away by his intense, tormented, half-screamed expressions of righteous indignation and passionate love. Such a deeply conflicted disciple, wanting to be free from Jesus, needing to be loved by him, and not knowing how to love him back. And he was a tragic figure, too, Jesus’s right-hand man who was literally set up by God to betray him.
Lying there on my red shag carpet in front of tan upholstered hi-fi speakers, I wore the record out. Sometimes I would sing along passionately in my best hard-rock voice. Other times I’d transcribe the words. Occasionally I’d even look up the biblical texts that inspired them. In the process, I learned that there were actually two different versions of what happened to Judas. In one, from the Gospel of Matthew, Judas ultimately regrets betraying Jesus, returns the blood money, and hangs himself. In the other, from the book of Acts (the second volume of the Gospel of Luke), he never repents, but buys a field with the reward money, trips on a rock, and disembowels himself. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber obviously went with Matthew’s version. And then went further, offering a fuller interpretation of the character of Judas. Their interpretation didn’t contradict the biblical text, but it allowed my imagination to find its way into the gaps in the story
—what was left unsaid, between the lines. It brought the story to life in ways that raised profound questions without trying to answer them. So, not only did Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar open my eyes to blatant contradictions within the Bible; it also opened my heart and mind to a different way of engaging it, not as the book of answers but as a place to explore, to play, to find new angles of interpretation and imagine things differently.
I’ll return to the story of my own rediscovery of the Bible later in this book. Suffice for now to say that Head’s hard-rock Judas was soon sharing time on my hi-fi with many other artists who found inspiration in biblical literature, from Bob Dylan to U2 to Ani DiFranco. As time went on, these and other artists conversed in my head with the biblical scholarship I was studying in college and graduate school. I found my understanding of biblical literature and interpretation getting quite a bit more complicated, but also, and more importantly, a lot deeper. As I persevered in my studies of biblical languages and literature, the cultural history of the Bible, and the history of biblical interpretation, I began to see that the very idea of the Bible with which I was struggling was not very old. It was by no means the only way that Christian Scriptures had been understood and interpreted throughout history. I was coming to see it as a cultural construction, “the Word as we know it,” with a fairly short history and a less than promising future.
Christian consumer culture and the Bible business have come a long way since The Way, as we’ll see. The Bible business has burgeoned into one of the biggest and fastest-growing fields of publishing, selling many thousands of different Bibles in every imaginable form for many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Within this brave new world of Christian consumerism, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between spreading the Word and selling it.
