Help! A Dinosaur Ate My Bible!

The Bible and the Plot to Destroy American Democracy, Part 10

I saw a meme the other day that said, “Abuse is not a biblical reason for divorce.”

It was a good reminder for me about why I do this work - appeals to “biblical authority” are often used to abuse power and escape accountability, which bring us to the point in this series when American Christianity split over the issue of biblical authority.

First, read these quotes from some leaders within one branch of American Christianity:

Franklin Graham on James Talarico “…Satan has relentlessly schemed to undermine the authority of God’s Word by parsing half-truths…today we call that progressive Christianity.” (“Progressive Christianity Is A Relentless Scheme To Undermine The Authority Of God’s Word.” 7/27/26)

Bob Jones on segregation: “In recent years there has been a subtle, Satanic effort to undermine people’s faith in the Bible; and the devil has led the race along until men have put their own opinion above the Word of God.” (“Is Segregation Scriptural?” 1960.)

Richard Furman on slavery: “…the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.” (“Exposition of the Views of the Baptists in Relation to the Coloured People.” 1822.)

I have learned over the last few years that when the South says the Civil War was about “states rights,” I should believe them. They never believed they were subject to the authority of the Constitution.

At the time of the Revolution, despite their differences, the Northern colonies made an alliance with the Southern colonies to unite against England.

The original plan was to form something closer to the European Union, which would have given individual states much more autonomy, but that fell apart quickly and the Constitution was adopted, which bound the states more tightly together.

What I never understood until recently is that the South was never a democracy and did not become one upon ratifying the Constitution.

The Southern colonies were built on the same kind of aristocratic systems that had dominated the empires of Europe. They had elections, but suffrage was limited to wealthy, white men. There was no free speech or right to dissent.

Christianity in the South reflected and supported patriarchal and hierarchical social structures, just as the Church had done in Europe. The South was a quasi-feudalistic society, only slavery made it even worse.

The Evangelicals Who Resisted Slavery

Meanwhile, the ideas of liberalism and democracy continued to spread through the North, along with something else, evangelicalism.

The disestablishment of state churches allowed the revivals of the Second Great Awakening to sweep through many American cities. Like the early days of Christianity, it was women and marginalized men who were drawn to this new movement.

There was an emphasis on having a “personal relationship with Jesus,” which along with higher literacy rates and the proliferation of Bibles, empowered people to read the Bible and pray on their own.

As industrialization grew in the cities, and capitalism spread, so did social problems. Moral reform societies formed, which brought these evangelicals together to attack issues like prostitution, gambling, and dueling. (see The Benevolent Empire)

They increasingly opposed slavery, claiming it was inconsistent with Christian teaching.

However, the Southern branch of Christianity claimed that all Christian teaching was subject to the authority of the Bible, and the Bible permitted slavery.

And so, several Protestant denominations split in the 1840s. The presenting issue was slavery, but the theological concern was authority.

There was no authority on earth that could force the South to end its practice of slavery or become a true democracy, because the Bible did not compel them to do so.

Appeals to biblical authority are often used to abuse power and escape accountability.

The Civil War may have ended slavery, but once Reconstruction was abandoned, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws and slipped into a kind of protofascism and Southern Christianity continued to support it under the doctrine of biblical authority.

According to Answers in Genesis, “Biblical authority refers to God’s Word being the foundation and absolute authority for our thinking in every area.”

Meanwhile, in the North, many Christians, motivated by the Gospel and the teachings of Jesus, continued the work of social justice. Pressure was put on businesses to pay higher wages, improve working and living conditions, and invest in education; they called for laws to hold businesses accountable for the harms they caused employees and consumers.

They also pushed for things like child labor laws, voting rights, and prohibition. The prohibition movement was an effort to put an end to the physical violence that drunk men inflicted upon their wives and children.

(Consider for a moment that it was easier to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of alcohol, than to pass laws prohibiting men from beating their wives and children.)

This movement is often referred to the Social Gospel which helped usher in the Progressive Era.

While all of this political and social change was happening, other stories were playing out that would make appealing to authority of Scripture increasingly difficult.

Dinosaurs!

In the early 19th century, people started finding these enormous bones in the limestone cliffs around England as they dug quarries.

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party tells the story of how people were forced to reconcile these bones with the Bible and their understanding of the world. It wasn’t just the fossils, there were the layers of sediment, shells found on mountaintops, and then Darwin’s ideas on evolution

People didn’t just wake up one day and throw out the Bible. They struggled throughout the 19th century with how to hold all of this together. They deconstructed and reconstructed Christianity.

Then some biblical scholars in Germany discovered inconsistencies within the biblical texts themselves. There were also discoveries in the new disciplines of geology and archaeology that seemed to contradict some of the Bible’s claims.

In the year 1800 and before, most people took what the Bible said at face value, because they had no reason not to, and it largely didn’t matter, but by the end of the century, there was evidence coming from every direction that the Bible was more complex than people knew.

The modernists, who were often also associated with the Social Gospel movement, advocated for adapting Christianity to scientific discoveries, even if meant rejecting core doctrines, like the virgin birth. In a strict sense, this meant that Christianity and the Bible fell under the authority of evidence-based reality.

Fundamentalists believed that core doctrines were necessary to faith, therefore the Bible must be without error and the authority of Scripture must prevail over scientific discovery. Science fell under the authority of the Bible. While much of Southern Christianity fell into this camp, not all fundamentalists supported slavery or segregation.

This debate probably didn’t matter much to the average person until Tennessee passed a law outlawing the teaching of evolution in 1926. What followed was the “trial of the century” and a media circus dubbed the Scopes Monkey Trial.

The law was upheld, but the modernist view won as many of the mainline denominations adopted the modernist perspective and fundamentalism retreated.

Yet, we know that’s not the end of the story.

Next Week: The Post-War Liberal Consensus

The purpose of this series is to flesh out the story of how the Bible came to be an instrument of power so that Christians can be empowered to reject bibliolatry and authoritarianism and follow Jesus instead. See full bibliography here.

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