Get Out the Word

John Fea, a respected historian at Messiah College, was commissioned by ABS officials to write The Bible Cause for the ABS’s 200th anniversary. Fea says that he only agreed to do this with assurances of “full academic freedom,” and his excellent book shows every sign that Fea was able to operate unfettered. For most of its history, the ABS distributed Bibles “without note or comment,” but Fea presents the organization as both an “American Bible Society” and an “American Bible Society.” It had both a religious and a national mission. Fea is clearly more comfortable with Bible distribution than the ways in which the ABS has sought to form an American Christian nation or to export that national culture around the globe.

The ABS was one of the largest and most successful of the great benevolent societies of the antebellum period, and its continued (though not unalloyed) prosperity through the present day makes it an ideal case study. Some readers with no direct connection to the ABS might ask why they should read the history of a single Christian organization. I would challenge the premise of the question: Legions of people in America and around the world have been touched by the ABS in ways they do not realize. Fea helped me see how deeply my own family’s Bible-owning and reading was shaped by ABS imprints. Moreover, focusing on one denomination or agency over a long period of time illuminates broader trends in American religion. The ABS shaped American religion and publishing; but external forces, from war to immigration, also influenced the society. Some readers may find the details of ABS policy and governance a bit overwhelming, but the massive significance of the ABS justifies what Fea has written.

The ABS’s founders included some of the most devout, if lesser-known, Founding Fathers, such as Elias Boudinot and John Jay. The creators of the ABS were Christians and “nationalists,” not in a jingoistic sense, but in their conviction that antebellum America needed a coherent Christian republican culture in order to thrive. The Bible was the key, not only to salvation, but also to cultivating a virtuous society and “national feeling.” As a republic, America depended upon a morally sound citizenry; to the ABS, most people became ethically responsible when God used the precepts of the Bible to change their hearts. The ABS hoped that these blessings would flow not only to literate whites but also to African Americans and Native Americans.

The ABS’s determination to spread the King James Bible—the paradigmatic Bible of the English-speaking world since the 1600s—without notes or commentary sprang from a deeply Protestant sensibility. One of the surprises that Fea delivers is how often the ABS clashed with Roman Catholics, not just implicitly or theologically, but in open conflict. As the tide of Catholic immigrants from Europe rose in the mid-19th century, putting unadorned Bibles in their hands became a way to save them (according to the ABS) from the clutches of Rome. Celebratory accounts in ABS publications told of Catholic immigrants reading the vernacular Bible for the first time and realizing that the Roman Catholic church had obscured the message of salvation through faith in Christ alone.

Catholic clergy saw what the Protestant Bible distributors were doing. Priests in America, as well as in Catholic-majority countries, instructed parishioners to refuse, or even to burn, the ABS’s King James Bibles. In one Mexican town, priests reportedly denounced the King James Version as “the book of the devil.” Although ABS officials played up such stories for publicity, successive popes in the 1840s cautioned Catholics against the Bible distributors. Pius IX warned against the practice of individual Bible study; only the “holy mother church,” he noted, had “received the commission from Christ . . . to decide upon the true sense and interpretation of the Sacred Writing.” Catholic officials also balked at the teaching of the King James Version in public schools, helping to bolster the creation of America’s parochial school system. Relations between Catholics and the ABS only began to thaw in the 1960s, due to ecumenical trends on both sides.

Times of war focused the ABS’s efforts on getting the Scriptures into the hands of American soldiers. Massive troop mobilizations during the Civil War and both the world wars precipitated ambitious Bible distribution efforts. Even the federal government got in on the act. During World War II, Congress provided funds for 1.2 million King James New Testaments, as well as hundreds of thousands of Scripture texts appropriate for Jewish or Catholic soldiers, to go out in the Army. The ABS, perhaps deemed too Protestant for this effort, only provided a template for these Army New Testaments, but they remained the exclusive supplier of Bibles to the Navy and Marines.

The most fascinating part of Fea’s account is the changing theological allegiance of the ABS over the past 75 years. At its inception, and for a century afterwards, the American Bible Society was basically an “evangelical benevolent society in an evangelical culture.” But when religious conflicts of the 1910s and ’20s split Protestants into fundamentalists (proto-evangelicals) and modernists, the ABS largely aligned with the modernist leaders of the mainline denominations. Given the prevalence of Eisenhower-esque American civil religion, and the continuing financial and cultural sway of the mainline churches, this alignment made sense: After World War II, the ABS’s dissemination of Scripture was grounded in the quest for a just and humane world order, championed more generically by the United Nations and the World Council of Churches.

The emblematic new Bible in the mid-20th century was the Revised Standard Version. This aspiring replacement for the King James Version reflected ABS translators’ commitment to “dynamic equivalence,” or capturing the sense of a passage in the original language, rather than trying to translate sentences word-for-word. Most notoriously to evangelical critics, the RSV declined to translate the Hebrew word for “young woman” as “virgin” in Isaiah chapter 7. (The King James Version had rendered it “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”) The ABS team was not persuaded by the idea that the passage was a prophecy about Jesus as the Messiah. For evangelicals, modernist monkeying with the text of the English Bible was anathema. Many evangelicals kept their distance from the Revised Standard Version, from successors like the Good News Translation, and from the ABS in general.

In spite of its modernist tendencies, Fea shows that, by the 1970s, the ABS began to rein in its most liberal elements in order to keep from utterly alienating evangelical constituents. This set the stage for a recent return by the ABS to its evangelical roots. In one sense, this shift was not surprising, given that the mission of the ABS—Bible distribution—always had evangelistic motivations that were out of joint with the liberal leadership of the mainline denominations. Many of those mainline leaders determined decades ago that seeking “conversions,” especially among non-Christians, was coercive and imperialistic. But I was surprised to find how overtly ABS leaders discussed the ramifications of the rise of evangelical conservatism in the 1980s and of the massive decline of the mainline denominations.

As the ABS observes its 200th birthday, it has become more clearly aligned with a broadly defined evangelicalism than it has been for a century. That adjustment has been both self-conscious and controversial among the ABS leadership. ABS leaders have also become concerned that the agency has, for too long, focused simply on shipping as many Bibles as it can. Touting the ABS’s own “billions and billions served,” as it were, is no longer sufficient: Especially in America, the Bible remains pervasively owned, but little read, except among a devout minority. With the advent of the Internet and smartphones, access to the Scriptures in physical or electronic form is no longer an issue for much of the world’s population. The problem is focusing a prospective reader’s attention (or what the ABS calls “engagement”) on the Word of God.

Christians have no doubt that the Bible is “living and active,” as the Book of Hebrews puts it. But millions of dust-covered Bibles on American bookshelves don’t do much to enliven souls or even to preserve an American national culture. Addressing that neglect of the Bible may be the greatest challenge the American Bible Society has ever faced.

Thomas S. Kidd, distinguished professor of history at Baylor, is the author, most recently, of George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father.