The American Christian landscape is littered with “Bible churches.” It is full of churches that use the word “Bible” in their name, or that claim to be “Bible believing,” and affirm that they “preach the Bible,” and so on. What meaning can we discern behind this code? What can we know about the kinds of Christians who define themselves in this way? This episode considers these questions, cracking the code of the “Bible church” and what it tells us about the profile of those who attend such churches and the Christian identity they express.
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Hello, welcome to your Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
This is the series, the second in what is a new series called It's in the Code.
Basically trying to map the terrain of contemporary American Christianity by decoding some of the kinds of slogans and phrases and terms and images that contemporary Christians use.
Introduced the series in the last episode.
If you're joining me for the second episode and you've listened to that, welcome back.
If this is your first episode, welcome.
And if you'd like some orientation to what we're doing, take a listen to that first episode.
Before getting started, I want to thank the Capps Center at UCSB, who offers this podcast in partnership with us in collaboration, and we thank them for their support at the As always, I want to thank everybody who supports us in any number of ways, through Patreon and other forms of support, and just everybody who listens and keeps us going.
And for this series, I want to thank all of you who really responded and contacted me, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, with ideas and topics and themes for this series.
So I want to thank all of you and dive in here.
So I've been overwhelmed and really gratified by the response that folks have.
Please keep those coming.
I have heard, received great stories, anecdotes, images that people have sent, everything from, you know, church sermon outlines to images on church signs and on and on and on.
Please keep them coming.
I'm keeping track of those.
I'm trying to sort those.
It's helping me sort of come up with maybe a typology of topics and so forth.
So keep those coming.
I don't get a chance to respond to everybody, but I am looking at those.
And thank you so much for that.
And in relation to that, I also want to mention one more thing.
That is the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
As many of you will know, I am, among other things, a trauma resolution practitioner with the center.
There are other practitioners as well.
And as I've heard these stories and seen these anecdotes and seen these images, one of the things that has struck me is how many of the emails I see and the stories I hear also resonate with stories I hear from clients and individuals through the Center.
If, as we talk about these things, these are things that you find traumatic or problematic and you think that you might benefit from being able to talk through that with somebody and begin to explore how to overcome the legacy of some of these things, if they've impacted you in that way, just please know that the Center is another resource.
So, where do we start?
Well, in looking through this first week of this kind of wave of images and topics that people have sent me and phrases, I kind of want to start with a background issue in a lot of the things that I've heard from you.
I have seen photos of the slogan on a sign at a quote-unquote Bible church, you know, the sort of fill-in-the-blank name-of-town Bible church.
I've heard people write about, I grew up in a small Bible church and the pastor would say this or this or this or this.
And what occurred to me is before getting into the specifics of those slogans or those signs or the things that pastors say, I wanted to take a step back and consider a kind of preliminary issue that is in the background of those things that I'm receiving from folks.
And that is this.
What is a Bible church?
More specifically, what is the code that is carried and sort of transferred and communicated in a church with the word Bible in its name?
And you'll be familiar with these if you've driven around, you know, sort of the American sort of maybe especially in rural areas.
The American landscape is littered with these and you might see something like Redeemer Bible Church or New Life Bible Fellowship or again, fill in name of town, Bible Fellowship or Bible Church.
What does that mean?
Right?
It's clear from the feedback I'm getting, a lot of you are familiar with this concept of a Bible Church, Or maybe you go to a church's website and maybe Bible isn't in the name of the church, but you go to the website or you receive their literature in some way.
Maybe it's one of those things stuck under, you know, a windshield wiper in your car or left hanging on a doorknob at your house or handed out at the county fair or whatever it is.
But maybe you go and you check out a church's website, or you look at their literature, and they describe themselves as quote-unquote Bible-believing, or as preaching the Bible, or as a Bible church, even if that's not in their name.
What does this tell us?
What does that appeal to the language of the Bible tell us, and what can we decode In that language.
And that's what I want to start with.
And there are some pretty obvious points to start with, right?
It implies that belief in the Bible, or that there is the belief that the Bible is an authoritative source of divine revelation.
It's not just a book.
It's not a set of opinions.
It is a revelation of God and God's will.
There is the presumption there that it's a kind of unified work with a unified message in the confession of many of these traditions with God as its author and so forth.
It reveals a desire to be able to ground these groups views on ethics and politics and cultural issues quote-unquote in the Bible, right?
To be quote-unquote biblical about that.
And outsiders and insiders often describe people like this, Christians like this, as taking the Bible literally, right?
But I want to suggest that there's more to decoding this use of the Bible than just that.
It's more than just what they think about the Bible or how they interpret particular verses or something like this.
What I want to do is think about what does all this Bible language tell us?
More broadly than just a set of beliefs or something like this, what else can we know about the kinds of Christians when this appeal to the Bible is made?
So I want to just line this out.
When I drive down the road and I see a church that's called Redeemer Bible Church or fill-in-the-blank Bible Fellowship or something like that, As soon as I see that, there are things that I probably know about the kinds of Christians who are there.
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