The Bible and America Today
In two major literary publications separated by nearly 35 years, Kenneth L. Woodward, former longtime religion editor of Newsweek, implied the stark reality of the state of America’s culture concerning its present relationship with the Bible. Woodward, who contributed nearly 100 cover stories for Newsweek, wrote one of those stories in 1982 titled “The Bible in America.” More than three decades later (2016) Woodward’s book, Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama, was published. Both the Newsweek article and Getting Religion are about the influence of religion in America.
It has been 40 years since Woodward’s Newsweek story affirmed “the Bible . . . has exerted an unrivaled influence on American culture, politics, and social life. . . . [It] perhaps even more than the Constitution is our founding document.” In Getting Religion, Woodward briefly references his Newsweek article, describing this piece seven pages in length, as being on “the historical impact of the Bible.” His 2016 book, just shy of 450 pages, includes an index of eleven pages. The index contains merely two listings for the Bible identifying five pages where the Bible is mentioned in the book. I did note an additional unindexed reference to the Bible where Woodward discussed his childhood years in Cleveland during the 1950s. He referred to his summer experience at a YMCA camp where he, with the other campers, sang the following:
The B-I-B-L-E
Yes, that’s the book for me.
I stand alone on the word of God—
The B-I-B-L-E
Other than a negative comment concerning those who would espouse the Bible to be inerrant, and an almost tongue in cheek chapter titled “Women’s Liberation and the Feminization of Religion,” which evidences the influence of today’s radical feminist agenda on biblical hermeneutics, there is little explicit reference to the Scriptures in Woodward’s book.
Two statements from Woodward—the first from his 1982 Newsweek cover story and the latter from his 2016 book—may summarize best what has happened in American culture concerning the Bible. In the former article, while describing a much earlier time, he wrote that the Bible “was read in public schools, so that the young might learn virtue [moral courage] and take their rightful place in what most Americans complacently considered a Christian nation.”
In contrast to what he wrote about the above earlier time in American history, Woodward concludes Getting Religion with an Epilogue in which he asserts that most incoming American college students arrive on campus today to be met with a curriculum and a culture that provide little encouragement to reflect on what is truly “the good life,” much less on “how to wrestle with the moral choices they personally face.” The last few paragraphs of the Epilogue identify moral relativism as the prevailing moral context in which many young Americans find themselves facing “in and out of the classroom.” Woodward concludes that such has resulted in “widespread inability to think through moral problems or even recognize them, even more the unwillingness to hold themselves accountable to anyone but themselves.” Then, in one of the few personal statements from this longtime religion editor that implies an absolute moral imperative with biblical roots, he says such moral chaos “should disturb us deeply.”
The Bible, with eloquent clarity, describes what happens when a nation is disconnected from the divine revelation—the Holy Scriptures: “Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint” (Proverbs 29:18). True Christian apologetics can help bring about the reclamation of a lost faith. May it happen in America!