Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (II Sam. 19:4) and Go Down Moses (Exod. 19:21), to the modern-day Pulitzer-winning author Marilynne Robinson and her Gilead, notes Noll, “the ability to evoke vast worlds of meaning with a simple phrase depended on wide-spread reading, not just in the Bible per se, but the Bible as known from the KJV.” Robert Alter, in his Pen of Iron, a study of the impact of the KJV on American literature, has said that in America, the KJV determined “the foundational language and symbolic imagery of a whole culture.” Because it was present in every home, quoted in every church, and echoed in every public meeting, the KJV “created a stylistic precedent for the American ear in which a language that was elaborately old-fashioned, that stood at a distance from contemporary usage, was assumed to be the vehicle for expressing matters of high import and grand spiritual scope.” Not surprisingly, then, American writers loved the KJV’s “powerful eloquence, paradoxically coupled with a homespun simplicity”—and they plundered its resources freely. But ironically, says Alter, novelists who were at odds with Christianity—and that was many, if not most, of the American “greats”—also absorbed not just the language and style but indeed the worldview and values of the KJV. After all, since they wove KJV language into the
fabric of their stories, they could hardly ignore what the Bible was saying about the world. And so they were always in dialogue with the Bible, wrestling with it, arguing with it, even (almost against their will) affirming it as they wrote.
The sword of public speech
continued on page 34
did you hear the one aBout the traveLing BiBLe saLesman? Left: An African-American Bible salesman. Above: A Massachusetts Bible Society colporteur.
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Christian History
AFRICAN-AMERICAN BIBLE SALESMAN: AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY ARCHIVES BIBLE COLPORTEUR WITH CART: WIKIPEDIA
At every defining moment of American history, the KJV was there. Noll describes how countless preachers during the Revolutionary period used the KJV’s words and phrases to express their vision of American liberty. “Touch not; taste not; handle not,” said a 1774 Presbyterian Sermon on Tea in the words of KJV’s Col. 2:21. During the Civil War, it was the same story. One Southerner even adapted the KJV wording of II Chron. 6:34–35 to describe the sectional crisis: “Eleven tribes sought to go forth in peace from the house of political bondage, but the heart of our modern Pharaoh is hardened, that he will not let Israel go.” Nowhere is the effect of KJV language on American rhetoric more evident than in Abraham Lincoln’s famous speeches. Lincoln, although he did attend New York Avenue Presbyterian Church while in the White House, never joined a church or made a clear profession of faith. In fact, he always harbored suspicions of organized religion because of the excessive emotion and bitter quarrels he had seen in the camp meetings of his youth. But Lincoln did absorb some of the tenets of his parents’ “hard-shell Baptist” affiliation. This was a group that spoke out against missions on the basis of a particular interpretation of Calvinism: God had predestined and would save those he wanted to—no human intervention was required. Throughout his life and presidency, Lincoln retained both a strong sense of God’s superintending providence and a kind of determinism that sometimes descended into fatalism. Whenever he spoke of the Civil War, it was through that lens. Brought up as he no doubt was with the phrasings of the King James ringing in his ears, Lincoln wove that language into his own powerful oratory. For example,