The Bible in American Law, Politics, and Political Rhetoric. Edited by James Turner Johnson. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985. 204 pp. $14.95

This article provides an initial report on oral histories being collected from three surviving Branch Davidians: Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of David Koresh, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Their accounts are being made into autobiographies. Interviews with a fourth survivor, Catherine Matteson, are being prepared for deposit in an archive and inform the material gathered from Bonnie Haldeman, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Oral histories provided by these survivors humanize the Branch Davidians, who were dehumanized and erased in 1993 by the application of the pejorative ‘cult’ stereotype by the media and American law enforcement agents. These Branch Davidian accounts provide alternate narratives of what happened in 1993 at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, to those provided by American federal agents, and flesh out the human dimensions of the community and the tragedy. Branch Davidians are differentiated from many other people primarily by their strong commitment to doing God's will as they understand it from the Bible. Otherwise they are ordinary, intelligent people with the same emotions, loves, and foibles as others.

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THE BIBLE IN AMERICAN LAW AND POLITICS: A REFERENCE GUIDE. By John R.Vile. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. PP. vii‐638. Hardcover, $125.00.

Religious Studies Review ◽

10.1111/rsr.15276 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 243-243

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Reference Guide ◽

The Bible ◽

Law And Politics ◽

American Law

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The Bible and the Religious Right

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190258849.013.9 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Rebecca Barrett-Fox

Keyword(s):

Free Market ◽

The United States ◽

Religious Right ◽

Individual Liberty ◽

Conservative Politics ◽

The Bible ◽

Political Views ◽

Free Market Capitalism ◽

American Law ◽

Conservative Christians

This chapter identifies the doctrines that are central to conservative American Christians’ interpretation of biblical texts. Such believers view their scriptures as inerrant, literal, divinely inspired, authoritative, easily understood, internally consistent, and coherent, a vision of the Bible that does not necessarily lead to conservative social and political views, even as those conservative Christians who participate in conservative politics insist that it must. Those who use conservative faith to justify conservative politics form the Religious Right, which seeks to form a “Bible-based” America, one in which a limited government promotes a strong international presence, free-market capitalism, and individual liberty. This chapter traces how the Religious Right promotes the Bible as the root of American law, a hierarchy that allows them to argue that all those in the United States, not merely conservative Christians, are under the authority of the Bible, creating a mandate for Christians to seek and maintain power.

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Christian Scripture and American Scripture: An Instructive Analogy?

Journal of Law and Religion ◽

10.1017/s0748081400002836 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 101-142 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gregory A. Kalscheur

Keyword(s):

Historical Context ◽

Biblical Interpretation ◽

Political Community ◽

The Bible ◽

Law And Politics ◽

American Law ◽

History Of ◽

History Of Biblical Interpretation ◽

The Church ◽

The U.S

As a Jesuit priest whose ministry includes the teaching of constitutional law, I regularly struggle with the task of interpreting two foundational normative texts: the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. The Bible plays a central normative role in the life of the Church, while the Constitution provides a normative framework for American law and politics. These texts ground the ongoing lives of both the Church and the American political community. Both of these textually constituted communities face the challenge of appropriating for contemporary experience a normative text produced in a significantly different historical context. But can American constitutional lawyers learn anything from the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted within the life of the Church?Jaroslav Pelikan, eminent historian of the Church's doctrinal tradition and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, believes that those engaged in the enterprise of constitutional interpretation can indeed learn something from the history of biblical interpretation. Drawing on a life-long “study of the twenty centuries of interpreting Christian Scriptures,” Pelikan offers his new book,Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution, in the hope that it “may be of some help and illumination … to those who stand in the tradition of the two centuries of interpreting American Scripture.” (37)

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The Bible in American Law

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190258849.013.33 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Daniel L. Dreisbach

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

North America ◽

Common Law ◽

First Century ◽

Biblical Law ◽

British North America ◽

The Bible ◽

American Law ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Constitutional Tradition

The Bible has had a significant impact on American law and constitutional tradition. The early colonists who settled in British North America brought with them the English common law, a system of jurisprudence that its leading authorities claimed was based on Christianity. Moreover, laws framed in the colonies, especially in New England’s Puritan commonwealths, drew explicitly and extensively on biblical law. As secular and separationists perspectives gained a following in the second half of the eighteenth century and the centuries thereafter, the Bible’s influence on law faced increasing challenges, and only laws that can be defended on secular grounds have survived into the twenty-first century.

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