How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Moses and Popular Culture

The story of Moses occurs in a plethora of popular culture mediums (fiction, songs, films, television, video games, comics, digital internet sources, etc.). This essay examines three themes in which Moses as a cultural artifact plays a crucial role in contemporary popular culture: visualizing Moses (Moses in film), learning from Moses (Moses as metaphor or analogy), and laughing at or with Moses (Moses in humor). Such a survey shows graphically the elasticity of Moses as a multivalent cultural artifact that has both influenced and continues to influence American culture. Indeed, while some extract religious meaning from the Moses story, others see parallels between Moses’ struggles and their own.

Publishing in Bible and American Popular Culture

This essay is an examination of scholarship on the Bible and (American) popular culture. It reviews the history and assumptions of cultural studies and maps how this body of work influenced biblical scholarship after 1990. It surveys an array of examples of scholarship on the Bible and popular culture and concludes with some suggestions for future work. Specifically, this essay asks the following: How has interest in Bible and popular culture affected academic publishing? How did these trends emerge, and what assumptions prompt them? What new journals or series or reference works have appeared that are specifically devoted to this broad topic, and what are some ways that the Bible and popular culture have been treated therein?

The Rapture in American Imagination

The Rapture is the sudden and hoped for event of the second coming of Jesus Christ in the clouds to raise true Christian believers to heaven. American popular culture has played with this scenario in a variety of genres (e.g., television, film, novels), most often in a satirical way. From the faith perspective, the Rapture is a major theme in Christian fiction (the Left Behind series) and follows a timeline of political and historical events. Representations of the Rapture in popular culture often reflect the current political climate and the psychological anxiety, isolation, and sense of persecution of believers.

Nicolas Roeg’s Retelling of Judges 16 in Samson and Delilah (1996)

This chapter considers popular understandings of Samson and Delilah’s relationship in Judges 16, arguing that readers’ interpretations of this relationship are often guided by the discourses, beliefs, and ideologies dominant within their own sociocultural context. The chapter first offers an overview of some common interpretive traditions surrounding this biblical story, which appear to draw upon those familiar tropes of feminine treachery and masculine vulnerability. Specifically, it suggests that interpreters’ reading strategies for the Judges 16 text are constantly negotiated and shaped by readers’ own heteronormative assumptions and discourses of gender and sexuality. In the subsequent section, the chapter focuses on a cultural retelling of this biblical story—Nicolas Roeg’s 1996 movie, Samson and Delilah—and considers the ways that this contemporary cultural text likewise employs these same tropes, imbued with the cultural flavors of the time, to offer a portrayal of Delilah as a postfeminist femme fatale whose erotic allure proved too hot to handle for “new man” Samson. Considering interpretive and cultural afterlives side by side, the chapter demonstrates the complexities of the reading process and the multiple threads—those sociocultural discourses, ideologies, and trends—that occupy and direct readers’ interpretations of the biblical text.

The Ten Commandments, Postcards, and Methodological Issues and Opportunities

Understanding the relationship between the Bible and popular culture requires a multidimensional approach that recognizes and integrates the various factors involved in particular uses of the Bible. Rather than studying these features in isolation from each other, focusing on their dynamic interplay demonstrates how biblical texts function as but one of many components in larger cultural productions. Furthermore, it shows how popular culture can act as a filter that selects and excludes elements of a biblical text for its own purposes, while transforming the text’s meanings. Popular uses of the Bible frequently reflect keen insight into biblical texts and often create innovative readings that go beyond academic methodologies, purposes, and abilities. Scholars therefore can learn much about the Bible from popular culture. Gilded Age and Progressive Era picture postcards of the Ten Commandments reflect this interplay, illustrating how factors such as capitalism, Victorian gender norms, American Protestant Christianity, and American exceptionalism combined to shape biblical expressions and uses.

The Material Dimension of the Bible from Print to Digital Text

The chapter addresses the material dimension of the Bible in the discourse and practice of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. According to surveys commissioned by the American Bible Society, announcements from big Bible publishers, and my own observations among contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal Christians in America, digital Bibles and Bible apps are on the rise. The transition from print culture to digital culture has not gone uncontested, and the discussions among Christians about the appropriateness of digital Bible media for religious practices points toward a contestation of the materiality of the medium through which God’s Word, and thereby God, is made present to religious practitioners. Thus the first part of the chapter introduces the frame of material culture studies and the approach to materiality in the study of religion. The second part discusses an analytic model suggested by the material religion scholar David Morgan along which a material analysis of religious objects should be developed. It will subsequently be applied to explore the relation between the Bible and its concrete materiality with a comparative focus on print and digital versions of the Bible.

The Bible in Pop and Rock Music

The Bible is ubiquitous in pop and rock music of the 1960s through to the present. This is surprising given that the art forms subsumed under these catchall categories are typically oppositional in nature. They resist the status quo and are often antiestablishment in posture, and by their very nature inclined to push back against the conservative values and authoritarian tendencies of organized religion. This chapter examines reasons why biblical and religious language is so persistent a feature in the popular music of recent decades, emphasizing the collective memory of the biblical story among songwriters and their audiences and the fragmentary nature of these “readings” of sacred texts and traditions.

Television and the Bible in American Popular Culture

This essay examines the Bible in American television, focusing in particular on the twenty-first century. It suggests that there are three broad categories which may helpfully illustrate and encompass the diverse ways in which the Bible appears and/or is utilized: (1) educating about the Bible (e.g., documentaries); (2) dramatizing the Bible (renditions of biblical stories); and (3) drawing on the Bible (the impact or use of the Bible in other television programs). Examining each of these in turn, this essay highlights the prevalence of the Bible on television and thus in American popular culture more generally, as well as considering some of the myriad ways in which it has been read, used, and interpreted. In particular, it endeavors to show how the medium can function as a tool for both reflecting and promoting levels of biblical literacy among its audience.

Genesis 1-11 in the Qatsi Film Trilogy

This chapter explores the ways cinema appropriates biblical motifs and transforms them, and how those motifs might be received and experienced by viewers. Insofar as it engages more fully film criticism and theory and inquires about audience reception, it reflects the so-called third wave of religion and film studies. While films have taken their inspiration from biblical narratives and characters since the medium’s invention, this contribution, following Adele Reinhartz’s lead, directs our attention to films whose biblical elements may be apparent only to those familiar with the Bible and its cultural interpretation. It focuses on Godfrey Reggio’s critically acclaimed Qatsi trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi), which represent cinematic transformations of the primeval history of Genesis 1–11. The ordering of the Cosmos, God’s declaration of its goodness, the command to the first humans to conquer and hold sway over it, human disobedience, the devolution of the created order into increasing violence, and the transgression of boundaries, including the building of the tower of Babel, are all echoed in these films. The films are transformations in the sense that they do not merely allude to the Genesis story or touch upon it in passing; they stay with the passages to which they allude, drawing out the implications of the text, wrestling with interpretive possibilities, offering visual metamorphoses that tantalize the modern imagination. While the character of the original story remains recognizably familiar, the cinematic vesture provides for dazzling transfigurations.