The Bible as a medium of discourse
So what does the commentary show? Like any commentary, the usefulness of this site is less in its overarching claims than in the details that it uncovers. As with any commentary, readers will come to this site seeking to make their own interpretations, and it is quite likely that the reader will be more interested in the materials that this site provides than the arguments that it advances. You are invited to make use of this site as a reference work, a commentary, or an argument as it suits your purposes. You may find many entry points into the project, either through this introduction or the discussion of methodology; through the visualizations; or through any of the thematic essays.
But the commentary’s overarching argument is that the Bible is primarily a medium through which public discourse happened, rather than primarily a substantive source for that discourse. Many American Protestants who thought of the Bible seriously as the source for all human endeavors walked a fine line between the clarity and mystery of the Scriptures. On the one hand, many Protestants believed wholeheartedly in the perspicacity of the Scriptures, a doctrine which held that the meaning of the Scriptures was sufficiently plain that any believer could understand it on his own, without even the aid of pastor or priest. God had written the Scriptures so plain that “he who runs may read,” in the memorable phrase from the prophet Habakkuk. But on the other hand, those same Protestants wrestled with the text, and filled their bookshelves with commentaries, Sunday school lessons, and sermons in the hopes of better understanding the Word of life. The Scriptures were full of the “the words of the wise, and their dark sayings,” as King Solomon had said.
When the Bible was quoted in the newspapers, the way it was used mirrored that paradox of clarity and confusion. When the Bible was cited on one side or the other of an issue, only rarely was its meaning explicated rather than assumed. It was far more common to treat the text as an authority to be cited rather than as a text to be understood. Those who cited the text most typically thought that their readers would understand its meaning precisely as they did.
The multiple and mutually exclusive ways in which newspapers used the Bible put paid to that assumption. If the Bible could be cited against slaveholding, then it could also be used to bolster a slave society. The Bible spoke in favor of capitalism and markets, and also cried out for the plight of the worker. The Bible condemned whiskey and “demon rum,” unless it didn’t. The Bible promoted peace and pacifism, and also supported the nation in its wars against Mexico, Spain, and Germany. The apostles and prophets were Republicans, unless they were Democrats. In short, any given quotation from the Bible seemed a source of certainty, but in the aggregate they sowed confusion.
The significance of the Bible in public discourse, then, was less what in it said—or was made to say—but in the fact that people said what they had to say in the language of the Bible. By looking at uses of the Bible in newspapers, we can see which parts of the Bible were in common currency among Americans, as well as the range of interpretations that were given to those verses. Verses that could be cited without a reference, or used in jokes and proverbs, indicated a kind of literacy or familiarity, and possibly a shared assumption about what those verses could be interpreted to mean. Verses that were used constantly were a shared cultural touchstone, while verses that were used only episodically reveal the tensions in a particular political or social situation. By looking at how the verses were actually used, we can see how the Bible was a contested yet common text. Like the markings that they made in their Bibles, the verses that they quoted tell us nothing about the Bible, but a lot about nineteenth-century Americans.