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Thumpin' It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today's Presidential Politics

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Berlinerblau's slim volume is one of the best guides to religion and presidential politics around today.

Berlinerblau is exactly right that the Bible has come back into our politics because politicians are aggressively targeting the evangelical vote. At the same time they are carefully ignoring the substantial (and growing) secular voting bloc. His discussion of secularism in America today is more nuanced and balanced than anything I have read on the subject.

Chapters 2, 3, 4 talk about how the candidates justify their ideas on issues like the stem cell research, the environment and Middle Eastern foreign policy. Chapters 5, 6, 7 give very balanced portraits of the religion strategies of all the 2008 candidates and Bush and Bill Clinton. The sections on Giuliani and Obama are excellent. This book will be an important resource for those trying to understand Obama's religious influences. Inexplicably, Berlinerblau leaves out any discussion of the evolution/ intelligent design controversy--the only significant weakness in an otherwise authoritative overview of the contemporary political-religious terrain.

Berlinerblau concludes that even though there is a lot of religion in American politics it still has little actual influence on governmental decisions. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and appreciated the author's sense of humor and his refusal to take sides. If he has an axe to grind, there is no hint of it in the book.

I think it's a literary breath of fresh air for my own political re-emergence this electoral season. Subtitled "The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today's Politics", it's actually a pretty good primer on the Bible's use throughout American history. He does a bang-up job at describing the details without taking a partisan side, explaining credibly that both sides "use and abuse" the Bible.

"... no empire, no society, and rarely even one denomination has ever been able to agree on what the Bible says. Put differently, even if there were one 'right' reading of the Bible, we have yet to find a social body that has achieved agreement as to what it might be." (p. 32)

His first pass is into such divisive hot button topics as the environment, stem-cell research and foreign policy - all areas of current event interest that are not really addressed in 2,000-year-old texts. But each "side" has its own loose prooftexts to cite, its own spin and perspective on the issues and problems at hand, and the Bible serves to give some weight and authority to those opposing views. Both sides paradoxically use the same Bible to point to diametrically opposed viewpoints. He also leads into dialog on the campaigns and the party dynamic, where Democrats are waking up to the spiritual side of the electorate that the Republicans have had a stranglehold on for decades. In most cases, the pointed use of vague and victorious-sounding scriptural rhetoric is a plus for a candidate, while relying too heavily on the Bible, or appearing to take it too seriously, is also almost always a pitfall.

I want to recommend this one to everyone - but it's mostly for those who see something spiritual on the political scope that "just smells funny". It's like everyone is spiritual, but not everyone's exactly truthful. The scriptures are as helpful as they can be when prooftexted to back up a point, but there's not any real political reliance on the Bible for much more than "a personal faith". Whether that's a plus or a minus is left to the reader. I appreciate that Berlinerblau's work goes beyond the current soundbites to a place that wrestles with truth beyond the pithy truths of the speeches and negative ads.

"Thumpin' it" is well written and the author understands the subject far better than many, whether secularists or Christians. But the author's extended, italicized disclaimer of "no bias" piqued my suspicions from the outset, and by the time I finished I concluded that the book fell short of its purported purpose--and is, indeed, a biased tome.

First, it is not scholarly. Its thoughtful, but not scholarly. One quick example--Berlinerblau accepts without critique the separationist interpretation of Jefferson's "wall of separation" metaphor, despite extensive (and scholarly) criticism that the modern hyper-separationist model arising from that phrase rests in bad history and created bad law. So bad that one federal appellate court recently called the concept a "tiresome extraconstitutional construct." Thus, his "neutrality" unfortunately slides onto the secularist end of the scale.

More subtly, he astutely analyzed the schism between Republicans on the embryonic stem cell issue, noting that two pro-life LDS Republican senators had allied themselves with pro-abortion Democrats to support federal funding for that embryonic stem cell research. But he didn't go to the next level, and explain why LDS theology leads its believers to accept embryonic stem cell research, while evangelical Christian theology finds the research morally repugnant (it has to do with the ensoulment of the embryo). And this failing is one of several factors that disproves his theory that religious principles don't influence American policy--Mormon theology drove that acceptance of a morally questionable act as throughly as Christian theology drove opposition to it.

The baseline shortcoming is that he seemed to be looking for a politician "proof texting" his way through a public policy thicket, spouting Bible verses on the way, before he would admit to the real impact of religion on civic life. But religious beliefs come out through principles and the application thereof--often easily traceable to the trained eye--and hold far greater sway in our society than one might think. Jacques' unfortunate conclusion is that the Bible is mere political puffery in American politics, when nothing could be further from the truth. One might get the French Republic with the benefit of Enlightenment thought, but one will never get the American republic without the Bible.... All in all, its a good read and worth reading--but biased, and stops short of a full analysis in some critical areas.

There is meant to be a separation of church and state in the United States - yet every president the country has ever had has been sworn in on a Christian Bible. "Thumpin' It: The Use and Abuse of The Bible In Today's Presidential Politics" is a scholarly examination of the politicians of the country's obsession with using the bible in what is meant to be an overall secular country. Looking how it impacts current issues such as the environment, steam cell research, abortion, among other countless other topics. "Thumpin' It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today's Presidential Politics" is a through and highly recommended addition to community library politics and religion collections and for anyone who wants a solid examination of this mixing of church and state.