The Year of Living Biblically Review: Seeing Ourselves Through Unlikely Critics
This The Year of Living Biblically review by LeRoy Lawson considers two books that examine religion, biblical literalism, and American religious zeal from challenging outside perspectives. Both works invite readers to consider how Christians and Americans may appear to others, especially when conviction turns into inconsistency or zeal.
- A. J. Jacobs’s experiment in biblical literalism exposes the difficulty and inconsistency of selective obedience.
- Robert Jewett’s study critiques American religious zeal and the nation’s sense of divine calling.
- Lawson commends both books as unsettling but useful mirrors for self-examination.
By LeRoy Lawson
A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
Robert Jewett, in collaboration with Ole Wangerin, Mission and Menace: Four Centuries of American Religious Zeal (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008).
“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”
So wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns in his little poem, “To a Louse.” Who hasn’t at one time or another wished the same—for other pesky people in our lives whose reformation we most dearly desire? But when someone else helps us to see ourselves as they see us, well, that’s another thing. A disquieting thing.
Examining Religion
A. J. Jacobs’s respectfully irreverent book is not one to read if you’re afraid to see what you look like. Jacobs is not exactly your typical religious teacher. In fact, he’s not religious at all. He’s a secular Jew, an editor-at-large for Esquire magazine, and perhaps the last person you’d turn to for insight on how to live religiously. Yet he has helped me see myself as others see me, and that—while very disconcerting—isn’t all bad.
Jacobs is an inveterate snoop. He wants to know—everything. He even wrote a book about his hunger for knowledge: The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. Now he can bombard his friends and fleeting acquaintances with bon mots plucked from his trivia treasury.
He also edited What It Feels Like: To Walk on the Moon To Be Gored by a Bull To Survive an Avalanche To Swallow Swords To Go Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel To Be Shot in the Head To Win the Lottery. What’s missing in this title is religion.
Religion, ah, there’s a subject worthy of his investigative powers. Coming from an irreligious family, he possessed many prejudices and few facts about his inherited faith (or nonfaith). So he set for himself a worthwhile if ultimately futile goal: He would literally obey all the Bible’s commandments for a year, devoting eight months to the Old Testament’s strictures, and four to the New.
He stopped shaving. For a year. He donned white garments. He observed kosher laws, kept the calendar of rituals, drove his wife to distraction when he built a booth (to observe Yom Kippur) in the apartment living room, made certain he did not wear clothes of mismatched fabrics (Leviticus 19:19), prayed at the appointed hours, did not touch a woman, obeyed all the commandments—and ran into trouble. Should he really stone an adulterer? Could he keep all prayer instructions? Would it be possible to live without lying, coveting, stealing? As someone asked, should he stone his mother for working on Saturday? If he sells his daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus, what would be a good price for her?
When he turned to the New Testament, I expected him to find the going a little easier. But he’s no slacker. He decided to follow both the Old and the New Testaments, while recognizing that the key difference between modern Judaism and current evangelical Christianity is the latter’s emphasis on faith. Judaism promotes deed over creed, but Protestant Christianity insists that good works alone can’t save you. You must be justified by faith. That’s a problem, since Jacobs can’t accept Jesus as Lord.
In his search for working models of biblical literalism, he visits some Christian communities. That includes everybody from the Pat Robertson-Jerry Falwell camp to the Red Letter Christians (those who listen only to Jesus—whose words are printed in red in some Bibles). Along the way he tosses in a surprisingly positive visit to a snake handler.
Jacobs’s motives are not pure. As he says, “One of the reasons that I embarked on this experiment was to take legalism to its logical extreme and show that it leads to righteous idiocy. What better way to demonstrate the absurdity of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism? If you actually follow all the rules, you’ll spend your days acting like a crazy person.”
Unsurprisingly, his experiment does not change his mind. But he doesn’t end exactly where he began. He confesses that his year in the Bible has made him a little better person. He believes C. S. Lewis was right, that pretending to be a better person is a good first step toward becoming one. He’s more tolerant, especially of religion. Of one thing he’s certain: all of us, when it comes to religion, pick and choose. None of us observes all the laws (either Old Testament or New Testament). We select what seems compatible and focus on that. In other words, we’re all inconsistent.
That knowledge should make us more tolerant, shouldn’t it?
Examining Zeal
Robert Jewett’s Mission and Menace is a study of four centuries of American religious zeal that leaves the zealot little to cheer about. Here is another opportunity to see ourselves as other see us.
We don’t look so good.
Professor Jewett’s appraisal of America’s zealotry is scathing. He fears our nation’s megalomania. We think much too highly of ourselves, he believes, an opinion most of the rest of the world shares with him. Abraham Lincoln humbly referred to us as an “almost chosen nation.” For most of our history, Jewett contends, we’ve dropped the “almost.” We have boasted our God-given vocation (“a city set on a hill”); we’ve sung “God Bless America” with little concern that God bless other nations.
Jewett argues that this belief in our special calling has shaped both domestic and foreign policies from our earliest colonial years to the present war in Iraq. It fueled the civil rights struggle, our expansionist Manifest Destiny years, our separation of church and state arguments, and the war against terrorism. We’re the guys in the white hats; the “other side” wears black.
We don’t understand why other nations don’t bow to our leadership. If God be for us, why should anyone be against us?
Jewett is highly critical of millennialism and the impact of fundamentalism, although he’s not all that complimentary of religious liberals, either. Along the way he looks at the impact (for better or for worse) of such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, John Brown, Jerry Falwell, Carrie Nation, Jonathan Edwards, Aimee Semple McPherson, and many others, locating them in the parade of zealous leaders who have benefited or marred America. This survey of American religion “shows that it has been in some ways a blessing to the world but in other ways the source of great danger to world peace.”
If you are willing to “see ourselves as others see us,” here’s a book for you.
LeRoy Lawson, international consultant with Christian Missionary Fellowship International, is a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and a member of Standard Publishing’s Publishing Committee. His column appears at least monthly.
