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71 Four THE KING JAMES VERSION AT 300 IN AMERICA “The Most Democratic Book in the World” Mark Noll In 1911 the collective leadership of the English-speaking world stood at attention to salute the King James Version of the Bible (KJV). The president, the king, the prime minister, and other statesmen of the first rank led a great chorus of praise for the literary, political, ethical, and religious virtues of what their contemporaries were hailing as “the greatest book in the English language”;1 the most vital book in the world”;2 and “the chief classic of our English language and literature.”3 This year, in 2011, we are witnessing well-publicized events and the publication of numerous books about the origins and long-term influence of the KJV, but not the same concentrated attention from the same lofty summits of culture and society. Queen Elizabeth did devote part of her 2010 Christmas broadcast to praising the KJV as “a masterpiece of English prose” and as providing “the most widely recognised and beautiful description of the birth of Jesus Christ.”4 Early in January an op-ed piece in the New York Times also commended the KJV for how “it captures and preserves the unavoidable rhythms of good English” and how its enduring popularity as a classic of the language falsifies what T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis asserted about the KJV’s influence resting on its religious rather than its aesthetic character.5 Yet for the most part, celebrations of the King James Version in 2011 seem to have been left to academics and aficionados. It was far otherwise a century ago. This chapter begins with a brief attempt to situate the 1911 celebrations of the KJV in the general history of Scripture in broader American history. It then canvasses the main points that were emphasized in the 72 Mark Noll many speeches and publications that commemorated the tercentenary. It pauses for more extensive examination of the major speeches on the KJV that were delivered by Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and William Jennings Bryan in the spring of 1911. The chapter ends by examining the relatively few commentators who directly addressed the relationship of the KJV as a cultural artifact to its character as a Christian book. My own reflections probe connections between the prevalence of the KJV and the problems of biblical civil religion, manic biblical politics , and populist anti-intellectual biblicism. The overall purpose of the chapter is to discern how the prominence of the King James Version in American history, as illustrated at the 300th anniversary, both advanced and retarded the cause of Christianity. The Bible in American History By the first decade of the twentieth century, the Bible occupied a prominent but rapidly shifting place in American society and culture. On the one hand, it remained an indispensable reference point for the nation’s churches and a much-noted factor in a national culture that still reflected the strong imprint of its dissenting Protestant foundations. On the other hand, it was well on the way to losing the preeminent place that for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century it had enjoyed in the nation’s law, public policy, scholarship, and even theology. A comparison with the era of the Civil War illustrates the indecisive role that Scripture had come to play by early in the twentieth century. At the close of the Civil War in 1865, American civilization to a striking degree was a Bible civilization.6 Nowhere in the world did such an extensive presence of the Christian Scriptures exert such a broad impact on such a substantial portion of a national population as in the United States. A sharp difference of opinion over whether Scripture permitted the institution of slavery had contributed substantially to the antagonism that brought on the conflict; a more general confidence of righteous biblical standing, in both the North and the South, justified all-out commitment to the war effort. In particular, the belief among Confederates that the Bible, rightly interpreted, sanctioned their cause may have extended the war a year or more past the time when rational assessment revealed the futility of fighting on. The climactic public statement about the meaning of the war was delivered on March 4, 1865, when in his Second Inaugural Address Abraham Lincoln, who was not even the member of a church, quoted the King James Version four strategic times in that very [3.14.132.214] Project MUSE...

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