Chosenness comes with a price. Everyone, it seems, wants to feel special. One way to ensure that feeling is to believe that you were specially chosen by God to fill a pre-ordained mission on earth. Since such views are always human views there will be inevitable conflict when another group thinks itself the truly chosen one. The process goes on and on with history laying waste one claim after another, but belief continues on just the same. America is a young country, at least compared to much of the world. Those who “govern” it (originally invaders) felt they were on a mission from God. Believing themselves the “new Israel” they felt a Calvinistic faith was the only true one. The people who put the government together were largely deists who’d left that thinking behind.
A recent story in the Washington Post cites such concerns with the God Bless the USA Bible, on sale in September. This particular Bible is bound together with the US Constitution. The reason people are concerned is a valid one—whenever something is bound with the Bible a significant number of people can’t tell the Bible from the other content. Believing the Bible to be magically revealed by God, the entire content between the covers becomes sacred revelation. Putting a secular document like the Constitution in there suggests to some (perhaps many) that said Constitution belongs to the canon of Scripture. It’s a real enough concern, as easily attested by any who teach the Bible. Even college-level students don’t know what’s Bible and what’s commentary.
Both the Good Book and the Constitution are documents in the public domain. You can do with them what you please. You could bind the King James Bible together with Moby-Dick if you wanted to, and if you wanted to make a long book even longer. The price is confusion among those who can’t really tell the difference. Many of the more evangelical stripe say “I don’t interpret the Bible, I just read it.” Putting aside that reading is interpretation, the problem becomes clear. That which is bound together in one book is one book. After all, The Book of Mormon mentions Jesus in America. The hazy view that many readers have of what’s actually in the Bible makes it dangerous to put other documents together with it. The problem becomes clear when a nation believes itself chosen. Chosen for dominion, it look to a specific book in support of that idea. Even if it doesn’t know much about what that book actually says.
