The Book We Still Can’t Spare

[Geee]

American Spectator:

 

Despite my well-deserved international reputation as a coward, I occasionally get into arguments with people, mostly on Facebook where no one can punch you. It was during such an argument recently that someone actually implied that I was a liar, one vice for which I don’t have a reputation, as far as I know. We were discussing…. never mind; that’s another essay. But when she asked me where I got my ideas about right and wrong, I said that I’d read the Bible. My opponent laughed that off. She’d never read the whole Bible, she said, and she was pretty sure I hadn’t either.

It was one of those “taken aback” moments that come more and more often as you get older. I realized in a fresh new way that I’m a creature of another century. I have in fact read the Bible more than a dozen times, and I can remember a day when reading the Bible all the way through, though certainly regarded as an accomplishment, didn’t rank alongside claims to have climbed K2 or to have built a model of Graceland out of toothpicks. It’s a long book, I’ll grant you, but not that much longer than The Lord of the Rings.

Now if you’re expecting me to lament the passing of Biblical literacy in our generation, well, I do, but my point here is a larger (or smaller) one. My fears for the future are many, but the one I’m thinking of just now is my fear of losing things that make participatory democracy workable.