Högre seminariet: The Scriptural Politics of the Secular

The Bible might be dismissed as an ancient collection of texts that is out of place in Western secular modernity. For the development of secularization in the West, however, the Bible has been pivotal, from the early modern circulation of vernacular Bibles, radical critiques of scripture by figures such as Baruch Spinoza, to adaptations of scripture, such as Thomas Jefferson’s remade (and drastically resized) Bible, fit for a modern age beset by scepticism. But, unsurprisingly, the relationship between the biblical and the secular is – as “the secular” itself – far from straightforward. In this talk I discuss the scriptural politics of the secular, focusing on Euro-American political trends in the last decades, where the Bible has been mobilized both as a foundation for secularism and a resource to combat secularism. Rather than simply being proof that the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, as Shakespeare put it, the scriptural politics of the secular is arguably caught up in biblically inspired fantasies of masculine heroism that can “save” the West.