Challenging Distance: Reframing the Subtle Violence of Biblical Interpretations

A series of the United States Supreme Court decisions, including Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. (2022) and Carson v. Makin, 596 U.S. (2022), have removed previously established legal separations between religious education and public primary and secondary education. Liberal proponents of these decisions often refer to the role religious texts already play in social studies courses, emphasizing a secular purpose for religious texts. However, I argue the frameworks used by these supposedly secular forms demonstrate a narrative of constructed distance for Christian liberals in the United States from violence within Biblical texts. In the first section I extend Julia O’Brien’s (2002) frameworks of violence in the Bible to analyze how distance allows Christian liberalism to avoid an uncomfortable reality of violence within biblical texts. In the subsequent sections I examine historical and modern cases of this constructed distance and how distance enables a disengagement from questions of domination and violence. I read these examples against Ernesto Cardenal’s The Gospel in Solentiname to demonstrate what engagement with violence would bring to interpretative frameworks. Then, in the final section I examine the idea of rejecting violence through the film Nope and challenge the notion that critique is a rejection. Throughout I argue distance provides a comfortable excuse for biblical violence, which then forecloses the possibility of deeply interrogating and understanding the role of violence in the Bible as a political project. Whereas a measured engagement with violence offers an opportunity to critique religious violence and the power structures it upholds.