Literally Speaking...

by Karen Parkman

What's in a name? In the fourth grade, it's pretty much what you see is what you get. But with greater familiarity with etymology and lexicography, proper names acquire more sophisticated referents. A name, it is learned, does not mean what its phonemes, were they to be morphemes in another language or part of speech, might mean. If your name is Smith, you are not necessarily one who works with metal; if your name is Robertson, your father doesn't need to be Robert. But until this fluency in linguistic theory impresses itself onto a youth's mind, maybe a dozen formative, sensitive years have passed under the verbal influence of rarely tactful classmates and neighborhood chums. Speculatively, it may have been this nominative confusion that spurred this cultural anthropologist on to don his knight's armor and begin his crusade against literalism in America.

In Serving the Word Vincent Crapanzano vigorously assaults Christian fundamentalism and judicial restraint in the United States. Derivatively, he spars with psychoanalysis, “identity” politics, and genetically-attributive human traits, on their traditionally literal interpretation of their respectively relevant documents or referents. He cites as fallacious the expectation to find any “plain meaning,” any “`literal' or `true'” meaning inherent in the constituent words and sentences of texts without consideration of historical, cultural, and non-linear contexts.

The table of contents divides Serving the Word into two principal sections, book-ended by a prologue, discussing his methods and a rudimentary overview of linguistic anthropology techniques, and an epilogue, mourning America's increasingly displaced hermeneutical values.

The first two-thirds of the book discuss Christians who understand and assert the Bible to be a verbatim transcription of the Word of God, notably the followers of Jerry Falwell and students at Bob Jones University. The second zeroes in on the Supreme Court justices and other interpreters of the U.S. Constitution, like Robert H. Bork, who refuse to waver “from the letter of the law,” standing apart from judicial activists. Each “encourages a closed, usually (though not necessarily) politically conservative view of the world,” and both frame the world into an a “we-and-they approach to people,” one in which the “we” possess all the truth, and the “they” must sadly wallow in “falsehood” and “depravity.”

To investigate the growing number of Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals in the United States, Crapanzano gives interviews, reads tracts, and visits Bible schools and seminaries. While sometimes unfairly stereotyped as hating all those they don't consider “saved” (which is, practically speaking, everybody but them), the fundamentalists really do have a difficult time communicating with those “not like them,” primarily those who do not believe as absolutely true the most literal understandings of the Bible. Metaphor is tossed out the door. Six days is six earth-turning-around-its-axis days. A “believer” in science immediately is seen as antagonistic in any conversation.

Crapanzano faces much more formidable foes in the second half of the book: conservative Supreme Court justices of the literalist and intentionist persuasion. The former read the U.S. Constitution as the fundamentalists read the Bible. As an illustration, he frames this section around a transcript of Robert Bork's testimony to the Senate, apropos Reagan's nomination of him to the Court. Various senators, some sympathetic, others antagonistic, question Bork about, among other cases, the Supreme Court's decision in the Griswold v. Connecticut—a case in which the majority understood the First Amendment to imply freedom to privacy in marriage. Bork responds, at length, that he cannot find anything about the freedom to privacy in the Bill of Rights, but only other freedoms (e.g., freedom of the press, freedom of assembly). He warns that, while every citizen of our democratic nation knows that our federal government must preserve the right to privacy, according to the U.S. Constitution, such legislation must be enacted through Congress, not the judiciary. The Court and its justices sit to help sort out tricky specific situations, to ensure due process of law, to provide applicable exegesis of the appropriate textual passages of the Constitution. They do not, however, gavel the bench to enact new laws.

The latter, intentionists, interpret the Constitution as the document the members of the Second Continental Congress meant to have written when scribbling down their John Hancocks. Rather than asking himself what the words on the aged parchment look like, the intentionist justice considers as evidence papers, correspondence, and journals from the latter part of the eighteenth century. Crapanzano cites the Federalist Papers and some letters from the congressmen home to their wives and acquaintances to this end.

Crapanzano goes on to describe the bureaucratic problems stemming from this method. In times of congressional or senatorial gridlock, in which legislation has been tabled or ignored—to the detriment of disadvantaged constituencies—one would assume that government should do something. Judges, potentially less political than their Capitol Hill colleagues, ought to take advantage of their clear consciences and their precedent-making abilities to do what's right. It's silly to sit there, staring blindly at the words on the page, understanding them as part of some immutable monolith. Crapanzano points out as alternately fortunate and unfortunate that “so many Americans have...related the Constitution to Scripture, Divine Providence, and God's creation;” we trust it, but stop trusting ourselves to do what is in our hearts. In the end, he writes off judicial restraint to “the distortion of reality that comes with professional engagement,” an artificial construction of unnecessary rules of purity. The literalists should grow up and read some literary theory.

It is in Serving the Word that Crapanzano distances himself from his fields of academic experience and expertise. As is clear from the cleverly metonymic subtitle, this book takes as its primary objects of study hermeneutics (the science of interpretation), Christian evangelism, and Constitutional jurisprudence. He admits that he is neither religious nor a theologian, nor is he either a legal or American studies scholar, and is thus “an outsider.” This is rather unfortunate, due to the necessary rigor of a work of interpretation, sociology, and political science.

Surprisingly, though, he leverages his relative immaturity in these fields. “My concern is neither with historical influence nor with sociological or psychological explanation,” all three of which have been amply done, he says, but rather to “offer a critical perspective” on this “dangerous” literal-minded mode of interpretation. Only an outsider can properly recognize what really is “rhetoric, plays of power, [and] unacknowledged desire,” in social situations.

I found this conclusion troublesome, both due to his lack of support of this approach, and in light of modern anthropological method. No longer can one “inspect” a culture from the outside, taking notes, referring values and norms back to one's own experiential framework. It is very difficult to believe his maxim, “Up to a point, we [anthropologists] can have our cake and eat it too.”

But Crapanzano only feigns ignorance of these developments in field method. Throughout the book he cites a contemporary standard wisely, if not over-bearingly, to point out obvious and severe problems in the beliefs of the object community. The beliefs are problematic not because they do not reach high enough on some hypothetical absolute scale of Truth or Right Belief, but rather, and the author discusses this to some degree in his conclusion, because we live in a democracy, one in which dialogue across all citizens is necessary. For dialogue to occur, a certain set of beliefs about what is good and advantageous to all involved in the democracy must exist, and also an openness, a respect, though not agreement, towards the non-shared beliefs.

But the author has not set out to broaden the field of discourse. Often, throughout his interviews with the Christian fundamentalists, hermeneutic exposition, and discussion about evangelical “sanctification,” Professor Crapanzano becomes frustrated with the Christian inability to justify “fully on intellectual grounds” their beliefs, regardless of from what their beliefs derive. They did not have a “certainty of [their beliefs] which transcended the subjective,” like “that of a mathematical truth.” He could therefore not seem to understand their seemingly tautological “when you know, you know.”

Continually he gasps in amazement at the seeming unlikelihood of beliefs, like that of a 10,000 year history of the Earth and the horror of original sin, adopting a bewildered “how could anyone possibly believe this stuff?” sort of attitude. Likewise, he enjoys, at least intellectually, catching suckers in contradiction, into which Christian fundamentalists habitually fall. When one Master's Degree student confessed a momentary uncertainty, he gloated in his ability to make someone finally “admit that he continually wrestles with doubt.”

While often making correct, responsible criticisms of the adherents to literal readings, he more often considers “the fundamentalists” as sorts of noble savages. “[As] I have tried to show here, the fundamentalist has a very articulate view of history, one which he often describes and charts.” Exhibit B, please. Crapanzano notices that they are often preoccupied with their own salvation (just as laboratory rats are with their cereal); it is, after all, in their religion, the purpose of life. While it was difficult for him, observing their continual “wrong-headedness” and “judgmental impatience,” he “made a great effort not to treat the fundamentalists as...`repugnant cultural others' or...`know-nothings.'”

Crapanzano spends nearly two hundred pages cheerily illuminating the naïveté, closed-mindedness, and immaturity of these sects. Why, it is never quite clear. He hauls out an entire munitions dump of postmodernist weapons to launch at these willfully ignorant people, who have but a few hundred pages of scripture and a private, personal connection with their Savior, with which to defend themselves. On page 349, eight pages from the end of the conclusion, he snickers how he can give no reason for the presence and stickiness of the fundamentalists. He crassly lists perfectly logical possibilities, “loss of values, loss of certainty, the loss of perspective,” and dismisses them, favoring the “disquieting effect of description to the complacency of explanation.”

He focuses less on the Supreme Court, and thus falls to absurdity to a proportionally lesser amount. His evaluation of the literalist doctrine comes generally to volubility tackling the ins and outs of “originalist” theory by summoning up Derrida et. al. He plays around with the “Death of the Author” and “infinite authors,” phrase-dropping like that. All the while he rides the line between articulateness and mumbled vocabulary lessons.

In analyzing “the state of” these goons, this ethnographer's methodology remains mostly the same as that which he used contra the fundamentalists. He belabors a narrative of the results of judicial restraint, comparing decisions of dissent with those of the majority. Even with “principles,” how could a judge not stand up for privacy? His disgust here is simply political. He does not mention that the “literalists”—Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Rehnquist—voted in 1995 to prevent discrimination against any group: “The First Amendment forbids public institutions to exclude religious groups from the benefits that are offered a broad class of participants.”

Perhaps, like the self-referentiality of the Bible he bemoans (the Bible asserts its own truth, and augments this boot-strapping by quoting men, whose only character witnesses are also Biblical), one must read Crapanzano's book just as he advocates interpreting the Constitution or the letters from the Apostles. Instead of taking him literally “at face value,” one ought to understand him metaphorically or figuratively. One must instead try to understand both the original intent of its author, and, evidently more importantly, the historical, contextual, and non-authorial intent. Crapanzano emanates an unconscious sense of insecurity and fear of certainty, an uncanny predilection to extrapolate from the extraordinary to the ordinary, and a political and cultural experiential distortion. He is pretty sure of his rightness, but what if Kierkegaard or Jefferson were to be right? There would be no way to know; the beliefs of each would necessarily be utterly incomprehensible. So, just to be sure, he swings his sword mightily at the windmills, surprised at their strength and defenselessness.