Scripture and Secularism

Funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation

The fact that the Bible has had an impact on the Western world is rarely disputed. It is often not clear however, how interpretations and ideas about the Bible become influential outside faith communities, in so-called secular settings such as politics, media, and culture. This question is at the core of “Scripture and Secularism: The Bible in Modern Publics”. The project has three aims:

1. To examine how processes of secularization are understood in relation to the Bible, particularly with regard to the origins of the secular. Here, the project focuses on historical, philosophical, and sociological accounts of secularization.

2. To analyse what role the Bible does or does not have in different cultures of secularity. Here, the project focuses on Western, more specifically on Anglo-American and Scandinavian political discourses, as these are often seen as archetypal of the secular. To challenge notions of the secular as uniquely Western, so that new angles on the relationship between the biblical and the secular can be developed, the project includes biblical reception in the Global South, primarily Brazil, as a point of comparison.

3. To establish theories, methods, and opportunities for research on the impact of the Bible in order to better understand the ongoing influence of the Bible in different cultures of secularity, where processes of secularization are not taken for granted as linear, complete, or unique to the Western world. Here, the project concentrates on theories of biblical reception and biblical reception history to develop a new approach of what we call reception criticism.