The Guinness Book of World Records names the Christian Bible as the top-selling book of all time. But which Bible? It’s been translated into multiple languages, and its contents differ according to the denomination. The Catholic Bible has 73 books. Most Protestant Bibles have 66. Orthodox Bibles have 76 to 78. There are versions of Bibles published for particular interest groups and Bibles associated with individuals. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, fashioned the Jefferson Bible by removing the parts with which he disagreed.
In his new book, The Accessorized Bible (Yale University Press), scholar David Dault uses the German word Schriftsprache, borrowed from the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, to reference a work that has shaped an entire culture. In the United States, the Bible functions as a Schriftsprache. This is the most formative text in our civilization, but we don’t even have a fixed reference point for our conversations about it.
In his book, Dault looks not only at how the Bible has shaped our thought, but how we use it, tailoring it to fit our tastes and “accessorizing” it to suit our desires, including our desires for violence.
Dault says his book isn’t really about Bibles: It’s “about how we treat one another.”
In your book, you quote Rebecca Solnit: There is an art to “making things unfamiliar again.” Why is it helpful for us to defamiliarize ourselves with the Bible?
I once presented a conference paper about Bibles, and the title was “A Magical Book That Nobody Reads.” Everyone thinks they know what the Bible means, without complication. But scripture scholars will tell you that the Bible is a complicated set of documents. Some believers approach the Bible like a Magic 8 Ball. They hold a question in their minds, open the book, put their finger down, and whatever verse it lands on, they treat as divine instructions.
I don’t want to suggest that there is only one way to approach a Bible or a particular doctrinal lens that makes the book suddenly simple. There are many ways of approaching it. On the other hand, we can’t dissolve everything into subjectivity. There are moral consequences to how we engage with the Bible.
I’m trying to slow down and begin a conversation about the thing that is in our hands or on our desks.
You write that every Bible we encounter is already accessorized. What does that mean?
Accessorization works on several different levels, in terms of the tangible product, but also the interpretation we bring to the Bible. We imagine the Bible as a solid text and that singular writers toiled away, telling a story that got passed on and cared for until it arrived in our hands. But a lot of what’s in the Bible came from fragments found on trash heaps. What we think of as a solid document is a reassembly of those fragments into what scholars thought was the most plausible version, given their interpretive lenses. The Bible is always accessorized by the invisible hands that shaped the physical texts.
But there’s another level. Bible companies publish Bibles in different interest areas: women’s Bibles, study Bibles, firefighters’ Bibles, golfers’ Bibles, even the NASCAR Bible. Bible companies sell these specialty versions at an increased price, so they can also afford to print cheap ones to get into the hands of as many people as possible. This accessorization has an evangelical aspect.
The Bible gets accessorized through scholarly assembly. It gets accessorized in the publication process. But there’s another level: the way we use a Bible to cover for the violence we do to one another. Suppose someone wants to bar trans people from bathrooms by saying that the Bible makes it clear that’s the right thing to do. The Bible is now the cover for the violence we are doing to that population. The Bible is an accessory to that crime.
What preconceptions do we bring to our encounters with Bibles?
A great example is the Stewardship Study Bible, which comes from a conservative evangelical perspective. It’s endorsed by Dave Ramsey and others in the evangelical financial self-help world. Acts 4 and 5 plainly say that the early Christian church was a community where everyone’s needs were met. This is where the Fabian socialists got “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”
The Fabian socialists influenced Karl Marx. Marx got socialism from the Book of Acts. But in the Stewardship Study Bible, those passages talking about Christian communism have a footnote that says, “This early Christian practice was not communism because . . .” There’s the text on the page. And there’s the footnote telling you it doesn’t say what it says. And you think, Well, it’s written by experts, so I should trust that what my eyes are telling me about the text isn’t true.
We are constantly engaging with a Bible that tells us again and again that the rich are going to hell and that says nothing about LGBTQ+ people. But what we hear when the message of the Bible is popularized is that sexual sin cries out for vengeance from heaven. Nothing about the rich exploiting the poor. We’re constantly misreading, dis-reading, un-reading what is plainly on the page. That’s not the fault of the book. The fault lies with us.
How is antisemitism connected with how we approach Bibles?
Unfortunately, in some of the epistles, we have language about “children of light” and “children of darkness” and the “synagogue of Satan.” Before the Second Vatican Council, we prayed for the conversion of the Jews in our liturgies. So people are getting their antisemitism from Christian practice. Often, those who prefer traditional Christian practice will go back to those pre-Vatican II readings to show fidelity to what they imagine an unsullied tradition would be.
But I don’t want to give the impression that there’s some pure, righteous form of Christianity, and that if we could get everyone on the right story, we’d have no problems. It’s not enough to say, “Read the Bible better,” because people think they are reading the Bible just fine. The answer to this is in our hearts. We are always going to be on the hook for the choices we make. If people are getting antisemitism from the Bible, it’s because they are antisemites. And that needs to be named and challenged.
I say this as someone whose grandmother was Jewish. In the Third Reich, the way the Nazis looked at bloodlines, my Christianity wouldn’t have saved me from people whose hearts are turned toward violence. The only hope is for people to stop being violent.
What is moral seriousness, and how is it relevant for our approach to Bibles?
This idea of moral seriousness comes from my friend and colleague David Dark. Explaining the idea to me, he referenced a quote from the German philosopher Hannah Arendt: “Education is when you decide to love the world enough to take responsibility for it.” He said that was the seed of what moral seriousness meant to him. In this book, I wanted to expand on that idea and initiate a conversation. So my chapter on moral seriousness is not exhaustive. It’s an invitation to do what we’re doing here.
Moral seriousness has to do with taking accountability for the way I continue to do violence in the world, even when I am comfortable. Karl Rahner has a famous example. There’s a cheap banana in a grocery store. You buy it and eat it while walking home but don’t think about the hands and the processes that went into bringing that banana from its place of origin to your grocery bag. But if you were to trace that back, you would find not only commerce but violence. To what extent are you responsible for that violence?
Another great example is the 17th-century Quaker John Woolman, who refused to wear clothes that were dyed with color, because the boats that brought the dye were the same that brought human beings into slavery. He refused to engage even in the commerce associated with the slave trade.
Moral seriousness is a life practice. It’s a conversion practice toward care for others, especially the least of these. It means being attentive to how our casualness and comfort lead to violence and harm. It’s something we have to practice every day. We constantly fail, but, as Samuel Beckett would say, we fail again and we fail better.
What would it look like to open up the Bible and to read it with moral seriousness?
You can read the Bible and find proof texts that will tell you to convert everyone on pain of death. But you can also find proof texts that tell you every encounter with scripture should encourage the flourishing and care of others. Often, we open the Bible with the intention of trying to get others to fall in love with it. We think that if they don’t love the Bible the way we do, they need to be corrected. Approaching a Bible with moral seriousness would be to open it and find every possible way it urges us to love the people around us—and to become invested in their care.
But the Bible doesn’t demand that you read it one way or another. That is a matter of your heart. That burden is upon us, not on the Bible. And I can’t stress this enough: A Bible is a book. It is an object. It doesn’t have an intention for us. A Bible doesn’t want anything from us. We want things as human beings, and we care for one another as human beings. A Bible cannot love for us.
People seem to think it’s an enchanted object, that God’s in there somewhere.
What does it mean to approach the Bible as a book, and how is that different from what we’re already doing?
Here’s an analogy: If you mix yeast, sugar, flour, and water and put them in an oven, and bread comes out, no one would be amazed. But if you took those same ingredients and put them in the oven, and out comes a gold brick, you would want to know what about this oven is causing this unexpected result. You might need to take that oven apart and figure out the mechanism, because either something is going on that explains this—or it’s fakery.
A lot of people approach a Bible like a magic oven where they can put in normal human ingredients and get something supernatural out of it. A lot of communities act like the Bible will yield supernatural messages. I want them to ask: What is the mechanism making this happen? Because if somebody says it’s happening, they may be lying or have some nefarious purpose.
We need to slow down and think about how a Bible operates for us as individuals and communities.
In Imperial Rome, people treated the Aeneid with a similar reverence: They played “Virgilian lots,” opening the book to get a divine message. Do other cultures have this reverence for a particular text?
In Sikhism, the holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, is considered the last living teacher. Every evening, the Guru Granth Sahib is placed in a majestic throne-like bed. In the morning, it is awakened and processed to the throne where it reposes throughout the day, as meals and other reverences are brought to it, because it is considered a living being.
Some Christians refuse to put Bibles on the ground or put any other book on top of the Bible. These are community-based practices that do not originate in the book but are accessorized around the book.
And remember, the book itself doesn’t care, because it’s an object. But we who interact with it and with one another want a great many things, and sometimes what we want is to evade responsibility.
How does our reading of the Bible connect with our actions?
We will use the Bible as an excuse for almost anything. There’s a 1979 film called The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner and starring Steve Martin as a simple man to whom bad things are always happening. At one point, a character called only the “madman” uses the phone book as an oracle, opening it at random and placing his finger by the protagonist’s name. And they clearly say, “Die Navin R. Johnson.” In the next scene, that same man is sitting in a car with a rifle, shooting at Navin R. Johnson. This propels the character into the next set of misfortunes.
If you asked the madman character why he decided to target this man, he could say the phone book told him that Navin R. Johnson had to die. And we would call that insanity. But every day, we encounter people in public life who do this. If you ask them, “Why are you doing violence against this particular person?” they will say it’s because the Bible told them so.
But the harm is not coming from the Bible. The people who read a Bible this way already have the violence in their hearts. That’s what we need to continually name. And we have to place the responsibility on these people and the way they fail to care for fellow human beings.
You say people use the Bible to protect institutions at the expense of the vulnerable. What would it look like to do the opposite?
If we listen to the accounts of clergy abuse victims, they will tell us repeatedly that their bodies were broken for the sake of the institution. Or, from a secular standpoint, we know what it is to break bodies for the sake of some perverse fascist purity: We’re currently doing it to our immigrant and nonbinary siblings. Both religious and secular institutions will break bodies for the sake of maintaining institutions.
But what if, instead of protecting the institution at all costs, we decided that every asset of the institution would be used for the care of those in it—even at the cost of the institution’s ruin? If instead of hoarding things, we focused on human bodies being made safe?
I was with a group of friends talking to a scholarly colleague who is Sikh. In the Sikh tradition, the men wear a very specific kind of head covering. Somebody asked him why he wore it, and he said, “I wear this so when I am in public, if someone is in danger, they will know they can run to me to be protected.”
What if the cross on top of our steeples was like that? If anyone in danger knew that they could run to that building under the cross and be safe? But often the opposite is true. If they risk coming under that cross, they risk violence.
If the Bible is to have value in the third millennium, it is to remind us of how much God loves every person we encounter and how we are called to honor God in them.
So what is the purpose of a Bible?
I’m a materialist, so my answer is that the purpose of the Bible in America in 2026 is to make money for a small amount of people. I wish it were otherwise. The Bible historically has had other purposes and is not limited or exhausted by that purpose. But someone who earnestly believes in evangelization would say that the purpose of the Bible is to get people to heaven. So for them, the Bible’s purpose is to get that person to change, instead of starting a conversation about how the world and its institutions need to change so all can have more community, more solidarity, more abundance.
But we aren’t having those conversations. We’re punished for trying to have them. My hope is that Bibles will be relevant again in a way that leads to human flourishing, but I’m not holding my breath.
This article also appears in the September 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 9, pages 20-24). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Priscilla du Preez
