by

Atheists in Biblical Scholarship (on Prof. Bauerlein’s ‘Haidt Speech’ Post)

Reading Professor Bauerlein’s important recent post on the “Haidt speech” I found myself quickly drawing parallels with the predicament of atheist scholars in biblical studies. Maybe too quickly.

Show of hands: Who here’s an atheist?” If a keynote speaker were to pose that unlikely query to an audience of 1,000 scholars gathered at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature my guess is only about a couple of dozen or so would publicly confess to infidelity.

Nonbelievers are few and far between in biblical scholarship. Not counting the theologians employed by seminaries who have yet to come out of the closet, the cohort is so small that we literally all know one another by name.

Accordingly, atheist biblical scholars, very much like conservative scholars in liberal arts colleges, are full of complaints.

Many of us argue that job opportunities are denied to nonbelievers. Sometimes this policy is explicit (and defensible), as in the case of theological seminaries that wish to hire co-religionists.

Sometimes this policy is unstated (and preposterous), as when a religious studies department in an otherwise secular (i.e., non-religiously chartered) institution is staffed by graduates of the aforementioned seminaries who don’t fancy nonbelievers.

The lack of non-believers certainly influences the ideational drift of the field. Editorial boards of leading journals in the discipline, I have alleged, will tend to dismiss scholarship that is overly critical of traditional assumptions about scripture.

As with conservative scholars in a field like, let’s say, women’s studies, tenure and promotion for atheist exegetes is always something of a tragic opera. Both groups lack the I’ve-Got-Your-Back perks of membership in an ideological tribe.

And then there is the general “ambiance” of the discipline itself. Biblical scholarship evinces a not entirely tacit embrace of traditionalist (as opposed to modernist) forms of religious ideas and people.  (That the discipline is becoming increasingly dominated by conservative Christians is a charge I made in the pieces linked above, indirectly seconded here, and examined thoughtfully here.)

Yet there is one crucial difference between the position of atheists in Biblical Scholarship and that of conservative scholars in the social sciences and humanities: the actual percentage of atheists in the general population is very low. It is, therefore, not statistically improbable that so few would be represented at the Society of Biblical Literature.

I need not get into the combustible question of atheist demography here. For now let’s assume that they comprise somewhere between 2 to 10 percent of the country (though I incline toward the lower figure).

By these standards the proportion of atheists in biblical studies is positively normal, even encouraging, compared to conservatives (whose presence in the non-academic population is much higher).

The crucial common denominator linking the atheists to the conservatives is not their feelings of distrust toward the academy (though I think those feelings are often quite justified). Rather, the link is an undergraduate population which is denied the obvious benefit of some intellectual diversity on campus.

Return to Top