Bibles are particularly charged objects, both in terms of the feelings they arouse and in their capacities to act and be acted upon. Bibles are held up in the hands of priests and rabbis. They are paraded, kissed, gently carried, or heavily highlighted. Bibles evoke feelings of anger at the way they have been used to oppress; nostalgia for different times; indifference as they gather dust on shelves. They are concrete artifacts, whether we are talking about the specific canons of faith communities, the manuscripts studied by scholars, or the versions marketed for teenagers and soldiers.
Though most readily thought of as the possession of faith communities, Bibles are potent objects in the political arena. Bits of biblical text feature on placards, in speeches and debates. In book form, Bibles are pounded, sworn on, or brandished before a crowd. The image of Donald Trump holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. in June 2020, after law enforcement officers forcefully targeted peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, quickly went viral. Other forms of political Bible-use are more humorous and subversive, like the Tory-Jesus memes circulating on social media.
The politics and potency of Bibles has long been recognized in the formation of modern nation-states. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, versions of scripture in vernacular languages became important for understandings of peoplehood through the prism of national culture and identity. National Bibles continue to be hailed as foundations for the nation-state. Around the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in the UK in 2011, then Conservative prime minister David Cameron pontificated that this Bible is a key source for the modern British nation, its language and politics.
Political uses of Bibles work because they are thick with association. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed discusses the way texts generate effects. Texts, particularly classics and canonical texts, are stuck to histories of association. Yet the way these associations orbit a text and make it thick with what Ahmed calls “affective value” is often concealed. Ahmed talks about the effects of repetition, but also of the concealment of the work of this repetition. Associations become thick from the ideas and histories that are stuck to Bibles and particular biblical texts. But the ways that Bibles and bits of Bible are perceived and handled are also a matter, as Karen Bray and Stephen Moore have contended, of how they feel.
Recently, as I have shown elsewhere, the British far-right movement Britain First has made use of biblical verses as forms of greeting on social media. On December 27, 2021, for instance, Philippians 4:13 was shared on their official Telegram account: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me,” followed by the message: “HAVE A GREAT DAY FELLOW CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS…” The image the text is set against is a blue sky with the indication of a cloud. A few days later, December 29, Psalm 139:23, “Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts,” was shared over a dark background with leaves in the top corners of the image. Multiple other biblical verses are shared by Britain First in this style and format.
Led by the former British National Party councillor Paul Golding, Britain First emerged in 2011 with distinctly nationalist, authoritarian, nativist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic tendencies. They claim to defend the “indigenous” British people by opposing immigration. Like other contemporary manifestations of the Far Right, Britain First repeatedly speaks of Islam as a threatening enemy, calling for “Islamification” to be resisted. Acting in part like a political party and in part more like a street-level protest movement, Golding has been charged on several occasions for publishing hateful material and for threatening and abusive behavior. While Britain First might not be deemed particularly successful, they have capitalized on the use of social media and have built up significant audiences online.
The sharing of biblical texts seems to have been instigated by Paul Golding on October 16, 2020, when he shared an image of a Bible on their official Telegram channel, and commented: “Just purchased myself a brand-new Bible. At a minimum, I’d suggest to other Christians to read at least one Proverb per day. Nourishment for the soul!”
In some ways the Bible posts of Britain First are not surprising. Britain First has written openly about Christianity in the ideology section of the official webpage (the webpage has since been revised). It describes Britain as a “solidly Christian nation,” and state that “[o]ur political and legal system was born out of the framework of laws and morals contained in the Holy Bible.” It further states:
Britain First is committed to preserving our British cultural heritage, traditions, customs and values. We oppose the increasing colonisation of our homeland through uncontrolled, mass immigration. Britain First is committed to maintaining and strengthening Christianity as the foundation of our society and culture.
The Bible-posts by Britain First can be understood as part of the history of using Christian scripture to perform national identity. I argue that the kind of Bible that features in the social media posts of Britain First is supposed to feel good, not necessarily as textual content but as a source of national sentiment that feeds on national and cultural pride in an anti-Islamic Christian “us.” Despite appearing negligent and benign, then, the Bible-use of Britain First is evidence of the potency of scripture in the political arena, particularly as an affective archive tied to the nation.
It is imperative to understand these daily Bible-posts within broader European far-right tendencies to invoke religion to emphasize essential differences in order to mask the racist division of people into native insiders and foreign outsiders. What contemporary far-right groups across Europe share is an anti-Muslim stance, frequently propped up by a defense of Christian identity and culture. Golding’s allegedly brand-new Bible was a King James version. In the history of creating national—often state-sponsored and state-sanctioned—Bibles in the vernacular, these Bibles can be seen as majoritarian artifacts made accessible for the people of a nation. National Bibles can be treasured books by a majority of the population without that requiring that they necessarily be exclusive or exclusionary. But national Bibles can function, as Marianne Kartzow Bjelland and Karin Neutel have argued, to defend and protect a majoritarian “we” in the face of a changing religious landscape that either implicitly or explicitly excludes minorities from the “we” in the public sphere. Expressing the need to protect the Christian nation and peppering their social media with daily Bible-posts can be a way for Britain First of fostering the “we” that are imagined as native to Britain.
Britain First is not peculiar in this way. In fact, beyond the nation-state, the Bible has long been celebrated as a foundation for “western civilization”. As Jonathan Sheehan has so persuasively shown, the Enlightenment period in Europe produced a dominant conception of the Bible as an icon of cultural heritage in the West. Sheehan suggests that the near-universal admittance of the cultural relevance of the Bible today—from academics to jurists, from the devout to doubters—is a sign of the prevalence of this Enlightenment legacy. Scholars have demonstrated how the idea of the Bible as a foundation for western culture has fuelled the belief that the Bible is inherently more democratic than the Qur’an, thus becoming a mode of articulating cultural superiority.
The style and format of the Bible-posts are not insignificant. Britain First presents a bite-size Bible as easily shareable content on social media, made up of short verses against an innocuously pretty image. These posts fit into recent social media trends when it comes to “feel-good” content. Peter Phillips has characterized this shift from propositional content to the therapeutic, to fit the therapeutically inclined ethos of social media. Scholars have discussed the exponential growth of “bite-size” content on social media. Much of this bite-size content is centred on positive thinking in the shape of inspirational quotes and memes, aphorisms, or motivational mottos that are superimposed on an aesthetically pleasing image. Tom de Bruin comments on the way biblical verses and bits of text are frequently superimposed on images and shared online; this does not necessarily reflect a preoccupation with religion or theology, but are signs of the “continuing value of the Bible as cultural object” (145). “The addition of images primes the audience to receive the text in a certain way” and this impacts the particular affective impact of the bite-size Bible (149).
We might understand the clouds, mountains, and leafy backgrounds to the biblical verses shared by Britain First as a way of packaging the Bible as a benign product. Considering the way right-wing populist and far-right movements (including Britain First) continuously present Islam as threatening, the Qur’an as dangerous, and Muslims as criminals and terrorists, the Bible becomes a point of pride and source of positivity for the Christian nations that purportedly need defending. The benign Bible imagery is problematic in that it masks violent biblical content and racist deployments of the Bible. It adds to a cultural amnesia of the biblical archive as anything but edifice and source of slogans for nations and civilizations. The sharper edges of critique and calls for justice that are part of historical and contemporary Bible-use should not be forgotten. Focusing on the enslaved Egyptian figure of Hagar, Nyasha Junior, for instance, has demonstrated how Black Hagar has been imagined by African-Americans, feminists, and womanists to counter perceptions of a White Bible. Yvonne Sherwood has disrupted bland references of the “Abrahamic” that serve to bolster the biblical foundations of the western world by speaking instead of the “Hagaramic”. As Sherwood puts it, in the context of “the ever more militant policing of European and American borders and identities, the Hagaramic evokes all the sans-papiers, Gastarbeiters, and ‘immigrant’ (?) religions, suing for citizenship and status” (466).
For a group such as Britain First, sharing innocuous Bible-posts can be a way of posing as culturally respectable, while simultaneously linking followers to more extreme content. Scholars have studied the way Britain First used its Facebook page in this way to include Islamophobic content side by side with posts about the British royal family, or photos of cats and castles. The sharing of biblical verses on social media, then, should be seen as part of the attempt to hold up Islam as other in relation to a Christian English nation. In the case of Britain First, the packaging of the Bible as feel-good mottos and benign daily greetings on aesthetically pleasing backgrounds stands in stark contrast with a persistent fear-mongering about a threatening and violent Islam. The potency of the Bible in the political arena is capitalized on to affectively stir up pride in a Christian nation while simultaneously stirring up hatred and fear of what is excluded from this Christian nation. As such, this Bible-use continues the pernicious clash of cultures discourse that has become so pervasive in Europe. These are not the only capacities Bibles have to affect and be affected, though. Bibles, biblical figures and stories have been used also to engender solidarity, disrupt borders, prompt compassion, and reimagine justice in ways that are anything but benign or innocuous.
