In conversation with David Dault

David Dault teaches at Loyola University Chicago’s Institute of Pastoral Studies and is executive producer and host of “Things Not Seen: Conversations About Culture and Faith.” It was a joy to discuss his new book The Accessorized Bible and to indulge our shared passions for theology, James Baldwin and pop culture.  

 

Greg Garrett: You are so much smarter than I am on so many different things, the concepts and the theory you’re pulling together. You did pull in enough story and pop culture that I’m able to follow along. But I wonder if you could help my readers understand the project for The Accessorized Bible?

David Dault: Well, first of all, thank you for the generosity of that question. And on the way to that, let me also say that your work on James Baldwin and our conversations about James Baldwin were so important to my thinking about this book. And so I’m grateful for your kind words. I want to reflect them back to you.

This was not the book Yale thought they were contracting, and it was not the book I thought I was writing. We started this process more than a decade ago, and this was at the time when there were still big-box bookstores like Borders, and you could go to the Bible section and you could see this kind of bumper crop of all these different varieties of Bibles.

We all thought I was going to be writing a book on weird Bibles and the kind of diversity of them. But I kept coming back to them and saying I think there’s a bigger, more important story here, and that is the ethics of how we read the Bible. Not just all these wild weird Bibles, but what is it when we actually put the book in our hands, what happens to us that we think somehow this book is now commanding us to go out and kill people or go out and heal people.

GG:  The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is arguing with the potentate of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Leo, about Matthew 25 and what Jesus’ moral teachings actually are. I wonder if your book could tell us a little bit about the Bibles they are invoking and maybe help us to some understanding about this controversy.

DD: What a timely and heartbreaking question. The thing I want to make sure your readers understand, and the thing I want to make sure my readers understand, is that The Accessorized Bible is fundamentally not a book about Bibles, even though it’s got Bible in the title, but it has everything to do with who we are and how we morally configure ourselves in relationship to this book.

If we think the answer for Speaker Johnson going up against Pope Leo is, well, he just needs a better Bible, or he needs to read the Bible better, there’s a missed moment there that needs to be named. Where I go with this in the book is an extended meditation on a 1979 film by Carl Reiner called The Jerk, which stars Steve Martin. There’s a point where he’s working at a gas station and he gets really excited because the new phone books are out and his name is in the phone book. And he’s like, I am somebody now, I’m in the phone book.

The very next scene, we cut to an interior shot, we see over the shoulder, somebody’s just opening the same phone book at random and putting their finger down on a random name. And it’s the character named Navin R. Johnson, at which point he says, “Die, Navin R. Johnson.” And so what’s happening here is this particular character who’s referred to in the credits as “The Madman.” This character is using a telephone book as a moral document to decide who gets to live and who gets to die.

What I try to pull out from that in my book is that any book can be read this way. You can open a book and immediately say, “This book is commanding me to kill this person for X reason,” or “This book is commanding me to support the thriving of this person for X reason.” It has nothing to do with the book, and it has everything to do with the moral comportment of the person reading it.

“Mike Johnson has a soul sickness that he needs to get past because he can’t figure out love.”

A person who is prepared to support the life and flourishing of someone is going to read that book as if they should fall in love with the people around them. It’s not about working on a better book for Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson has a soul sickness that he needs to get past because he can’t figure out love.

GG: Could you speak a little bit about how religious authority transfers down to the people who are reading these phone books? I’m not Catholic, but I’m going to listen to the pope.

DD: Yeah. Well, I am Catholic and I do listen to the pope. When we look at the friction that is going on between Vice President JD Vance, who is a Catholic, and the pope, we have precedent for this actually in Pope Francis trying to revise the moral teaching on the death penalty.

The moral teaching on the death penalty was not well received by many American bishops who, even though they received the text, refused to receive the spirit, and they used their canonical office as bishops to reinterpret what the pope was clearly saying for their particular flocks. Right now, we’re in a position thanks to social and other kinds of media that people can very much bishop shop. I can find a new pope from a distance who then can speak to my condition. So, it’s nothing new to go shopping for the interpretation you like the best or the preacher who gives you the interpretation you like the best.

I really am trying to get the reader to release themselves from the idea that they are beholden to the book in a particular way. And this is part of all of the weird language I use, which is trying constantly to reignite the idea that I’m not looking through the Bible to some reality beyond it, but I’m literally looking at an object in my hands, which is why I keep referring to things like the object we call the Bible.

GG: “Material” is a word you use often, and it is so useful.

DD: When we talk about someone like Speaker Mike Johnson, I don’t just want to know how he’s reading the Bible. I want to know what Bible he’s reading and who’s coming alongside him. What is his community of readers? I want to ground it in those ways because we never ever get this kind of magical, transparent connection between us and the heavenly meaning.

In the word I use oftentimes, the book is political. By that I mean we are literally working with others to construct our meaning of this text. What is the reasonable reading of this text? And our political machinations are going to yield readings that are very different from readings from 200 years ago and from 2,000 years ago. So we have to be conscious of those mechanisms. But those are the mechanisms that disappear completely. There’s a Sherlock Holmes quote: The most obvious thing is oftentimes the most overlooked.

GG: Why write about James Baldwin, and why the particular incident you bring forward as the moment in his life when after leaving the pulpit, he stepped back in and said, “It is time for me to be moral”?

DD: Witness. I imagine I’m speaking for both of us when I say it has been my experience over the past decade, where I will have a good theological or moral idea and I will come to find a few weeks or a few months later that James Baldwin already has written an essay about it and a really good essay.

I have the advantage of having had the chance to teach at a historically Black college down in Nashville called American Baptist College. And my students taught me a lot about what it is to do theology and what it means to not have things be abstract, but instead to have things be, again, material, concrete. We can’t just talk about the abstract improvement of the poor or the vulnerable, but we’re talking about the material improvement of the poor and the vulnerable. So that’s a backdrop for all this. The idea of moral seriousness comes to me from my friend and colleague, a fellow from Nashville by the name of David Dark, who teaches at Belmont University.

He oftentimes will use this phrase, and he pointed me toward that Hannah Arendt quote that education is where you decide you love the world enough to take responsibility for it. He said that’s his starting point for answering the question about what moral seriousness is.

I’m still trying to figure out what this phrase means, but it has become a very important phrase for my teaching, for my interacting with people. And one of the ways I would shorthand the idea of moral seriousness is when I am engaging with you, I can say at each point that I am trying to be available and fully present in my interaction with you. I’m not trying to use what the Frankfurt School would call instrumental reason. I’m not trying to be a car salesman who feigns empathy in order to get on your side. I’m trying to have a kind of genuineness in my relations to people. The Jesuits would say, I’m trying to deal with whole persons as a whole person.

I was looking for a way to make this palpable in that story of James Baldwin, and in my conversation with you from a few years ago, you also recounted this story. It’s when James Baldwin is safe in Paris, he’s thousands of miles away from home. He reports seeing (there is some question about the timeline of this and what he actually saw), but he later said he saw a picture on the front page of a Parisian newspaper of Dorothy Counts, one of the Little Rock Nine, sort of there in the midst with people jeering around her. And he has this phrase that ends, “And some one of us should have been there with her.”

It seemed like that was the shorthand, the handle I was looking for because I can’t live with my comfort anymore. I can’t feel safe in my comfort anymore. It’s like, what do they say when you try and take too much manna and it turns to ash in your pockets and it turns to ash in your mouth?

It’s like Baldwin couldn’t stay with his safety. He was compelled to go back. And to me, that spoke to what I was trying to get at in this idea of moral seriousness.

I have an acquaintance who is a member of the Sikh religion. Your readers may know that Sikhs wear a particular type of headgear. One time we were at a conference and we were all talking and somebody asked him why, what was the deal with the turban. And his response was, “I wear this so when people are in danger, they know they can run to me and they will be protected.” And I think about that in terms of moral seriousness because that was Baldwin’s response. Some one of us should have been there with her. He needed to go so he could stand between the danger and her.

That’s like a Christian who is reading the Bible is such a way that they fall in love with everyone around them. That seems to me the outcome we’re looking for. It’s not the outcome we’re getting. But it seems to be the standard we’re looking for.

 

Greg Garrett is an award-winning professor at Baylor University, where he is the Carole McDaniel Hanks Professor of Literature and Culture. One of America’s leading voices on religion and culture, he is the author of 30 books, most recently the novel Bastille Day and The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity. He is currently administering a major research grant on racism from the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation and finishing a book on racist mythologies for Oxford University Press. Greg is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and Honorary Canon Theologian at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.