In 1982, amid the Reagan revolution and the rise of the new Christian Right, historians Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll co-edited The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (Oxford University Press). Though only one hundred ninety-one pages, this volume was a landmark for its broad cultural approach to the Bible's role in American history. Previous scholarship had largely failed to offer any critical assessment of scripture's functions in the life of the nation. Ironically, one reason for this scholarly neglect may have been the Bible's sheer omnipresence. As Perry Miller once remarked on the ubiquity of the Bible in the early republic: “Historians have as much difficulty taking cognizance of it as of the air people breathed” (Hatch and Noll, 6).

Thirty-five years later, the six hundred ninety-two-page reference work edited by Paul C. Gutjahr, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, represents a coming of age for the field that Hatch and Noll opened. Gutjahr, himself an important contributor to the new Bible historiography as author of An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford University Press, 1999), has assembled a stellar group of forty-four contributors hailing from a variety of specialties (history, religion, American studies, anthropology, sociology, theology, literature, education, and communication). Such interdisciplinary diversity is one of the distinguishing features of the newer scholarship represented by Gutjahr's volume, whose contributors employ their fields’ various methodologies (textual, hermeneutic, historical, ethnographic, rhetorical, material). Anthropologist James S. Bielo, for instance, draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork to analyze cultural production at the Ark Encounter, a $172 million replica of Noah's Ark that opened in Kentucky in 2016. Kristin Schwain relies on her expertise as an art historian to explore how different groups deployed “visual exegesis” of the Bible for moral instruction or cultural critique.

A second feature of the Gutjahr book is a move beyond an earlier focus on the Bible in politics and the public sphere. Soon after Hatch and Noll's volume appeared, President Reagan declared 1983 the Year of the Bible, following a request by Congress in October 1982. As Rebecca Barrett-Fox points out in her chapter on “The Bible and the Religious Right” in Gutjahr's collection, Reagan was appealing to a conservative base that felt that the Bible's role in the public sphere was under attack. Such wielding of the Bible as a political weapon by public figures has often overshadowed other uses of scripture in the culture. Though Gutjahr's essayists do an excellent job of covering the traditional “public” topics such as the Bible in law, politics, nationalism, war, and the like, the book also includes illuminating overviews of the Bible's function in other spheres, both public and private. Jeffrey Scholes, for example, considers the Bible and sports, including what the late commentator Frank DeFord dubbed “Sportianity” (the merger of sports culture with evangelical Christianity). John B. Weaver ponders the implications of digital culture for American Bible reading, while Seth Perry examines the cultural work done by Bible bindings and formats in how Americans experience scripture.

A third aspect of Gutjahr's volume, consistent with the recent historiography of American religion, is an expansion of pluralism in the telling of the national story. Though much scholarship on the Bible in America has understandably focused on Protestantism (founded as it was on the Reformation's dictum of sola scriptura), Gutjahr's volume decenters the old narrative. Included are chapters on Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians; on homegrown American traditions such as Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and Mormons; and on feminist, LGBT, and African-American interpretations of scripture. David Holland's incisive essay on the Latter-day Saints, for example, shows how deeply Mormonism reflected the Bible's own tension between universalism and particularity. Michael J. Gilmore dissects the hermeneutical practices of the Jehovah's Witnesses and also describes the distinctive features of their own New World Translation. Teresa J. Hornsby takes stock of LGBT interpretation as both a popular and academic phenomenon, understanding it as a new brand of liberation theology. Yet even as these contributions diversify the picture, other chapters shed new light on Protestants, both liberal and evangelical. Elesha Coffman recounts the perennial Bible revision efforts, and resultant Bible battles, among mainline Protestants. Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr. examine the durability of creationism (even in a new geocentric form that thumbs its nose at Galileo) among conservative Protestants.

Fourth and finally, Gutjahr's handbook balances insightful essays on “high” intellectual culture with innovative coverage of more popular culture. On the intellectual side, four essays (including one by Mark Noll) survey the history of biblical interpretation chronologically, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. On the popular side, Russell W. Dalton explores the history of American children's Bibles; Andrew T. Coates investigates retellings of scripture in graphic novels and comic books; Jason C. Bivins attends to the Bible in musical genres ranging from hymnody to rap; and William D. Romanowski looks at the Bible in cinema.

Though the full list of topics and contributors cannot be mentioned in this review, the chapters are uniformly helpful as tools for further study in that all include notes and bibliographies. Gutjahr also provides a useful historiographical introduction, delineating six strands of interpretation of the Bible in America and discussing important works under each. The only thing regrettable about the book is the price ($150); a paperback edition would be a welcome addition, especially for graduate students. Gutjahr's volume is truly a handbook that will, as he hopes, “serve as a foundation and a catalyst for future scholarship” (xxx). The book itself is testimony to the Bible's seeming inexhaustibility as a stimulus of culture.