Virginia Postrel writes today on the sad atrophy of great prose among modern megachurches and "contemporary Christian" culture:
After all, nobody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.Now I'm not a Christian, let alone an evangelical. If megachurches want to play bad-to-mediocre rock instead of great hymns, that's their business. But the spread of Christian pap does have spillovers, not the least of which is that devout Christian faith no longer brings with it a deep familiarity with what's actually in the Bible, as opposed to a few verses from the preacher's PowerPoint. Unless the person is over a certain age, Biblical literacy, when you do find it, rarely means acquaintance with great English. Forget theological or philosophical sophistication. I'd settle for the ability to comprehend complex sentences.
Throughout American history, Christian (largely Protestant) devotion has stretched people's minds and given them reason to think, if only within a closed system of belief. Religious practice has taught people to read, write, and speak. The rhythms and rhetoric of the Bible have given America its greatest political rhetoric, from Abraham Lincoln's to Martin Luther King's. Today's Christianity produces...George W. Bush.
The King James was always my favorite growing up, because of the language. When my grandmother said grace, she correctly conjugated the second-person singular, and if I recall correctly also alternated between "my/mine" and "thy/thine" before vowels. Deciphering the speech made learning my first foreign language much easier, and more trivially helped me win a Scrabble game on a challenge against "kine".
It wasn't until studying Hebrew in college that I realized that so much of the "poetry" of the KJV is due to use of Hebrew word order: Hebrew is VSO, which for some reason can convert sentences about administrative reorganization to beauty. And there arose in the land a new pharoah, who knew not Joseph.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at January 11, 2006 12:53 PM