Scripture and Secularism

Funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation

The fact that the Bible has had an impact on European culture is rarely disputed. Yet it is often unclear how interpretations of the Bible become influential. This project is a reception history inquiry into the ways the Bible has been seen as supportive of, and even foundational for, ideas and ideologies of secular Europe, since 1945. At the same time, this project questions notions of ‘secularity’ by investigating the continued use of biblical motifs and texts in modern contexts and publics that are usually considered secular.  Politicians invoke biblical texts, as do political philosophers and theorists drawing on the Bible. The Bible appears in a range of settings and different media, often to prop up a diversity of political views, or to signify cultural heritage and national traditions. 

The project focus is mainly on European contexts. However, it also includes comparative work between the so-called global North and the global South, to clarify the way “Europe” cannot be understood as an isolated or natural entity.

The team of researchers involved in this project shed light on how particular parts of the Bible are remembered and repeated in discourses about Europe, laying bare the processes of interpretation that result in – often unquestioned – assumptions about Europe. One example is the way “the Bible” is held up as a foundation for “our democratic European values”. Such assumptions have often contributed to the construction of the idea of “the religious Other”, resulting in the normalization of forms of Islamophobia as well as the re-emergence of older forms of antisemitism embedded in Europe’s history. 

Scrutinizing how the Bible becomes seen as a foundation for the ‘secular’ and in turn how the ‘secular’ is complicated by continued Bible-use in so-called secular spaces, can also, then, become a step forward in critically and creatively reassembling understandings of the Bible and its legacies for Europe. 

The team of researchers in the Scripture and Secularism project, led by Dr. Hannah Strømmen, include Samuel Auler, Dr Hanna Liljefors, and Dr Frida Mannerfelt. 

The project is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (2022-2027).