Harnessing Chaos: The Bible in English Political Discourse since 1968

Description

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Harnessing Chaos: The Bible in English Political Discourse Since 1968 (2014) looked at the shifts in political understandings of the Bible in the aftermath of the social and economic changes of the 1960s. The book examined the decline of the Radical bible (i.e. the Bible roughly equated with socialism) in parliamentary politics and the victory of (a modified form of) Thatcher's re-reading of the Liberal Bible tradition, which equated the Bible with rule of law, democracy and tolerance. This showed how Thatcher's Bible was developed by politicians and the significance of Tony Blair's socially liberal qualifications, as well as the Radical Bible's survival outside Parliament and against the backdrop of emerging Thatcherism. The new, revised edition of Harnessing Chaos includes an additional chapter/postscript on some of the remarkable and unexpected uses of the Bible that happened since 2014. These include David Cameron giving a number of key speeches which intensified Thatcher's Bible, particularly in his justification of his most controversial policy decisions surrounding foodbanks, austerity and ISIS, Ed Miliband engaging with Russell Brand's Radical Bible, and the unpredicted emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, which has seen him and his close allies explicitly use the Radical Bible, in direct disagreement with Thatcher, in his first major speeches. These developments have been, in varying degrees, unpredictable but also vital to understanding the fate of the Bible in contemporary English politics.

James G. Crossley is Professor at the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St Mary's University, UK.

James Crossley is not only an exegete of biblical texts, but an exegete of exegesis - that is, concerned with the ways in which the construal of 'religion' in neoliberal political theory has had a profound impact on the reading and use of the Bible. Taking England since 1968 as his focus, Crossley offers an incisive analysis of how the Bible has been implicated in political discourse and how its role as a supposed touchstone of shared values has been invoked variously in support of the State's role in the welfare of its citizens, the war on the British labour movement, and the political construct of "True Religion" in the "War on Terror." This is required reading for anyone who thinks that biblical exegesis is a historically neutral and purely antiquarian project. * John Kloppenborg, University of Toronto, Canada * Underneath the secular skin of our political self-understandings, behind the back of the career representatives of our religious institutions, there is an ongoing political war to manage and manipulate the empathy, outrage, and even violence of biblical traditions. In a richly detailed and engagingly written book, James Crossley uncovers since 1968 a generally unrecognized public struggle for the political hearts and minds of Britain. Crossley is our shrewdest and most challenging analyst of the biblical networks still operative in the soul of English politics. The new paperback edition includes updating material about David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, and Russell Brand. Crossley shows how their recent pronouncements fit squarely in an English tradition of struggle for a kind of divinity management of the political. * Ward Blanton, University of Kent, UK *