"I'm Joseph, I'm from Dallas, Texas, and how you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you," said Joseph Dearing to the candidates at last Wednesday's YouTube/CNN Republican debate. "Do you believe every word of this book?"
Dearing raised up a copy of the King James version of the Bible to the camera, displaying the title prominently to the candidates and the audience.
"And I mean specifically this book that I am holding in my hand," he said. "Do you believe this book?"
It should surprise no one who pays attention to contemporary politics that such a stark pass/fail question would be asked of this year's Republican presidential candidates. Over the past decade, the evangelical Christian right has become an increasingly key constituency of the modern Republican party, embracing George W. Bush as one of their own in both the 2000 and 2004 elections.
This primary season, however, evangelicals have increasingly scrambled to find a potentially winning candidate who meets all their criteria, such as an unflinching embrace of biblical literalism. Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the current front-runners, are both theologically suspect from many evangelicals' points of view and not surprisingly, neither candidate gave an unqualified "yes" to Dearing's question.
But rather than focusing on what biblical literalism means politically, it may be more interesting to ask why biblical literalism has become so important in recent years, to the evangelical community in particular, but also as a cultural issue. Why is a significant subset of a major American political party demanding fealty to a particular holy book, and why have corollary issues of biblical literalism, such as evolution versus so-called "intelligent design," taken a much higher profile in the past decade?
Interestingly enough, the answer has less to do with the larger issues of faith versus reason or science versus scripture, and more to do with the specific nature of modern Christian evangelicalism.
Consider that evangelical theology hews very closely to a few core points of the Bible: that God created man in his image, that man sinned and is fundamentally flawed, that God redeemed man by sacrificing his son Jesus Christ and that the most important thing a man or woman can do is accept Jesus as their savior.
Biblical literalism is fundamental to such a worldview. It is not sufficient to believe that Christ merely existed and that he was an exceptional human being, and it is not acceptable to believe that God may also work in ways outside of or beyond traditional Christian theology.
Evangelicals almost universally believe that the crucifixion happened exactly as laid out in the Bible and that it was every bit as much a historical event as Neil Armstrong on the moon or the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. And because their gospel is literally true, the most important truth of all, it must be spread to the entire world.
But take any of that literalism away - suggest that, for example, man was not created precisely in God's image, but was instead produced partially or entirely through the random process of evolution - and cracks of doubt begin to spread through the entire edifice of evangelical theology. If even one piece of the Bible is not true, then how certain can evangelicals be about the rest of it? And how can they proselytize to others when they're not absolutely certain of their own faith?
Therefore, to suggest that the Bible is not literally correct is to cast doubt on the narrative that accepting and spreading the word of Jesus Christ is the most important thing in life. And without that narrative, evangelicalism has no motivating force - it reduces to mainstream Christianity, slowly dissolving bedrock truths in an acid bath of critical historical and textual analysis.
And so, faced with a general public increasingly hostile to evangelicals and an increasingly non-Christian population, evangelicals grasp on to biblical literalism as a rock in a storm, demanding that their worldviews be shared by the person in the highest office in the country.
Unfortunately, the political trends do not seem to be going their way, and there's an excellent chance that, starting in 2008, it may be a long, long time before someone in the Oval Office answers "yes" to Joseph Dearing's question.
That being the case, it's up to Dearing to answer a question of his own: What will he say when the president of the United States answers his question by saying, "No, I do not believe literally in that book. What are you going to do about it?" Jones is an electrical and computer engineering graduate student.
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