Understanding texts

Reading Dr. Byrd’s book raised some interesting questions for me about how we are to understand people’s relationships with text.  As we can see in Revolutionary America, as well as throughout history in general, people can use religious texts to argue a variety of different viewpoints.  This has been said so often that it has become a truism.  In the case of the Revolution, both patriots and loyalists alike pointed to their favorite Biblical passages in order to justify their stance.  In this way, text could turn into a rhetorical tool: Thomas Paine, for instance, a radical known for his contempt of scripture, used religious arguments in his own favor, employing them as tools without necessarily believing them.

However, Dr. Byrd’s book suggests that to write off the colonists’ use of scripture as a mere tool to justify already-held beliefs would be a mistake: indeed, it would ignore the deep connections that many colonists felt to the Bible: “For them, the Bible was not a distant, ancient text, it was an engaging, universal drama, relevant and realistic” (9).  Instead, Biblical texts acted as a lens through which colonists understood the war.  In Dr. Byrd’s telling, then, ideas do matter.  As we saw earlier in Jill Lepore’s work, texts can give meaning to the fighting of war. 

While I am readily convinced that ideas do matter, that religious texts can give meaning to people’s experiences, it becomes more difficult when we try to pinpoint how this happens. At the heart of this question seems to be a fundamental tension between ideas and delivery.  Were colonists convinced by the ideas presented in sermons, or did they imbibe a more abstract sort of sensibility that linked Protestantism, patriotism, and republicanism? Dr. Byrd, for example, points to the historiographic debate over the role of revivals.  Did revivals make intellectual contributions that underpinned the Revolution, or were they act more as breeding grounds of a new sensibility, an egalitarian spirit that infused the attending crowds with religious and patriotic zeal?

Perhaps to start to understand these questions, we have to historicize what we mean by texts.  For modern readers, separating the ideas from the delivery seems easy, but is it possible to do the same thing for a sermon, the very form of which combines ideas and delivery in order to reach its audience?