David Dault, a professor of Christian spirituality at Loyola University Chicago, is bridging social critique with biblical study by looking at how people interpret, use, brand, and weaponize the Bible in The Accessorized Bible (Yale, Jan.). He demonstrates how the Bible, as a material object, has bolstered identities and positions of power, raising questions about who benefits from specific interpretations and who is excluded.

What do you mean by the “accessorized” Bible?

Part of the book's concept is looking at the way that we use the Bible to accessorize our identities and our lifestyles, but also at the ways in which the Bible is an accessory to our violence and an accessory to the harm that we continually seem to think that we are authorized to do to one another.

You urge readers to change their perspective of the Bible, challenging them to focus on the book itself. You write, “My task is to talk about the objects we call bibles, not The Bible.” Can you say more about this?

We have in front of us a book that we call the Bible. We call this book scripture, and different communities will look at different versions of this book and will highlight different aspects of the book. But, in each of these cases, the community is imagining somehow that it just sees through the book to some kind of truth behind it, whether it's the will of God or the history around Jesus Christ or the events of the Old Testament. I keep saying "the object we call a Bible" to interrupt that process and continually call the readers’ attention not to what we imagine is behind the book, but rather to the book itself, and to concentrate there.

Why is it so important to look at what the Bible text means as an object in history, politics, and society, especially in our current cultural moment?

Because of the language of the Bible. Ask any trans person or ask any woman why it’s important to look at the language. Ask any person who has been told by this country they’re a threat for simply existing—the immigrant, the childless woman, the orphan. You can go through the categories in the Old Testament and see all the people that currently are being defined as threats to a certain imagined version of American life. And you can find the authorization for that in the Bible, as well as the authorization for the protection of these people in the Bible. It is important for us to be focusing on the object—the language—because these decisions that we keep imagining happen somewhere else are very much in our control and are very much having real material effects on the abilities of certain populations to survive, to thrive, and even to live. So, the most important questions that you can ask from any book are: who gets to live and who gets to die?

Your book explores how the physical form or presentation of a Bible has shaped history in significant ways. What is a modern example of Bibles shaping things like ethics, culture, or politics?

We can think of a place where a Bible shows up but is not being read. In the first administration of President Donald Trump, tear gas was used to clear out the area in front of a church near the White House. And then Donald Trump arrived in that space and held up a Bible. In the name of this book, and in the name of a certain type of public Christianity, he literally cleared out Christians who were protesting him for the sake of, I don't know, a photo op. In this case, we have the erasure of actual Christians who are there physically in the space, in the name of a kind of abstracted Christianity, in the name of a kind of abstracted biblical interpretation.

The final chapter in the book calls for a radically inclusive way of interpreting biblical texts—one that has implications for churches and other institutions that authorize those readings. You’ve said writing it scared you. What felt risky about it?

As a theologian, I am an institutionalist, and it is my job to support the institutions of the church. Nevertheless, in writing that final chapter, there is the dilemma: do we break bodies to preserve institutions, or do we finally allow ourselves to break our institutions to preserve the vulnerable bodies that are trapped within them? I made the choice to move in the latter direction and to try and explore and invite Bible readers to explore what that might mean, to try new ways of reading and interpreting the language.

What is the #1 most important thing you want readers to learn from The Accessorized Bible?

That a book can’t love for you. We must take the responsibility to love our neighbor ourselves. We’ve been deferring that for far too long.