Reclaiming Our Religious Roots in a Time of National Discernment: Suggestions for Enhancing the Impact of <i>The Progressives' Bible</i>

THE PROGRESSIVES' BIBLE: HOW SCRIPTURAL INTERPRETATION BUILT A MORE JUST AMERICA. By Claudia Setzer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2024. Pp. xviii+206. $29.00. Claudia Setzer's book The Progressives' Bible skillfully surveys the history of biblical interpretations that informed activist changemakers in American society and politics from the nineteenth century until today. The first four chapters examine how men and women leading four important and overlapping movements—the abolition of slavery, women's rights, temperance, and civil rights—drew inspiration, strength, and clarity for their causes through their readings of the Bible. The book mainly explores the religious roots of some early representatives of these social justice movements in the United States, an emphasis that crescendos in the fifth chapter to discuss how biblical interpretations continue to motivate leaders of several contemporary faith-based Jewish and Christian social justice organizations. While this topic is clear enough from the title and introduction, as well as in the carefully planned structure of the work, it appears to this reader that the actual thesis, the contestable claim that motivates the whole line of argumentation, is not fully unpacked until near the end of the volume. It is there that Setzer states: “Religious voices have always been part of our national narrative . . . and progressive religious voices need to be heard . . . Progressive voices need to strive for more influence” (132). She elaborates more on this when she concludes that: “reclaiming the religious roots of some progressive movements can produce depth, understanding, and spiritual stamina and counter the image that the Bible in the public square was always a weapon used to ward off social change” (155). One key word for me in this statement is the active verb “reclaiming,” meaning that the book is not simply an historical description of how religious Progressives in the United States engaged with biblical readings throughout the last century and a half—which would be an interesting history in and of itself. Rather, the function of the examination is to inform and inspire today's Progressives, to create “understanding and spiritual stamina” and what Setzer calls “a hedge against despair” (132). As the implications of the US presidential election become clearer for a host of vulnerable groups and for the climate of the planet, there is plenty of despair to go around, needing plenty of hedges! The second critical part of Setzer's statement is that she wishes to equip Progressives with biblical arguments for their sociopolitical causes and thus “counter the image that the Bible. . . was always a weapon used to ward off social change” (155). Here, she presumes rather than explains why such a counternarrative is necessary, but the “elephant in the room” is that the group today in the United States that most often invokes the Bible in the public square is the evangelical Republican Right, which claims biblical justifications for conservative policy positions that Progressives may see as being in tension with social justice concerns (e.g., equity, care, and protection for vulnerable and historically disenfranchised groups). Hence, while it may not be the main aim of the book, it appears that Setzer hopes to help redress an imbalance of religious political discourse by contributing tools from history and biblical studies to Progressives, who may well be inspired by this reclaimed history. This leveling of the biblically informed political playing field seems to be what she has in mind when she states in the introduction that “no one owns the Bible or holds the exclusive key to its interpretation” (xviii), a sentiment that also concludes her argument, as she states: “no one owns the Bible nor can say what it really means” (159). Setzer's perceptive project first takes meaningful steps toward this goal by means of her lively, compelling, and accessible writing. The beginning of each chapter engages readers with riveting stories that convey the relevance of the scholarly project to past and present events in American society. Writing with scholarly nuance, yet in a way that still fosters understanding for a wider audience, is a vital skill that is too often absent in academia. This can sometimes also prove to be difficult for us biblical scholars, who spend our time pondering ancient languages, employing niche methodologies, and constructing detailed point-by-point exegeses that remain puzzling to most nonexperts. Arguably, though, the very future of our discipline rests on our ability to communicate the relevance of biblical scholarship to public audiences and, most of all, to students. Setzer is to be applauded for walking into this space so adeptly. I do, however, wish to offer two critiques that are aimed not at the substance and content of the project itself, which I think is more valuable than ever, but rather at certain omissions that I hope can still be addressed one way or another to secure the book's impact in this present moment of US history. The first omission concerns basic dates and a few more elementary explanations of historical events. The history of progressivism that Setzer imparts ought to be known widely in our country, and undergraduate students could benefit greatly from studying this expert handling of figures who have so profoundly shaped American identity and freedoms. Americans' ignorance of our own history has been well documented, for instance, with less than a quarter of Americans surveyed being able to state accurately why the colonists fought the British (Institute for Citizens and Scholars 2018). Many believe the erosion of public education was accelerated when the required CCSS or common core state standards (or, in Virginia, the SOLs or Standards of Learning) reduced an emphasis on critical inquiry and problem-solving in favor of the memorization of decontextualized facts (McArdle 2014). COVID-19 then disrupted college students' academic experience even further (Reyes-Portillo et al. 2022). Moreover, the history of disenfranchised groups has been under assault in recent years at the primary and secondary levels, for example, with Florida banning the teaching of AP African American History and Virginia instituting a hotline for the public to report teachers that make students feel “uncomfortable” when teaching about slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, colonialism, or the inequity of women's rights. Thus, being clear-eyed about the knowledge gaps that many college freshmen are bringing into the classroom, gaps that are so much more pronounced in the public sphere, I would like to see the addition of basic historical dating and timelines for every figure or historical event that Setzer mentions. Without overly simplifying her argument, the inclusion of dates for the enslavement of Africans, Reconstruction, and the introduction of German critical scholarship, for example, could help to make a meticulous academic work such as Setzer's even more impactful, and perhaps this could still be provided in some fashion as a supplement to the book. Similarly, it sometimes also feels like Setzer is assuming her audience is familiar with the Bible or even with biblical study approaches, such as when she mentions Esther, Paul, Sarah, or Hagar without explanation or in-text citations (although the endnotes convey good information). However, many, if not most, of the progressive readers for whom Setzer is reaching are often unfamiliar with the Bible, and thus, providing in-text citations of every biblical reference and some brief context would be very valuable. This recommendation is even more applicable for the wider American and international publics, which possess members who are woefully illiterate in the Bible save for a few key passages that pundits keep highlighting in the public square. Given the potential for the volume's influence, I believe that providing consistent historical timelines, dates for figures and events, one-sentence explanations of technical terms, and in-text citations for every biblical passage is an essential corrective that could benefit the Progressive agenda in general. As the last presidential election has demonstrated, broad swaths of the American public feel that Progressives are out of touch with their concerns and manner of communicating, which is why Progressivism has been accused of assuming moral correctness and of speaking with insider jargon. According to both her Introduction and Conclusion, Setzer is writing to inspire and empower Progressives, but if this only occurs in an echo chamber in which her progressive readers are only equipped to speak to other Progressives in the know, and if they also need to have some depth in biblical literacy, then little change will result. Thus, I would recommend to Setzer that she has a golden opportunity to reach a broader group of students and members of the general public, many of whom may not consider themselves to be “Progressives” (xviii, 159), who might be informed and inspired by reading her carefully researched work. While I obviously believe that Setzer's work is more needed than ever, from my boots-on-the-ground perspective as a teacher and peacebuilder across interfaith and party lines, I wish that she did not automatically equate “Progressivism” with “social justice” and “goodness.” The perpetually close tie in the popular vote for “liberal” vs. “conservative” parties at the national level, and the continued hardening of the right into acceptance of increasingly radical views on social issues, means that the case must be continually and repeatedly made by Progressives, and never assumed, that the abolition of slavery, advocating for women's equal rights, and direct actions that broke US law to secure better civil rights were the best course of action in our nation's history. The implicit assumptions must become explicit arguments. This is all the more the case when Setzer moves from the first part of the book to the closing chapter, as we see what historically progressive movements look like when extrapolated forward to the contemporary period. As I write this review, President Trump has just put all federal employees associated with DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) programs on administrative leave, ordering all DEIA programs to be terminated in sixty days. Several executive orders target programs aimed to promote inclusion in federal workplaces by recruiting, supporting, and protecting those from minoritized groups, including federal workers with disabilities, reversing a civil-rights-era executive order that made it illegal for federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin when hiring, and later amended to prevent discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (Fitzgerald et al. 2025). Clearly, even civil rights laws signed under President Lyndon B. Johnson are being eroded, politicized, and hotly contested in a post-factual era, which is why I believe Setzer should not simply assume the rightness of the causes she analyzes. Thus, I'd like to see her argue from a position of making the case that the progressive social movements she reviews were the ethical and beneficial courses of action based on evidence rather than assuming their value is obvious. As for the major content of her argument, I was riveted by Setzer's analysis, and I think that one of the most valuable parts of this work is that it goes beyond the conventional historical overviews that mention the use of the Bible in these pivotal American movements for the abolition of slavery, women's rights, temperance, and civil rights, without any attention to the modes of biblical interpretation. What sets Setzer's work aside from other historical treatments is precisely that, as a biblical scholar, Setzer is able to fully recognize the methods of interpretation that the early changemakers employed. I have never read a study that covered this so intentionally, which alone makes this a valuable resource to be treasured on my shelf of Bible in America volumes. For instance, Setzer explores the biblical rhetoric of the abolitionist trailblazer Angelina Grimké-Weld, who, with her sister Sarah Grimké, became the first women in the movement in 1836. Setzer also shows how Grimké-Weld, at that early phase, engaged in several of the methods that would become standard later in biblical studies. Setzer notes that in this early period, Weld not only accepted the argument, current in abolitionist circles, that the Hebrew-and-Greek-word-translated “slave” can also mean “servant,” she further conducted a kind of and reading of US of the nineteenth century and the biblical with the biblical much for their that, for instance, and Sarah did not as the who in the of and they did not their as a that was to if the did not produce a that were with the as another of the on the and would go in the with their as well as when the while at the for the other any that the biblical of which some of the rights, including to also used biblical passages like a her to from and who all broke such as the of to a century the arguments of in a from there who would to out the from the biblical figures who laws . . . 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