Scripture & Secularism

mapping the impact of the Bible on the secular world

The fact that the Bible has had an impact on European culture is rarely disputed.
Yet it is often unclear how interpretations of the Bible become influential.

This project is a reception history inquiry into the ways the Bible has been seen as supportive of, and even foundational for, ideas and ideologies of secular Europe.

The project

Focusing on European contexts, the project also includes comparative work between the so-called global North and the global South, to clarify the way “Europe” cannot be understood as an isolated or natural entity. 

The team of researchers involved in this project shed light on how particular parts of the Bible are remembered and repeated in discourses about Europe, laying bare the processes of interpretation that result in – often unquestioned – assumptions about Europe. 

Scrutinizing how the Bible becomes seen as a foundation for the ‘secular’ and in turn how the ‘secular’ is complicated by continued Bible-use in so-called secular spaces, can also, then, become a step forward in critically and creatively reassembling understandings of the Bible and its legacies for Europe.  

The Scripture and Secularism project is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

Click here to know more about the researchers involved in the project.

S&S blog