Please see the following guest post from Nicholas Dion, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto and regular contributor over at The Religion Beat.
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I really can’t take the credit—or the blame, depending on your perspective—for what’s about to follow. My colleagues were sitting around a table one evening during a recent trip to Germany. I walked in late on the whole conversation, so I don’t even know where this came from or who had thought up the idea. But there it was: a Youtube video of Pastor Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, speaking about the King James Version translation of 1 Kings 16:11—“And it came to pass, when he began to reign, as soon as he sat on his throne, [that] he slew all the house of Baasha: he left him not one that pisseth against a wall, neither of his kinsfolks, nor of his friends.”
The shock factor is intended. Did God just say “piss”? Yup, he sure did. Not only that, but he does it six times in the entire KJV. But how dare we be offended? If God said it, it can’t be wrong. So that’s the first side of this story—a sort of radical sola scriptura. The Bible is all Christians have in the search for the divine. But translation complicates this. Only the KJV has retained the original phrase; all others, which sanitize the phrase “pissing against the wall” into something generic like “men,” distill the word of god (see here for parallel translations). The KJV is elevated as the only reliable translation. From this flows an essentialized masculinity: because God describes men as “those who piss against the wall,” he sets them apart from women. But only in the KJV. Those “other” translations lead men astray. So German men, who pee sitting down, clearly need more KJV. And so do those politicians who refuse “to piss against the wall” and lead; America is on its way to becoming Germany.
The Bible is clearly presented as the primary source of guidance for Christians, and control over biblical translation—as demonstrated by the emphasis on the KJV—becomes the pastor’s tool for shaping his congregation. There is absolutely no hint of a historical consciousness concerning the bible, the circumstances of its production, or the reliability of its content. What is clear, though, is the nod toward theocracy, the notion that politicians should lead according to the principles contained in the biblical text. And that would be almost as painful as watching the video.
