Abstract
[...]our panel at the Conference on Faith and History in October 2018, I doubt I had spent much time thinking about religious sources per se, that is, religious sources as a distinct category with their own peculiarities and problems that demand a distinct approach or at least a certain caution to handle them well. In America (not uniquely but perhaps especially) we have long experience with sermons that sound more like moral philosophy or political speeches than homilies, and we have long experience with "secular" speeches that not only sound like sermons and operate in the prophetic mode but quote a lot of scripture and mimic the rhetoric and cadences of the King James Version of the Bible. [...]I have also learned to take seriously Oakeshott's problem of "survivals." Consider James Byrd's widely praised book, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution.4 Byrd undertook a massive project to assemble sermons from the late eighteenth century in order to understand how patriots (mostly preachers) used the Bible to justify the war, define the meaning of their cause, and characterize colonial resistance and the British enemy.