Back to the Bible: Turning Your Life Around with God's Word

Kroll preaches to the choir in this diatribe about an alleged decline of both American biblical literacy and our society. He argues that while early European settlers knew the Bible and lived by its principles, Americans such as Horace Mann circumscribed Christianity's role as the nation's civil religion, and the result has been ""Amoral education. Anti-biblical educators. Undereducated students... [and] the tragedies in Paducah, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Littleton, Colorado, and many other communities."" While it may not concern those who share his ideas, Kroll's arguments are riddled with unsupported cause-and-effect assertions, caricatures and false dilemmas. For example, he claims that postmodernism (an umbrella term for his caricature of liberals and leftists) causes biblical illiteracy, and vice versa--his underlying assumption being that improved biblical literacy would certainly lead to universal embrace of his ultraconservative politics. His tone often degenerates to malicious sarcasm; after an out-of-context quotation of an ideological enemy, he exclaims, ""I think I'm going to be sick!"" For a book that harps so incessantly on education, this one contains some glaring factual errors about history and current affairs. The last few chapters offer genuinely helpful advice about how to study the Bible inductively, but it's too little, too late. Incisive evangelical critiques of postmodernism do exist (especially Roger Lundin's Culture of Interpretation), but they are thoughtfully written explorations, not invective masquerading as a friendly, plainspoken invitation to come back to the Bible. (Aug.)