Since the early 20th century, biblical inerrancy served fundamentalists as a theological litmus test. In the 1970s, conservative evangelical leaders declared a “Battle for the Bible” against both liberal Protestants and moderates in their own ranks. A crucial but understudied part of this theological consolidation and its legacy in the New Christian Right was the work of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI). From 1978 to 1986, the ICBI gathered evangelicals to sign the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy then Statements on Biblical Hermeneutics and Biblical Application and also helped sponsor the 1982 Congress on the Bible. The ICBI’s publications are important windows into American evangelicalism during its existence. Research into the participants in ICBI efforts and the ICBI archives offers further insights into evangelical theology, politics, and culture. These four papers are a first step toward expanding scholarly analysis of the ICBI and its impact on American evangelicalism.
This paper examines the conservative political influence of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI). The impetus for the organization came from missionary-turned-pop-intellectual Francis Schaeffer who insisted that American evangelicals had lost their commitment to both the inerrant Bible and the US Constitution that it allegedly inspired. Other politically-active evangelical leaders, and others abstained precisely because they saw the “political cast” of the ostensibly theological organization. Through its 1982 Congress on the Bible, the 1983 “Year of the Bible,” and its 1986 Statement on Biblical Application, the ICBI made its connection with the Reagan Revolution clear. Ultimately, the ICBI showed that evangelical biblicism was not separate from the emerging culture wars. Rather, a literalist theo-political hermeneutic of biblical and constitutional interpretation drove a much larger and more lasting fight over definitions of evangelicalism, religious liberty, and American law.
This paper will examine Conservative American Christians who believe that Biblical Inerrancy provides the moral defense for racism in several forms: African slavery, production of the Slave Bible, and the rejection of Critical Race Theory. These defenses are best observed in The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI), the views and agenda of Albert Mohler Jr former President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Richard Furman’s letter “Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population...”, and Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines that rejects Critical Race Theory.
Defense of American slavery, creation of the Slave Bible, and the contemporary rejection of Critical Race theory all stem from the controversial reality that Biblical Inerrancy is part of the same heritage that continues to demand Black inequality within ideal Conservative American Christian culture and society.
Since its modern development in the 1970s and 80s, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy has worked to protect inherited beliefs by minimizing and often demonizing alternative interpretations of scripture, presenting them as biblically subversive and thus necessarily erroneous. Utilizing new interviews with Beth Allison Barr (The Making of Biblical Womanhood, 2021) and Sarah Stankorb (Disobedient Women, 2023), this paper will tell one part of this much larger story, particularly how inerrancy has been weaponized to promote and protect a patriarchal theology of authority, submission, and abuse. Special attention will be paid to how inerrancy has been used to attack Barr, Stankorb, and others via social media, blogs, reviews, sermons, books, and threats of lawsuit. The weaponization of inerrancy is a lived reality for these and other authors, many of whom have dared offer a hermeneutic of risk that takes seriously our historical consciousness and thereby challenges inerrancy’s desire for certainty
Opposition to reproductive freedom can be understood as a symbolic masculinity that defends a particular religious tradition as well as the discursive economy of project 2025 Given the current political climate and the rise of evangelical restrictions to other’s freedoms through legislative action, understanding this symbolic masculinity is important both communally and for the academy. Leaning on the scholarly works of Butler, Cassino, Ammerman, and Primary source documents from the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, this paper advances the following claims. Reproductive freedom liberates women from their assumed participation in the “form” of the receptacle. Reproductive Freedom creates a sense of communal and personal crisis for evangelicals who affirm Biblical Inerrancy and Complementarianism. This sub-culture contains materializes the body through the perpetuation of “conversational plausibility structures” and a sexed economy grounded in a perpetuation of Plato’s receptacle strangely arising from an interpretation of the “inerrant” biblical text.