A few years ago, I was a teaching fellow at Boston University for an undergraduate course on the Bible. On the first day of the fall semester, the professor opened the class with a touch of drama. He walked in just as class was to begin, stood in silence at the front of the room, and waited for the students to turn their attention forward. Once they did, he looked, scanned the room and then, in perfect King’s English, recited the 23rd Psalm.
At the end, the professor allowed the psalm to hang in the air for a moment, then asked if anyone could say where the poem came from. We waited through several seconds of silence. “Anyone?” We sat through more awkward moments. Was this start-of-school nerves, or did these kids really not recognize one of the most famous psalms in Western civilization?
Pulp Fiction?
“Any ideas at all?” the professor pressed.
This time, one hand rose shyly. A girl gave her best guess. “From Coolio? …”
The professor shot a glance at me, his young graduate student who should know all things pop culture. I looked at my shoes.
“Coolio?” he said with a game smile.
“You need to clue me in.”
“He sang that song from Dangerous Minds about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.”
“‘Gangsta’s Paradise,’” someone helpfully added.
The whole class murmured in approval, and a half beat later I remembered Coolio’s hit from the mid- 1990s with an infectious beat and a biblical opening line: “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”
“OK,” the professor moved us on. “Anyone else know anything about where the poem comes from?”
“Pink Floyd,” a boy in the back of the room called out. “They sing that in ‘Sheep.’”
“‘Sheep,’” the professor repeated, now bemused. “Any non-pop-song associations?”
A hand in the middle of the room went up. “It’s in Pulp Fiction.”
“Pulp Fiction? I’m not sure I …”
A few of the students started nodding, and the girl sat up straight. “Yeah. It’s what Samuel L. Jackson’s character quotes before he kills someone.”
Now the know-it-all graduate student had his first say. “What Jackson says is not actually what the professor said. But, yes, there are some similarities in style.”
Talking Points
Eventually, the professor was able to wrestle the conversation away from popular culture and toward the psalm’s actual home — which, in case you were wondering, is the Old Testament — but not before other students, realizing they were in comfortable territory, offered a few more sources of biblical language — U2, the Beastie Boys, Dogma — they knew from their vast pop-culture catalog.
That fall, the class performed a marathon study of the Bible, covering highlights from Genesis to Revelation. With the exception of one guy who had attended Hebrew
school, one dedicated Mormon girl and one recent evangelical convert, the students had very little familiarity with the Bible.
But they knew this stuff; they just didn’t know they knew it. Again and again — as we read about Noah, Abraham, Moses, the children of Israel and David, and as the stories of the Jews folded into the story of Jesus — the students recognized names, events and even individual verses. Without realizing it, they had been “reading” the Word of God all their lives as they listened to rap and rock, watched television and sat in movie theaters. “I’m seeing and hearing the Bible everywhere” became the class refrain.
That semester taught me that we aren’t as many degrees removed as we fear from meaningful conversations about the Bible. Popular culture does not provide biblical literacy; nor, of course, does it provide decent theology. But it does provide talking points. Even as we worry over whether students are finding theirway to the Bible, it’s helpful to realize that the Bible is finding its way to them.
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Patton Dodd is an editor for beliefnet.com and the author of the acclaimed spiritual memoir ‘My Faith So Far‘ (Jossey-Bass, 2004).
