Ray Waddle's Journal

MURFREESBORO — Organizers of a "Bible marathon" here recently were on a mission: To read the whole Bible straight through, out loud, in public. They did the math: It would take 90 hours — five days and four nights, round the clock. It meant finding 360 volunteers, more or less, to read 15 minutes each to get from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22. The sanctified logistics of the thing sounded staggering.

Yet on the last Sunday afternoon in April, they hooked up loudspeakers in a city park near downtown and got to work. They put up a tent, a podium and a banner that declared: "Honoring God — Reading Thru the Bible— The Answer to All Life's Needs." On a clipboard they filled time slots with names of volunteer readers.

There were chairs for the audience, free coffee. More than 100 people came for the opening music and color guard. Eventually most people went home, but the assigned readers one by one continued their march through Old and New Testament — all the famous parts, every obscure portion, all the begats.

They read past sunset and into the wee hours, when usually nary a person was present to hear the words except an organizer or two. Lack of an audience never stopped them. If no one signed up for the 4 a.m. slot, an organizer was there to step in.

The Bible-reading marathon is just the sort of ambitious Protestant spiritual errand that leaves the critics baffled. To participants, it's an exercise in cando faith and spiritual stamina, a symbolic gesture of public piety, also a way for lay people to join a big effort to promote Holy Scripture.

"Society has been getting back to basics in nutritional habits and exercise, and we need to get back to basics in moral and social behavior too," said the Rev. Ken Sharp, lead organizer of the event.

"Reading and applying the whole Word of God is the solution to society's problems. The Bible gives us the answers to every problem. God is big enough to speak to each person individually."

(The event is sponsored annually by the International Bible Reading Association and Bible Pathway Ministries, a local religious publisher. Similar marathons were going on in hundreds of locations across the world. Virtually all are organized by evangelical Christians — Sharp is Baptist — but open to anybody.)

The marathon is a labor of love. It's also, perhaps, an admission of anxiety — a widespread uneasy feeling that Scripture's influence is in decline. Like a doctor fretting over a patient's mysterious illness, pollsters keep probing attitudes about the Bible, looking for signs of vitality and noting declines. In 2000, a Gallup poll said 59% of Americans read the Bible at least occasionally. In the 1980s, that number was 73%. The shock of Sept. 11 reportedly bumped up reader interest in Scripture, at least temporarily. Lately, a Barna poll says belief in the inerrancy of Scripture is down: In 1997, 58% believed the Bible to be infallible in everything it says; in 2001, 41%.

I showed up on Thursday morning May 1, the marathon's final day, to see how things were faring. When I arrived they were settling into the Book of Revelation, the strange vision of apocalypse with its terrifying angels, evil beasts, 666, new heaven and new earth. A dozen people were listening under the tent, ignoring the roar of nearby traffic and freight trains. No distraction could stop the recitation. A woman read from Revelation 13: "And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its head were blasphemous names."

For decades now, people have quoted and feared the Book of Revelation. Few, I reckon, actually read it. It is routinely used by pushy prophets to spook millions into believing that God's Final Battle of Good and Evil will be triggered by tomorrow morning's bad-news headlines. That same revved-up fear, fascination and political pessimism drives the blockbuster Left Behind fictional book series — more than 50 million copies sold so far.

To hear Revelation read aloud, over a P.A. system on a breezy morning, is a new experience. Besides the dense symbolism of its First-Century narrative, you hear other details that never get quoted, like Rev. 22:2, a vision of goodness and healing: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its 12 kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations."

So it goes at a Bible marathon. The words of Scripture are launched into the air, no one knowing where they'll land. I asked people why they came. Earlier in the week, Presbyterian minister Joe Fisher, youth minister at Murfreesboro's First Presbyterian Church, was jogging in the park when he noticed the Biblereading taking place. Next thing he knew, he was invited to read. He did so the next day, 9:30 a.m., reading three chapters from the Gospel of Matthew.

"I thought it was good just to be part of an international effort to read the Bible in this way," he said.

Taking part in a Bible-reading marathon is an exercise in religious faith, the proposition that reading Genesis, Joshua and John at 3 a.m. across a cityscape is a way to send words of the Bible looping the earth and watering the ground in some ultimate mysterious way.

It goes to the heart of an American passion for the Bible still.

(Ray Waddle, who was religion editor at The Tennessean from 1984-2001, is now a writer and lecturer in Nashville.)