Andy Schlafly, the son of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, has been known to counter "liberal" views. In 2006, he launched a wiki site called Conservapedia as an alternative to Wikipedia which "he felt become dominated by liberal and anti-Christian bias."
Now he has come to the conclusion that the King James Version of the Bible needs to be free from liberal bias. Therefore, Schlafly has decided to rewrite the Bible through a new online wiki format.
Joseph Laycock and Thomas Fabisiak have recently spoken of Schlafly's project in their article, The Conservative Bible Project: Looking for Conservative Diamonds in a Liberal Dung-Hill.
While the Conservative Bible Project (CBP) has so far been regarded largely as a joke, it does raise some interesting questions. The idea of writing a sacred text through a wiki is largely unprecedented. The CPB also marks an escalation in what Robert S. McElvaine has called “Grand Theft Jesus”—the appropriation of the Christian tradition for political ends. Is Schlafly a profoundly cynical politician, attempting to manipulate religion in a way that would put Machiavelli and Karl Rove to shame? Or does he truly believe that the Bible has been tainted by “liberalism” for over a thousand years?
Even leaving aside the question of historical or linguistic accuracy, however, this project presents serious problems for those scholars, ministers, and lay-people concerned with the ethics of intepretation. One would have to question the grounds of understanding young girls to be “temptresses” or “bimbos,” for example, or of excising a passage in which Jesus defends a woman from being stoned to death for adultery because it is too “liberal.”
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