Religious & Political Bias In Popular History & Archaeology

The academic fields of archaeology and history have become tainted with religious and political ideologies. I see indications of this quite often on the History Channel, where programs often air that are based on places and events of the Bible. Topics such as Noah’s flood, the parting of the Red Sea, the Ark of the Covenant, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, and the apocalyptic books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation have all been topics from the Bible treated as if they had some real-world meaning instead of being religious-based stories. Where is the independent academic research that refuses to make assumptions? Even the idea that one would choose a Biblical topic for research is, to me, an act of academic bias. For example, why do people seem to assume that all of the nationalities residing in what is present day Israel/Palestine were secondary to the Israelite/Jewish nations that were central to the Biblical narrative?

I’m not trying to pick on Judeo-Christianity. The same could be said for parts of the world where other religions sprang from. By focusing on these faiths and the concentration of people and events centered around just them, not only are questionable assertions within the religions being accepted without scrutiny; everything that was contemporary to those religions’ “histories” but outside of their direct influence gets essentially trivialized at best and either ignored or even unduly criticized at worst.

I have long held the view, right or wrong, that humanity has traditionally structured its societies in small villages, around extended families/clans. Even when there has been a kingdom or empire supposedly running things from afar, the real predominant human condition has usually been (until the recent technological revolution) people living in small communities in extended family units, working together to try to survive (see the movie Apocalypto). Those at least popularizing history seem to fall into the trap that small communities of the past were only legitimate subjects of study insofar as how they reflected the presence of the macro-governing structure (such as empire, kingdom, republic, theocracy). What I maintain is that communities, when confronted with a change in the outer political/religious structure, will tend to simply convert their expressed allegiances to the new imposed authority structure without substantially changing the way things run within the community. So a sixteenth-century European community that was Catholic suddenly comes under the rule of a prince who decides that he is a Lutheran. In that situation, such a community would often switch over in a wholesale manner to Protestantism (and back to Catholicism if a ruler loyal to Rome came into power). While going about their business pretty much the same as before.

It is easier (and lazier) for a scholar to take religious scriptures and old historic documents and create a history of an area from those without regard to what was really going on beneath the surface veneer of “official history” within the much more complicated, diverse, and spread-out societies underlying it. But people in general want things simplified, and objective academic investigation usually goes in the opposite direction. So instead of getting a picture about how things really were in the past, we’ll probably continue to get storybook narratives based on political ideologies and religious doctrines.