The American self-help legalist’s Bible

You may not know this, but Thomas Nelson recently produced something called The American Patriot’s Bible:  The Word of God and the Shaping of America.  I wouldn’t have known it except that my wife recently signed up as a book-review blogger and ended up reviewing it.  This appears to be a product much akin to the recent Green Bible from HarperCollins, except that where the Green Bible pushes environmental dogma, the APB pushes a politically conservative form of what Christian Smith dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  As my wife wrote,

There is plenty to encourage the idea that what God wants from us is to work harder. There is nothing here for the broken, repentant sinner, aware of his own inadequacy, whose desperate hope is to fall at the foot of the cross and find grace.

When Jared Wilson writes about “the weird modern desire for legalism,” well, this appears to be the Bible to support that desire.  Thomas Nelson has not blessed the American church by producing it.