QUESTIONS FOR LAURIE WHALEY
Fashion Bible
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
 "Revolve,'' a Bible for teenage girls designed to resemble a fashion magazine, has zipped up the Amazon.com sales list with record speed. Isn't that unusual for the New Testament? How did you come up with the idea?
We at Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville did some research and
found that teens don't read the Bible. They say it is too freaky and
too big and it doesn't make sense. The only thing they read is fashion
magazines, so we thought, What if we made the Bible look like a
magazine?
But Seventeen and Glamour, with their emphasis on acquiring the
latest Marc Jacobs purse, seem a bit out of sync with the antimaterial
thrust of the Bible.
That is true. The teachings of Vogue and other pop-culture magazines contradict the teachings of Christ.
Christ himself was not exactly a fashion plate.
I would say that Christ resisted fashion. He was not treated like a
king, and he did not have the apparel of a king. He walked a lot, and
it wasn't as if he was wearing Cole Haan.
Why appropriate the format of fashion magazines to hawk the Bible? Doesn't the medium nullify the message?
Not at all. God is not at all opposed to a fashion magazine or its
format. All we have done is said that teen girls are reading magazines,
so we're going to put the Bible into the format of a magazine. We have
removed the obstacle of the black-leather packaging.
Some literary scholars have suggested that the Holy Bible would
have been a better read if they had left the New Testament out. But you
chose to exclude the Old Testament from ''Revolve.''
The Old Testament is three times longer than the New Testament, so
how could we have included it? That would have made for a magazine
about the size of a Sears, Roebuck catalog!
But you found room to include sidebars on fashion and romance
and to raise the question ''Are you dating a godly guy?'' What
translation of the Bible did you use?
We use the New Century Version. It translates the Bible thought for
thought instead of word for word. The King James translation reads at a
12th-grade reading level. Most people in our country today do not read
at that level. The New Century Version reads at a
fifth-and-a-half-grade reading level, which is about the average where
people can comprehend.
Can you provide us with an example of your efforts at translation?
O.K. One of my favorites is Psalms 1:1. The King James says,
''Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.''
I learned it when I was 8. I'm a third-generation pastor's kid, and I
didn't have a clue what it meant.
How do you prefer to translate that line?
In the New Century Version, it says, ''Happy are those who don't listen to the wicked.''
But the King James Bible is a piece of imaginative literature on par with Shakespeare.
It is Shakespearic! That's the problem. All those thous. I can
honestly say my heart breaks because the church has made it so
difficult for people to grasp the concepts of the Bible.
And yet you were able to grasp the concepts sufficiently to extract fashion tips from them.
A ''Revolve'' girl makes a point of dressing modestly. She might
wonder to herself, Would God find this too revealing or too suggestive?
But Mary Magdalene, who was Christ's girlfriend, favored low necklines and loads of jewelry.
Mary was a friend of Christ. From the Bible, we have no indication that there was any sexual relationship with her.
You could argue that Christ was drawn to her precisely because of her flamboyant clothing.
Christ was drawn to everyone. I think he loved Mary regardless of her clothing.
But he does not love girls who call boys, at least according to
''Revolve''! It's positively regressive for ''Revolve'' to suggest that
God made men to be the leaders in romance.
There's no indication from Scripture that Mary Magdalene ever picked up the phone and called Christ.
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