Thread by @crazypastor

The Holy Bible is made of 66+ books written by different communities with different agendas for different purposes.

It has never said just one thing. What matters is the lens you bring to it. (And we all have a lens — *especially* the people who swear they don’t.)

I get hit for focusing on some things at the exclusion of others.

No shit, Sherlock. It’s utterly impossible to not do that.

But at least I focus on narrative arcs and overall themes in the Bible.

You wanna obsess over John 3:16 and John 14:6 and John 19:11 (for the anti-Semitic Christian) — see a pattern there? — go ahead. But those are single verses plucked for a purpose.

And so I get the “other side” sometimes, when people say, “But, you’re doing the same thing from a liberal perspective.”

(Not a strawperson argument, PS — I get this often from actual people.)

But, umm, I’m not.

There are some 31,102 verses in the 66 books of the First and Second Testament (and there are Christian denominations that recognize more as canonical, thus the “+").

More than 2,000 deal with poverty and money in general, for instance.

Guess how many verses white supremacists need to condemn all black people? Just one — and it’s a bullshit one, imagining that the “curse of Ham” from seeing his naked father (Noah) applied to people with dark skin (that’s Genesis 9:25, for those keeping score at home).

There are a handful of verses that seem to condemn LGBTQ+ people — & not only are all these “bible bullets” easily dismantled once you consider context, but there are also plenty of fucked-up marriage examples that remind us maybe the Bible shouldn’t be a go-to for sexual ethics.

Or take the Gospel of Mark, the oldest extant piece of biblical scripture that tells the story of Jesus.

In its 16 chapters, Jesus won’t shut up about social justice and the demonic forces of evil — but he says five words about marriage and conservatives lose their minds.

Yeah, you can come at me with your fav verses from I Peter (while forgetting that your evangelical forebears used the same book to say “slaves obey your masters”), or your pithy wisdom from Proverbs or your piety from II Timothy — I swear to God, they hardly quote anything else —

But try and actual talk about stories and narrative that paint a bigger picture — the Bible is full of those — and you see something wildly different than a few cross-stitched verses.

You see story after story of God saving God’s people — Genesis.

You read stories of immigrants upending “what the Bible says” about certain people — Ruth.

You see stories of civil disobedience and stunning courage in the face of brutal power — Esther.

Stories of badass prophets literally screaming at the rich and powerful for their injustices — Amos, Micah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jonah (these are just a few).

And, of course, stories about a homeless prophet who thumbed his nose at the powerful and healed the sick and whose mother literally sang to #burnitalldown while he was in her womb — the Gospels.

But what do we get in most (white) American Christian churches?

These stories are read with as much gusto as a “terms and conditions” paragraph, causing people to wonder why the hell we spend so much time in this boring AF collection of books.

And then the disconnected verses that uphold some version of Republican white Christian man-boy philosophy are spewed by Jesus dudebros who swear they love the Savior but seem to hate the very people he spent all his time with.

I promise you — those who use the Bible as a weapon to theologically pummel those on the margins don’t love the Bible. They just love using it. They usually don’t even know what’s in it.

And these fundamentalists evangelicals and their acolytes have convinced too much of America that the Bible is some self-help book that guarantees personal property and individual freedom.

That’s grade-A horseshit, beloveds.