cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/42004497
It’s also likely to backfire on the religious right. They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class. As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether.
There’s a reason conservative Christians prefer quoting solitary Bible verses out of context: Not only does this allow them to twist the meaning for their own personal or political ends, but it also makes it much easier to avoid the critical thinking that engaging with longer passages can provoke. On my YouTube show “Standing Room Only,” the scholar and former evangelical Brad Onishi pointed to 2 Chronicles 7:20, a passage Christian nationalists often deploy to argue that America is meant to be a Christian nation by relying on the verse’s violent implications of God promising to “pluck” the unbelievers “up by the roots out of my land.” The larger context reveals that this story is about the ancient king Solomon, and it has nothing to do with the modern nation-state, much less one on a continent unknown to the writers of the Bible.
I feel like you don’t need much critical thought to find it unfair that an entity would create you for the sole purpose of torturing you for eternity (Romans 9:19-21), or that the mass killing of women, children, and animals is unambiguously evil (1 Samuel 15:3) or that we shouldn’t kill people for working on Sunday (Exodus 35:2)
You’d have to read it, understand it, & the critical part: know how to apply it to your own life. I come from a family where I was bullied - you are trained early on not to even think of “backtalking” authority for fear of your own safety. They just won’t allow themselves to go there. There’s a reason the right is so irrational: they never learned to question anything because they weren’t allowed to. So their arguments are just a random combo of shit they were trained to “believe” and whatever sounds like a good bully argument. It’s attack, or be attacked & that’s their primary concern deep down.
I only escaped the clutches because my parents separated while the family was in a foreign country. I was the youngest & “Mom’s baby”, and my mother was absolutely clueless on how to parent & ultimately didn’t. I wound up l spending a huge chunk of my life trying to figure out how the world worked on my own, which definitely had some huge drawbacks, but at least on the positive side it allowed me to see the world for what it actually was. Eventually.