HOW TO USE THE BIBLE IN YOUR POLITICAL ARGUMENTS (OR, HOW TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS FROM THE HAIRY APEs)
By: Rev. Dan Schultz
Like many liberal folks, I've heard many calls since last year's election to "throw scripture back at the fundies!".
It's a wonderful idea - if you're prepared to use scripture
appropriately. If not, you run the risk of: looking like an ass;
losing your debate; and reinforcing the stereotype of progressives as biblically-illiterate trolls who hate God, America, Mom, and Apple Pie.
And nobody wants that.
So, here's what you need to remember in a nutshell: there is a difference between claiming that a text is authoritative, and saying that it is foundational.
The former is the fundies' home turf, and you will not win there. The latter might seem like more work initially, but it may also bear greater fruit.
Why aren't you going to win on the authoritative turf? You won't because that is where the fundamentalists have been playing for the past hundred years. Long story short, a group of conservative Christians reacted against liberal readings of the Bible early in the 20th century by publishing a series of pamphlets on the "Fundamentals" of Christian belief. Those fundamentals had the by now familiar ring to them: the Bible is the sole, sufficient, authoritative guide to Christian life.
In other words, the Bible is a rule book. You go to the instruction manual, it tells you what to do, badda-bing, badda-boom! You're done.
Who ever reads an instruction manual from start to finish? You read the parts you need, and ignore the parts you don't. Trust me, these folks have way more "instructions" memorized than most of us. So, if you go into an argument on social policy armed with a shaky knowledge of the Beatitudes and Christ's injunctions to care for the poor, you're going to get slaughtered. It's like arguing precedent with a lawyer: If you don't know what you're talking about, it's generally a good idea to stay out of the conversation. Otherwise, you're just going to prove yourself to be an ignoramus. More to the point, you're going to demonstrate that you don't "really" believe this stuff.
Nor is it very helpful to say, "the Bible speaks of poverty 2,000 times and homosexuality only six". It's true, but for a believer it's not much more than a nice statistic. When you're dealing with 300,000 verses, you have to make decisions about what's important and what's not. For example, the institution of the Lord's Supper is only described five times in the New Testament, and yet those five mentions are absolutely at the heart of Christian belief and practice. So, sheer numbers won?t do.
On the other hand, to recognize a text as foundational is to see how it opens up a conversation. In fact, much of scripture is itself a conversation between various perspectives on God, history, social ethics, and morality. It is, in short, a record of about 2,000 years worth of conversation on capital-m Meaning by the Jewish people.
Fundagelicals, unless they're completely closed off or self-satisfied pricks like Jerry Falwell, need to take part in that conversation, whether they know it or not.
And so do you.
Does that mean you need to learn scripture backwards and forwards? Does that mean that we all need to have learned arguments over the nuances of prophetic literature?
Of course not.
What we all need to do, as human beings, is to talk about What It All Means. The people who think they don't need to do this are to be pitied, because they are incomplete. It doesn't matter if you're religious or not; somehow or another, we have to form an idea of what life is all about, and we need to update that idea to take into account new thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Again, this isn't so much morals, ethics or values, so much as it is Meaning.
But our understanding of Meaning inevitably bleeds into our morals, ethics, values, and it's here that you can have a scripturally-based conversation with someone of a completely opposite political perspective.
Once you get hold of the idea that, for example, the Bible consistently values life - though it has many different notions of what that value means - then you can begin to argue that perhaps there's more to being "pro-life" than simply outlawing abortion, and do so with some scriptural justification. There is a powerful argument to be made, after all, that social justice such as the prophets extol is actually more effective in reducing abortions than the most stringent of partial-birth bans.
Homosexuality is a tougher nut to crack. (Er, so to speak.) There's no use trying to wriggle out of it: the Bible's few mentions of homosexual practice are not very approving. Not at all.
But it is also the case that scripture mentions more than once that it is part of a continuing process of revealing God's will. God repents in the Bible! God chooses new courses, decides to remake the world. Even as late as Paul's letter to the Galatians, the apostle is warning his readers that God may have more in store for us. It might be that getting a fundie to admit that "God hath more truth and light yet to shine upon us" is as good as you're going to do on this score.
And so it goes. My basic point here is that if you want to throw scripture back at the conservative "values voters," that's fine. But don't just throw back atomized quotes with no context or sense behind them. Do it in a way that respects what scripture "really" is, who you really are, and who they really are.
Otherwise, you're fighting a losing battle on a field of somebody else's choosing.
See the connections, and use them to make a connection. Thats scripturally sound, and I happen to think it's a very progressive way of approaching some pretty deep questions.
FIRST IN A SERIES
Dan Schultz is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ who lives in Central Pennsylvania and writes for
Article added
at 12:01 AM EST
Updated: Monday, March 7, 2005 12:54 AM EST
