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By Root 1511 0

again and again—from Galileo’s time, to Darwin’s, to our own. For example, I remember in my younger years hearing preachers passionately decry psychology and psychiatry; the only relevant categories in the Bible were disobedience and demon possession, so there was no place for counseling or lithium or Prozac. As a pastor, I heard stories of suicides committed by young Christians whose churches would not allow them to get psychiatric help, including one from the former president of a seminary whose sister was one of the casualties. She had been counseled by her pastor to pray and fast as the only “biblical cure” for depression and forbidden to seek professional help; that pastor, it turned out, had been trained at the seminary led by the woman’s brother. Similarly destructive patterns of Bible abuse are being repeated even now. Many pious people deny our environmental crises by quoting Bible verses and mocking science. Just as they were the last to acknowledge the rotation of the earth and its revolution around the sun, they’ll be the last to acquiesce to what science is telling us about our growing ecological crises.

Second, we are in trouble in relation to ethics. The Bible, when taken as an ethical rule book, offers us no clear categories for many of our most significant and vexing socioethical quandaries. We find no explicit mention, for example, of abortion, capitalism, communism, socialism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism, systemic racism, affirmative action, human rights, nationalism, sexual orientation, pornography, global climate change, imprisonment, extinction of species, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, genetic engineering, space travel, and so on—not to mention nuclear weapons, biological warfare, and just-war theory.

If we must steer our ship—personally and socially—by wresting biblical passages to bear on these issues in a simple “thou shalt not” way, we will find ourselves stuck precisely where we are stuck now: largely paralyzed in solving major life-and-death-of-the-planet issues and largely obsessed with narrow hot-button feuds that end up being little more than litmus tests for political affiliation. Not only that, but we can look back over history to see how various groups pulled verses from the Bible to justify unjustifiable ethical positions; we don’t want to encore those performances. I remember in my own childhood hearing white people use the Bible to justify segregation and forbid interracial dating and marriage. In the 1980s, I heard Christian Reconstructionists use the Bible much the way Islamic fundamentalists might use the Qur’an—to advocate the death penalty for homosexuality and rebellion toward parents. As I mentioned already, I was devastated recently to read that, in the United States, white Evangelical Christians are the most fervent advocates of government-sanctioned torture and that frequent churchgoing is a statistical indicator of support for torture. Quoting Bible verses to buttress “ethical” positions clearly protects nobody from being a moral buffoon or clod.

Third, we are in deep trouble relating to peace. As much as we love the Bible, many of us are afraid that the Bible is becoming a box cutter or suitcase bomb in the hands of too many preachers, pastors, priests, and others. When careless preachers use the Bible as a club or sword to dominate or wound, they discredit the Bible in a way that no skeptic can. I was appalled during the buildup to the Iraq war in 2002 to hear radio preachers pull a Bible verse about God “crushing Satan” under “our feet” to justify a preemptive war. In 2005, I appeared on a radio talk show with a popular radio host who used similar “Bible-based logic” to argue that the United States should preemptively declare war on Iran.

Last year I talked with Rwandan Tutsis who told me that some of their preachers used to claim that they were descendants of the sexual union between King Solomon and the Ethiopian queen of Sheba. To these preachers, this possession of “Jewish blood” justified their being