So I have my beliefs (the threads of the web I have long held) and I have the perspectives and experiences of others (the fence posts and branches that keep me connected to this physical and social world). I need to discuss how they each have contributed to my political shift. To put it bluntly, it’s not my progressive political bent that makes me see the world the way I’ve been working to articulate. Rather, it’s seeing the world as it is, that makes me progressive.
As a person of faith, it was studying the Bible as it is, rather than how it is sometimes described, that started the shift for me. I grew up being taught that the Bible is inspired by God, a sort of guidebook for humanity. Everything we needed to know was revealed by God and given to us in this book, which plainly tells us the answers we need for life. It’s universal, for all time and for all people.
When you dive into the Christian Bible, it becomes clear that it’s actually 66 separate works, written over more than 1000 years, by more than 30 different authors. Some of it is poetry, some is narrative. Some is law, some is wild apocalyptic literature. Some is pithy proverbs of wisdom, while some is deeper, more nuanced philosophy that flatly contradicts those definitive proverbs.
There’s actually very little resemblance to any of our self-help or how-to books. Finding, say, advice on what college to go to, or what a good system of health care should look like, is challenging.
In seminary, professors started forcing me to look at the assumptions I brought to the Bible, and made me examine whether they held up. I saw how, for instance, the Christian comic books I read as a kid created an assumption in me that America and the current state of Israel should be correlated with the Israel of the Bible. And yet, the message of the biblical prophets and the message of Jesus constantly critique empires which consolidated wealth and power and don’t look out for the poor and the oppressed—critiques of empire which actually better fit the American empire of the 20th and 21st century.
At first, it was terrifying to tear apart these views I had of the Bible. If God didn’t dictate this word for word to the author, if it was biased according to the cultures and perspectives of those authors, wouldn’t it lose all its power?
But it turns out, stories and lived experience communicate so much more life than an imagined answer book! The Bible became interesting and fun again.
And then something fascinating began to occur. When I worked and wrestled to better understand the cultural situation of some of these books I had always loved—when I challenged my own assumption that I was part of the good people in the stories, and instead let the descriptions of the heroes and villains define how I saw myself and my culture—when I began to do things like that, the Bible actually gained a power over me it never had before. It challenged and undid me. I couldn’t any longer have it be out there, as something I wielded to encourage people how they could “live for God.”
I had to let it read me.
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