When the Bible is Used Against You
Finding the Sacred in Scripture While Renegotiating Your Relationship with the Church
“I hate that thing.”
Sarah’s face scrunched in disgust as she pointed at the giant blue mustang on our way to pick up her son. “Blucifer” bucks thirty-two feet tall at the entrance to Denver International Airport, his blue mane arched and red eyes flaming.
I protest. “I think most Denverites would revolt if they took him down!”
We like our airport weird. It’s like they poured conspiracy into the concrete at its base and DIA is in on their own joke. It’s always under construction and instead of “pardon our dust” signs, there are signs showing lizard people the city may or may not shelter in the giant underground tunnels and bunkers. “Apologies for the noise, it takes really big drills to get to the underworld.” Some believe the Illuminati built the bunkers and the New World Order was behind the airport’s conception.
But the truth we know is always stranger than fiction. The artist who made Blucifer was killed constructing it: Luis Jiménez was crushed when a giant piece of the 9000 lb sculpture fell and severed an artery in his leg.1 Maybe it is cursed. Or maybe, making art is more dangerous than we think.
Maybe any work of art holds the potential to harm or to heal.
The airport’s on my mind this morning, having just returned to Colorado after almost three weeks away on vacation. Merry Christmas, indeed! Today I write to you from my infusion chair with an IV snaking from my sweatshirt, feeling ocean deep gratitude to have been well enough to adventure and enjoy these last few weeks.2 It was incredible to celebrate my sister surviving ten years since her lupus-induced heart attack. When I close my eyes, I still see aquamarine and cerulean water with bright yellow striped fish fluttering by. Traveling internationally away from my typical surroundings let me really see how far I have come in one year. I can newly imagine a future that is good. 😭
Today I’d love to introduce you to my friend
. Liz is a local Colorado friend with a deeply kind soul and a bright, vibrant mind. She’s a writer’s writer who has written a book I believe will be incredibly welcoming and helpful to many of you. Here’s a tidbit from the back cover of Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible:In the beginning was a work of art.
What does Bible study look like after inerrancy? Do you have to give up studying Scripture when you no longer believe in its literal interpretation? Can you still believe this book is sacred even while renegotiating your relationship to the church?
Um, what a generous friend! She wrote me a whole book! 😉
Today, Liz is sharing with us about a searing dynamic so many of you, like me, have experienced. When the Word of God is used as a weapon instead of a welcome it is challenging indeed to reclaim it as safe and good and full of life again. Liz’s words give me hope that I can keep finding goodness in the Bible, and I hope you’ll check out her book. It releases in just one week! Order a copy here.
When the Bible Is Used Against You
by
My favorite Bible of all time was the Adventures in Odyssey Bible my relatives gave me for Christmas at age nine.3 They lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the homeland of Focus on the Family’s Odyssey paradise, and whenever we visited, we trekked to Whit’s homeland to stock up tapes of Connie and Eugene and Whit’s adventures (using my grandmother’s volunteer discount code so we could take home as many binders as possible).
The Adventures in Odyssey Bible, on the other hand, captured my attention for other reasons. I pored over the pages, seeking out the comics printed between the wispy leaves of the text. Eventually I memorized the comics, and that’s when I turned my attention to the words of the Bible itself.
I grew up within white American evangelicalism, and I trusted this book completely because my parents and other adults I trusted told me it was trustworthy. They told me that these four-pounds of paper and ink contained, in some mystical way, Godself. And I was a believer.
I remember how, once, at age ten, I debated a neighbor’s mother who was hostile to my family’s religion. She asked me on the playground, “Where are the dinosaurs in the Bible? How can it be trusted if it doesn’t even mention the dinosaurs?” Yet her questions did not faze me. The presence or absence of dinosaurs changed nothing, and I told her so. My certainty in the Bible, Jesus, none of it weakened at her prodding.
That early in my life, the conviction of those around me—parents, relatives, pastors, church volunteers—had already supplied me with complete confidence in a text that predated my oldest grandparent by millennia. Not that I knew anything about the origins of that book. I did not need to. I trusted the people who trusted the book.
Yet I did not remain a child. As I grew, my trust in the Bible changed. In some ways, it deepened. Yet I saw the ways that the adults I once trusted themselves disregarded these precious words of God that they had told me to build my life around.
If you grew up within white American evangelicalism, as I did, then you’ve likely experienced the same. You, like me, have seen how the Bible has sometimes become a weapon in the hands of our leaders. “Obey the authorities,” our elders told us, even if the authorities are our abusers. “Rejoice at all times,” our elders told us, even when depression has crippled our minds. “The flesh is evil,” our elders told us, even as our bodies suffer in pain and disability. The Bible can comfort, but it has also been used to perpetuate great evil throughout history, such as when white Christian American slaveholders used the Bible to manipulate slaves into submission.
This is the story of Dr. Howard Thurman’s grandmother. Dr. Thurman was a theologian whose work inspired the founders of the American Civil Rights Movement, and his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, had been an enslaved sharecropper from Daytona Beach, Florida, before her emancipation after the Civil War. Throughout her life, she cultivated a devoted trust in God, yet her “master” limited her worship to his own all-white church. At these services, he could maintain control even over his slaves’ religious yearnings by asking the minister to tailor his teachings to the topic of “submission to authority.”
Yet Ambrose did not allow her master to hijack her spirituality. In secret, she joined meetings held by an enslaved minister who preached the same message to his congregants each week: “You—you are not slaves,” he would say. “No, you—you are God’s children.” All week long, these enslaved men and women heard dehumanizing lies about themselves from their oppressors. Yet when Sunday came, their pastor offered them words of blessing. These words were the truth according to God, the God who saw, knew, and valued each one. No, they were not slaves; they were children of God. From these words, Thurman’s grandmother developed an interior strength that could endure even abuse and disdain.
This simple message also guided her reading of the Scriptures after the Civil War when she obtained her freedom. Though she never learned to read or write, her grandson, Howard, often read aloud to her from the Bible, as she requested. Reflecting later, her grandson wrote in Jesus and the Disinherited that she “never ever” chose to read the Pauline Epistles. One day, he asked her why, and she explained that her “master’s” minister had exclusively preached Paul’s writings during her enslavement:
“At least three or four times a year he used as a text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters . . . , as unto Christ.’ Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom came, I would not read that part of the Bible.”
She abstained from these passages for the rest of her free life. She did so because she understood the plain message of God to her: she was loved, safe, and whole because she was a child of God. And any traumatic memory of her life before, when she daily heard the opposite message, she could forgo in freedom. She recognized that she could not receive the words of Paul as anything but the tools of hatred, manipulation, and abuse. So, she soaked in the Psalms, the Gospels, and the book of Isaiah instead—passages that reaffirmed the identity bestowed upon her by God from birth in a way she could receive it. Her interpretative matrix allowed her to read the Scriptures with creativity and personality. She read plainly, without any academic instruction or perspective, and she read for the sake of survival.
For those of us who have experienced the darker sides of the church, we need to claim our spiritual autonomy in reading the Scriptures, centering and marginalizing certain texts within the library known as the Bible without guilt or embarrassment. The truth is, the Bible is diverse, a text that contains many voices, and I believe that as part of our recovery from harm in the church, God invites us to approach the Bible with freedom. We can reframe verses that others used against us, or we can refrain from reading those verses. The point of faith is not that we read and practice every inch of the Bible, but that we respond to the pursuit of God in obedience and love.
While Thurman’s grandmother’s method may not be the Western norm, it is contemplative and wise. A wider variety of reading modes displays the variety of Godself. The freedom that Ambrose took with the Scriptures is my inspiration as I seek creative, generative, and healing ways to engage God in the Bible once again. May you, too, embrace your spiritual autonomy as you seek to understand God and Bible apart from past spiritual abuse or religious trauma. With God, you can be safe. With God’s book, you can be free.
Here’s an essay I wrote while on my epic trip, about healing and tenderness:
Interjection from KJ—omg I was obsessed with Adventures in Odyssey as a kid and am pretty sure I briefly owned one of these bibles too!! Sometimes I wish I could go back and find the relics of my former religiosity. Wild stuff here! Who else owned this bible??
Pre-ordered. This seems like exactly the type of read I need to start the year. Thank you for sharing!
K.J.: SO happy for your refreshing 3-week vacation. You have been through so much! I became familiar with you after discovering "The Place We Find Ourselves" podcast. I purchased THE LORD IS OUR COURAGE immediately after you were a guest. Your writing (and your husband's) has stirred up SO MUCH in me. You both express what I need to but can't because I don't have any words to describe it. I keep praying to find a tribe of people here who love God but aren't religious. Thank you for your words; they continue to move me.