I Trust the Bible. I Just Don't Trust Texas to Teach It.
Hey friends,
My home state just voted to put the Bible in front of millions of public-school kids, and I have been chewing on it all week.
As many of you know, I grew up in Texas and most of my family is still there. There are kids I love that are going to walk into these exact classrooms and get handed these exact lessons. So, this is not some far-off “culture war” headline for me. This effects my people, my hometown, and the book I love most.
And I will tell you where my gut went first, before I had any of the details. It went straight to suspicion. I love this book enough to get nervous the second I hear the government wants to be the one teaching it. I spent over a decade in evangelical ministry, which means I know the difference between handing somebody the Bible and handing them an argument about the Bible dressed up to look like the Bible. I know that difference because for years I was the one doing the dressing. I can say that honestly.
So, I went looking to see if my gut was right, and that is where my boy Dan McClellan comes in.
Go watch Dan McClellan first
If you do nothing else with this email, go watch this video. I will link it right here. It’s over 18 minutes but it is well worth your time.
Dan McClellan is a biblical scholar, the real deal, the kind of guy who reads this stuff in the original languages and has spent his entire career in the actual text. He is way smarter than I am, and he put out a video breaking down these new Texas reading requirements that articulated the exact thing I had been feeling in my chest but could not have laid out half as cleanly.
The problem is they are not teaching the Bible, they are preaching their evangelical version of it, and he shows the receipts, from a watered-down translation chosen to smooth over the Bible's own tensions to a butchering of Job and Lamentations that keeps the tidy verses about bowing low and throws out all the grief and the arguing.
I have spent years sitting with people in the actual ash heap, and that sanded-down version of suffering is the exact theology that has quietly wrecked the faith of half the people who read these letters.
So here is where I land
I do not trust this government to be the one teaching this stuff, and Texas just spent a whole curriculum proving exactly why.
And the State Board of Education not only picked a Bible translation that preaches what they want, they kept the passages that produce agreeable kids while cutting the passages that make a person wrestle and has the nerve to call the whole thing “education”.
So go watch Dan’s video, because he proves the case better than I ever could. And then do the thing the state will not do for your kids. Read them the whole book of Job, the furious chapters included. Read them a Lamentations that gets to grieve before it hopes. The Bible can survive being studied, sure. It cannot survive being used. And your kitchen table is a safer home for that book than the Texas State Board of Education is ever going to be.
Pray a psalm of lament this week. We are so trained to clean up our prayers before we hand them to God that we forget the Bible gives us language for the unedited version. Open to Psalm 13 and pray it slowly, out loud if you can, and do not rush to the hopeful part.
Bring God the actual complaint you have been carrying. The thing about your job or your body or your marriage or that person you cannot stop being angry at. You do not have to tidy it first. The whole witness of the psalms is that honest grief is already a form of prayer, and the God of Job can clearly handle being yelled at.
Dan McClellan's book The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.
I don’t talk about Dan and his scholarship near enough. In his book, he works through the claims people love to end arguments with, the “it-says-so-right-here” verses on women and sexuality and slavery and the rest, and he shows you what the text actually does and does not say once you read it on its own terms. It is rigorous and it is also funny, which for a book about the Bible is no small thing.
You may not agree with every landing, and that is sort of the point. And what I love about Dan is that he wants you reading more carefully, not just taking his word for it.
A few weeks ago, a man showed up at Resurrection Downtown who was raised Catholic and was clearly still finding his footing with us. He asked one of our worship staff if there was any way he could help out (since he arrived almost 1 hour early), and she told him we needed a communion server for the 8:00 service. He said yes. And during the part where they walk you through how to do it, tear the bread this way, say these words, she looked over and his hands were shaking. He could not believe he was being asked to serve communion to other people. He could not believe he was being trusted with it.
I keep thinking about those shaking hands.
So many of us spent years being told we were on the outside of the table, and then one ordinary Sunday somebody hands us the bread and asks us to feed the people next to us. That is the whole thing. That is what coming home feels like.
I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.
I am feeling this same gut punch. Thanks for the links.