Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, used a “Biblical quotation” to support an argument.
The hitch? The words, although eloquent and thought-provoking, simply aren’t from the Bible.
What she claimed is found in the Bible is: ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’
Was this a paraphrase that inadvertently got turned into a quotation? Something read elsewhere and attributed to the Bible? The Bible itself seems to include cases of both these sorts of thing, and so Pelosi would be in good company. If this was an attempt to willfully concoct a Bible verse to support her view, then that is much more disturbing. Apparently this wasn’t the first time she has “quoted” this “verse”.
You’d think people nowadays would know that they are unlikely to get away with such things. Then again, young-earth creationists have been saying the same things about evolution for decades, and even though they’ve been answered time and again, it seems to have little effect. So let’s wait and see just how long this “verse from the Bible” will continue to reappear…
The fundamentalists should not get too smug about this. Is inventing a “quote” that bears at least some resemblance to what at least some Christians understand the Bible to teach worse than quoting the Bible accurately out of context in order to make it say something other than what the author is likely to have intended? Of course, Pelosi has been accused of doing that too…
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In