They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things

They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things
Said “I’m pretty sure we’ve heard this one before”
And don’t it all end up in some revelation
With four guys on horses and violent red visions
Famine and death and pestilence and war?
I’m pretty sure I heard this one before

— The Hold Steady

The “America Reads the Bible” worship event and political rally is going on all week at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. We discussed this last month (see “Texts of Terror? Terrific!“), suggesting that lobbyist/MAGA revivalist Bunni Pounds really wasn’t prepared for how vast, strange, perplexing, and disturbing a lot of the Bible is, or for how weird things are gonna get when you decide to read the whole thing, cover to cover.

But on the other hand, Bunni’s Bible-thon is also basically a speed-run of a familiar experience for most of us who grew up in white evangelical church youth groups. This is the Read Through the Bible in a Year challenge thing, but condensed into a single week, like somebody binge-watching a complete series at 1.5 speed.

Most of the youth group isn’t gonna make it through the whole thing. The initial commitment and enthusiasm will carry almost everybody through the book of Genesis and the first half of Exodus. That’s mostly narrative, and the stories will seem familiar because of the Sunday school and children’s book versions of many of them that trick you into thinking you’ve heard these bits before.

But then comes the rest of the Pentateuch — the long lists of laws and commandments and way more genealogies and censuses and long lists of “begats” than anybody wants to read. This is where 90% of the people who start out saying “I’m going to read the whole thing, straight through, cover to cover” give up.

This is not their fault. It’s built in to the way the anthology of anthologies that makes up our Bibles is packaged. The Genesis-to-Revelation order of biblical books is set up, roughly, as chronological by setting (and not at all chronological by composition), and there’s a logic to that arrangement. But it’s also like picking up a one-volume edition of the complete works of J.R.R. Tolkien that forces readers to start with The Silmarillion.

So these youth group kids get fired up by the youth pastor and commit to this cover-to-cover Bible reading, assured that it will inspire them and fill them with holy zeal and a sense of purpose. And then they hit big blocks of text like this one, from Numbers chapter 1:

Now the Lord spoke to Moses in the Wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying: “Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male individually, from twenty years old and above—all who are able to go to war in Israel. You and Aaron shall number them by their armies. And with you there shall be a man from every tribe, each one the head of his father’s house.

“These are the names of the men who shall stand with you: from Reuben, Elizur the son of Shedeur; from Simeon, Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai; from Judah, Nahshon the son of Amminadab; from Issachar, Nethanel the son of Zuar; from Zebulun, Eliab the son of Helon; from the sons of Joseph: from Ephraim, Elishama the son of Ammihud; from Manasseh, Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur; from Benjamin, Abidan the son of Gideoni; from Dan, Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai; from Asher, Pagiel the son of Ocran; from Gad, Eliasaph the son of Deuel; from Naphtali, Ahira the son of Enan.” These were chosen from the congregation, leaders of their fathers’ tribes, heads of the divisions in Israel.

Then Moses and Aaron took these men who had been mentioned by name, and they assembled all the congregation together on the first day of the second month; and they recited their ancestry by families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, each one individually. As the Lord commanded Moses, so he numbered them in the Wilderness of Sinai.

Now the children of Reuben, Israel’s oldest son, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, every male individually, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war: those who were numbered of the tribe of Reuben were forty-six thousand five hundred.

From the children of Simeon, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, of those who were numbered, according to the number of names, every male individually, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war: those who were numbered of the tribe of Simeon were fifty-nine thousand three hundred.

Ten more tribes of census listings to go.

One of three things happens here for the youth group  kids who raised their hands or signed the pledge or whatever, committing to reading through the entire Bible. Most of them, of course, just give up. A lot of them, frankly, gave up well before Numbers — abandoning the whole project long ago when they encountered similar lists of begats and genealogies and census lists back in Genesis.

This is completely understandable, but it’s bound to make those kids feel bad about themselves. They were assured that God would reward them for reading this stuff and they haven’t been experiencing any of those promised rewards. “From Asher, Pagiel the son of Ocran,” they read, without any sense of spiritual guidance or increased zeal for the things of God, and they conclude this must be their fault — something wrong with them. Telling those kids to just keep reading harder without addressing that is pastoral malpractice.

Another, much smaller set of kids in that youth group will read that census report from Numbers 1 and notice that the Bible keeps giving them lists of the 12 tribes of Israel and that those lists seem to be different every time. They won’t ask the youth pastor about this because they’ve already noticed, due to their earlier questions way back in Genesis, that such questions aren’t welcomed and won’t be answered. So they’ll start looking elsewhere for answers to such questions and, depending on where they turn to find them, will either wind up scandalizing their church by going to seminary instead of Bible College, or scandalizing their church by becoming some kind of atheist podcaster.

But something else happens for another big group of those youth group kids when they read something like that impenetrable chunk of Numbers. They were told that reading through the entire Bible would make them feel closer to God, holier, more spiritual, more on fire for Jesus. They were taught 2 Timothy 3:16 as a promise and a contract. They were told what they could and should expect to gain from reading every word of every scripture and they were told what others would expect them to gain from it, and so what they learn — not just from this single passage, but from the entire experience of cover-to-cover reading — is to cultivate those expectations while ignoring the often-boring or confusing or unexpected aspects of the actual text itself.

They’ll get really good at this, spending a whole year practicing this new skill all the way from Genesis to Revelation. The actual words and content of the actual text will fade into fuzzy soft-focus background and all they will see is the kind of vaguely hortatory devotional pablum that the youth pastor will praise them for gleaning from these pages. This skill — replacing the actual text with one’s expectations and preconceptions — is what will carry them through all the tedious begats and the arcane laws and the texts of terror and the inconsistent retellings and the otherwise confounding ancient literary conventions. It will carry them through the prophets and the Gospels and the fierce epistles of Paul.

And so they will become like all of those white evangelical leaders who beclowned themselves over the past month by recoiling in horror when Pope Leo quoted the verbatim words of scripture, condemning those words as “woke” inventions of some “cultural Marxist” pope.

Haven’t they read Isaiah chapter one? Yes. Yes they have read that. They read through the entire book of Isaiah right after they read through the entire book of Song of Solomon and right before they read through the entire book of Jeremiah. They got through it all, cover to cover. But all they remember is what they expected to find.

And so they got all the way through the book of Isaiah without ever noticing anything about widows, orphans, aliens, and the poor. Just like Nelson Bell — Billy Graham’s father-in-law, read all the way through the Song of Solomon many times over without ever allowing it to challenge his vehement opposition to “miscegenation.”

This is a way of reading the scriptures that is attested to in the scriptures themselves — a form of religion that leads one to tithe cumin and dill while neglecting the weightier matters of the law, straining at gnats while swallowing camels.

Maybe the starkest example of this kind of reading the text while ignoring it can be found in the book of Ezra, which ends with Ezra bringing together all the people of Israel to read the scriptures. And then, after they read those scriptures, what do they decide to do? Ethnic cleansing and mass divorce. Thousands of them divorce their Moabite wives, deporting them along with their own children, sending all of their former wives and children away penniless and helpless.

Widows, orphans, aliens, and the poor. Widows, orphans, aliens, and the poor. This is a refrain that is pounded home again and again throughout all the law and the prophets. God holds us accountable — as individuals, and as a society, and as leaders of societies — for how we care for widows, orphans, aliens, and the poor.

This is such a forceful, frequent theme in almost every book of the scriptures that I’ve sometimes said things like “It’s impossible to read the Bible without recognizing God’s special concern for widows, orphans, aliens, and the poor.” But of course that’s not really true. It is possible to read the Bible without recognizing that if you’ve trained yourself to do so.

And many have, including that rat-bastard Ezra. Who sat down and read the scriptures that he had and then stood up and said, “Hey, everybody, let’s make thousands of new widows and orphans. Let’s impoverish them and send them away because they’re foreigners!” He checks all four boxes in the most perverse and evil way imaginable.

It’s not a coincidence that Bunni Pounds says here “America Reads the Bible” event was inspired by the book of Ezra. This is her model — get everybody together to read the scriptures, then rally them all in support of mass-deportation and ethnic cleansing.

I’m pretty sure I heard this one before.