And as I wrote in a story yesterday about a publicly funded Christian school in Wisconsin threatening to withhold graduation and destroy the university careers of two lesbian students, Christians in the United States until the late 20th century frequently argued that the Bible justifies racist segregation in employment, worship, and education.
I wrote in the context of Bob Jones University creating curricula for Christian schools, and helping them operate. Bob Jones University today is a powerhouse in the US White Evangelical Christians world, and they are infamous for treating LGBTQ people (including students) like shit.
They use the Bible to justify that, just like they used the Bible right up until the year 2000 to justify discriminating against Black students and expelling Black and White students who dated or married people outside their race.
Christians today often act shocked that their immediate forbears resisted racially integrated schools by quoting the Bible. Christians today like to pretend that didn't happen.
Because they don't want to understand that so many Christians in their own institutions used the Bible adjust a handful of decades ago to do something so wicked and shameful. They don't want to understand that using the Bible to make moral judgments requires interpretation. Always. And sometimes the interpretations that people arrive at are wicked.
I don't know what it would be like to be inside the head of that school official I wrote about. I don't know what it would be like to actually threaten two teenage girls with the destruction of their university career if they wouldn't break up with one another and seek pastoral counseling for being lesbians.
It takes a special kind of cruelty, a special kind of evil, to be that man —to use the Bible like that to viciously hurt somebody. But he seems proud of his Christian "convictions."
Personally, I think Jesus would have been appalled at that Christian man's abject cruelty. I think he would have urged him to interpret things differently, perhaps by loving his neighbor above all else.
