I'll Never Get Y'all to Read the Bible, Will I?

The other day a friend was describing to me his experience of how anarchist-ish spaces seem to spontaneously spawn oligarchs. I told him, “Bro, you really need to read the Bible. This is just like the story of Saul and David.”

This wasn’t the first time I told him to read the Bible. He thought that “Jesus overturning the tables of the moneylenders” was something that Christopher Moore made up for Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.

I think that everyone should read the Bible. It’s profoundly sad that most people, if they encounter the Bible at all, encounter it only during their childhoods, when the actions and motivations of Biblical figures make very little sense--when they haven’t yet seen how real, how contemporary, these Biblical figures are. Take Moses, for instance: an activist for an oppressed group, Moses was raised in the heights of privilege himself. He fought in the name of less-privileged people who were always telling him that his fight was going too far. You can see the parallels. My guess is that people who think highly of Moses think less highly of his modern doppelgangers, and that Moses’s settler tendencies are probably unpopular among the people who otherwise function similarly to him. And there are endless examples of this, getting shocked by seeing a bronze-age pastoralist or an iron-age courtier do something you were pretty sure no one did until the invention of the internet. Reading about these people in the Bible has another advantage over reading about them on twitter: you get to see how these actions and their consequences play out, in a narrative that some people believei s historically true, and basically everyone believes is at least lindy.

But, as my friend unhelpfully pointed out, the traditional way to get people to read the Bible is by starting a church. That’s not an option for me, because I’m a woman. If my church-founding goal was something other than Bible book club--attaining power, getting validation from my followers, or even a sincere desire to save souls--the woman thing probably wouldn’t get in the way of me giving it a try. But since my actual goal is to get people to read the Bible, the woman thing is a bit more of an obstacle, because if my followers actually read the Bible, they will notice that women are specifically not supposed to teach.

Then, my friend suggested, if I want people to read the Bible but can’t start a church because I’m a woman, then the other obvious option is to become a nun. But he had some stereotypes about nuns that were just not accurate. He brought up slapping children’s hands with rulers.

No, I told him, nuns aren’t like that any more. My nun teacher was actually cool.

I had to take it back. She was not cool. She played Catholic rap for us in class. But she also brought us copies of basically every religious text to read in class--including a translation of the Quran. This outraged the parents, they weren’t paying Catholic school prices for religious relativism. Actually, she was so firm in her faith that she genuinely thought that comparative religious education could only confirm us in our own.

Honestly, it kind of worked, at least short term. I found out that the Quran affirms the virgin birth, which made me feel like the Protestants were the odd ones out. Everyone should also read (a translation of) the Quran.

This nun had great grace with the issue of names. When she was born, her parents named her, let’s say, Remy Martin--her real name was also the name of an alcoholic beverage that the tweens she taught had heard about in non-Catholic rap, so she smiled through a lot of jokes. When she was a postulant, Remy was really looking forward to the name change and not having to listen to liquor jokes any more. Then one day the formation director called Remy into her office. “Remy, I think you’re ready to take the next step in your religious vocation, so I have been thinking a lot about what your religious name will be. And I think you have a real connection with Saint Margarita.”

Ba dum-tshh.