All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.
This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it’s not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico — a seminary student-turned-politician — embodies an existential threat to the right’s long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.
Here’s the thing about The Bible: it says all kinds of shit. Much of it contradictory. And so you’ll find that the parts of The Bible people subscribe to are always the parts that reinforce their existing ideology, because it can then be weaponized as a sort of justification of their views. So, those people are just giant assholes using “the word of God” as justification to continue being assholes.
…which is why I call it basically a Rorschach blot in literary form - whatever ethics you wish to seek in there, you can find. I would think that most people come to this stuff via their own moral and ethical system and cherry pick the parts that fit that bias and make it fit.
All my life, I’ve run into the kind of religious zealots that would insist that “you cannot have ethics without [their] god and [their] religion” - and I’ve always found this so absurdly and painfully naive. You can tell these sort have had next to no introduction to anything philosophical, except as through an explicit filter provided by their equally zealous parents or pastor or whatever.
Robert Anton Wilson would often say something like “What the Thinker Thinks, The Prover Proves” and when it comes to varying sects of xtianity and where they lie on the ideological and moral spectrum, you can see this in action.
The “red letter xtians” or people like Thomas Jefferson can read most of what Jesus says and find their value system there. The assholes that believe in Supply Side Jesus and/or a “muscular xtianity” can ignore most of what Jesus actually says in the NT and prefer most of Paul and the uglier things in the OT for their system of belief.
Which is probably why official churches were very important in early Christianity. You can’t let the masses interpret it themselves.
Which also explains why there were a lot of prohibitions on translations into local languages.
It also explains why you had an explosion of various sects ever since the printing press. These days there are ~45,000 denominations of xtianity.