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.
I remember Robert Anton Wilson, who grew up Catholic, musing about how they should probably be called Paulians. Man, did that hit home with my experience.
I grew up xtian (from a liberal tradition of xtianity) and when I started hearing how other kids that were also xtian talking about certain issues, as early as maybe third or fourth grade I started to understand that there are vastly different interpretations of what that means.
I read the NT at a rather early age, slogged through the OT later, 2x for both of them (although I admit to skimming Numbers) and that did a lot to generally give me a great distance from all of it.
When hard core wingers talk about “the bible”, I often get the sense they have never read anything but hand-selected passages spoon-fed to them. It is especially wild to notice that when I talk about “red letter xtians” around them they often get a look of confusion. Before the term was concocted, though, even as an adolescent, when I’d ask people if what they were espousing was something that was written in red, they’d be confused. Which is strange, since quite a few bibles I’ve seen have Jesus’ words in red…
When this same batch of illiterates advocate for “teaching the bible”, part of me wants to say - yes, let’s do that, but read the entire thing and have class discussions after each assigned reading.
No special guidance, though, from certain beliefs. No apologetics applied to “explain” all the contradictions with logic, math, science and ethics. Start to finish, baby, even if it takes a few years to do it.
See how long that lasts, LOL.