Jesus was not a “light-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed man,” to be sure. We don’t.” I queried this argument in my defence of a narrative-historical perspective on European Christendom. That’s all very ironic, because in Butler’s view: “There are no white people in the Bible, though so many white people act as if they own the Bible. Biblically grounded public voices on the Left have been “needed to counter such views, but we were often absent or outgunned and drowned out.” In the US the Bible has become a tool of the Right for the oppression of women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, muslims-pretty much anyone who isn’t white and male. In the Introduction Butler sets out the basic problem. Inevitably, that is both its strength and its weakness. Butler expresses a convincing passion for the Bible, but the book is as much an account of protest in America-sometimes, commendably, an eye-witness account-as it is an attempt to reclaim scripture. Who Stole My Bible? is a lively blend of auto-biography, story-telling, biblical interpretation and apologetics, and strongly progressive polemics. For the most part she writes out of solidarity with the progressive left and out of a rather caustic disdain-frankly-for those on the right who “praise the tyrant and do what he says, or else.” But there is also a lot of what looks to me-again, from a safe distance-like moral high-grounding, and in an intensely polarised political context that risks undermining any attempt to recover the Bible as a basis for independent social witness. Answering the question, though, is not easy.īutler writes with some moral authority, and there is the occasional note of even-handedness. For Christians, the question of how we allow the Bible to speak into this is as pressing after the fall of Trump as before. Injustices continue, governments struggle to right wrongs, governments often make matters worse, and people protest. Of course, the underlying issues don’t go away. America is one election away from a one-party system.”

“Money in politics and a new type of gerrymandering advanced in the nineties is close to locking political power in the hands of one party: the Republicans. But the book was written in the middle of a fierce political storm that now seems to have blown over.īutler is firmly of the opinion that America was in thrall to a right-wing, white supremacist, nativist, exclusivist (how we love our -ist words these days!), patriarchal, anti-democratic, imperialising tyranny, and that a large part of the church had been deceived into worshipping the beast. Admittedly, I’m reviewing Jennifer Butler’s Who Stole My Bible? Reclaiming Scripture as a Handbook for Resisting Tyranny from a safe distance, and maybe there’s a lot that’s not visible from here. It’s funny how quickly a book can go out of date.

Jennifer butler golen