Living Life in the Abstract: Biblical Knowledge and Christian Right Politics

Three immediate thoughts on this piece about biblical ignorance the Christian Right:

(1) I don’t think that playing gotcha on the books of the Pentateuch is a good way to assess Bible knowledge/ignorance (i.e. that wasn’t a good example for the article’s thesis);
(2) Won’t a certain sector see this deficit as an incentive to actually increase the quality and quantity of bible study groups?
(3) And if (2) happens, won’t that actually increase, in the near term, the possibility of misapplied verses and bad politics?

The problem with Christian Right politics is not so much bad Bible knowledge but an unwillingness—after injecting theology into the public square—to tolerate compromise, process, and democracy. That kind of liberalism reads as license to them. The true believer in so-called pro-life politics abhors compromise. Living life in the abstract makes it difficult to deal with practical messiness of democracy. – TL