By Andy Hale

“The Bible says” is undoubtedly one of the most powerful openings of a sentence. At the same time, it can also quickly divulge into one of the most toxic, divisive, and loaded statements.

“The Bible says” has been used to justify some of the most unconscionable acts in human history, such as the Crusades, Inquisition, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow.

In our modern age, the Bible has become unfairly associated with those who seek to weaponize it for their own political, economic, social, and emotional gain.

“Today we face a fundamental threat to democracy, the system of governance that protects the fundamental biblical teaching that human beings are created in God’s image and worthy of dignity and respect,” argued Rev. Jennifer Butler on the CBF Podcast.

Butler is the CEO of Faith in the Public Life. We sat down with the author to discuss her new book, Who Stole My Bible, an invitation to see the sacred text as a handbook to resist tyranny.

“This way of grounding our resistance in the Bible is not just cherry-picking a good verse to quote in our speeches or comments to the press. It is a way of growing our movement in insight and compassion as we imagine ourselves in the story, identifying with the challenges of that moment.”

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Andy Hale is the creator and host of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Podcast. Hale is the senior pastor of University Baptist Church of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, following eight years as the founding pastor of Mosaic Church of Clayton and five years as CBF’s church start specialist. Follow on Twitter @haleandy