Chapter 4

A Book People Have Cut to Fit

There is a copy of the Bible sitting in a museum in Washington, D.C., that I think every American ought to see once, in person, before they die.

It is not old the way the Dead Sea Scrolls are old. It is not beautiful the way an illuminated medieval Psalter is beautiful. It is a small, plain, unremarkable-looking book, printed in London in the year 1807. The title on the front is longer than the book has any right to require. It reads: Select Parts of the Holy Bible, for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands.

People today call it the Slave Bible. That is the honest name for it.

Open it, and the first thing you notice is that it is thin. Alarmingly thin. A standard Protestant Bible contains 1,189 chapters. This one contains 232. About ninety percent of the Old Testament is missing. About fifty percent of the New Testament is missing. It is not a paraphrase. It is not a children's edition. It is not an abridgment for busy people. It is the Bible with a large and very specific set of passages removed on purpose, by people who knew exactly what they were doing, for a reason that is written plainly, in English, on the cover.

The people who made it were not villains in capes. They were, in their own minds, missionaries. They belonged to a British society whose stated goal was the conversion, religious instruction, and education of the enslaved people held in bondage on Caribbean sugar plantations. They wanted, they said, to bring the Gospel to the enslaved. And they had figured out that if they brought the actual Gospel (the whole book, the way God had inconveniently arranged it) the enslaved people would read it and, within about a week, understand something the slaveholders very much did not want them to understand.

So they took out the parts that would give the game away.

They took out the Exodus. The entire book. Gone. The single most important narrative in the Old Testament, the story of a God who hears the cry of enslaved people, who confronts the empire that holds them, who breaks that empire in public, and who leads his people out of bondage into freedom, was cut. If you were an enslaved person on a Jamaican sugar plantation in 1808, holding this book in your hands, you would have no way of knowing, from Scripture, that God had ever freed anyone from slavery in his life.

They took out the Psalms of deliverance. They took out most of the prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah) the very books in which God, through his messengers, thunders against nations that oppress the poor, that trade human beings for a pair of sandals, that grow fat by making others thin. They took out Daniel, whose whole point is that empires fall and God's kingdom does not. They took out Revelation, in which the greatest empire the world had ever seen is called Babylon and dragged into judgment.

And in the New Testament, and this is the part that, when I first saw it, made me have to close the book and go sit down for a while, they took out Galatians 3:28. One verse. Thirteen words in English. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The single most explosive sentence Paul ever wrote against every hierarchy human beings have ever used to justify treating each other as less than human. Cut. Removed. Not printed. Not there.

What did they leave in?

They left in the parts that would help. "Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling." That one stayed. "Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust." That one stayed. Anything that could be pressed into the shape of stay where you are, do what you are told, wait for heaven stayed. Anything that could be pressed into the shape of God is on the side of the free, God will break the chains, God has done it before and will do it again went.

That is what a Bible looks like when it has been edited to serve an agenda.

An honest question

I have described the Slave Bible not because it is an obscure historical curiosity but because it is the clearest, most physically undeniable example in modern history of something the rest of this book is going to spend a lot of time talking about. And I want to ask, right at the beginning of this chapter, an honest question.

If a group of people can hold a Bible in their hands, know what is in it, decide that certain parts of it are politically inconvenient, and cut those parts out, with scissors, on a printing press, in 1807, then what should we make of a group of people today who hold the whole Bible in their hands, keep it intact, and simply never read, quote, teach, preach, or apply the exact same passages?

Because that is the pattern I want to trace in this chapter. And it does not stop in 1807.

The Jefferson Bible

Thomas Jefferson kept a razor blade and a copy of the New Testament on his desk in his later years. He was, by his own account, an admirer of Jesus. Of Jesus's ethics, Jesus's teachings, Jesus's moral vision. He was not an admirer of the miraculous, the supernatural, or anything he considered "priest-craft." So he did what a certain kind of Enlightenment gentleman would do. He cut.

He literally cut. With the razor. He took his New Testament and physically excised every verse that reported a miracle, every reference to Jesus's divinity, every account of the resurrection, every prophetic claim, every angelic visit, every voice from heaven. What remained he pasted, in his own hand, into a slim volume he titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It ends with Jesus in the tomb. Full stop. No resurrection. No Great Commission. No ascension. Just the ethical teacher, safely dead.

I do not tell this story to score points against Jefferson. I tell it because it is the mirror image of the Slave Bible, and the pairing matters.

The slaveholders cut out the parts of the Bible that threatened their political and economic power. Jefferson cut out the parts of the Bible that threatened his philosophical and intellectual comfort. Both of them ended up with a book that reflected themselves back to themselves and asked nothing of them they did not already want to give. Both of them called the result the Bible.

Neither of them was reading the Bible. They were reading a mirror.

This is, I think, the oldest temptation religion faces. It is much older than America. It is much older than Christianity. The temptation is to take a book whose entire purpose is to confront you and, instead, to trim it until it merely confirms you. To take a word that is supposed to read you, and to read it instead, with a red pen in one hand and your own agenda in the other.

Once you have seen that pattern, you start seeing it everywhere.

The scissors got quieter

The Slave Bible is easy to see because the editing is physical. Pages are missing. You can hold it in your hand and count what is gone. Jefferson's Bible is the same. There is a book, and then there is a smaller book, and the difference is measurable in cubic centimeters of paper.

Modern American Christianity, most of the time, does not use scissors anymore. It does not need to. The editing has gotten quieter, and more effective, and much harder for the average person in the pew to notice.

Consider the Scofield Reference Bible. Published in 1909 by an American lawyer-turned-minister named Cyrus I. Scofield, it did not remove a single word of Scripture. Every verse was there. What Scofield added was footnotes. Cross-references. Section headings. Interpretive apparatus wrapped around the biblical text like a set of guardrails, gently steering the reader's eye toward a particular reading of the whole book. A reading that divided history into rigid dispensations, that read modern political events into ancient prophecy, that made the modern nation-state of Israel a central player in end-times drama, and that tied all of it to a specific set of American political commitments.

The Scofield Bible sold in the tens of millions. For most of the twentieth century, in most of American evangelicalism, if you were handed a Bible as a young Christian, it was likely to be a Scofield or something modeled on it. Millions of people did not know they were being taught a particular interpretation of Scripture. They thought they were just reading Scripture. The footnotes were on the same page as the text, in the same typeface family, in the same authoritative black ink, and no one told them that everything under the horizontal line was the opinion of a nineteenth-century American lawyer with strong feelings about the end of the world.

That is not scissors. That is something more powerful than scissors. That is a pair of glasses handed to you with the lenses already tinted, and no one telling you they are tinted, and no other pair available in the store.

The prosperity gospel does something similar with a highlighter. It does not remove Jesus's warnings about wealth. They are still there, in every copy of the New Testament ever printed. It simply never lands on them. The camera never turns that way. Sunday after Sunday, the same handful of verses about abundance and blessing and favor get preached, and the whole of Luke's Gospel (the Gospel in which Jesus says woe to the rich, woe to those who are full now, woe to those who are laughing now) sits quietly on the shelf. The book is intact. The reading is a Slave Bible.

Christian nationalism does the same thing with the Old Testament. It goes hunting for passages about Israel as a nation, about God blessing kings who defend the land, about foreigners as threats to purity, and it presses those passages into service to justify a modern American political program. It rarely lingers on the fact that the same Old Testament, on the same pages, commands love of the foreigner more than ninety times, denounces the very kings it praises when they turn to violence and greed, and ends with prophets whose message to the nation is not God bless you but God will judge you if you keep doing this.

None of these movements need to cut. They only need to be selective enough about what they pick up.

A pattern that predates America

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make it sound as though this is a uniquely American sin. It is not. Editing Scripture to fit power is one of the oldest human habits on earth.

The prophets of the Old Testament spent their careers fighting it. Jeremiah stood in the courtyard of the temple and told the priests to their faces that they had turned the house of God into a den of robbers, quoting God's words back at people who claimed to speak for God. Isaiah accused the religious leaders of his day of trampling the poor and then coming to worship with clean hands, and God's response, through the prophet, is one of the most searing passages in all of Scripture: I hate, I despise your festivals. I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Take away from me the noise of your songs. This was not God rejecting worship. This was God rejecting worship that had been edited to leave out justice.

Jesus, when he began his own ministry, walked into a synagogue in Nazareth, unrolled the scroll of Isaiah, and read a specific passage: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Then he rolled the scroll up, sat down, and told the people in the room that this scripture had just been fulfilled in their hearing.

I have often wondered why the people in that room, according to Luke, tried to throw him off a cliff for saying it.

I think the answer is that they knew the scroll. They knew that particular passage. And they knew what had been sitting in the passage in a way they had learned, over generations, not to see. Good news to the poor. Release to the captives. The oppressed set free. It was all right there, in ink, in a scroll they had listened to for their entire lives, and somehow, through the exact process I am describing in this chapter, they had learned to hear it as something safe. Something spiritual. Something metaphorical. Something that meant less than it said.

Jesus read it as though it meant what it said. And they tried to kill him for it.

Every generation of God's people has this problem. Every generation has to be re-shown the parts of the book it has learned not to see. That is not a peculiarly American failing. It is a human one. But it is a human failing that has taken a particularly American shape in the last two centuries, and the shape it has taken has real victims, and it is worth naming.

The particular American version

American Christianity did not invent selective reading. But it did industrialize it.

For most of the country's history, there has been an official Christianity, a version of the faith with the endorsement of the wealthy, the powerful, and the popular. And there has been another Christianity, less visible, quieter in the mainstream press, held together in the pews of small Black churches and small immigrant churches and small dissenting congregations, that has kept insisting on reading the whole book. When the official Christianity said God had blessed the enterprise of slavery, the other Christianity gathered secretly in the woods and sang about the Exodus. When the official Christianity preached that segregation was God's design for the races, the other Christianity marched from Selma to Montgomery quoting Amos: Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. When the official Christianity told Native peoples that their conversion required the surrender of their land, their language, and their children, the other Christianity, sometimes among those same peoples, sometimes among a small remnant of missionaries who actually read their New Testaments, insisted that this was not the Gospel and that God would judge those who called it one.

The pattern is unmistakable once you look for it. Whenever the whole Bible has been read, in America, by people without a financial or political stake in editing it, it has produced abolitionists, civil-rights leaders, sanctuary movements, worker priests, freedom singers, and a long line of ordinary Christians who could not be made to shut up about the poor. Whenever the Bible has been read selectively, in America, by people with a great deal of financial or political stake in the reading, it has produced a chaplaincy to whatever the powerful happened to be doing at the time.

That is not a coincidence. That is the pattern.

I want to be honest about something. The Christianity I am critiquing in this book, Conservative American Christianity, is not the first version of American Christianity to do this. It is the current one. There have been earlier versions with different political flavors that have edited the book in different directions for different agendas, and their heirs are welcome to write their own books. My concern in this book is with the version that is loudest right now, that is doing measurable damage right now, that is being taught to my neighbors right now, and that is claiming the entire mantle of "biblical Christianity" while treating enormous portions of the Bible as though they had been left on the cutting-room floor in 1807.

What has quietly gone missing

Here is a partial list of what has, in practice, gone missing from the working canon of Conservative American Christianity as I have watched it operate in public. Not removed from the book. Just, somehow, never landed on.

The Jubilee laws of Leviticus, in which every fifty years debts are canceled, land is returned, and enslaved people are freed, because the land belongs to God and human beings are not property. Gone.

The prophetic literature of the Old Testament, nearly a third of the Bible by page count, in which God's rage is directed almost entirely at his own people's leaders for growing rich while the poor grow hungry. Gone, except for a handful of verses about idolatry and sexual sin that survive as ammunition.

The Sermon on the Mount, in full, read as instructions to be actually followed rather than as an impossibly high standard designed to make you feel grateful for grace. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemies. Do not store up treasures on earth. Do not judge. Do to others as you would have them do to you. All of it, read as though Jesus meant it. Gone.

Matthew 25, the passage in which Jesus describes the final judgment, and sorts humanity not by belief statements or voting records or national origin but by a single criterion: how they treated the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. And identifies himself, personally, with every one of those people. Gone.

The letter of James, in which the writer says, plainly, that religion pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Gone.

The book of Revelation, read not as a puzzle about the future but as a vision of the present, in which the great enemy of God's people is not a secular government or a rival religion but empire itself: the wealth, violence, and self-worship of a system that thinks it is eternal and that God, unhurriedly, brings down. Gone.

I could keep going. The list is longer than a chapter can hold. But you can do the exercise yourself. Take a Bible. Open it anywhere. Ask, honestly, when was the last time you heard that passage preached, taught, quoted on the radio, printed on a bumper sticker, hung in a family kitchen, or used to justify a political position by any leader who claims to speak for Christian values? If the answer, over and over, is never, you are looking at the outline of a Slave Bible without a single page cut.

The good news, oddly, is that the book is intact

Here is the strange grace of the situation.

The people who made the 1807 Slave Bible succeeded, for a while. They put a mutilated book into the hands of enslaved people and hoped that would be the end of it. But it turned out that the enslaved could hear the missing pages anyway. They heard them in the songs of other enslaved people, smuggled across plantations. They heard them in the preaching of the few free Black ministers who had access to a whole Bible. They heard them, sometimes, in a single line of a psalm that had somehow slipped past the censors. And when Emancipation finally came, and full Bibles were placed in the hands of formerly enslaved people, they went straight to Exodus. They went straight to the prophets. They went straight to Galatians 3:28. They knew, somehow, exactly where the missing pieces were.

The editors could not, in the end, cut the book. The book kept re-assembling itself in the minds of the people who most needed it.

That is, I think, the only reason a book like this one, the one you are reading now, is possible to write. The Bible has not been destroyed. It has not been lost. It has not been so successfully edited that it can no longer speak. It is still there, on the shelf, in the drawer, on the phone, in every hotel room in the country. Every passage the movement I am critiquing has learned not to see is still there in every copy of the book they claim to defend.

Which means the rest of this book is, in one sense, a very simple project. I am not going to bring you any new material. I am not going to give you a secret Gospel. I am going to open the same book those movements say they love, turn to the pages they have quietly learned to skip, and read them aloud.

If you have never read those pages before, they are going to sound like something completely new.

They are not new. They have been there the whole time.

They were there in 1807, when someone took a pair of scissors to them.

They were there in 1809, when Jefferson took a razor to them.

They were there in 1909, when Scofield wrapped them in footnotes that quietly re-directed the reader's eye.

They are there right now, in the sanctuaries where the whole book sits open on the pulpit and only the safe parts get read.

The book has been trying to speak the whole time.

The next several chapters are simply going to let it.