When someone you love says the Bible caused racism, sexism and slavery, you can answer in two steps. First, agree with what is true: people did use Scripture to defend all three. Second, separate what people did with the book from what the book says, and offer to look at the passages together. Do both slowly, and listen longer than you talk. This guide is practice for that conversation. You will rehearse it out loud until the calm answer comes to you without effort.
You can work through it alone with a notebook, playing both voices, or with two or more people taking turns. The whole guide takes about an hour. It draws on a Jude 3 Project session in which Dr. Charlie Dates, senior pastor of Chicago’s historic Progressive Baptist Church, takes up the question of whether the Bible is the problem. His conclusion is direct: “the Bible’s not the problem. We’ve been the problem.” The goal here is narrower than proving him right. You are learning to say something like that honestly, kindly and in real time, to a person who may not want to hear it.
Before anything else, write your first answer
Imagine a specific person, someone you actually know, telling you this: The Bible was used to keep my ancestors in chains and to keep women quiet. Why would I trust it? Before you read further, write down exactly what you would say back. Use your real words, not your best words. Then note how your body responded as you imagined it. Did your jaw tighten? Did you want to correct them, or did you want to end the conversation?
Fold the page and set it aside. You will come back to it at the end. In a group, people can keep this first answer private. No one needs to read it aloud.
What Scripture asks of the person answering
Start with the posture before you study the argument. Three short passages describe how a believer is supposed to answer a challenge. Read each one twice, slowly.
- “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.” (Colossians 4:6)
- “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath:” (James 1:19)
- “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:” (1 Peter 3:15)
In 1 Peter 3:15, the old word sanctify means to set apart as holy, and meekness here carries the sense of gentleness. Notice the order in that verse. Honoring the Lord in your heart comes before giving an answer, and the answer is described as a reason for hope rather than a victory over an opponent. James puts hearing first and anger last.
Observation task: underline every phrase in these three verses that describes how to speak, and circle every phrase that describes what to say. Which list is longer? What does that suggest about where most of your preparation should go?
Learn to state the charge better than the accuser does
Dates does not start by defending the Bible. He starts by naming the suspicion in its strongest form. Some readers, he says, look at God making one nation of Abraham and at the line Scripture draws between Jews and Gentiles, and they build an ethnocentrism on it that puts one people at the center and pushes everyone else to the margins. Others point to what he calls toxic patriarchy. Others point to money, misogyny and slavery. He takes each one seriously enough to say it out loud.
That is the first skill to practice. A person who feels misunderstood will not hear your answer. A person who hears you say their objection well is more likely to stay in the conversation.
Practice: the restatement drill. Work in pairs. One person states the charge in their own words for about thirty seconds. The other repeats it back, starting with So what you’re saying is…, and keeps adjusting until the first person agrees, Yes, that’s it. No answering is allowed in this round. Then switch. If you are alone, write the strongest version of the charge you can, and then ask whether someone who believes it would sign their name to your wording.
For whoever is leading: this drill often shows that people want to answer before they have understood. Let the group notice that without shaming anyone. Run the drill a second time if the first round felt rushed.
Three distinctions to carry into the conversation
Dates offers several ideas, but three do most of the work when you are on the spot. Each one comes with a short Scripture exercise so you can test it against the text instead of taking his word for it.
1. What people did with a text is not the same as what it says
Dates appeals to something everyone already knows: “You don’t like for people to quote you in a way that you didn’t intend for it to be meant.” He then points to the enslaved Africans whose faith survives in the spirituals his church preached through during Black History Month. “These enslaved persons do not deny the person and work of Jesus Christ or his word, even when that word was wrongfully used to abuse them,” he says. The same book was read toward bondage by enslavers and toward freedom by the enslaved. So the way a book was used cannot settle, by itself, what the book means.
Scripture exercise: read Ephesians 6:5, which begins, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh”. This is the verse most often quoted in the charge. Now keep reading through verse 9, which addresses masters: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.” (Ephesians 6:9). Write down what changes when you read the two verses together. Then ask a fair question: does reading verse 9 answer every concern about verse 5, or does it only show that the slaveholders’ use of verse 5 left something out? Be honest about which it is.
2. Bad authority is not proof that all authority is bad
Some people will say the deeper problem is that the Bible claims authority at all. Dates locates the problem differently: “we are wrestling with the plight of poor authority, not the fact that there is some authority, but poor authority.” He uses a stop sign to make the point. If one driver treats it as a suggestion and another ignores it completely, people get hurt. “It’s gotta mean stop to everybody.”
On women, he is just as plain: “anybody who tells you that God made man superior to woman is not reading the scripture correctly.” Test that against two verses: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27) and “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” (Ephesians 5:21). What do these verses say about worth? What do they leave unaddressed? Christians who take Scripture seriously still disagree about roles in church leadership. Practice saying that honestly instead of pretending the question is closed.
3. Context protects a text from its abusers
Dates says “The Bible is aiming to bring order to the chaos that sin created.” He reads much of the Old Testament law as managing the damage of a broken world, not describing God’s ideal. Rules about debt or selling land, he argues, do not mean God wanted people in debt. He also shows how recovering the original setting changes a familiar line. He explains that the words of “Give us this day our daily bread.” (Matthew 6:11) were tied to poor laborers who could only buy bread one day at a time. The prayer belongs to the poor, and it also teaches everyone to depend on God daily.
Exercise: choose one verse you have heard used to hurt someone. Write it in the center of a page. Around it, write the verses just before and after it, who was speaking, who was listening and what was happening. Then write one sentence about what the verse meant to those first hearers. You may not resolve it. The point is to learn the habit of looking before concluding.
Run the conversation
Now put it together. Work in groups of three if you can: one person plays the friend, one answers, and one observes. Rotate after each round. If you are alone, speak both parts out loud, then play back what you said or write it down and read it as if a stranger had said it.
Each answer should take about two minutes. It should include three things: a sentence that agrees with what is true in the charge, a question that invites the friend to say more, and one distinction from above offered as something to look at together. Do not try to use all three distinctions in one round.
Round one. The friend says: It literally says slaves, obey your masters. How can you follow that?
Round two. The friend says: Men wrote it to keep women under them. That’s obvious.
Round three. This is the hardest one, and it deserves real practice. The friend says: Every time a verse looks bad, you say it was misread. That’s convenient. You just call the readings you don’t like misuse. Dates gives you an honest place to stand here. He admits “However, when truth is in the hands of an interpreter, truth can take on the color of that interpreter.” He also warns that “There are people with conservative convictions and people with progressive convictions these days that are making the Bible say what they want it to say rather than letting the Bible speak for itself.” A good answer in this round concedes that the danger is real, including for you, and then explains what a reader can check: original context, genre, the surrounding passage and other believers who will push back.
Round four. The friend says nothing argumentative. They say, quietly: That verse was used on me. The person answering does not answer the argument at all this time. Practice what James 1:19 asked of you.
The observer watches for specific things, not general impressions. Did the person answering agree with anything before disagreeing? Did they ask at least one real question? Did their voice speed up or get louder? Did they leave the friend room to disagree? Give feedback in that order, starting with what went well.
For whoever is leading: some people will treat these rounds as a debate to win. Slow them down by asking the friend in each trio, Did you feel heard? Others may grow quiet because the charge is their own doubt, not a role. Let anyone pass on playing the friend. If someone shares that Scripture was used to control or harm them, put the exercise aside. Thank them, believe them, and don’t defend the book in that moment. If what they describe is abuse at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, and a trusted pastor or counselor is a good next step.
Questions for discussion
- In the restatement drill, which part of the charge was hardest for you to say fairly? Why do you think that part was harder?
- Dates appeals to how enslaved believers read the Bible. Why might that evidence carry weight with a skeptic? What would a skeptic be right to ask about it?
- Dates admits that if you don’t share his starting point about sin, “if you don’t believe this, you won’t be able to fully accept anything that I’m saying.” What does it change in a conversation to name your own starting assumptions out loud?
- Where do you see the difference between poor authority and no authority in your family, workplace or church? Where might someone you love see only the first?
- Round three asked how you tell a faithful reading from a self-serving one. Which of the checks would you trust most, and which would a skeptic trust most?
- Is there a reading of Scripture you hold that might be colored by who you are? How would you find out?
- Dates says, “I’m certainly not today in this moment thinking everybody who watches this is gonna agree with everything I said.” How would your conversations change if you went in without needing agreement by the end?
Return to your first answer
Unfold the page from the beginning. Read what you first wrote as if the friend you pictured were reading it. Mark what you would keep, what you would cut and what you would now say first. Then write one new opening sentence for that conversation, no more than two lines, that you could actually say out loud to that person.
Dates closes his session by asking listeners to treat the Bible as the authority and to consider that we are the ones who are often wrong. The psalmist gives words for that kind of self-examination: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (Psalm 139:23-24). Before you have the real conversation, read those verses once more. Ask what in your own reading, or your own reactions, might need straightening out first.