Let's talk about the weaponization of Scripture

An excerpt from Zach Lambert's new book, Better Ways to Read the Bible

A couple of days ago, I found myself digging through old boxes in the closet, looking for my childhood immunization records. Why an elusive little yellow card from the early 80s would be housed next to a letter from my grandfather, a research paper on MARY MAGDALENE and Jesus from my junior year of college, and my oldest son’s first pair of shoes is beyond me, but I continued to root my way through the forgotten box.¹

The immunization records weren’t in the box, I’ll have you know, but I did stumble upon an entire binder of old camp talks — talks I gave fifteen, twenty, nearly twenty-five years ago at church camps up and down the West Coast.

Those years, my process was often the same: dig into the research. Write it all out (and bold any and all Scripture sprinkled throughout). Outline the main points on a 3x5 card and tape it to the front of a pocket Bible.

By then, the “talk” was nearly memorized, firmly cemented into the sinews of my brain so that when I stood in front of hundreds of campers, week after week, I didn’t so much as have to look at the notecard to tell a story or two.

But when I look back at the binder of old camp talks, I think about how much the messages I spoke, the messages I so fervently, passionately believed to be true, were also sometimes filled with shame and guilt and even manipulation — inadvertently used to exclude and not include, to weaponize in the name of Jesus.

That’s hard to write, if I’m honest.²

Maybe that’s why I’m so glad

Zach W. Lambert

not only names the weaponization of Scripture, but also rewrites new ways of interacting with Scripture that, in his words, lead to healing and wholeness and fullness of life.

His new book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, is everything I wish I could have had in my hot little hands fifteen, twenty, nearly twenty-five years ago.³ But grace upon grace, we have it now.

Enjoy this excerpt from his new book!

Zach! His book!

I watched our pastoral leadership weaponize the Scriptures in ways that lent spiritual authority to prejudice, partisan politics, and oppression. They used Bible verses to baptize bigotry.

On my first day on staff, an executive pastor took me on a tour of the facility. It was spread out over a 140-acre campus with a cumulative square footage of over 150,000. This multi-hour tour culminated in the worship center, a trilevel venue that could seat about 7,500 people.

On the tour, the pastor walked me to the highest point in the auditorium. Standing at the top of the balcony, he made a sweeping hand gesture and said, “Zach, you have three things in your life right now: your wife, seminary, and this church. You simply won’t have enough time and energy to give all three of them what they need from you. You’re going to have to cheat one of them.”

Then he gave me such an intense look that his face is forever burned into my memory, and he said, “Zach, I don’t care which one you cheat, but do not cheat this church.”

This church had strict rules about who could lead and who couldn’t, with explicit sanctions against women leading and unwritten rules for people of color. LGBTQ+ folks weren’t even allowed to be church members, much less on staff. The executive leadership team consisted of uniformly straight, white, politically conservative men.

Our senior pastor was a televangelist and a top Southern Baptist Convention leader, serving as a faith adviser to President Donald Trump. He spent his Sunday morning sermons wielding the Bible like a sword against anyone he didn’t like, and the list was long: liberals, progressives, gay people, social justice warriors, Democrats, “baby killers” (people who were pro-choice), immigrants, “thugs” (code for minorities who didn’t conform to white cultural norms), feminists, and so on.

I repeatedly saw the Bible weaponized to subjugate women, justify slavery, bash LGBTQ+ folks, cover up abuse, and exclude anyone brave enough to speak out against these injustices. I’m ashamed to admit that early on in my time there, I wielded the Bible in the same way—to great applause from the pastoral staff—but I couldn’t keep it up.

A combination of my personal struggles with Scripture and my increasing unwillingness to use it to hurt people led me to a tipping point. I began to ask questions, and they were met with warnings to stay in my place. I started not following directives that I found to be immoral or, in a few cases, illegal. These actions were met with anger.

Not long after this transition, an argument with the pastor turned into suspension from work.

The morning my suspension ended, I walked into the teaching pastor’s office to figure out what to do next. He had prepared a written apology for me in advance. He encouraged me to memorize it and repeat it to the senior pastor as a form of biblical repentance.

I remember it like yesterday, reading that prewritten apology with the words “biblical repentance” echoing in my mind. I remember the way the paper felt in my hands. I remember the heat rising up in my chest and blushing out through my cheeks.

Enough was enough.

I set the paper down on his desk, told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and walked out of his office. I had become not only one of the twenty-six million people who have stopped reading their Bibles but also one of the millions who have left church behind.

Over the last twenty years, church membership has fallen 23 percent, while the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion has ballooned to 21 percent of the population. Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but I can tell you why I left and why so many of the people I know left: The churches they joined and the leaders they followed weaponized the Bible in ways that hurt them and the people they love.

Millions of these defectors are not rejecting Jesus; they are rejecting the use of Jesus’s name for the purpose of domination and oppression. They aren’t rejecting the Bible; they are rejecting harmful ways of reading it. I’m convinced that this rejection doesn’t make them un-Christian. It makes them Christlike.

Jesus chastised folks who weaponized Scripture and elevated it above love of neighbor. He repeatedly denounced those who used sacred texts to divide rather than unite, incite violence rather than make peace, and exclude rather than include.

Like so many others, after I put my Bible on the shelf and walked out of the church, I had no idea there was anything other than what I’d left behind. I didn’t know there were better ways to read the Bible.

What if the problem wasn’t the Bible, but the way I’d been taught to read it?

As I began to consider these questions, something started to shift. Like ice thawing in the spring, it happened slowly at first, but I began to realize that even though I believed the Bible was inspired by God, the interpretations I’d been given were not.

The prophet Isaiah looked forward to a time when God would make all things right again. No more pain, no more sorrow, no more violence. To accomplish this restoration, people would “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Isa. 2:4). In other words, making things right includes transforming weapons of harm into tools of healing. I believe this will happen in complete fullness someday, but we don’t have to wait for that day to come before we start dismantling our weapons. As the apostle Paul says, “Today is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2 NLT).

Today is the day of being set free from everything that gets in the way of our flourishing and the flourishing of our neighbors. Today is the day to start leaving behind bad Bible interpretations and choosing to read Scripture in ways that lead to healing, wholeness, and fullness of life.⁴

1. Yes, I could use a personal organizer, why do you ask?

2. Even if I did just write 60,000 or so words on the subject.

3. Better Ways to Read the Bible is available wherever books are sold. I recommend ordering it from Bookshop, but you can also find it on Amazon.

4. Content taken from Better Ways to Read the Bible by Zach Lambert ©2025. Used by permission of Brazos Press.