The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part four.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates.

The third link is through Biblical oppression of women. Most crimes are committed by men, many of them against women, as with rape and domestic violence. The relatively small number of domestic violence cases of women against men are often, as in the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case, women taking revenge for abuse by men.

All of ancient society, in which the Bible was written, was misogynistic. The question of whether the Bible is more, or less, misogynistic than its social context is irrelevant. Fundamentalists pick out the passages that oppress women and hold them up as the will of God. In the Bible, as in the world at large, a woman has to marry whomever her father orders her to marry. Women are property.

The general attitude, enhanced by fundamentalism, that women are lesser creatures contributes to an atmosphere that contains rape and domestic violence. In the Old Testament, rape is a property offense. If a man rapes a woman, the rapist has to pay the woman’s father, then she is required to marry the rapist. Happy ending! Deuteronomy 21:11 permits conquering Israelite men to take captive women as their wives, plural. They are spoils of war.

My old fundamentalist self, like many modern Christians, tried to deny this. We emphasized the passage in which the Apostle Paul told husbands to love their wives. Clearly, according to conservative Christianity, a man is not supposed to viciously harm his wife; he is supposed to treat her nicely even while treating her as property.

Even though the Bible does not say it, many fundamentalist Christians believe that women want to be molested. President Trump said that women enjoy having their pussies grabbed by rich men. Many Christians believe everything Trump says as if it were in the Bible. Maybe they think it is. Most of them haven’t read the Bible.

In the next essay, I will present some final thoughts that came to me as I ready Sparks’s book.