“Your son is disruptive, disrespectful and dishonoring to God. He asks too many questions during Bible study, and it’s causing the other students to doubt their faith. I’m sorry, but he’s not welcome here anymore.”
My youth pastor said this to my parents one Wednesday night when they came to pick me up from our Southern Baptist church’s youth group. A few minutes prior, I’d been told to go sit in the hallway after asking a “heretical” question during the Bible study portion of the program.
What was the question? It was the week of Easter, and our youth pastor was talking about Jesus’ death on the Cross. He told us that because Jesus had all our sin laid on him, God the Father had to leave Jesus alone because he can’t be around sin.
Zach Lambert
My hand shot up. Before being called on, I blurted out something to the effect of “Didn’t you just say that God was a good father? A good father doesn’t turn his back on his son when he needs him most. If God can’t be around Jesus because of sin, then he definitely won’t want to be around me.”
“Go sit in the hallway, Zach,” my youth pastor responded, accompanied by an irritated stare I’d become familiar with.
Banishing me from Bible studies or telling me to pray harder was usually the response to my questions about the Bible and my doubts about faith.
But no amount of prayer assuaged my doubts, and no amount of hallway sitting eradicated my questions. My doubts grew bigger and my questions loomed larger. I viscerally understood Christian spaces were not safe places to ask pesky questions or voice nagging doubts, so I spent most of my teenage years searching for answers and meaning elsewhere.
That’s when I overdosed.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I overdosed on a combination of alcohol and cough medicine. The very next night, I watched someone else overdose and drown.
Back to the Bible
These two nights amplified my questions even more; it now felt like acquiring the answers was a matter of life and death. Even though I’d been expelled from every Christian space I’d known, I did what any good Christian is supposed to do: I returned to the Bible.
“Even though I’d been expelled from every Christian space I’d known, I did what any good Christian is supposed to do: I returned to the Bible.”
I took a different approach this time, trying to read it with fresh eyes. I started with Matthew, the first book in the New Testament and one of the four Gospels, which tell the story of Jesus’ life. I didn’t go verse by verse with a commentary or attempt to translate every word from the original language like some pastors have done. I just read it. Like a book. Like a story. And, well, that changed everything.
I began to realize I knew the beginning and the end of Jesus’ story by heart — the stories of his birth at Christmas and his death and resurrection at Easter had been drilled into me —but I knew very little about the rest of Jesus’ life. Sure, I’d heard about Jesus walking on water and feeding a bunch of people with just some bread and fish, but outside of that, I was clueless.
I didn’t know Jesus was constantly offering alternative interpretations of Scripture, even when other rabbis disagreed with him. I didn’t know he was reprimanded for hanging out with people on the margins. I didn’t know he taught that love was the most important thing. I didn’t know he pushed back against the occupying Roman authorities. I felt like I knew baby Jesus and resurrected Jesus, but I was meeting the radical, revolutionary Jesus for the very first time. This was the Jesus I wanted to follow.
I decided I was going to be a Christian, but what kind would I be? I’d always been told there were three kinds of Christians: Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics and “crazy liberals,” who probably weren’t actually Christians. At age 17, I knew I wasn’t a Catholic or a liberal, so I figured the only other option was to boomerang back into the Southern Baptist world, the only kind of church I’d ever known.
Weaponizing Scripture
A year later, I finished high school and left Austin to play college football in West Texas, but after a career-ending shoulder injury my freshman year, I became a youth pastor at a small, rural Southern Baptist church, where I worked until I graduated from college. Talk about coming full circle. My wife and I, married all of six months, decided graduate school was the best next step.
We moved to Dallas, and I started seminary classes on the same day I started a job at one of the largest churches in America. As an intern, I directly supported the senior pastor on everything from sermon composition to dry-cleaning retrieval. During my time on his staff, I saw the Bible weaponized in new and horrific ways.
I’m going to talk a lot about the “weaponization” of Scripture throughout this book, so allow me to offer a brief definition of the term. “Weaponization” is the process of turning something meant to be a tool of healing into an instrument of harm.
The weaponization of Scripture is not theoretical. It happens every single day, with devastating consequences. I will tell stories throughout this book of the Bible being weaponized against people, while exploring better ways to read it, but it’s worth sharing an example here as well.
Two of my closest friends in Austin are Imam Attia Omara and Rabbi Kelly Levy. The three of us have been working together on multifaith projects for the good of our city since 2020. Both Imam Attia’s mosque and Rabbi Kelly’s synagogue have been the target of attacks by Christians in the last few years. After one attack on his mosque, Attia texted me a picture of the sign left behind by the assailants. The sign had an artificial pig’s head covered in fake blood staked through the top of it and the words “MUSLIMS: You are as unclean to God as a pig is to you. Have your idolatry washed clean by the blood of Jesus Christ! 1 Corinthians 6:9–11.”
In case you’re wondering, 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 says, “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
This passage is from a letter written by the Apostle Paul to the church in Corinth. The larger section is not about suing fellow Christians, and the verses immediately preceding the passage say this: “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers and sisters. Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom?”
The weaponization of Scripture looks like twisting a passage meant to encourage Christians to avoid lawsuits if possible into a justification for violence against Muslims.
At the megachurch where I worked, I often saw the Bible weaponized to justify bad behavior by staff members, cover up abuse, promote conversion therapy for LGBTQ folks and much more. These incidents left me shaken and jaded, unsure if I could continue a career in ministry. After two years of watching pastors use the Bible to inflict harm on the very people they were supposed to be caring for, I knew I couldn’t be a part of it anymore. Without a clue as to what I would do next, I walked into my boss’ office and told him I was done.
Finding Jesus
I was at a crossroads. I still wanted to follow the radical, revolutionary Jesus, but he was nowhere to be found in so much of the Christianity around me. I also knew I needed to figure out better ways to read the Bible. The ways I’d watched it wielded as a weapon were incongruent with who I knew Jesus to be. But I wasn’t ready to throw away the Bible. After all, it’s where I first read about the life-changing love of Jesus.
“I still wanted to follow the radical, revolutionary Jesus, but he was nowhere to be found in so much of the Christianity around me.”
I didn’t have the language at the time, but looking back, I see I was trying to deconstruct harmful ways of reading the Bible and reconstruct something better. This deconstruction and reconstruction process eventually led me to move back to my hometown of Austin to start Restore Austin — a church for the many people who’d been left out in the cold by churches and leaders who mishandled the Scriptures. It didn’t take long for me to see that more people fell into this category than I previously realized.
Many folks have come to see the Bible as either a dusty old book that’s irrelevant to modern life or a toxic text that causes more harm than good in politics, people’s lives and the public square. Research reveals the majority of Americans now say they read the Bible “never” or “less than once a year.” A major reason people are avoiding the Bible is because they have experienced it not as a good book but rather as a weapon to shame and scold, judge and condemn, marginalize and oppress.
A lack of confidence in the goodness of Scripture has led to a lack of confidence in the churches and pastors who preach it. When religious leaders misuse the Bible in ways that inflict pain on people, those people understandably leave. This is one significant reason why the church in America is experiencing the greatest mass exodus in its history.
I knew I wasn’t going to change a national trend from my solitary perch in Austin, but I could provide an alternative community where those who had been spiritually burned could find solace and healing. So we founded Restore as a place where anyone has a seat at the table and everyone experiences the love of Jesus. In order to avoid perpetuating harm and triggering trauma for those who had been beaten up by the Bible, myself included, I knew we needed to read and interpret the Bible differently than the communities many of us had come from read it.
Zach Lambert serves as lead pastor of Restore Austin, a congregation in Austin, Texas. He holds a master of theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and is pursuing a doctorate at Duke Divinity School. Zach is cofounder of the Post-Evangelical Collective This article is excerpted from his upcoming book, Better Ways to Read the Bible ©2025 and is used by permission of Brazos Press.