If Part One taught me anything, it’s that the people most certain God said something are usually the people who have read his book the least carefully.
Let’s continue.
Mary Magdalene Was a Prostitute
No, she wasn’t. Not even a little. The Bible doesn’t describe her profession. It doesn’t imply her profession. What it does say, in Luke 8, is that she was a woman of means who traveled with Jesus and helped fund his ministry. It says Jesus cast seven demons out of her. And it says she was the first witness to the Resurrection. The first person to encounter the risen Christ and the first person sent to tell anyone about it.
That’s not a peripheral role. That is, by any measure, the most significant moment in Christian theology, and a woman was the chosen witness.
The Eastern Orthodox Church, which has always kept her distinct from other biblical figures, has called her Equal to the Apostles for centuries. The prostitute story came from a single pope. Pope Gregory I, in a homily delivered around 591 AD, identified Mary Magdalene with the unnamed sinful woman who anoints Jesus’s feet in Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany. And for the first time, she was explicitly characterized her sins as sexual in nature.
He was not reading the text. He was collapsing three different women into one composite character to make a theological point about repentance. Scholars argue that early church leaders conflated her with other women because Jesus had empowered women so extensively in his ministry that it made some of the men who would lead the early church uncomfortable. That discomfort turned a prominent leader and financial patron of Jesus’s ministry into a reformed whore.
It seems, Pope Greg may have been a woman hating incel. But, I digress.
Historian Jane Schaberg coined the term “harlotization” to describe what happened to Mary’s reputation. She said it is a deliberate process that disempowered a powerful leader of the faith. In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church officially corrected its stance, revising its liturgical calendar to distinguish Mary Magdalene from the sinful woman of Luke 7. That was 1,378 years later. The church eventually admitted it had been wrong. Hollywood has not gotten the memo.
The most important woman in the resurrection narrative had her entire identity replaced by a man with institutional power and a sermon. That’s not scripture. That’s a smear campaign.
God Wants You Rich
Aww, yes. The prosperity gospel. The one preached by the Copelands and the Osteens and the Crefflo Dollars of the American evangelical world, the one with the private jets and the stadium megachurches. Their one central claim is that God promises material wealth to faithful believers. Texas and and California have the most megachurches in the country. Shocker.
This happened two years ago. Christmas time. A megachurch here in Dallas, while people went hungry and homeless in the same city.
There was community backlash. Probably because we’ve been heading for the Great Depression 2.0, and watching a church deck its halls like a Rockefeller while turning the hungry and needy away tends to land a certain way.
The church was not fazed. A spokesperson said Jesus deserves the best.
Bitch, Jesus don’t give a good goddamn.
Can I get an amen.
This is the gospel that tells you to give money to the church, speak prosperity into existence, have enough faith, and God is contractually obligated to make you rich. That looks economically similar to a commercial transaction or even a fraud-like pitch, no? This is not in the Bible. What is in the Bible, repeatedly and emphatically, is the opposite.
Matthew 19 has Jesus telling a rich young man to sell everything he owns and give it to the poor. Mark 10 has him saying it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The Sermon on the Mount blesses the poor. James 5 warns the wealthy that their gold and silver will corrode and testify against them. The prosperity gospel requires you to read past all of that.
According to historian Kate Bowler, the prosperity gospel emerged from the intersection of Pentecostalism, the New Thought metaphysical movement, and an American gospel of pragmatism, individualism, and upward mobility. It is, at its origin, more American self-help ideology than Christianity. The Word of Faith movement was founded by Kenneth Hagin in the 1960s, with its roots in the earlier teachings of E.W. Kenyon. Oral Roberts preached “seed-faith,” proclaiming that money donated to his ministry would return to the donor sevenfold. I’d love to know if anyone got their sevenfold money from God yet? Kenneth Copeland built a theology around positive confession — say what you want, believe it, receive it.
His estimated net worth now exceeds $300 million. More recent sources put it at $450 million to $760 million depending on the source. Religion is one of the largest and most persistent social institutions, as well as the biggest con, in human history.
The theology and the biography are doing very different things. Even some of its biggest architects eventually cracked. Jim Bakker, writing from federal prison after his conviction for fraud, asked: “If we equate earthly possessions with God’s favor, what are we to tell the billions living in poverty?” Joyce Meyer later apologized for her teachings, saying there is nowhere in the Bible where we are promised we’ll never have trouble.
The prosperity gospel is not an ancient theological tradition. It is a 20th-century American invention built on misread scripture, 19th-century self-help mysticism, and the observation that telling people God wants them rich is an extremely good way to get them to give you their money.
Tax the damn churches.
The Bible Condemns Tattoos
This one shows up whenever a tattooed person walks into a church and someone decides to make it their business. I remember hearing it all the time by “churchies” and my own family members, “Don’t desecrate your body, it’s against God’s will.” What a load of crap.
The passage is Leviticus 19:28: “You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves.” It’s right there. Case closed. Except it isn’t. Because Leviticus 19 is in the Holiness Code, the same section of Torah that prohibits eating shellfish, wearing clothing made of two different fabrics, cutting the hair on the sides of your head, and planting two different kinds of seed in the same field.
The verse about tattoos sits eight verses away from the verse about mixed-fiber garments. No one is picketing the gap. The argument that Christians are bound by the Levitical code is theologically incoherent within Christianity’s own framework. The entire premise of Paul’s letters, particularly Galatians and Romans, is that followers of Christ are not under the Mosaic Law. This is not a fringe interpretation. It is foundational Protestant theology. You cannot selectively enforce Leviticus based on which prohibitions are culturally convenient.
There is also the question of what the original prohibition was actually about. The phrase “for the dead” is a clue. Scholars broadly read this as a prohibition on mourning rituals practiced by surrounding cultures, ritual cutting and marking as part of pagan funerary rites. It was a boundary marker, not an aesthetic ruling. It has nothing to do with someone getting their kids’ names on their forearm.
The people invoking Leviticus 19:28 at tattooed strangers are enforcing a mourning ritual restriction from ancient Canaanite cultural context that their own theological tradition says no longer applies to them and wearing blended fabrics while they do it.
The Bible Is Anti-Divorce
This is the one that gets wielded most often against women, usually by institutions that would prefer they stay. Yes, there are passages in which Jesus speaks negatively about divorce. Matthew 5 and Matthew 19 both include statements that marrying a divorced woman constitutes adultery. Mark 10 has Jesus saying that whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery. But, people often skip the exception clause. Matthew 19:9 contains it directly— “except for sexual immorality.” That exception is right there in the text.
The “no divorce, ever” position requires ignoring a clause Jesus himself included. And people turn a blind eye, almost completely, to the historical and legal context. Jesus was speaking to a specific first-century Jewish debate about the grounds for divorce under Mosaic law. The school of Shammai held that divorce was permissible only for sexual unfaithfulness. The school of Hillel held that a man could divorce his wife for nearly any reason — including burning his food.
Jesus was closer to Shammai’s position than Hillel’s, but stricter than either of them. He was not issuing a universal eternal prohibition. He was addressing men who were using easy divorce as a mechanism to discard inconvenient wives with no legal recourse.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 adds another exception explicitly. He added that a believing spouse is not bound if an unbelieving spouse chooses to leave. Scholars call this the Pauline privilege. The tradition of reading the Bible as an absolute prohibition on divorce under any circumstance requires ignoring the exceptions built into the text, ignoring the rabbinical debate that forms the context, and ignoring that Paul himself carved out a second explicit exception within the same generation. The church has spent two thousand years using a rabbinical debate as a cage. Mostly for women.
America Is a Christian Nation, Founded on Biblical Law
I’m lookin at you, Bible Belt.
This one isn’t in the Bible. It’s barely in history. The founding documents of the United States do not mention Jesus, do not reference the Bible as a legal foundation, and contain no declaration that the nation was established as a Christian entity. The Constitution mentions religion exactly once in Article VI — to prohibit religious tests for public office.
The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. That’s it. That is the entire constitutional treatment of Christianity. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797 and signed by John Adams, contains Article 11, which states plainly that “the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Christian Nationalists argue the line was a diplomatic reassurance to a Muslim state rather than a statement of national identity, and it’s worth knowing that Article 11 does not appear in the original Arabic version of the treaty, only in the English translation. But that English translation is what the Senate read aloud on the floor, printed copies for every senator, ratified unanimously without debate, and what John Adams signed into law. Whatever the translation’s origins, that is the version with legal force.
Not a word of objection was raised in 1797.
Several of the founders were personally Christian. Many, including Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, were deists who expressed loads of skepticism about orthodox Christian doctrine. Jefferson literally cut the miracles out of his Bible with scissors. He kept the ethics and removed the supernatural. His version is in the Library of Congress.
The idea of America as a divinely chosen Christian nation is largely a post-WWII construction. The phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, during the Cold War, as an explicit contrast to godless communism. “In God We Trust” became the official national motto in 1956, displacing E Pluribus Unum, the motto on the Great Seal since 1782, which had served as the de facto motto of the country for nearly 175 years without anyone feeling the need to make it official. These were deliberate mid-20th century political choices, not recovered founding principles.
Christian Nationalists have been handed a country whose foundational architecture was deliberately designed to prevent the establishment of state religion, and they have decided that the founders were wrong, they decided the documents are wrong, and they decided what the nation actually needs is their specific theology written into law.
The Bible doesn’t call for the United States to be a Christian nation. The Constitution doesn’t call for it. History doesn’t support it. Someone just decided it was true. And now we’re all living with it.
That’s enough for today. There’s more where this came from. There always is. Part three coming soon!
Though it seems obvious, perhaps “Thou Shall Not Rape Kids” should be added to the Commandments
Well written. Thank you for some real truth.