The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

by A. J. Jacobs

  I've read dozens of Falwell's sermons online since that visit. And this wasn't a total aberration. More than half of the content is run-of-the-mill stuff: the importance of passing the baton to today's youth. The suggestion to keep a prayer journal. A moral lesson about being optimistic, another about having patience--both of which I find hard to argue with.

  I noticed the same thing from watching hours of Pat Robertson's 700 Club. Sometimes you'll get a crazy "Let's assassinate Hugo Chavez"-type comment. But a lot of it is indistinguishable from standard morning TV: an interview with a gospel singer, or a health segment on the club's weekly "Skinny Wednesday" feature (the wackiest thing I learned there was that Robertson has a side business in "age-defying protein pancakes").

  That's the big secret: The radical wing of the Christian right is a lot more boring than its liberal detractors would have you believe.

  Falwell's sermon today ties his church's fiftieth anniversary to the concept of the Jubilee in the Bible, which occurs once every fifty years. He encouraged us to be "soul winners" and win over the two hundred thousand souls in the Lynchburg area.

  It's not a particularly offensive sermon, but I will say that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Jubilee the Bible talks about. The Bible's Jubilee year is about forgiving debts and returning all property to the original owner, about social justice, about evening the balance between rich and poor. Falwell's was about expanding his church.

  After the service, the curious seeker can get one-on-one counsel with one of Falwell's pastors. I am assigned to Tom, who looks to be in his twenties, and has a spiky boy-band hairdo to offset his suit and tie.

  Tom works at Liberty University, Falwell's nearby college. It's an amazing place, Liberty, the total opposite of my permissive, grades-optional alma mater. The Liberty rulebook contains such items as: "Six reprimands and $25 fine for attendance at a dance, possession and/or use of tobacco" and "twelve reprimands and $50 fine for attendance at, possession or viewing of an 'R,' 'X,' or 'NC-17' rated movie, or entering the residence hallway of the opposite sex."

  I decide I have to redeem myself. I have to stop lying, so I tell Tom that I'm Jewish and writing a book about my spiritual quest. He's interested. I ask if I could gain anything from following the moral teachings of Jesus without being born again.

  "It's OK to follow his teachings. It can make you a better person," he says. "But it's not enough. You need to accept Him, to be born again.

  "I got saved when I was a freshman in high school," Tom continues. "I was a good Christian already. I went to church. I acted as morally as I could. I had accepted Jesus here." Tom points to his head. "But not here." He points to his heart. "I was off by twelve inches."

  He talks so passionately, so intensely, with such freedom from irony, I feel myself becoming unanchored. Perhaps to counter this, as a defensive measure, I bring up the gay issue.

  "I have a lot of trouble with the Bible's stance on homosexuality," I say. Adding somewhat lamely: "I have a lot of gay friends."

  "So do I," Tom says.

  This takes me aback. A Falwell pastor hanging with Lynchburg's gay community? It turns out, Tom meant formerly gay people trying to overcome their gayness, which made more sense.

  "Yes, homosexuality is an abomination," says Tom. "But I'm a sinner too. We're all sinners. You just have to love them."

  This is a pretty mild stance--the hate-the-sin, not-the-sinner idea. I'm guessing he toned the rhetoric down for his Northeastern Jewish audience of one. But, still, I find this stance intolerant in its own way. It's like saying that we should love Jesse Jackson, except for the fact that he's black.

  After about a half hour, my questions slow, and Tom asks if we could pray together. We close our eyes, bow our heads, put our elbows on our knees, and he begins addressing the Lord. "Thank you, Lord, for giving A. J. and me the time to talk today. And may you give him more guidance in his spiritual journey, Lord."

  More guidance--that I need for sure. We can agree on that.

  . . . The men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

  --ROMANS 1:27

  Day 256. Back in New York, I'm continuing my tutorial in evangelical Christianity. It's Friday night, and I'm sitting in on a Bible study group. The group has been around for thirty years and meets every week on the Upper East Side of New York. Tonight we'll be delving into the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter three. We'll be led by a man named Dr. Ralph Blair, who is a hardcore Christian evangelical.

  Oh, I should mention one other thing: Ralph Blair is gay. And outof-the-closet gay. Not, mind you, the I-once-was-gay-but-now-am-cured type of gay. Ralph--and all the other men in his Bible group--embrace their homosexuality with the same zeal that ultraconservative evangelicals condemn it. They're the anti-Robertsons.

  "Come in," says Ralph. "You're the first one here."

  Ralph has a calming, velvety voice. Which is appropriate--his day job is as a psychotherapist. The Bible study meets in his office, which is everything you'd want in a shrink's office: black leather chairs, indirect lighting, dark wood everywhere. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders weighs down one shelf, The Sex Atlas another. And Ralph himself looks pleasingly shrinkish: bald except for a fringe of gray hair, dressed in a dark green corduroy jacket, a blue sweater, a red tie, and chinos.

  "I'm glad you found us," he says. "It's not what your average gay man in New York is doing on a Friday night."

  I chuckle.

  "The New York Times wrote us up in the eighties, and that's how they started the article," he says.

  Ralph has arranged a dozen seats on the edges of the room, each with a thick blue Bible on top. It's more than we'll need. Most of the regulars are out of town, so only three diehards show up: a stout songwriter who grew up in Florida; a square-jawed architect; and a dance teacher at a New Jersey college who takes copious notes.

  They are all members of Evangelicals Concerned, an organization that Ralph founded in 1975 for gay and gay-friendly evangelicals. It's not a massive movement: Ralph has two thousand people on his mailing list. But its existence alone was a surprise.

  We begin. Ralph appoints the dance teacher to read some verses from Hebrews 3 out loud. Ralph stops him to discuss. "Faith is not merely intellectual assent," Ralph says, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses to punctuate the point. "You have to be willing to act on your faith. In other words, talk is cheap. Except in therapy."

  Ralph returns his glasses to the end of his nose. He's not overbearing, but he's definitely in charge. He's the analyzer, the parser, the one who knows the original Greek words.

  "Go on," says Ralph.

  The dance instructor reads a verse that likens Moses to a house and Jesus to the builder of a house.

  This is an important verse. It's at the heart of Ralph's theology: Jesus isn't just a great prophet. He isn't, as Ralph says, "the fairest flower in the family of humanity." He is God, and the Resurrection was literal. Ralph quotes C. S. Lewis here: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice."

  In short, Ralph is theologically conservative. That's what makes him an evangelical. The Scriptures' social and humanist message is important, but Blair puts the emphasis on the divinity of Christ itself.

  The ninety-minute session glides by without a single mention of homosexuality. If an evangelist from Thomas Road Baptist Church happened to drop in, he might not even notice anything different. Well, let me revise that. Ralph and his group do, at least, fulfill one gay stereotype: They know a lot about clothes.

  At one point, the conversation drifts to buttons, and the dance instructor starts throwing around terms like placket--which apparently means the part of a man
's shirt that covers the buttons.

  The architect tosses in a factoid about Eisenhower-style jackets, which were truncated to save fabric in World War II. They had no skirt.

  "The skirt," he explains to me, "is the part of a man's blazer worn below the waist." He looks at Ralph: "You wear a skirt almost every day."

  Ralph smiles.

  After Bible Study, we go out for chicken kebabs at a Turkish restaurant and I get a crash course in Ralph's life. He grew up in a moderately religious Presbyterian home in Ohio. He knew he was gay early on, certainly by high school. He also knew he loved religion.

  In his high school library, he found a catalog for Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist college. He was drawn to it, he says with a laugh, because it was bright yellow. "All the other catalogs were dull colors, black and white."

  He liked Bob Jones U's emphasis on Christ, and enrolled in 1964. It didn't go smoothly. For starters, Ralph got chewed out by an apoplectic, finger-wagging Bob Jones Sr. for defending Reverend Billy Graham, who was considered too liberal. "I thought he was going to have a heart attack," he says.

  Ralph didn't come out of the closet at Bob Jones U. He went public slowly, steadily, as he crisscrossed the country attending other seminaries and grad schools. He started Evangelicals Concerned in 1975 after the president of an evangelical college took him out to dinner in New York and confessed that he was a tormented, closeted gay man.

  Of course, Ralph's organization is controversial. And at first blush, it makes about as much sense as an Association of Vegan Burger King Owners. It's at once inspiring and depressing. Inspiring that they have found one another, and depressing because they are part of a movement in which the majority thinks of their sexuality as sinful.

  But Ralph says that you have to distinguish between evangelical Christianity and the religious right. The religious right's obsession with homosexuality comes "out of their culture, not out of Scripture."

  "But there do seem to be antigay passages in the Bible," I say.

  "Yes, the so-called clobber passages," he says. "But I call them the clobbered passages."

  Ralph's argument is this: The Bible does not talk about loving samesex relationships as they exist today. Jesus would have no problem with two men committed to each other. One of Ralph's pamphlets has this headline on the front: "What Jesus Said about Homosexuality." You open up the pamphlet, and there's a blank page.

  Ralph says that if you look at the Bible's allegedly antigay passages in historical context, they aren't antigay at all. They are actually antiabuse, or antipaganism. Consider the famous Leviticus passage: "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination."

  "In biblical times, there was no parity between men and women. Women and children were just a little bit above slaves. To lie with a man like a woman was to disgrace him. It's what soldiers did to their conquered enemies, they raped them."

  That famous Leviticus passage is actually merely saying: Do not treat your fellow man disgracefully.

  Or take another commonly cited passage in the New Testament, Romans 1:26-27. Here the Apostle Paul rails against those who gave in to "dishonorable passions."

  ". . . Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error."

  Ralph says that Paul is preaching here against pagan cultic practices-- the loveless sex that went on in the idolatrous temples of the day.

  I hope Ralph's right. I hope the Bible doesn't endorse gay bashing. But even if it does, there's another tack religious people can take. This one I learned from Ralph's acquaintance in the Jewish world, a man named Steven Greenberg. Greenberg is the first out-of-the-closet Orthodox rabbi in America. Like Ralph, he's an extreme minority. Most Orthodox Jews still believe that Leviticus bans same-sex relationships of any kind. Your average far-right Orthodox Jew is just as antigay as your average far-right evangelical; in 2006 the ultra-Orthodox Jews held violent demonstrations in protest of a planned gay pride march in Jerusalem, an event that was eventually canceled.

  I call Greenberg. He has plenty to say about the Bible and homosexuality. But the point I find most fascinating is this: God and humans are partners in a quest to reveal new meanings of the Bible. The letters of the Bible are eternal, but not its interpretation.

  "The whole Bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man," says Greenberg. "God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways. We don't have to sit back and passively accept that Leviticus bans sex between men at all times and in all ways if other convincing ways of reading can be found."

  Or put it this way: Greenberg says that God is like an artist who is constantly revising his masterpiece. Sometimes He nearly erases his whole work, as with the Great Flood. Other times, He listens to what humans say. Moses, for instance, argues with God and convinces him to spare the lives of the complaining Israelites. "It sounds strange to say it," the rabbi says, "but in the Bible, God is on a learning curve."

  Greenberg tells me, "Never blame a text from the Bible for your behavior. It's irresponsible. Anybody who says X, Y, and Z is in the Bible--it's as if one says, 'I have no role in evaluating this.'"

  The idea that we can work with God to evolve the Bible's meaning--it's a thrilling idea. It makes me think back to Mr. Berkowitz and his shoes and the whole issue of religion providing freedom from choice. Greenberg is at the other end of the spectrum from Mr. Berkowitz. He says that just because you're religious doesn't mean you give up your responsibility to choose. You have to grapple with the Bible.

  Give thanks in all circumstances . . .

  --1 THESSALONIANS 5:18

  Day 263. I feel myself becoming an extremist--at least in some areas. Like with my obsession with gratefulness. I can't stop.

  Just now, I press the elevator button and am thankful that it arrives quickly.

  I get onto the elevator and am thankful that the elevator cable didn't snap and plummet me to the basement.

  I go to the fifth floor and am thankful that I didn't have to stop on the second or third or fourth floor.

  I get out and am thankful that Julie left the door unlocked so I don't have to rummage for my King Kong key ring.

  I walk in, and am thankful that Jasper is home and healthy and stuffing his face with pineapple wedges.

  And on and on. I'm actually muttering to myself, "Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you."

  It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

  Sometimes my thank-yous are directed at no one in particular. It's more of an appreciation than a thanks. A reminder to myself: "Pay attention, pal. Savor this moment." But other times, when I'm in a believing phase, my thanks have an addressee. I'm thanking God, or the universal laws of nature--I'm not sure which--but it gives the act of thanking more weight.

  And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said: "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."

  --LUKE 6:20

  Day 264. In terms of stereotype busting, it's hard to beat Ralph Blair and his group of gay evangelical Christians. What could possibly top that? Evangelical Christians who don't believe in Jesus? Evangelical Christians who worship Poseidon? I don't know.

  But I do want to spend some time with another group of evangelicals who, in their own way, have camped out far from the tent of Pat Robertson and Thomas Road Baptist Church. They're called the Red-letter Christians.

  I'd never heard of the Red-letter Ch
ristians before my biblical year. They're still much smaller than the conservative evangelical lobby. They don't have TV shows with millions of viewers and 1-800 operators standing by. They don't have their own universities with facilities like the LeHaye Ice Hockey Arena. And, yet, even since the start of my year, I've watched them gain more and more national prominence.

  The Red-letter Christians are a loose-knit, like-minded group of preachers, the most prominent of whom are a Philadelphia-based pastor named Tony Campolo, and Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners magazine and author of God's Politics. Bono is an honorary member.

  Wallis writes in Sojourners about how he came up with the name. He was doing an interview at a Nashville radio station, and the DJ said:

  "I'm a secular Jewish country music songwriter and disc jockey. But I love your stuff and have been following your book tour." He told me he loved my "riffs" and would like to spend an evening together just to get some lines for new music. "You're a songwriter's dream." Then he told me he believed we were starting a new movement, but noticed we hadn't come up with a name for it yet. "I've got an idea for you," he said. "I think you should call yourselves the Red-letter Christians, for the red parts of the Bible that highlight the words of Jesus. I love the red letter stuff."