And a lot of what God is described as doing, from demanding that Abraham sacrifice his only son to striking a pair of early Christians dead because they wanted to hang on to some of their own property, seems downright nasty. With so much in the Bible to be disliked or discounted, there seems to be little left for liberals to do but engage in the same kind of moral prescriptiveness the religious right has made so unattractive. The mainline Protestant tendency is to ask what we can pluck from the fire, and extract these rather banal ethical teachings. And in a war of competing texts, religious conservatives will always be able to make the clearer, and louder, case. Seeking refuge from modern science and a contemporary moral view that allows for abortion, premarital sex, and homosexuality, they find in the Bible facts and rules that give them comfort.
Religious liberals have a much more difficult time of it.
Faced with an ancient text like the Bible, they feel stuck with either taking it literally and hating it, or wrestling some usefulness out of it by contextualization and extrapolation. But it takes him a whole book, Dirt, Greed, and Sex, to do it. In the sound-bite competition that is today's political debate, it's not too hard to figure out who wins. Used that way, the Bible is as malleable as those inkblots in a Rorschach test. The biggest threat to the Catholic Church could be sexual desire in the priesthood.