While America’s evangelical Christians are rightly concerned about the secular worldview’s rejection of biblical Christianity, we ought to give some urgent attention to a problem much closer to home–biblical illiteracy in the church. This scandalous problem is our own, and it’s up to us to fix it.

Newsweek magazine has launched a frontal attack upon Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” but the real target of the magazine’s article is the truthfulness of the Bible itself. In “Who Really Killed Jesus?: What History Teaches Us,” Newsweek’s February 16 cover story, writer Jon Meacham labels Gibson’s movie “controversial,” “powerful,” and “troubling.” More seriously, he blasts the movie as anti-Semitic and potentially dangerous. Newsweek raises the specter of a new wave of anti-Semitism spreading across the world, directly due to the influence of “The Passion of the Christ.”

In The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope drew an unforgettable portrait of a spineless Anglican bishop. Trollope’s Bishop of Elmham is “a man sixty years of age, very healthy and handsome, with hair just becoming gray, clear eyes, a kindly mouth, and something of a double chin.” He is well liked and kind to children. As for doctrinal divisions, he never takes a stand, one way or the other, “because he would not put out to sea in either of those boats.”

Today’s American adolescents almost certainly know less about the Bible than any previous generation. Statistics indicate that many in this generation of teenagers have experienced almost no contact with the Bible, have no knowledge of its contents, and have no plans to do anything about it. This, we must all admit, presents biblical Christians with a huge challenge.

While America’s evangelical Christians are rightly concerned about the secular worldview’s rejection of biblical Christianity, we ought to give some urgent attention to a problem much closer to home–biblical illiteracy in the church. This scandalous problem is our own, and it’s up to us to fix it.

The great obstruction in the path of homosexual activists in the church is the Bible. This is not really a limitation on the thinking of the theological elites within liberal churches, but it is a problem at the grassroots. Liberal theologians long ago decided that the Bible is hopelessly homophobic, hostile to women, and that it presents a judgmental deity with all kinds of hang-ups.