What does it mean to read the sacred texts of the Bible in the aftermath of the 2024 US election? What are our obligations as scholars to help undergraduate students learn to read these texts, and analyze other people’s readings, in today’s political climate?
The paper emerges from my experience teaching biblical texts to undergraduate students across 2025. First, I report on a Gospels class, in which students analyze politicians’ use of the Gospels to support their political convictions and policy positions. Second, I share how my students in a Gender and Family in Genesis class wrestle with Genesis 1-3 in conversation with President Trump’s Executive Order declaring that the United States recognizes only two sexes, male and female, thereby “restoring biological truth.” Finally, we will explore the ethical concerns that accompany my own sense of urgency that students develop skills to read the Bible responsibly in this moment of a politics of certainty and throwing off all restraints.
In Spring 2025, I am teaching a class entitled, “The Gospels.” In this class we read canonical and noncanonical Gospel texts from the first few centuries with a particular concern for social, historical, political context and the diversity and complexity of the developing traditions about Jesus and his significance for the world. This class includes a midterm project inviting students to encounter and analyze the Gospels IRL. One of the options for this assignment is to choose three politicians or political movements across and explore how each one employs their reading of the Gospels, either explicitly or implicitly, to support their message to the people. Students are required to choose people across the ideological spectrum and to identify which parts of the Gospels, or what images/presentations of Jesus, they relied upon. Examples connected to the most recent election include Donald Trump, JD Vance, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter. Exploring these student essays allows us both to explore the politicians’ reading of the Gospels and the students’ reading of the politicians’ reading of the Gospels.
In Fall 2025, I am teaching a course I have taught on a few other occasions entitled, “Gender and Family in Genesis.” As you might imagine, a significant portion of the beginning of this course entails close readings of Genesis 1-3, with particular focus on 1:26-27 and 2:18-23.
Genesis 1: 26-27: 26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness’…27 So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them” (NRSVUE).
Genesis 2:18, 22-23: 18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.”…22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” (NRSVUE).
This year, we will be reading these texts in light of, and in conversation with, Executive Order 14168 signed on January 20, 2025, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term as President, entitled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” One part of this Executive Order reads, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality…(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. (e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” Although the Executive Order does not reference the Bible directly, elsewhere Donald Trump has described that the goal of the Order is to “reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female" (October 21, 2024 speech in Concord NC). Once again, we will have an opportunity to explore the students’ reading of these texts along with their assessment of politicians’ use of the texts in making or critiquing policy.
The final part of the paper will explore my own role as a biblical scholar and an engaged citizen who has a profound ethical responsibility to help teach students to become responsible readers of sacred texts and political discourse.
The paper emerges from my experience teaching biblical texts to undergraduate students across 2025. First, I report on a Gospels class, in which students analyze politicians’ use of the Gospels to support their political convictions and policy positions. Second, I share how my students in a Gender and Family in Genesis class wrestle with Genesis 1-3 in conversation with President Trump’s Executive Order declaring that the United States recognizes only two sexes, male and female, thereby “restoring biological truth.” Finally, we will explore the ethical concerns that accompany my own sense of urgency that students develop skills to read the Bible responsibly in this moment of a politics of certainty and throwing off all restraints.