If you are not familiar with the Bible or if your exposure to the Bible has mostly been filtered through the kind of churches that tend to put Scripture on a pedestal, you may not even recognize why the book is seen as so problematic by many nonbelievers or liberal Christians. So, let’s look at just a few verses that really sum up what’s seen as wrong with the Bible. We’ll start with one of the most notorious passages in the New Testament, Ephesians 5:22–24: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.”
This is just one of the many passages in the Bible that enforce a rigid understanding of gender, paired with a clear sense that women should be submissive to men. It’s a viewpoint that completely ignores the legacy of rape culture and violence against women and that dismisses literally half of the human race as undeserving of full freedom and autonomy.
It’s bad enough that the Bible promotes gender inequality, but it also makes life difficult for LGBTQ people:
For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. . . . They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them. (Romans 1:26–28, 32)
There are only a small number of verses in the Bible that have been used to denounce same-sex attraction, but Christians who hate queer people get plenty of ammunition from just a few passages like this one. Many scholars today believe that the author of this passage was really trying to criticize lustful behavior rather than loving relationships, but that nuance does not show up in the passage, making it hard for ordinary readers to see this quotation as anything other than homophobic.
The scapegoating of women and queer people is part of an even larger problem in the Bible: it is far too easy to read Scripture as condoning violence and, in particular, war—it seems that the Bible maintains a simplistic morality of “if it’s good for our side, it’s okay”—while seemingly oblivious to the profound horrors of political and military violence. As 1 Samuel 15:2–3 states, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
Is God a supernatural bully who takes sides in war and even promotes genocide? This passage sure makes it seem that way. I, for one, am not interested in worshipping a God who demands the utter destruction of those who oppose him. Is that a god or a monster?
But the aggression that is tolerated in the Bible isn’t just on the level of nations at war; it also accepts the horror of slavery, where oppression takes place on a person-to-person and systemic level: “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel” (1 Peter 2:18). Is this really what God wants? Or is it what people with power want? Is this an expression of spiritual wisdom or authoritarian control? When Peter (or whoever the author was) dared to tell slaves to be obedient even to cruel masters, did he intend to say that slave owners get a free pass to treat the people they oppress any way they want? Take your pick, but either the author or God (or both) ends up looking bad here.
The same is true for the following quote: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). This passage is quoting Jesus himself, whom Christians proclaim is the Son of God. Elsewhere the Bible says that God is love—but if that is so, how could the Son of a loving God so blithely instruct his followers to hate their family members? This makes even Jesus seem to have a shadow side. And unfortunately, it’s not an isolated incident. Another passage recounts him cursing a fig tree simply because it didn’t bear fruit when he was hungry (never mind that it wasn’t even in season).
Scholars often try to explain away this passage by claiming that Jesus was speaking hyperbolically—in other words, using an extreme example to make a point. But this passage sounds just like the kind of things that authoritarian cult leaders say to their followers to exert complete control over them. If Jesus is the Son of God, shouldn’t he be smart enough to find a far less aggressive way to make his point?
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These are merely a handful of problematic passages—there are more where these came from. Some Christians insist that all the “bad” passages in the Bible are found in the Old Testament, but please note that this is a terrible misunderstanding (and perhaps even subtly anti-Semitic since the Christian Old Testament is the Hebrew Scriptures, the Bible of the Jewish people). Note that all but one of these examples that I’ve provided to you come from the New Testament—the section of the Christian Bible that tells the story of Jesus and his earliest followers. When it comes to violence, slavery, patriarchy, and homophobia, it’s sad but true to acknowledge that the Bible did not get better as the years passed.
Editor’s Note: Content taken from Read the Bible like a Mystic: Contemplative Wisdom and the Word | Broadleaf Books by Carl McColman, ©2025. Used by permission of Broadleaf Books.
