Read The Whole Thing!

19 January 2026  1 Samuel 15:16-23

“Go, utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed.” (1 Samuel 15:18)

The Constitution clearly protects slavery. It is plain as day, in Article 1, Section 2. There it says that states may count 60% of their slaves in their total population for determining representation in Congress. More slaves means more voting power in Congress for slave-holders. It couldn’t be more obvious. Therefore the Constitution, and hence the entire government of the United States, is racist.

This is true… as long as you don’t read the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th or 24^th amendments; as long as you take no notice of Supreme Court decisions like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967); as long as you pass over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and dozens of other acts of Congress aimed at dismantling the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination 

In short, to conclude that the government of the United States is racist based just on Article 1, Section 2 is a stupid way to read the Constitution. There is a clear difference between what is in the Constitution, and what the Constitution actually promotes.

Any progress in understanding the Bible, however, means you have to read the whole thing, and more than once. For the best of us, that means reading it every day, talking with people who know a lot more about it than we do, maybe even learning another language. Or two.

You have to read the whole thing.

The same is true of the Bible. Yes, there are texts that call for the annihilation of certain groups hostile to the Chosen People: “Go, utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites…” (1 Samuel 15:18). But the arc of the whole Bible is very long. It develops and deepens, from unlimited vengeance (e.g. 1 Samuel 15), to limited vengeance ( e.g. Exodus 21), to limited mercy (e.g. Hosea 14:1), to unlimited mercy (e.g. Matthew 18:21-22). The arc of the Bible is always toward the radical, unlimited love and mercy of God. To conclude, after reading just 1 Samuel 15, that God is a hateful ethnic cleanser, is a stupid way to read the Bible. There is a difference between what is in the Bible, and what the Bible teaches. You have to read the whole thing.

Some may wonder how something as repugnant as the annihilation of the Amalekites could ever have found its way into the Bible in the first place. You could ask the same thing about the Three-Fifths Compromise in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution. It took Americans almost two centuries to figure out what “all men are created equal” meant, and we are still living with some of the hangover from that struggle. Today, two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. are obtained by Black and Hispanic women, but almost nobody talks about that because they are afraid of being called racists. It is a shrieking human rights issue, but few will even mention it because they are so intimidated by our racist past. The Bible’s mission is even more ambitious than the struggle for civil rights – it is trying to get us inside the mind of God, and the life of God inside us. To get our minds and our lives around that has taken us over two thousand years – we have learned a lot, but we aren’t even close to being done, or even halfway through.

Any progress in understanding the Bible, however, means you have to read the whole thing, and more than once. For the best of us, that means reading it every day, talking with people who know a lot more about it than we do, maybe even learning another language. Or two. For all of us it means recognizing how foolish it is to think our mission is accomplished and our duty done once we have made a magisterial pronouncement about a single text like 1 Samuel 15.

The arc of the Bible is long, and it bends unmistakably toward radical love and mercy. Keep reading.