Bible

The Bible is treated throughout the book as a contested instrument of authority rather than simply as a source of religious doctrine. Its significance lies in the way the text associates biblical belief with obedience to threatening supernatural power, patriarchal ownership, resistance to state regulation, and hostility toward modern ideas of justice and equality. At the same time, the book places the Bible within a larger struggle between inherited authority and the emancipatory claims of reason, civil rights, and collective political action.

Religious Authority and Obedience

The book presents many American conservatives and libertarians as Christians whose political psychology resembles religious submission. In this account, believers kneel before an archetypal dominant authority that demands absolute obedience and threatens eternal punishment. The story of Abraham agreeing to murder his own son because God commanded it is used as the sharpest emblem of that relationship: faith is interpreted not as moral independence but as willingness to suspend ordinary ethical judgment before an unquestionable command.

This treatment connects the Bible to the book’s broader discussion of the master–slave dialectic. The wealthy elite are described as ruling because the majority accepts domination, and religious obedience becomes one of the cultural forms through which that submission is normalized. The Bible therefore appears not merely as a sacred book but as part of a political structure in which authority is desired, feared, and defended by those subject to it.

Property, Patriarchy, and Social Order

The book calls the Bible the “right wing handbook” and argues that its authority supports a property-based understanding of human relationships. Within the text’s polemic, the right-wing conception of private property is not limited to land or money: it extends historically to the treatment of other human beings as possessions. African-American slaves are identified as the most obvious example, while wives and children are described as having been regarded as the property of Christian husbands and fathers.

This argument is developed through the history of English marital law. Under the former legal doctrine of coverture, husband and wife were treated as one legal person, with the husband representing that person; a married woman’s independent legal existence, property rights, and contractual capacity were suspended or absorbed into his. The book quotes Sir William Blackstone’s formulation that the woman’s legal existence was incorporated into that of her husband, under whose protection she acted. It further notes that a wife could not sue or be sued independently, that the husband controlled her personal property, and that the law placed her in a status compared with that of a criminal or a lunatic.

The Bible is consequently positioned within a wider genealogy of patriarchal and paternalistic authority. The book argues that the same mentality persists when a right-wing father treats his wife and children as his property, assumes the right to shape their religious beliefs, and resists state interference in the family. Education becomes a particularly important point of conflict: the armed father is portrayed as defending his authority against public institutions that might expose his family to modern, secular, or enlightened values. In this interpretation, biblical authority, family patriarchy, and property rights reinforce one another as overlapping claims to private control.

Christianity and the Politics of the Right

The Bible is also used to explain the book’s severe moral judgment of right-wing politics. Right wingers are accused of opposing social justice because they endorse social injustice and anti-meritocracy, while their religious commitments are presented as evidence of a morality inverted around obedience, hierarchy, greed, privilege, and inherited power. The book intensifies this accusation through references to biblical violence, including the willingness to accept a father’s sacrifice of his child and God’s destruction of the world by flood. These examples are not offered as balanced theological analysis; they function as polemical demonstrations of what the author sees as the danger of unconditional religious loyalty.

The same rhetoric links Christianity to the political support of Donald Trump. Poor Americans who vote for a billionaire plutocrat are described as natural submissives who seek a powerful ruler, and Christian belief is presented as one cultural expression of that desire. Trump’s supporters are called lackeys and puppets of the rich, while right-wing opposition to social justice is interpreted as an alliance with unjust elites. The Bible thus becomes part of the book’s explanation for why people who lack economic power might nevertheless defend hierarchy and support a member of the Ownership Class.

The argument is deliberately expansive and often makes no distinction among different forms of Christianity. It treats Christian conservatives, patriarchal fathers, anti-government activists, and defenders of unrestrained capitalism as manifestations of one underlying mentality. That sweeping construction gives the Bible a powerful role in the book’s political mythology, but it also reveals the text’s tendency to turn a diverse religious tradition into a single emblem of reaction.

Bible, State, and Human Rights

A central contrast in the book is between biblical or inherited authority and the positive liberty of the state. The author argues that right wingers seek to weaken the state so that it cannot regulate capitalists, religious institutions, or right-wing families. They are described as wanting freedom to do whatever they like, including exploiting or enslaving others, while rejecting laws, regulations, and collective restraints. The Bible is associated with this resistance because it is said to legitimate paternal authority and private control over dependents.

Against that position, the book identifies the state as the force capable of abolishing forms of domination that private “voluntary” arrangements would preserve. Its discussion of the Confederacy argues that slavery was accepted as a mechanism for maximizing capitalist profit, and it compares modern right-wing hostility to government intervention with the Confederacy’s defense of property rights over human rights. The Bible is woven into this historical analogy as a source of Christian patriarchy and as a text used to naturalize the ownership of wives, children, and enslaved people.

Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to a nation divided between slavery and freedom supplies the book with an alternative political symbol. The quoted “A house divided against itself cannot stand” becomes a framework for describing the continuing conflict between extreme property rights and human and civil rights. The author calls for a new Lincoln who would end not only the Confederacy as a physical entity but also the “mental” Confederacy represented by right-wing ideology and predatory capitalism. In that proposed emancipation, the state is not the enemy of freedom; it is the means by which freedom is protected from private domination.

Reason Against Inherited Certainty

The Bible’s authority is further contrasted with reason, expertise, and the Enlightenment. The book identifies Martin Luther as the first American in a spiritual sense because he made individual faith in an inerrant Bible more important than institutional authority and treated reason with contempt. Protestantism is interpreted as a protest against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, while modern right-wing America is described as a protest against the authority of the state, experts, logic, knowledge, qualifications, intelligence, and meritocracy.

This comparison produces a double critique of authority. The right wing rejects modern public expertise while retaining an older sacred authority, and it treats personal belief as superior to shared standards of knowledge. The book calls this “Dunning-Kruger America” and presents Donald Trump as its Dunning-Kruger president. In the same polemical register, scientism is criticized for replacing religious certainty with a prevailing scientific paradigm that is equally closed to radical revision. The Bible therefore belongs to a larger pattern of dogmatism: the problem is not only religious belief, but any system that turns inherited assumptions into unquestionable truth.

The book’s proposed alternative is rational and emancipatory rather than confessional. It invokes the Enlightenment, mathematics, rationalism, and a future “ontological mathematics” against both biblical literalism and scientific orthodoxy. Its political climax imagines a worldwide revolution and a society illuminated by the Light of Reason. Within that vision, the Bible stands as one of the principal symbols of an older order whose authority must be challenged when it conflicts with human and civil rights.