EVERY politician says something he has to walk back once in a while. In the case of Bradley Byrne, a Republican candidate for governor of Alabama, it was

I think there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be literally true and parts that are not.

Mr Byrne was battered by so much criticism that he quickly trudged to a Piggly Wiggly grocery store to hold a press conference and recant. Claiming he had been misquoted, he said

I believe the Bible is true. Every word of it.

Mr Byrne's momentary hesitation about the literal truth of every word of the Bible makes him the religious hippie in the Republican field. James Potts, another runner, thinks that public property should be allowed to display monuments to every faith—except Islam: "Either you accept our way of life or you go back to another country that is Muslim." All supported voluntary school prayer. All but one thought that public-school teachers should be allowed to teach from the Bible.

The one dissenter on that last question? Roy Moore, the judge famously stripped of his job as the state's chief justice for installing, then refusing to remove, a 5,200-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. Yes, nearly all of the Republican candidates are running to Mr Moore's right on the role of Christianity in public life. Mr Moore's reason for not wanting to teach from the Bible in school was not, of course, because the Bible isn't perfect. He argued that government teaching of scripture could ruin it. Good to see that anti-government orthodoxy can still, sometimes, trump religious orthodoxy, in today's GOP.

(Via Ed Brayton.)