Sam’s Club pulled The Brick Bible from its stores after complaints. And according to a story on Reddit, a Christian store refused to put 1 Timothy 2:12 onto a t-shirt for a customer, because doing so would be disrespectful of the storeowners’ religion. Why then is it not disrespectful of Christianity when fundamentalist Christians put that verse on signs and placards and wave them around?

These stories illustrate the problem at the heart of Christian fundamentalism – such Christians cannot quite bring themselves to affirm, believe, subscribe to and practice everything that the Bible demands. And so they find ways of affirming the perfection and total truthfulness of the Bible while selectively avoiding those bits that cause them too much consternation. Which bits those happen to be differ from individual to individual and church to church, but the same sort of paradoxical contradiction is always there at the heart of Christian fundamentalism.

The other question is why they didn’t simply order the shirt from Amazon…