Last year, maternity wards closed in two sparsely populated communities, further expanding our maternity desert. Yet in debating a bill to provide some relief to new moms by extending Medicaid’s postpartum coverage, a freshman member of the State House, Jeanette Ward, invoked a brutally narrow view of the Bible. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” she said. “The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”
This confusing mash-up of Scripture (Ms. Ward got it wrong: The answer is yes, I am my brother’s keeper) is emblematic of a Christian nationalist who weaponizes God’s word to promote the agenda du jour.
She gets the Biblical reference wrong, but in a horrifyingly revealing way. Cain had descendants, at least until the flood, but I've never seen anyone claim him as a forbear, let alone as a role model.
It could be that Representative Ward is, as Stubson suggests, just cherry-picking: on certain forms of Biblical literalism, every word of the Scripture is true and doesn't just permit but demands to be taken out of the context in which it is uttered. This is one way to avoid the problem of different biblical accounts of the supposedly same event, like the two accounts of the Ascension we heard in church yesterday, a problem few literalists even acknowledge. Ward may have grown up in a "biblical" culture consisting entirely of lines plucked out of context by preachers with a message.
But her comfort with Cain as a forbear suggests something else to me. Ward is comfortable, at least for now, not just with nobody being their "brother's keeper," but in a world in which the Abels die and the Cains live. No meek inherit the earth in this morally tonedeaf theology. Stubson adds a wan hope to her account of the Cainite Representative, somewhat desolately:
We should expect candidates who identify as followers of Christ to model some concern for other people.
