The bible probably isn't on your side.

• Author: Slade, Stephanie
• Position: Follow-Up - Religion and politics

As long as there have been political movements, people have tried to use religion to shore up support for their side. In the November 1984 issue of reason, Antony Flew lamented that churches were "forever issuing anticapitalist statements and aligning themselves with all manner of socialist and even specifically Marxist-Leninist causes."

Luckily, wrote Flew, there was now The Kindness That Kills, a collection of essays edited by Digby Anderson. According to the book, one need only look to the Parable of the Talents, a story from the Gospel of Matthew that celebrates the use of commerce to increase one's wealth, to see "how mistaken it is to draw socialist conclusions from the Bible." Of course, proponents of Christian socialism in turn could point to the Magnificat, a story from the Gospel of Luke in which "Mary speaks of God sending the rich away empty and filling the hungry with good things," using the same texts to validate a wildly different worldview.

This year, when Pope Francis visited the United States, politicos scrambled to use his statements to bolster their positions. But they found it harder to stop their opponents from doing the same. Some on the American right were chagrined when the pontiff called for an end to capital punishment and for better treatment of immigrants...