One thing I've noticed as Ian and I have tried to expand our base for the New Testament Review podcast and now Youtube show is the extent to which fundamentalism (and defining yourself with/against it) just has the floor in modern American public discourse.

So if you make a video about, say, Jesus' two donkeys in Matthew, the question you get is "Okay, but is this an inerrant report of what happened?" When you try to steer people gently towards the literal thousands of other interesting historical questions you can ask, you're met

with hostility, because *everyone* knows THE question of the Bible is "did everything in it happen according to the standard of modern journalistic/scientific/historicist accuracy or not." If you aren't asking THE ONLY IMPORTANT QUESTION OF THE BIBLE, then you're equivocating.

I'm sure I'm going to have non-religious people reading this thread patting themselves on the back assuming I'm talking about evangelical Christians, by the way, and y'all just as bad.

I think the two things that have contributed to this are 1) the success with which fund./evangel, Christians have succeeded in convincing their kids that this is the only thing about the Bible that matters, and those kids take that belief with them after they leave Christianity

2) You guessed it, the death of the liberal arts education.