Liberals love to say “The Bible talks more about poverty than anything else,” and from this they claim support for their increasingly socialist agenda.

The problem is, nearly every one of them reject inerrancy—that is, the belief that the Bible in its original autographs does not contain any errors. So the argument fails.

Here’s how.

You can ask one question and expose the fundamental error in how liberals misread the Bible.

I did this last week in a lively exchange on my show with Bob Edgar, who’s recently stepped down as the general secretary of the National Council of Churches (ncccusa.org) in order to head up another liberal group called Common Cause (commoncause.org).

I had asked him to lay out his main thesis from his latest book “Middle Church: Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right.” [Read Al Mohler’s excellent review here.] Seeing as how I’m a proud member of the religious right, I was curious as to how he planned to reclaim those moral values and, in particular, which moral values he was referring to.

To no one’s surprise, least of all to me, Edgar laid out exactly what I expected him to. I’ve heard the same thing dozens of times from other leaders of the religious left I’ve had on.

Essentially, they want religious people to care less about abortion, homosexuality and gay marriage and more about poverty, war and the environment. That is, they want people to support pacifism, environmentalism and socialism—or in terms of specific policies, they want higher taxes to grow a larger welfare state, immediate withdrawal from Iraq and everybody to pay a pollution tax in the form of carbon offsets.

Or, to be even more clear, they just want voters to put Hillary in the White House.

Edgar’s primary argument comes down to this. He said, “The Bible mentions abortion not once, homosexuality only twice, and poverty or peace more than two thousand times. Yet somehow abortion and homosexuality have become the litmus test of faith in public life today.”

Set aside the obvious point that though the words “abortion” and “homosexuality” aren’t in the text, the concepts certainly are at Exodus 21:22-25; Gen 19:5-8; Jude 7; Leviticus 18:22-23, 20:13; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:9-10 and Romans 1:16-17, respectively. Far more than “not once or twice.” Killing an unborn child is murder and homosexuality is a sin. No way around it.

But here’s how to really expose how liberals misread the Bible. Ask them this question:

If the Bible is not the inerrant Word of God, then why should we assume that God cares more about one group of merely human words over another group of merely human words simply because they occur more frequently in the text?

You see, it all comes down to one’s view of inerrancy.

Inerrancy is the view that God is the author of every single word of the original autographs of both the Old and New Testaments, and that He superintended the human authors to compose and record without error exactly what He wanted, even down to the specific words that were used. Continued...