I asked off at work for both my family's seder and also a more laid-back seder my boyfriend was hosting at his cool new house in a swanky neighborhood. I had so much fun at both of them; it was the best Passover of my young adult life. And those two seders amounted to two Pesach-related time-off requests at my job, which caused more of a stir than I ever would have dreamed.
My manager asked what a Passover seder is. My unintentionally funny, uber-redneck department lead asked me what a Passover seder is. My peer and co-worker asked me what a Passover seder is, and also what Passover itself is. Shockingly, a health-and-wealth evangelical co-worker who says Obama is the anti-Christ claimed to have never heard the word "Passover" in her life.
This upset me. Not as a Jew, mind you. I don't expect non-Jews to know anything about Judaism. I know very little about Hinduism or Buddhist monks, and I cannot for the life of me figure out the holy trinity. The only time I get angry about peoples' lack of knowledge regarding Judaism is when they are speaking with authority about something they know little about, like when some Christians claim the "Jewish G-d" is mean and judgmental.
So I usually do not care when people do not understand Passover or any Jewish custom. No, I was upset not as a Jewish person but as a gay person. I was upset because all those people I mentioned are Christians. My peer is not homophobic, but both my manager and my redneck lead are against gay peoples' right to marry because of what the Bible says about homosexuality and what the Bibile supposedly says about marriage.
So if the Bible is so important to you as to be the deciding factor in your anti-gay bigotry, how on earth do you not know what Passover means? The Passover story of G-d delivering the Jews from slavery to liberation is the second biggest event of the Christian Bible, second only to the Gospel account of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. It is a thematic parallel that supposedly binds the two books into one. G-d delivered the Hebrews from phsycical slavery in Part One; in Part Two G-d supposedly delivered Hebrew and gentile alike from spiritual slavery. First G-d delivered His law; then He delivered grace. Jesus' last meal was a PASSOVER SEDER. Even if that were not painfully obvious in the actual scripture, most Bibles helpfully explain those facts in the notes.
In my experience--and I have much experience with right wing Christians--, the only conservative evangelicals I know who are knowledgeable about Passover and the seder are those who are studying a Christian field at school or those whose churches host seders to show how Jesus is the Passover lamb and how Christianity supposedly supercedes Judaism as the true faith. (To their enormous credit, some more progressive churches like the Christ the King parish near my apartment host annual seders supervised by actual rabbis, and there is no offensive motive at all.)
It isn't just Passover. It seems Bible-believing America is not quite the same as Bible-reading America. According to USA Today, 60% of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments. 50% of high school seniors say Sodom and Gomorrah were married ("Americans Get an 'F' in Religion", Cathy Lynn Grossman.)
It really is infuriating. The Bible is the main excuse for anti-gay bigotry (just as it was the main excuse for slavery and anti-Semitism) and yet most of those bigots do not even read it. If you're against straight/gay equality because of the Bible, you should curl up the "Good Book" every night. You should know what it says like the back of your hand. Because if you do do not, you're hypocritical in addition to prejudiced.
In my thinking, that's two sins for the price of one.
