As I walk around my beautiful city, I often observe women wearing headscarves. I assume that the vast majority are of Turkish origin.

This got me thinking about Christian women and why so many of them do not wear headscarves, in particular during church meetings.

In the Bible it says in 1 Corinthians 11:4-5: “Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved.”

I used to belong to a church where the members believe absolutely that the Bible is the word of God (often termed as fundamentalism) and that all its teachings should be respected and put into practice by believers.

I find it fascinating that our leaders taught us that the above quotation from the Bible is, however, a culturally determined aside that is no longer applicable to the church today. Women covering their heads amounted to so-called legalism from which the church should be set free. Hence, some young men prophesied wearing base-ball caps and women prophesied without wearing a head covering.

The same unusually liberal interpretation applied to this interesting quotation from 1 Corinthians 14:34: “Women  should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.”

Women were actually encouraged to speak up during our church meetings, since this verse too was passed off as a culturally determined relic. Women were not allowed, however, to preach or to lead churches.

I could provide many similar examples, but two suffice to get to my inevitable question: if the above two verses of the Bible are historical relics that are no longer applicable today, even for fundamentalists, how many other quotations fall into the same category? And how are we to distinguish the one category from the other?

All of which goes to prove, no matter how inerrant the Bible might be, the multi-faceted and completely differing ways of interpreting the same text render it errant in terms of its application to daily life. Ultimately, Christians, like every other socially determined group of human beings, do what they want to do and then find a narrative that can be used to justify their actions.