That reminds me, at Cornell in the early 2000s I took a course on the history of American Protestantism, it was actually the first half of a two-course sequence offered every two or three years but the other half conflicted with something I needed, shame.
Anyway, there was a take-home exam with some choose-your-essay prompts and I chose the one analyzing some quote from a sermon about slavery.
He referenced three old-tymey kinda mineral/spices and I was like \u201cthat MUST be a biblical reference\u201d so I found some bible website with a search feature and it was.
And because of Everything2, which was an early Wikipedia competitor, I knew about all the major biblical commentaries (they have their own whole citation format, even) so I looked through them and they explained how it was referencing the taxation patterns of this one old empire.
So I wrote about that, and about the way it almost works as an inverse reading of \u201cgive to Caesar what is Caesar\u2019s\u201d, that a government could be impious enough that its taxation claims were invalid
Anyway the week after I turned it in one of the grad student TAs cornered me leaving class and awkwardly, caveated to make sure I didn\u2019t feel pressured either way, asked if I was a Christian
I wasn\u2019t and she said that honestly she was even more impressed, that kids seemed to have a rough grasp of the Black liberatory tradition and tended to connect it to that (though not such a great grasp of the details - they overestimated when a random preacher would have heard of Frederick Douglass and often confused him with W.E.B. DuBois entirely)
but I was the only one in this 60-person class, full of kids she knew were like \u201cI\u2019M an American Protestant and they told us in church all about how American our Protestantism is and vice versa, this\u2019ll be a gimme\u201d who had thought to connect that quote from that Protestant sermon to THE BIBLE