YOUNG people have been culturally conditioned to read the Bible for moral lessons— “abstract ‘shoulds’ that strip stories of their theological depth and emotional power” — a new study reports. The study, Troubling Jesus, the third part of Youthscape’s “Translating God” project, suggests that teenagers’ readings of scripture, including the extraction of “sanitised metaphors about mindset or personal improvement”, mean that Jesus can “fade into the background”. The project, a collaboration with the Scripture Union and the Bible Society, was funded by the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. Jesus’s encounter with the woman at the well suggested an “unequal power dynamic” to one young man, who observed that Jesus “seems like he is mansplaining” and “has a God complex”. For some of the young people, the report observes, “Jesus is not the liberator from judgement, he’s the subject of it.