Texas

There's a dangerous difference between critical bible analysis and guided bible study.

With how cryptic it is and how heavy on metaphors and parables, interpretation and contextualisation are important aspects of actually understanding the text, and the context sometimes isn't directly in the text but in the environment (time, place, recent events, social group) it was written in, or in other texts the writers expected their peers to be familiar with.

Critical analysis needs to investigate and consider thay extra-textual context. Guided study can explain it, but it can also omit or twist it. Critical analysis shouldn't just pick out individual passages. Guided study can cherry-pick the parts I want you to read.

For example, consider the story of the good Samaritan: A guy gets robbed, beaten half dead and left in the ditch. Two priests walk by and ignore him. Then another guy (the titular Samaritan) comes by, helps him, cleans his wounds and pays for an inn to take care of him. The whole thing is told in response to the question "if I'm supposed to love my neighbour, who is my neighbour?"

I could frame it as Jesus telling that Rabbi "neighbour means peers, and the priests walking by had no obligation to help the peasant because he's not their peer; let the rabble take care of each other and worry about your own". I could also, however, point out that Samaritans and Jews had a religious conflict, oil and wine weren't as cheap as they would be today and two full days labourers' wages are not a sum of money to sneeze at. In that context, the point isn't about peers and obligations but about how this guy helped a potential enemy at some expense, because that's who you're supposed to love: People whose humanity transcends borders, religious enmity and personal profit.

So depending on how I spin it, I can use it to encourage division and elitism, or to tell you that Muslim immigrants deserve your kindness and help too.

This is a bit of an extreme example (I hope; though I wouldn't be surprised to learn otherwise), but having been in "bible study", I can tell you that there absolutely are people willing and able to make the text fit their agenda quite convincingly.

I have zero faith thay this will actually be reading the bible critically so much as cherry-picked indoctrination.