You answered the wrong question. I said to ask a historian regarding the unfounded assertion that "Religion has less to do with the underlying morality of the scripture and more to do with what religious leaders of the time say it is, and their interpretation can be...flexible."

Prove that. You can name a few examples where there was a widespread spirit in the air (Crusades, Spanish Inquisition [even though the death count was only about 14 executions per year]), but you can't show an example where Christians ever believed premarital sex was OK, or Muslims ever believing you could eat pork one morning. You can show plenty of flexibility of Protestantism though, but that's unique to that religion which rejects centralized authority or the importance of traditional views for scriptural interpretation.