Brad speaks with Dr. Jill Hicks Keeton about her critical review of Beth Allison Barr's popular new book "The Making of Biblical Womanhood."
Here is an excerpt of the article:
"Barr is certainly right that patriarchy is socially constructed and not a given or natural framework for organizing society. But one of the tasks of the historian, I think, is to make visible the work that has gone into making the contingent seem natural.
Yet when it comes to the sacred anchor of Barr’s evangelical tradition, the Bible, Barr pulls her punches. The Bible, particularly Paul’s writings within it, manages to escape critical analysis. Christianity “rightly” practiced and the Bible “rightly” read are both, for Barr, anti-patriarchal. Barr reinterprets, for example, the so-called “household codes” in the New Testament, which uphold patriarchal order of man over wife (and master over enslaved), by attributing their oppressive hierarchies not to Jesus-followers but to the “fallen” world around them."
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion, Skidmore College, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm joined today by a returned guest, and that is Dr. Jill Hicks-Keaton, who is associate professor of religious studies at Oklahoma University, or the University of Oklahoma.
Dr. Hicks Keaton is a biblical scholar who's been here before, has written widely on things related to New Testament studies, including a book entitled, Arguing with Asenath, Gentile Access to Israel's Living God in Jewish Antiquity.
As we discussed last time, is also the co-editor and a contributor to the Museum of the Bible, A Critical Introduction, and that was an overwhelmingly popular episode.
She is back today to talk about an article that appeared just a little bit ago at Religion Dispatches, and that article is entitled, The Breaking of Biblical Womanhood, The Problem with the Hot New Book, Taking Aim at the Subjugation of Women in Evangelicalism.
Dr. Jill Hicks-Keaton, thanks for coming back and taking the time to talk with us.
Thank you for having me.
So you have provided something that I think is needed, but is kind of singular at this moment, which is kind of a critical approach and a critical reading of Beth Allison Barr's new book on biblical womanhood.
And I want to get into your critique.
I want to get into sort of some of your issues with the book and why you think there's some blind spots.
But I do think, while this is not a requirement, it is a compelling part of your article, and a compelling part of your approach to this book, is that you and Beth Allison Barr really kind of share some biographical elements, and you talk about these in your piece.
And I'm just going to embarrass you by reading the first couple sentences of the piece, and then maybe ask if you would maybe just elaborate on your personal experience with evangelicalism, with the Potential path of ministry, and so on and so forth.
So here's what you say.
As the Mississippi sun drenched my parents' stately living room, I strained with anticipation from my bedroom on the second floor to overhear the conversation.
A man, a Southern Baptist Seminary student on his way to be a pastor, was declaring his intention to my folks to court and eventually marry me.
You go on to talk about how this sort of unfolded.
You left soon for Baylor.
Fill us in.
Tell us about your experience, if you don't mind.
I mean, as somebody who's an evangelical, who was an evangelical minister and now is a scholar of religion, we share some of these elements.
And I have told my biography on this show many times, so I hope I'm not sort of embarrassing you too much, but this does just pertain to what you wrote and what it is you're doing with this piece.
Thanks for asking.
Yeah, I mean I think it's it's really important for scholars for writers to to locate themselves.
So I am, you know, part of this bandwagon and academia where we really need to be expressing our positionality and For the reason that it constrains sometimes the questions we ask and also because it opens up horizons that maybe others from different positionalities can't see.
So I think it matters in this case that even though my critique is coming from my expertise in New Testament, I also would describe myself as a historian.
But I think it matters that I grew up in evangelicalism, so I was trained to be a biblical woman in the sense of how Dr. Barr is using it in her book.
And so my own personal reflections are part of how I see the world and what I see promise in and what I see peril in.
So you draw some deep comparisons between your story and her story, just in terms of what they might have looked like.
Perhaps going into ministry, but that not necessarily being an option.
Perhaps marrying a minister, and that not being a very attractive option.
So would you mind maybe just elaborating on those two?
Yes, first I just want to say that I think I would be a terrible pastor's wife, and so it is probably good for everyone that that did not come to fruition.
But you know, I was a fantastic youth group participant, I was in the praise band, I led a girls Bible study.
I was a Southern Baptist-funded missionary for a couple of summers that I spent out of state, away from home, as a high school student with a lot of college students from Christian universities where we were sort of placed in an apartment complex and our job was to sort of bring the light of Jesus to the world.
And I look back on that and realize with my greater training and different ethical commitments that I see a lot of problems in the tradition in which I was raised.
Not just when it comes to my feminist sentiments now, but also as I reflect on the racism that is implicated in that as well.
Just point blank, I would ask, do you feel like you were cultivated in the tradition of biblical womanhood as it is sort of being presented in the book and all of the kind of patriarchal overtones that come along with it?
Yeah, I mean, I honestly think that this is why I'm a professor today, because I got to Baylor for undergraduate, which is a, you know, the big Baptist institution where Dr. Barr now teaches.
And I remember that first day of class in what was called Old Testament at Baylor with Dr. Rosalie Beck, who's a feminist church historian.
She gave us the text of Genesis, like the traditional fall in Christian theology, and said, you know, okay, I would like you please to articulate for me, break up into small groups and articulate for me, How you could make an argument that women are supposed to lead men based on this passage.
And that activity absolutely stuck with me as, you know, an undergraduate who had believed in, you know, I couldn't put words to it at the time, but inerrantist notions of what the Bible was, that it was written for me, and so forth.
And that was sort of stunning to me, that what we now call the patriarchal reading of the opening narratives of Genesis is not natural to the text.
That it can be read differently.
And that sort of set me on a trajectory where I was attracted to academics because she was an academic who, in my mind, was pushing against a notion, what I call patriarchy now, that I inherently knew was wrong.
But didn't have vocabulary for, and didn't have the reading strategies that I needed in order to sort of break that bond.
Now, I would later come to see that, you know, one of the distinctions, I think, between Barr's book and my own perspective is that I would say that since there is not a natural reading, that we have more agency in making meaning out of what the text is if people accept it as authoritative.
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