Biblical Commas? On Controlling Textual, National, and Physical Bodies
Last weekend theologian and former head of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Owen Strachan tweeted that taking away even one comma from the Bible would demean it. This let to a Twitter storm and many folks pointed out the misguidedness of attributing things like commas to the original composition of the biblical texts.
Brad digs deeper into this controversy to show how Strachan's approach to the biblical textual body lines up with his complementarian theology and his White Christian nationalist approach to social justice and history.
Strachan's comments on 'biblical commas' are easily debunked. There is no historical case for them. The deeper question is what such rhetoric does for him and other biblical literalists. Strachan is clearly someone who wants to control borders and bodies. His theology of gender, marriage, and family is based on a strict patriarchal order. His new book resists any examination of the American social body's structuring, labeling "Whiteness" an imaginary category. Read in this context, the "biblical comma" tweets reflect a desire to put clear borders and boundaries around the biblical text just as he has sought to do with marriage, family, and the nation. For him, the Bible is scary if it offers permeable categories and ambiguity; complex texts and difficult histories. Instead, a fortified virginal text protected from any intrusion. A wall built around Scripture in order to make it--or keep--it sacred. This, as a whole, is a theology of fear.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy You're listening to an Irreverent Podcast.
Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
All right, Dan, we have to tell some folks about some very exciting things coming we have to tell some folks about some very exciting things coming up for Straight White So in August, I'm going to be launching, and I know you'll be part of it too, our Masculinity After Purity Culture series, and that's going to be in our Patreon.
And so purity culture is something that both of us experienced and went through.
I know a lot of folks out there have as well.
It was harmful.
Am I right, Dan, that you had a pledge card at the very first True Love Waits?
I believe I did.
Yeah, people study true love weights and they went to the National Mall in D.C.
and put in all the cards.
I believe that one of my cards was there.
Yes.
And I think it's a good series.
As you say, we talk about purity culture.
It's talked about a lot.
But there has been, I think, a gap of what it means in relation to masculinity and for men and boys coming through purity culture.
And that's something I think we're really going to try to hit as we talk about that.
So that's launching in August.
It's very exciting.
It's going to be on our Patreon.
In September, we're going to be having our very first Straight White American Jesus Seminar.
So if you would love to take a class from Professor Dan Miller or Professor Brad Onishi, this is your chance.
We're going to be talking about a pure America, religion, race, and nation.
We're going to be looking at white Christian nationalism, And how white Christian nationalists try to create a social body in this country that is straight, white, patriarchal, native-born, and so on and so forth.
It'll incorporate so many themes we talk about on this show.
Purity culture is one of them.
Christian nationalism is another.
But we'll get into the weeds with some things that we don't always have time with on our shows.
The ways that white evangelicals were the foremost proponents of pro-slavery theologies, the way that conspiracy theories and other aspects of white Christian nationalist movements play into this attempt to create a kind of pure America.
I'm excited about it.
I'm excited, too, because a lot of this will will touch on some some material from your new book, Queer Democracy.
You're going to be kind of leading the charge, even though I'll make an appearance at various times.
Are you excited about this as I am?
I'm really excited about it.
And I'm excited for an opportunity.
I know we hear from people, follow ups who they want more depth than we can do in the podcast or maybe more depth and is really going to sort of communicate that way.
This is an opportunity for anybody who's interested in that to get that, to get time.
This won't be the only one of these we do.
We plan on doing others, right, to get time getting to know each other, getting to know us, getting to interact.
It'll be virtual, but live, right, in a way that we can't do in the podcast and other things.
I'm really excited about it.
I think the themes and the topics are really important and timely, but I also really look forward to having sort of a deeper conversation with some of the people that have been with us and some of the people who are coming to be with us in a way that we just can't do on a weekly basis in the podcast.
So I'm really excited about it.
We'll have more information in the coming weeks.
We'll have a brochure and links for signing up and dates and all those things.
Be on the lookout for that.
Two big announcements.
August, Masculinity and Purity Culture.
September, our very first Straight White American Jesus seminar on race, religion, and nation.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Our show's hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
Today, I want to talk about biblical commas, and I know some of you are like, what is that?
And some of you are like, exactly what I'm talking about?
Well, what I'm referencing is a tweet from Owen Strachan from last weekend, July 17, 2021.
And here's what the tweet says.
There's not a single edit you could make to scripture.
To improve it.
Anything you would do to amend, so much as a biblical comma, would drastically demote it.
You can't improve the Word of God.
You'd only ruin perfection.
Keep your edits on the shelf.
So, this created somewhat of a Twitter storm.
There were many reactions and many jokes made.
And I want to talk about how Strachan's comments about quote-unquote biblical commas link up with other themes in his theology, and they really sort of tie together ideas of our country and about gender and sexuality and marriage.
The basic idea for me here is that when it comes to any kind of body, a text, a nation as a social body, or individual physical bodies of human beings, when it comes to any of those literal or metaphorical or textual bodies, for Strachan the goal is to create a border, a very strong boundary around them in order to control them.
That's the impulse.
He wants to make bodies great again by building a wall around them.
And so that's what I want to get into today and link all this together.
All right, so, Strachan tweets about biblical commas, and you can't edit even one comma in the Bible, otherwise it will amend it and demote it.
Now, this is easily debunked, and I'm not going to spend the bulk of time today talking about why this is just inaccurate.
So many folks on Twitter, so many folks on social media, so many blog posts, so many places, The easiest of rebuttals to this that shows that all of the punctuation and the commas and the chapters to the Bible were added later.
And so when you look at commas, when you look at chapter headings, those were not in the original text.
And so some of you out there went to seminary, Some of you read Greek or Hebrew, others of you just know your history and the history of the Bible, and this is just dumb.
And my guess is he probably knows better, but he's trying to kind of rile up his base and to make a kind of point and to create cultural backlash.
He's also probably promoting his new book, and I'll get to this in a minute, but he has a new book coming out.
That is about what he calls wokeness and the false gospel of wokeness and how that's a big a big issue in the United States today.
So that's probably in my view what's happening, but this is easily debunked.
That's not the real issue for me.
That's not really what is at stake.
What's at stake is what this does for him, this idea that the Bible is closed, that it's a closed, unchangeable text that is ensconced within a frame that can never be altered.
It's a border, it's a boundary, it's a wall, and that within it is the Bible, kind of pristine and protected, and to do anything to that is to do violence to it, according to him.
It's to infiltrate it, it's to attack it.
What I want to talk about here is just how this links up with the impulses that undergird Christian nationalism and evangelical and other fundamentalist approaches to gender and sexuality.
So, as I said at the top, here's my thesis.
His comments on biblical commas are easily debunked.
There's no historical case for that.
But if you examine his theology as a whole, you see a hardcore complementarianism.
And I'll get to this in a sec.
He believes that men and women were made by God with different roles, that men should be leaders and in charge, and that women should be submissive and receptive to men's authority.
Strachan also has a kind of view of the nation that could be described as Christian nationalist.
Now, he's not as hardcore as some out there, Robert Jeffress and others, but he does have this sort of take on the American nation as not imbued with white privilege and not imbued with white supremacy.
So for Strachan, he's clearly somebody who wants to control.
He wants to control borders and bodies.
He wants to control how we think of the American nation.
He wants to hold it in a certain frame.
He wants to do that with gender and marriage and family.
He wants men and women, and he only understands men and women in terms of cis men and cis women, to be in marriages and in family structures that are patriarchal, okay?
So let's go through these and see how they're all linked and kind of back up this thesis.
So let's start with the idea of the biblical comma.
As I said before, there is no case to be made for the biblical commas being part of the overall construction of the original text, right?
The commas came later.
The chapter titles came later.
Let's think about what happens in biblical translations and examine how what he's saying is actually something that can actually backfire on him quite easily.
Sam Perry has just done great work on this, as always.
Sam Perry's always doing just amazing work.
But he has a new paper out that talks about evangelical translations of the Bible and translations that actually alter and change and read into the text certain ideas about gender, certain ideas about sexuality, certain ideas about slavery that are actually misleading and are actually a little bit formative when it comes to a biblical language.
So let me read a little bit of what Perry says in his paper, Whitewashing Evangelical Scripture, Intransitivity Engaged Orthodoxy in the Case of Slavery and Antisemitism in the English Standard Version.
Drawing on the case of the English Standard Version, a contemporary evangelical revision of the Revised Standard Version, I show how the ESV editors, while modifying certain Revised Standard Version renderings to establish transitivity for their texts among Complementarian Biblicist Christians,
sought to establish intransitivity between the texts and more pejorative social interpretations by progressively retranslating lexically ambiguous terms and introducing footnotes to obviate the bible's ostensible promotion of slavery and anti-semitism.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swag episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swag Archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
