In this episode, Dan revisits the claim or aspiration to be “biblical.” If such claims or aspirations involve efforts to control religious adherents, what are the consequences of this? What claims or attitudes, or actions does it license? How do claims to be “biblical” create an “anything-goes” kind of spirituality? How does this play out in concrete, practical terms? Check out the episode to find out!
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Hello and welcome to Stray White American Jesus and the series It's in the Code.
I'm I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College and the host of this series.
Pleased to be with all of you who are listening.
As always, Straight White American Jesus and this series are offered in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
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So diving right in here, in the last episode, I talked about the idea of something being biblical, the claim or aspiration to be biblical, and what that means.
And as always, the focus on this series, as the name implies, It's not just the sort of surface meaning or maybe the obvious understood meaning of some of these phrases that people use or the things that they say, but as I like to put it, the work that these phrases do, right?
That's what we mean by sort of cracking the code.
How do they actually operate?
What can we know about the groups who speak this way, act this way?
What is going on, as it were, below the surface?
And I talked about this concept of being biblical.
And I actually want to revisit that today.
That's why we've got this kind of silly title, you know, Being Biblical 2.0.
And I don't usually do this, but as I thought about it after posting the episode last time, and as Brad and I were prepping for the regular Straight White American Jesus weekly roundup, Some issues came up, and I actually had some people who reached out to me as well about an issue that I didn't address in that episode, but that I think I should have.
And so I want to revisit that.
I want to sort of pick up with this.
So one of the things that I suggested in the last episode was that the claims or desire or aspiration to be biblical was, among other things, that it was about control.
That the language that, you know, we are being biblical, we should be biblical, we follow biblical teachings, a Christian should live a biblical lifestyle, and so forth, however that word biblical arises, that often it figures very prominently in what I'm referring to as high-control religious environments.
And I think that's one of the reasons, not the only one, but one, why more liberal or progressive Christians are less likely to make claims to being quote-unquote biblical.
And I talked about that in the last episode.
Don't want to revisit all of that.
But there's another issue that I do want to pick up here that's kind of related to this issue of control, to this idea of control.
And basically it's this.
Another way that the claim to be biblical operates, another thing that it does, another way that it works in these kinds of religious contexts, is that it allows religious practitioners and religious leaders, maybe leaders even more, to claim or demand anything with impunity.
Not even with impunity, let's say with moral superiority.
And what exactly do I mean by that?
What I mean is that if I'm, say, a pastor, an evangelical pastor, as long as I can claim that what I'm saying is quote-unquote biblical, that I'm appealing to the Bible in some way, that I'm trying to follow the Bible, I can make any demand of you that I want.
I can level any claim of any kind.
I can say anything about any group or class of people that I want, as long as I can mount some sort of argument or make some sort of appeal to the Bible and say it's biblical.
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