Brad is joined by scholars Jill-Hicks Keeton and Cavan Concannon to talk about their new book: "Does Scripture Speak for Itself: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation. "
https://books.google.com/books/about/Does_Scripture_Speak_for_Itself.html?id=f3iwzgEACAAJ
The Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC is arguably the latest example of a long line of white evangelical institutions aiming to amplify and promote a religious, political, and moral agenda of their own. Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon show how the Museum's exhibits reinforce a particularized and partial interpretation of the Bible's meaning. The authors reveal how the MOTB produces a version of the Bible that in essence authorizes a certain sort of white evangelical privilege; promotes a view of history aligned with that same evangelical aspiration; and above all protects a cohort of white evangelicals from critique.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the CAP Center, UCSB, and I have two return guests who are back, and they're back together, which is amazing.
They're joining me in a dual interview, which is fantastic, and that is Dr. Jill Hicks-Keaton and Dr. Kevin Kincannon.
So thanks to both of you for coming back to Straight White American Jesus.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.
Happy to be here.
So we're here to talk about your fantastic new book, and that is, Does Scripture Speak for Itself?
The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation.
And friends, if you don't remember, when I've talked to both of these folks, let me just tell you about them briefly.
Jill Hicks Keaton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
The author of Arguing with a Senneth, Gentile Access to Israel's Living God and Jewish Antiquity.
And Kevin Concanon is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California.
The author of Profaning Paul, which came out just last year.
Also the author of Assembling Early Christianity, Trade Networks, and the Letters of Dionysus of Corinth.
You all have done something amazing, which is you both are people who study the Bible, and you took yourself out of the textual world and went into the world of the Museum of the Bible, which is in Washington, D.C., and is something that, if you don't know, friends, I imagine many of you listening do, the Museum of the Bible is a particular enterprise, as we're going to get into, done by white evangelicals, and so it's not part of the Smithsonian, it's not part of The kind of official matrix of certain institutions in D.C.
that you might be familiar with and you might have visited when you were there.
The Museum of the Bible is really something kind of set apart in very particular ways.
And we're going to talk about how and why that is here in a second.
So I want to just be fully transparent and say when I tried to send Jill and Kevin the link to this, I sent them a web page about the Trinity.
And so I want to say publicly that was not me.
Being passive-aggressive and telling the biblical scholars that they needed to learn some theology if they wanted to talk about modern things.
That was me being just totally busy and sending people links to the Trinity, apparently.
So I'll just put that out there.
All right, y'all.
So let's talk about this.
This is really the material for the last chapter of the book, but I want to kind of talk about it first.
The Museum of the Bible is funded by a certain group of people and a certain family.
And I wonder if, if Jill, you could just kind of help us understand, like, who are the people that kind of put up the money, the enormous sums of money, to make the Museum of the Bible happen?
The Museum of the Bible is an institution that was founded and funded by a famous white evangelical family, the Greens, who are based here in the state that I currently call home, Oklahoma.
They're the owners of the craft store chain of Hobby Lobby, and they were the family who were involved in the Supreme Court case about Obamacare, and they won the right not to pay for abortifacients.
So the Green family are, many people listening will be very familiar with them.
And I guess one of the follow-up question is really, you know, for either of you, what, um, I think people can guess, but I'm just wondering if you have some kind of insight into like, what's their motivation?
Why spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on a very high publicity thing like the Museum of the Bible?
I mean, there's been some controversies, there's been some scandals.
It's not like this has left them unscathed.
And so any ideas to, you know, why they would want to do this, this kind of project?
Well, let me tell you something that we're excited about that we do in this book that is different from our previous writing on the Museum of the Bible, which is that we're actually not as interested in interrogating the motivations of the Greens as locating the Museum of the Bible in a long history of white evangelical institution building that promotes and publicizes a certain kind of Bible.
One of the things that we do in chapter one, for example, is we look at examples of how the consensus, both theological as well as social and political, that we associate with white evangelical Christianity.
We all kind of associate white evangelical Christianity with a certain set of demographics, a certain set of beliefs, a certain set of political postures.
How those Those the notion of white evangelicalism is actually the result of institution building that goes back over a century, primarily by white industrialists who pumped money into building all sorts of things that then amplify and resonate And add to and combine together to form white evangelical theology and white evangelicalism as an entity.
And the Greens are just sort of a more recent manifestation of that.
And the Museum of the Bible has grafted itself very cleanly into this apparatus that includes things as diverse as Biola University or the Moody Bible Institute or the publication of the fundamentals in the early part of the 20th century.
Radio networks, television networks, all sorts of podcasting venues.
So there's a whole network of institutions that have largely been funded by very conservative white Christians.
that continue to exist even after their funders have gone because that puts them into a position of being stable and that network continues to develop and develop and that's something that people don't tend to pay attention to when we're talking about white evangelicalism as a phenomenon.
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