It's In the Code Ep. 40: Don't Be A Stumbling Block
One of the most central metaphors for living a life of Christian faith is that of one’s “spiritual walk.” And within this framework, the metaphor of the “stumbling block,” of something that would cause us to “stumble” in that spiritual walk, is also common. But what exactly does this mean? What does it mean when Christians admonish one another not to cause other Christians to “stumble” or “fall”? In this episode, Dan decodes this common Christian metaphor to demonstrate its significance beyond its surface meaning.
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Hello, this is the series It's in the Code, part of the podcast this is the series It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, glad to be with all of you.
And also, as always, Straight White American Jesus and what we do is offered in partnership with the Kapp Center at UC Santa Barbara.
Appreciate them.
I appreciate all of those of you who support us in so many ways, those of you who listen, Those of you who contact us with emails and questions and comments, those of you who support us financially, we can't do it without you.
Specifically, I want to thank all of you who continue to email and contact me about this series.
As always, I want to respond to your emails, your ideas, your comments.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
And always welcome the comments and the insights.
As I always say, I don't get to respond to as many as I should or would like to, but I do the best that I can.
I do read the emails and do sort of keep working through those.
I also want to thank Dr. Laura Anderson.
The last two episodes were interviews that Laura was kind enough to do with us.
So much of what we do and talk about in the series, it's in the code, relates to themes of religion and religious trauma that I've encountered, that I've dealt with personally, that I work through with folks as a coach working in trauma resolution with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
Just so much overlap, so many of you that I hear from who have been sort of dealing with issues related to the topics that come up in this series.
And so I really wanted a chance to weigh in with her.
Also came at a good time, gave me a couple weeks to catch up on some emails and some things like that and to plot out some directions and so forth.
So, without further ado, I want to dive into this episode's topic.
And once again, it's a kind of a rhetorical chestnut that many of you have brought up to me individually, in emails, in conversations, in so many different ways.
And for some, it's going to be almost painfully familiar.
I've also heard from people who have come across this, and again, these are people who didn't grow up in American evangelicalism or conservative religion or what we might call high-control religious environments, but they encounter folks in their lives who use this language, and sometimes I hear from them and I say, I don't understand what that meant.
What was that?
What were they talking about?
And so what we're talking about today is very much part of a particular kind of Christian code that is opaque for those people who didn't grow up with it, whose spirituality wasn't shaped by it.
And the idea is the idea of the so-called stumbling block, right?
Or more specifically, the admonition not to be a stumbling block for your fellow Christians, or in kind of traditional language, not to cause your brother in Christ, that's in quotes, To stumble, and that brother language will be important as we go along here, right?
And sort of delving into this, thinking through this, collecting some thoughts on this.
This is another one of those topics that's going to require a couple episodes, so we'll spend the next couple episodes on this.
But let's start with this idea of the stumbling block, right?
Most of us don't spend our time talking in our regular daily lives about stumbling blocks.
It's not a metaphor we use.
Like so many of the codes that become admonitions within high-control religious contexts, the admonition comes from the Bible and specifically from the Apostle Paul in particular.
There are other references in the biblical text.
But really, there are a couple central references when people talk about being a stumbling block, or the admonition not to be a stumbling block, or causing others to quote-unquote stumble, and so forth.
They're usually looking to Paul's letter to the church in Corinth, so the biblical text, 1 Corinthians, chapters 1 and chapters 8 are where they talk about this.
In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says that the message that Jesus Christ was crucified is a, quote, stumbling block to the acceptance of the gospel within first century Jewish communities.
He says it's foolishness to the Gentiles, a stumbling block to Jewish communities.
And in 1 Corinthians 8, it comes up in the context of his discussion about the use and misuse of Christian freedom.
And the basic meaning of this is simple enough— Um, I think most of us have some sense.
We may not talk about stumbling blocks.
We get the idea of what a stumbling block might be, right?
Something that trips us up, that causes us to stumble.
Literally, if you're walking down, I don't know, a path or a sidewalk, or maybe you're on a hike or something and you, you trip on a tree root, or if we want the block language to come through more strongly, maybe you've got one of those old cement walkways in front of your house and either Freezing and thawing or tree roots or something has made it uneven and, you know, your foot catches on a corner and you trip, you stumble, right?
That's what we're talking about.
That's the metaphor.
Something that causes you to stumble.
And oftentimes within the Christian tradition, the one's faith, living one's faith, is understood as a walk, a walk of faith, walking in faith, a path of faith, a journey of faith.
So, you get this metaphor of walking or moving, and so this language of the stumbling block, the block that would trip you up, that would cause you to stumble, that could cause you to fall, That metaphor sort of runs throughout the Christian tradition and runs deeply.
I would argue that this notion of the language of falling into sin, of tripping oneself, you know, being tripped up in your faith, of stumbling in your faith, these are all metaphors for sinning, for sort of departing from one's Christian values and doing things that you shouldn't.
They're metaphors that are so basic within a lot of forms of Christian life that I think for many Christians, they're not metaphors at all.
They're not experienced as metaphors, right?
When they talk about their Christian walk, it doesn't register as a metaphor.
For those of us on the outside, if you're on the outside of that, and that's not a way that you've talked or thought or experienced yourself, or maybe even your own spirituality, if you think of yourself that way, this can sound really, really foreign.
And so that's the kind of metaphorical world that we're living in, right?
And so, Paul, to take that 1 Corinthians chapter 1 example, for Paul, who was Jewish and had accepted the view that Jesus of Nazareth is also the Christ or the Messiah, the fact that this person, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed publicly as a criminal by the Roman authorities is a quote-unquote stumbling block For most Jewish people in the first century, right?
In other words, it creates a kind of obstacle to recognizing who Jesus is.
This is not what was anticipated in terms of the Messiah and so forth.
And so he says it's a stumbling block.
And Paul, again a Jewish Christian, And looking to account for the fact that most Jewish people did not accept that Jesus was the Christ, was the Messiah, looking to explain that, this is part of his explanation.
It's a quote-unquote stumbling block, okay?
We're going to get into the 1 Corinthians 8 passage a little bit more next week.
But this is the basic idea, and the way that it works out in Corinthians 8, and the way that the metaphor works in Christian tradition as it develops, is that a stumbling block is something that causes us to stumble, that disrupts our faith, that causes us to sin in some way.
So, we understand the meaning of the metaphor.
Those of you who listen know that what I'm interested in is not just the surface meaning, but how's the metaphor actually used?
How does it actually work?
How does this language of being a stumbling block, how is it used within the church?
What effects does it have on people?
What work is it doing?
Right?
And that's what we're interested in.
And so in contemporary use, when you hear people say that you shouldn't be a stumbling block, It's the admonition not to do anything or to act in any way that would cause other Christians to stumble in their Christian walk, right?
That's the basic idea, is not to cause somebody to stumble, not to in some way contribute to them sinning or acting in some way that's contrary to their Christian faith, right?
And on the surface, that admonition makes sense, and it gives voice to, I think, a sense of mutual concern for other Christians, right?
As part of the Christian community, we ought to do all we can to aid others in their Christian walk.
Living as God wants us to live.
If somebody identifies as Christian and you talk to them, they'll say, it's hard to be what it is that you think God wants you to be.
It's difficult enough without additional hindrances being thrown in our way, different additional difficulties to trip us up.
So part of our own, quote-unquote, Christian walk, our own faith, should be common concern for helping others in their Christian walk, in their Christian faith.
And that's all good, as far as it goes.
And that's laudable, and that's a nice concern.
And again, I know for lots of people, when they hear this language, this is perhaps what they think of, and the idea that it could be problematic in some way is going to be surprising to them, right?
That's a sort of base-level decoding of the stumbling block metaphor, is helping one another in our Christian walk.
But if that's all it was, if that's the total of the work it did, if that's most of the work this language did, I wouldn't hear from so many of you asking for an episode on this topic.
And the reason I hear from so many is because the use of this metaphor often goes beyond a concern of mutual support as we undertake our Christian walk together.
No, almost always the reason I hear from people about this metaphor and the context in which I've experienced the metaphor is as an expression of judgment on people And quite frankly, as an expression of the effort to coerce quote-unquote proper Christian behavior, to police people's behavior, to make it be what we see as proper or approved Christian behavior.
The admonition not to cause someone to stumble, it's typically not offered as just a reminder for mutual support.
It's leveled as a judgment against those who are thought to be somehow causing others to stumble, that they are viewed as a hindrance to other people successfully being Christians.
And the key is, and everybody who's familiar with this, you are going to know this.
So many of you have emailed and reached out about this.
This is going to resonate with a lot of people.
It's a judgment that is typically leveled at very particular members of the Christian community.
And the reason is that the language of being a stumbling block in principle should apply to anything that one might do that would sort of disrupt somebody else's faith or their quote-unquote Christian walk.
In practice, The language of the stumbling block is often code for issues related to sex, sexuality, sexual purity, and so forth.
And I did an earlier episode on purity.
It didn't focus specifically on sexual purity, but the same points apply.
That's the context.
So much so that when many people hear the language of the stumbling block, All they think about is sex and sexuality.
Just as many Christians, when they hear the word purity, all they think about is sex and sexuality, even though the metaphor in principle extends beyond that, right?
So the admonition not to cause Christians to stumble is almost always about not doing something or in some way enticing others in such a way that they would sin sexually, including feeling lust or desire or whatever else.
But within that, and again, this won't be surprising to anybody who's familiar with these contexts, but to those on the outside, maybe it will be, is that this is an admonition.
The admonition not to cause somebody to stumble is almost always leveled at women, and it is almost always leveled at women as an admonition not to act or dress or move or speak in ways that would cause male Christians to quote-unquote stumble.
Now, I want to pause here and say that this discourse, when it takes place within these religious contexts, it is always presupposing a cis heteronormative framework.
That is, it is always presupposing that we are talking about cisgender men and women, and we're talking about cisgender men and women who are heterosexual, men who are attracted to women, women who are attracted to men, and so forth.
The whole notion of divergent gender identities or different sexualities is largely absent from these discourses because those are just considered straightforwardly impermissible, right?
So it goes without saying that a man doing anything to quote-unquote tempt another man would be acting inappropriately, would be a stumbling block, and so forth.
But within these understandings, there's no appropriate way to be trans or gender non-conforming.
There's no appropriate way to be gay or pan or bi or poly or whatever other sexuality somebody might identify with.
All of those are out of bounds.
The only legitimate expressions are cisgender gender identity and heterosexual sexual orientation, right?
Within that framework, The language of being a stumbling block is almost always aimed at women.
Making sure that they don't tempt men, that they don't cause men to fall or stumble or so forth, right?
So, the language about the stumbling block is almost always language aimed at regulating women's and girls' sexuality, their bodies, their sexual expression, even their sexual desires, right?
And it is very often also given as kind of a free pass to men.
That is, if men do fall with women in some way in sexual sin, certainly they're morally culpable, but there's often a sense that the woman in some way bears a greater responsibility for this because she is the cause of him stumbling or whatever.
This is such a pervasively gendered and sort of sexualized concept that in all of my years within evangelicalism, all the conversations that I've had with say coaching clients or just other people or the emails I've heard, the conversations all the conversations that I've had with say coaching clients or just other people or the emails I've heard, the conversations we had at our live event in Denver or whatever, I don't think that I can recall a single time when a man or something a man did was referred to as I don't think that
It's It is so far the other way that the language of the set of the stumbling block is almost always used to regulate and to judge and to coerce the behavior of women.
Okay?
And I think that that's really key.
And the reason behind this is that essentially women are viewed as inherently sort of chaste.
That's chaste with an E on the end, right?
Not pursued, but pure, sort of sexually demure, not having strong sexual desire or expression and so forth.
Men, on the other hand, are presented as sexually voracious and having a strong sex drive and so forth.
And the idea is that the role of women is basically to have to restrain male sexuality.
That is what their divinely given role is.
And so when women fail to do this, they are a stumbling block to men.
So the language of the stumbling block typically conveys a very, very specific double standard applying to women in a way that it just doesn't for men, right?
I've got to wrap this up.
Again, I'm going to pick back up with this theme of the stumbling block in the next episode, but to sort of sum up and tie some of these things together, the basic meaning of the stumbling block metaphor is straightforward enough.
It has to do with the idea of Christians aiding one another in living their faith, helping one another not to quote-unquote stumble.
In practice, In its actual concrete usage, it is almost always a term that expresses judgment.
It is almost always a term that expresses judgment specifically about sex, sexuality, sexual expression.
And it is always, in my experience within those contexts, aimed specifically at women.
That's the language of the stumbling block.
Women are, in and of themselves, through their very existence, a potential stumbling block to men.
They are a potential temptation.
They are the potential cause of men's spiritual downfall, and so they bear the responsibility not to bring that about.
So when we decode the stumbling block language, what we find is it's really about, again, policing and regulating women's bodies and their sexuality.
It's about so much related to gender and sexuality, so much more that we can get into here.
Next episode, we're going to decode this further.
Looking at really just sort of how kind of twisted and counterintuitive the deployment of this language actually is within these contexts, which may be surprising for some given how pervasive this language is and how common it is for those who grow up within these contexts.
Again, I want to thank everybody for listening.
You can reach me, Daniel Miller Swaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Please keep the ideas coming.
Again, this series has been long running, longer than I originally anticipated, certainly.
But as long as I feel like it's resonating with people, as long as I am hearing from you and it makes sense, as long as ideas are coming from you that we can talk about and think about together, I'll keep this going.
Again, thank you so much.
There are other things you could be doing with this time.
Whatever you're doing right now as you listen to this, you could be doing something different, and we value that, and thank you for that.
Once again, we couldn't do it without all of you.
And as always, until we meet again in the strange virtual format that we have here, please be well.
