It's In the Code Ep. 41: Don't Be a Stumbling Block Part 2
Building on the previous episode, Dan dives deeper into the code of not being a “stumbling block” in this episode. How do admonitions not to be a stumbling block depart from the actual context of that phrase in the Christian New Testament? And what does this tell us about some Christians’ claim to be “biblical literalists?” What does it reveal about the insecurities at the heart of their own spirituality? Listen in and find out.
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Hello and welcome to It's In The Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight Wine American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased as always to be here with all of you, and as always want to thank all of you both for the ideas that you keep flowing, feedback and input, as well as your support financially and otherwise for the podcast.
We say all the time we can't do it without you, but it's completely true.
As always, I want to invite you to reach out.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
It takes me some time to get back to people.
I apologize for that, but I do read the emails, do value them.
It honestly is the high point of my workday, oftentimes, getting to check that account.
So without further ado, I want to dive right in here.
This is the second episode in kind of a two-part one.
We started in the prior episode, so if you haven't listened to that, maybe go back and take a few minutes and do that.
But it's on the theme of the stumbling block, this code we introduced in the last episode, this language within a certain kind of religious context about the idea that you shouldn't be a stumbling block to others in the faith.
And we talked there about how it's almost always used in the context of sex and so-called sexual purity to not make somebody stumble, quote-unquote, sexually, which means that it is almost always used in the context of judgment.
It's not simply an encouragement or an admonition to help, you know, your fellow Christians, but, you know, is usually judgment about sex and sexuality.
It's aimed at controlling others and it's particularly aimed at controlling women and women's sexuality and women's bodies.
I shared in that episode that in all of my years within evangelicalism, my years studying purity culture, my time talking with coaching clients and so on, I don't think I've ever encountered a single time when a man was called out for being a so-called stumbling block for women.
It is almost always women being a stumbling block for men.
We talked about all of that last week.
So what, Dan, you might ask, do we have left to talk about?
Well, I think that there's more to this idea, because like so many of the codes that we run into in this series, It's most likely a phrase that you're going to hear in high-control, theologically conservative religious contexts.
You're going to hear it from evangelicals.
You're going to hear it from people in your life who occupy those spaces.
If you're coming out of those spaces, maybe you're familiar with this language.
As I always say, if you're not familiar with it and you run into it on the outside and it doesn't make sense, that's part of the context, right?
And what all that means is that you're most likely to bump up against this language or to have it deployed against you in contexts that claim to be quote-unquote biblical or to read the Bible literally and so on.
And I'll just invite you, if you're interested, you go back and look in some of the early episodes we did in the series, we talked about the notion of the Bible church and things being biblical and kind of what that means and how that works.
Well, that's the context where you're going to hear this.
The same people who say you shouldn't be a stumbling block to others, you shouldn't cause somebody to stumble sexually and so forth, they're typically going to be the same crowd of Christians who say that the Bible is literally true or that they interpret it literally or something like that.
Now, All of you, if you've listened to me at all, have heard me say many times that I don't like the idea of biblical literalism because no one reads the Bible literally, including the people who call themselves literalists.
And I'll never have time to fully sort of flesh that out or explain why I say that, but this is one of those points that illustrates that.
The whole idea of the stumbling block is a case in point.
And if we dig a little bit deeper, even going beyond what we did last week, last episode, you can kind of look under the hood more clearly and you can see even more of what's going on.
So what do I mean by that?
About saying it's not literally true and so forth?
Well, first of all, the obvious point that it's a metaphor, right?
You're not literally putting a stumbling block in front of somebody and making them fall.
But more specifically, the language of the stumbling block as it is used in these contexts, all claiming biblical authority for their use, it's taken almost entirely out of context.
It would surprise a lot of people to know, it does surprise people to find out, I've had this conversation, that the language of the stumbling block, the most prominent passage where that language comes from, it's in 1 Corinthians 8 in the Christian New Testament, it has to do actually not with judgment, not with controlling others, not with regulating the action of others, but it has to do with the exercise of Christian freedom.
And that's of interest to a lot of people because those high-control religious environments that spend so much time talking about not being a stumbling block, they are not environments that are known for advocating freedom.
My experience, the people I talk to, people I hear from, none of us, when we sort of say, you know, what are maybe five words that you associate with that kind of religious context, or the faith you grew up with, or the evangelical church you came out of, or whatever, Freedom?
Usually not on the list, right?
So I want to talk about that because I think it's really significant, right?
The topic's a little arcane to modern readers, to modern listeners, but the focus in the Bible passage is about eating food that's sacrificed to idols.
And you might be like, why would anybody eat food sacrificed to idols?
That seems kind of weird.
Well, in Roman society, animals were often butchered in contexts either explicitly dedicating them to different non-Christian gods, or sometimes in a ceremonial context, or a priest or other religious person would sort of say an invocation over the space, and so forth, right?
You could think of it as a parallel to the preparation of, say, kosher or halal foods, just in the sense that there's a whole protocol that has to be followed, and if butchers followed the proper protocol, Then that meat was dedicated to whatever traditional Roman or other god was the focus of the particular area, right?
So for Christians, the question came up about whether or not it was okay to eat this food.
It was a big deal because it would be like, you walk to your local, you know, supermarket and you buy, you know, a pound of ground beef or whatever.
If all of the meat in that supermarket has been dedicated to different non-Christian deities, Your option is probably to eat meat or not, sort of, period.
And so it was a pervasive problem, and Christians asked whether or not it was okay to eat this food, and there was a lot of debate about this.
And so Paul, he's the writer of this, the book we call 1 Corinthians, his letter to the church in Corinth.
He argues that because idols are nothing, right?
For him, there's only one God and it's the God revealed in Jesus and so forth.
He says, you know what?
The idols are nothing and because they're nothing, Christians can eat meat, sacrifice those idols because Christians know the truth and they know that those idols don't mean anything, right?
They can eat that meat with a clear conscience.
But he also says that some weaker Christians, and that's his word, and that's going to be important.
We're going to come back to that.
He says some weaker Christians, Christians who are more immature in their faith, they're still hung up on the whole meat-sacrifice-to-idols issue, right?
Maybe they're people who converted from a traditional Greco-Roman religious background, and so the idea that those gods are false is really, really new for them.
It's still something they get hung up on.
He says, because they're still hung up on it, Christians who eat meat-sacrificed idols, they should be sure and take care that exercising their legitimate Christian freedom doesn't become a stumbling block to their weaker Christian brothers and sisters.
That's the language of the stumbling block.
So, the first point is that the passage obviously has nothing to do with sex.
Right?
So the next time somebody wants to tell you, you know, here's where my sexual morality comes from, and start talking about not being a stumbling block, and also wants to claim that they're taking the Bible literally or whatever, they're not.
The passage has nothing to do with sex.
If Christians want to apply it to sex and sexuality, that's fine.
Christians can do what they want with the Bible, but don't call it literalism.
It's not.
But I think that there's an even more important issue about this.
Again, sort of taking a deeper look, and I think it's this notion of Christian freedom and maturity that's really important here, because it shows just how backwards the admonition to not be a stumbling block is.
So, Paul does encourage Christians not to cause other people to stumble.
He says that.
But here's the key, and this is something that has always struck me about this passage for years and years and years, and I used to ruffle feathers when I was in the evangelical context, when I was an evangelical pastor.
I used to have arguments with folks about this, And I would say, if you note in the passage, it's the more religiously observant Christians who are described as weak.
In other words, Paul doesn't praise the stricter Christians.
He doesn't praise the ones who won't eat the meat.
He doesn't say, make sure and keep everybody in line, make sure they don't eat that meat sacrificed to idols.
No, he describes those people as weak.
What might have been seen as a sign of a more religious orientation is actually described by him, and I think this is a dig, I think this is a criticism, he describes it as a weakness.
So he doesn't praise those who refuse to eat meat sacrificed to idols, he describes them as spiritually immature.
And following from this metaphor of immaturity, I think the idea is that once they grow up in their understanding of Christianity, they won't have the hang-ups they currently do.
In other words, Paul is saying here, hey, you know what?
When they're more mature and more settled and more confident in their faith, they're not going to have these hang-ups.
You're not going to have to worry about meat sacrifice to idols.
But right now they're weak and it's a concern for them.
So why do I think that matters?
Because I think those are religious communities that insist on policing the actions of others.
on coercing their behavior by judging them, by appealing to the stumbling block language to keep people in line.
They have the whole idea backwards.
The control that they exercise is actually a sign of immaturity and weakness.
What they take as a vision of robust faith, as a vision of a mature or strong faith, is weakness.
And what they criticize in others as a sign of weakness or straying or wandering or not being serious about one's faith or whatever, that's the sign of strength.
And we're familiar with this dynamic.
We're familiar with this dynamic that when they control or when they seek to control others, when they exercise control, it's actually a sign of immaturity and weakness.
We know that, for example, the people in our lives who often spend the most time criticizing others are in fact the most insecure.
The people who try to make others insecure, who try to draw out their insecurities, are themselves typically the most insecure.
We know that those who bully and abuse others, they were bullied and abused.
We know that people mask weakness through apparent shows of strength.
We know this.
This is a standard pattern.
It's something we're all familiar with.
So here's my central criticism, not just of this, this, this stumbling block thing, but of high control religious environments for communities as such.
And folks, this is, this is big for me, right?
This is why the stumbling block thing really gets under my skin.
Because for me, when we start sort of digging around and we work to, to get into the code and look at what it's doing, it opens up like judgments on the entire tradition as such.
And so I'm going to say that my most significant criticism of any kind of high-control religious environment or community, and this is a big statement because this is my criticism of most American evangelicalism in particular, the tradition that I'm most familiar with, the tradition that I'm most sort of comfortable criticizing because I feel like I know where I stand with it, but it would extend not just to Christian high-control religious environments and not just to evangelicalism, to any high-control religious environment.
My criticism is that the religious observances they demand is the price of entry.
The religious observances that they demand for you to be accepted.
The observances that they say you have to undertake, the way they say you have to undertake it to be able to participate in that tradition, they are signs not of the strength of their devotion, but of the shallowness of their religious conviction.
They're a sign not of religious assurance, but of religious insecurity.
And I know that for some that may sound confusing.
It may sound counterintuitive.
I'm sure a lot of you will agree with me.
But what that means is the people in the world who often present as the most religiously observant, the most fervent, who in fact might be the most fervent, are often the most insecure.
I believe strongly that they are often the ones with the weakest convictions in their faith.
And this is especially true of Christians who run around telling us how omnipotent God is, how we have to do everything God says because God is all-powerful and so forth.
My question for them is always, if your God is so completely powerful and all-powerful and is going to judge everybody and so on, why does he need you to help him do it?
Why do you need to get so worked up about what I do if I've got to contend with God?
It's a sign of shallowness and weakness.
And that would be okay.
If people want to dedicate themselves to a life of religious insecurity, that would be fine.
If that's what helps them feel more secure is the masking of their insecurity under religious observance, then great.
Cool.
Except that they destroy other people in the process.
Because just like those other bullies and abusers, they hurt other people.
I can have compassion for the fact that a bully or an abuser was bullied and abused himself, but it doesn't excuse being a bully and an abuser.
And I can understand the insecurity that people feel that draws them to this kind of religion, but it doesn't make it okay for them to hurt other people in the process.
So that's sort of my take here, right?
If religion and spirituality matter to you, and I know that my listeners are all over the map on this.
I know that some of you still identify as religious.
It matters to you trying to find what you understand as sort of a healthy and productive kind of religion matters.
I know that for some of you, you're done with religion.
You want nothing to do with it.
Being religious or spiritual isn't a value to you.
And I know that some of you are the sort of, let's say, religious curious.
Maybe there's just people in your lives you're trying to understand.
I get all of that.
If religion or spirituality matter to you, if being a part of a religious or spiritual community is something that you want or need in your life, I really, really implore you to find a community that will truly allow you to explore and live that spirituality and freedom.
It can be done as a Christian.
There are Christian congregations like that, but there are a lot of high-control religious contexts where freedom just really doesn't play a significant role.
And finally, I gotta wind this up, but I would be remiss to say, you know, if we don't come back to the issue of sex and sexuality, I don't want to just leave that hanging.
If you're interested in a freedom-affirming Christian affirmation of a diversity of sexualities, of sexual expression, of gender identities, if you're coming out of a tradition that you've always heard that sex is a stumbling block, it's a negative, it's something you have to keep under wraps, it's something you have to sort of hold and bind to yourself, There are alternative Christian visions, and I was just rereading recently for something else that I was doing, but I highly recommend Nadia Bolz Weber's book, Shameless, in particular chapter three.
If that's something that matters to you, if that's something that could speak to you, a sort of different Christian vision of sexuality than that stumbling block language that we've used, especially if you're female identifying and have always heard that you are a stumbling block to men in particular, I encourage you to take a look at that.
As I say, we've got to wind this down.
It's my takeaway on the stumbling block last week about how it's really code for sexual purity and for coercion and judgment, and then this week how it's code for more, or not even a code, it masks more.
Not only does it belie the fact or demonstrate that the so-called biblical literalists aren't biblical literalists at all, But more significantly for me, when we lift the hood and we take a look and we dig around in the code, we find that the whole idea of the stumbling block and the clinging to it and the way that that phrase is used masks a deep-seated religious spirituality that I think cuts to the heart of a lot of American religion.
Thank you, as always, for listening.
Thank you for supporting us, whether it's directly, financially.
Again, we can't do it without you.
Whether it's just suffering through all the ads, we need that.
Thank you so much.
There are other things you could be doing right now than listening to this.
I'm very aware of that.
Please keep the ideas coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
And as always, please be well until we meet again in this weird virtual format.
