What does it mean when a Christian warns us against being “unequally yoked” with someone else? Where does this language come from? And how has been used to marginalize and exclude others? What are the dangers of this language, which is so common among some Christians? Dan tackles these topics in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad, as always, to be together with all of you, and as always, thank everybody who listens to us, everybody who supports us, everybody who reaches out.
I can be reached.
Love to hear from folks about any topic, but certainly about topics for the series.
Feedback on the series at danielmillerswaj.com.
As always, I respond to as many of the emails as I can, and I know that it's not nearly enough, but I do value them and value the insights of so many of you.
Before getting into today's episode, I do want to plug and let people know that the new website, Straight White American Jesus website, is up and running.
It is just StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com, all one word, no hyphens or underscores or any of that fun stuff.
Check it out.
It's more searchable than what we had before.
It's easy to find episodes.
It's easy to find episodes on specific topics.
I'm really excited to that.
Shout out to my co-host Brad Onishi and all the work that went into that.
So please, check it out when you get a chance.
I want to dive into today's topic.
Again, a topic I've heard so much about from so many people, and it's one of these that honestly I can't believe that we haven't sort of talked about it before now.
But it is the idea of not being, quote, unequally yoked in one's, as the Christians will say, or a certain kind of Christian will say, in one's Christian walk, of not being unequally yoked.
And as with lots of other passages or, well, themes that we've talked about, it is a passage that comes from the Bible.
That's where it's drawn from.
Its basic meaning is straightforward enough, but like all the things, basically, that we talk about in this series, we also find that the work that this does goes beyond, in many ways, that basic meaning.
For me, in this case, it really intensifies that basic meaning, which is problematic enough, okay?
So, when Christians invoke the idea of not being unequally yoked, and to non-Christians or people who didn't grow up with this kind of biblical idiom, this is another one of those phrases that can seem really, really strange.
We talked some episodes back about the notion of being a stumbling block or encountering a stumbling block, and again, this is just not a way that regular people talk.
Well, most regular people don't talk about being yoked unequally or otherwise, and so when we hear this language, it can sound kind of strange.
Well, the reference is from a passage in the New Testament.
It's 2 Corinthians 6.14, so 2 Corinthians, one of the books written by the Apostle Paul, where it says, and I'm reading, I think, New International Version translation.
This is the translation I kind of grew up with, the one that when I hear this passage or this phrase, this is what I think of.
It says, Do not be yoked together with unbelievers, for what do righteousness and wickedness have in common, or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
2 Corinthians 6.14.
The passage is so commonly invoked that for many Christians, the meaning and intent are straightforward.
That is, it's one of these passages, or these themes, or these idioms, if you like, That features so prominently within a certain kind of Christianity that it doesn't strike the people who hear it as sort of noteworthy or anything like that.
And it's one of those reasons why, if you have a certain kind of Christian in your life who may use this language of being unequally yoked, and you may be like, what in the world are you talking about?
What does that mean?
And they will say something, they'll be there like, What do you mean, what does it mean?
It's obvious what it means.
It's just such a basic conception for them.
But it's actually a metaphor, which is why those of us who haven't grown up or been socialized into hearing it can't immediately make sense of it.
But it's an easy enough metaphor to understand.
It's an agrarian metaphor, a farm metaphor.
Likening the relationships of Christians to a team of oxen that are yoked together.
Everybody's seen this, right?
If you're like me, you didn't grow up with oxen, I didn't grow up farming, I didn't do those things, but you've seen movies and things like that with like a team of oxen maybe plowing a field or pulling a wagon or hauling freight or something like that, right?
And the idea is that if the oxen are not equally matched, They won't work together well, and they can even work at cross-purposes, or one can go too fast, or they distribute the work unequally and so forth, right?
It just doesn't work the way that it's supposed to.
So you want a team, presumably, that is equally yoked.
This metaphorical meaning is plain enough that some modern translations just do away with it.
So I mentioned a translation called the New International Version a few minutes ago.
The New Revised Standard Version, when I engage with biblical text, this is the translation that I typically use.
It says, do not be mismatched with unbelievers, right?
That's what it's getting at, is this notion of being mismatched.
To carry it through into the metaphor, if you had two oxen that are mismatched and then yoked together, they won't work effectively.
So once again, what the metaphor is telling us is straightforward enough.
We come across a passage that's intended as a kind of encouragement or admonition to Christians trying to successfully live their spiritual lives, right?
Associate and be paired with, so to speak, other Christians because non-believers, non-Christians will disrupt your spiritual progress.
They will, to refer back to that previous episode again, they will cause you to quote-unquote stumble in your faith.
Straightforward enough.
So far, so good.
Once you get into just the really basic level of understanding the metaphor, hey, it makes sense, right?
Okay, great.
But once again, as always, it's worth digging a little deeper into this word of encouragement to understand the work that it does.
And those of you who listen regularly know that that's always my interest, is is not just what do these words mean, these phrases, these slogans, these admonitions, but what do they do?
What is their effect?
What is their social purpose?
And on a basic level with this idea, it's not hard to get at because it's right on the surface of the passage.
Because with his admonition not to be unequally yoked, Paul casts the Christian life into really, really stark either-or terms.
And I'm going to be hard on the Apostle Paul here in a few minutes, and I know that some people would say, look, Paul doesn't usually talk this way in the New Testament, and some of the strident language that he uses in this passage, he doesn't use it anywhere else.
He doesn't talk this way in other places, and so forth.
The reason they want to do that is to kind of want to soften the impact of some of the points that I'm going to bring up here, to which my response is just, frankly, okay, cool, but I don't care.
Like, he wrote it, he said it, it's there in the Bible.
And again, when it comes to how the passage is used, And the meaning that those who appeal to it have drawn from it, it's right there.
It's very much in line with this.
So let's just think about this, right?
The first is just the obvious fact that for Paul, the world is simply divided into believers and unbelievers.
It is simply divided into Christians and non-Christians.
You're a Christian or you're not, and that is the sum total of everybody.
Period.
Start either or thinking.
The second point about this that kind of builds from this is that for Paul, associating with unbelievers can only be a detriment to your faith.
It can't be a source of learning.
It can't be a source of understanding.
It can't deepen your faith.
It is simply something to be avoided.
Those unbelievers are a detriment to your faith.
You should not be paired up with them.
And third, I mean just to kind of intensify this, is the way that Paul describes these so-called unbelievers.
He casts Christians as righteous and describes the non-Christians as wicked or lawless, depending on the translation you look at.
He says Christians live in the light, they represent light, and non-Christians live in the darkness or represent darkness.
And he goes on to kind of carry out this contrast to the next verse as well, but the point is, it's stark contrast.
Christian or non-Christian.
Righteousness and godliness or wickedness and lawlessness.
Light or darkness.
Polar opposites that conflict and are mutually incompatible.
Right on the surface then, the admonition for Christians to not be unequally yoked casts the world in starkly oppositional terms.
Which means that it casts Christians' relationships in starkly oppositional terms.
It actively constructs the social world in us-versus-them terms.
Social existence is set up as a kind of zero-sum game.
And again, that's not me doing lots of extrapolation or like, you know, digging down into metaphors that deeply or anything.
This is right on the surface.
This is what Paul says.
So the passage as it stands is already, in my mind, pretty brutal stuff when it comes to our shared social life, and many of us have experienced that.
And again, that's why I hear from so many folks about this passage.
If we are not or we are not perceived to be Christian or somebody thinks we're not real Christians or the right kind of Christian or whatever, we might have been on the receiving end of this passage.
That is, we might have people in our lives who no longer associate with us because they were directed or taught that they couldn't or shouldn't because they would be unequally yoked, that we would be a hindrance to their faith, that we were a threat to them.
Or on the other side of this, for many of us who grew up in the church, we can remember strict admonitions to cease associating with people in our lives.
Sometimes people in our immediate families, on the grounds that they weren't true Christians, that to be associated with them was to be unequally yoked and to bring our own spiritual well-being under threat.
I mentioned the work that I do as a coach at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
I have talked to people on both sides of this.
I've talked to people who have experienced the loss of a Christian community that no longer accepts them as Christian and essentially sort of casts them out and will no longer associate with them because of the threat they pose.
And I have talked with people who mourn relationships that they ended because of this perspective that those other people in their lives were a threat to them spiritually.
So this is one of the pieces of this.
This is the lived experience of how this passage works.
But if that weren't bad enough, if we look at how it's actually been used and decode it in this regard, and, you know, okay, so here's what the passage says, but let's look into, like, what it's actually been code for, it gets even worse.
It has a long history, as many of you will know, within white racist discourse.
The command not to be unequally yoked was used within a context of presumed inequality of different races.
It was used regularly to legitimize all kinds of racist policies and practices.
A society could not stand if quote-unquote unequal races were yoked together, if they had equal rights, if they had equal access, and so forth.
Signifying that they needed to remain separate.
And the language of light and dark in the passage was used crassly and literally to support this.
Right?
Light and darkness can't mix together.
White skin and dark skin cannot be equal and mixed together within a society.
Right?
That's how it was used, very explicitly.
That language is not as explicit as it used to be, but it still finds its way into some forms of Christian discourse.
It is still used, and I still hear it used, as leverage against interracial marriage, for example.
You get a kind of softened racism that doesn't argue on the basis of biology or skin color, but will use cultural language, and so it will talk about different races having, you know, Deep cultural divides that can't be bridged and so to try to unite together people these two different cultural or quote-unquote ethnic backgrounds, they're unequally yoked to each other and neither will benefit and so they should remain separate.
And you can get the same argument in a broader social racist discourse.
And these are the racists in the world who say, oh, no, no, it's not about race.
It's about different cultures and so forth.
But this language of being unequally yoked has had a long history there and still lives on.
Right?
Tied in with that, extending from that, but in different directions?
The passage can be used following that logic as a bludgeon against any group that is viewed as inherently inferior and unequal by definition.
An obvious example of this within the discourse of many contemporary Christians in the U.S.
are members of the LGBTQ plus community, right?
They are viewed in their diversity as being inherently Unequal to cis hetero people.
And so to associate with them at all, let alone to have deep relationships with them, is to be unequally yoked and to threaten your own spiritual well-being.
So it's used as a bludgeon against the LGBTQ community and their inclusion.
The concept also features extensively within sexual purity culture, which we talk about a lot on the podcast.
Sarah Mosliner does work for us on this.
We've talked about it some in this series, right?
That even within a sort of cis-heteronormative context, This passage is used to police relationships and sexuality, particularly that of women, so that any potential partners or dating partners or potential marriage material or whatever, who would potentially, according to those that, you know, hold authority, threaten one's sexual purity, they are a threat and you can't be unequally yoked with them.
And this is often used, in particular, against women who are viewed as having been quote-unquote sexually impure, who are sexually active, who have lost or forfeited their sexual purity, and now are not fit as equal spiritual partners with men who might otherwise date or marry them because of their sexuality and their sexual practices.
Right?
It's a horrific kind of discourse, but this language figures prominently.
And again, this is one of the contexts where I encounter this and the damage that this language does.
And finally, getting back to Paul's own all-or-nothing logic, the language operates at the level of shared society and politics, beyond these kind of, you know, individual level kinds of interactions that we have, right?
It legitimizes Christian nationalism.
It legitimizes Christian nationalism because it carries with it or it's taken to signify the idea that a quote-unquote secular government or society that is governed or a society that is not governed by solely Christian strictures, it's one that is unequal.
You can't have a society where Christians and non-Christians rule together, deliberate together, pass laws together, live in the same polity.
Because they are quote-unquote unequally yoked.
It's a society that will fail.
Such a society is doomed, so the argument goes, that only a Christian society can stand.
So Paul's us-versus-them mentality takes on a chilling sort of macro-level social form that goes beyond individual relationships and our attitudes to individual people or groups in our lives.
So once again, we come up with the idea of being unequally yoked.
A very familiar, for many of us, familiar Christian admonition An admonition that may be so familiar that its hyperbolic intensity passes over us.
We miss just how overstated and intense the things that Paul says in this context really, really are.
So that when we decode it, when we pause for a minute and say, well, let's just look at what this really says, let's look at the implications of this, let's look at how it's been used, we find a lot more work than we might expect.
And I would go further and I would say this, you know, coming as it does from the thinkers whose writings have done more than anyone else's to shape popular Christian consciousness, right?
It's Paul.
We find that it lodges this way of being in the world, this oppositional logic, at the very heart of Christian identity.
And again, to the kind of Pauline apologists, I just frankly don't care that Paul doesn't talk this way all the time.
He writes this way here.
He says this here.
It has had a huge impact.
on Christian society and Christian groups.
For Paul, this is a fundamental aspect of Christian identity.
Indeed, that's what 2 Corinthians is about, is maintaining what he sees as authentic Christian identity.
And it means for me that this oppositional all-or-nothing logic, this logic that the world is a space, it's a zero-sum game with either Christians versus unbelievers, and there can't be any adequate mixing of the two, it lodges it right in the code of Christianity itself.
It's there that is at the heart of many articulations of the Christian faith.
So if you've heard this phrase before, and it wasn't clear to you what it meant, this hopefully gives you a little bit of that context.
If you're like, other people I talk to, and you're one of those people who says, you know what, I hear that phrase, I don't know exactly why, but man, it really sets my teeth on edge.
It just, it just drives me crazy and I find myself getting angry or frustrated or anxious and I don't know exactly why.
Maybe this helps to explain why that is.
We need to wind this down.
As always, thank you for listening.
There are lots of things you could be doing right now as you listen to this instead of listening to this.
Thank you for taking the time and listening.
Thank you for supporting us.
Please reach out.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Always looking for continued ideas for the series.
Welcome those.
Welcome thoughts from you.
Oftentimes ideas kind of spin out of episodes that I've done and the insights that you send me.
So please keep those coming.
In the meantime, until we meet again in this weird virtual space, please be well.
