The Bible is full of ravenous violence, sexually explicit scenes, sexual assault, murder, and more. But somehow it's considered the universal good book. While histories show us that white Christians in the US have frequently appealed to their Bibles in support of issues now judged to be on the wrong side of history, including racism, sexism, and colonialism, contemporary white evangelical figures have in recent years worked steadfastly to defend the Bible against charges of complicity in harm. This is especially the case when it comes to patriarchy and the place of women, as evangelicals conscript the Bible into arguments for and against patriarchal normativity in response to changing conceptions of what is good.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm joined today by a return guest and someone who I'm just so glad to have back on the program, and that is Dr. Jill Hicks-Keaton.
So, Dr. Hicks-Keaton, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
It's always a pleasure.
Listeners know that I have a six-week-old baby, and therefore my brain and life are basically jello at this point, and so I want to publicly say thank you to you, because I messed up our recording time this week, and you are so gracious and generous, and you still came back.
I have sent you the $1,000 gift card to DoorDash you required, but other than that... You're the one who needs that.
Let me tell folks about you.
You are Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
You're a prolific writer, and we've had you on to speak about some of your previous work.
One of those is Does Scripture Speak for Itself?
The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation.
You also edited a book called, or co-edited, I should say, The Museum of the Bible, A Critical Introduction, and so on.
We're here today, however, to talk about your brand new book, and it's one that I'm so glad to get to talk about.
It's called Good Book, How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.
And I just want to read a little bit about the book so folks know what you're doing here.
Good Book interrogates how white evangelical Christians in the U.S.
make the Bible the good book.
An inanimate object with a contested table of contents ripe for multiple meanings and uses, the Bible cannot be a moral agent on its own.
People must make it so, as indeed they have.
As prevailing social norms change, evangelical Christians confront intellectual and interpretive challenges as they quest to make an ancient book newly relevant and ever benevolent.
I want to stop there and just say a couple things.
First, thank you for writing this book.
I told you before, but I'm going to say it again.
Friends, this is a really, really, really well-written book.
I am so lucky I get to do this for a living and read a lot of books, and I always learn things.
But sometimes when you read a book, you're also thinking, wow, this is the kind of book that everyone should pick up.
Because if you're saying, I'm not a biblical scholar, I'm not… Somebody who wants to read dense, boring professor, you know, stuff.
This is not that.
You will pick this book up and I'm not kidding.
You'll be done with it in two hours, three hours, four hours, because you won't put it down.
So and some of it is the chapter headings and the writing are so clever and so well done.
And I just want to tell you that I take pride in this.
I do this with our, like, episode titles, and I thought to myself, like, 10 times reading your book, how dare you?
You're way better at this than me, and I'll never compete.
So anyway, people, go read the book.
Let me start here by asking you this.
You give us a great analytical tool in the book.
It's called Bible Benevolence.
White evangelicals and others make the Bible the quote-unquote good book, and they do it through what you call Bible Benevolence.
What is that, and how does it work?
Well, first, let me say thank you for reading my book, and I appreciate the compliments, obviously.
It is not every day that scholars get to talk with people about their work, and I really appreciate what you do.
So Bible benevolence, you can tell that I grew up Baptist because I had to make it alliterative, but it does make for a tongue twister, especially because sometimes I call it the business of Bible benevolence.
But this is really what I, it's a shorthand for a phenomenon in which people are doing rhetorical, moral, intellectual work to render this set of texts that is the Bible.
The Good Book.
And it happens for many reasons, but one of them is because social mores change over time.
So the definition of good is not fixed.
So the idea is that people who make the Bible into the Good Book have to engage in this project of Bible benevolence over and over again.
One of the ways that this is done is through depicting Bible stories in a certain light.
I write in my book about Story of Jericho, you do this too.
And one of the ways that Bible benevolence might be illustrated for people is through VeggieTales.
Now, listeners, if you don't know what that is, if you didn't grow up in this subculture, VeggieTales is this very popular animated series that uses characters who are vegetables, a tomato and so on, to illustrate Bible stories.
So what does VeggieTales have to do with Bible benevolence?
Well, so I describe their product called Josh and the Big Wall.
I think that's what it's called, where Larry the Cucumber and his friends are inhabiting the Israelites as they march around Jericho, which is a story from the book of Joshua.
And I use this as an example of one way, one strategy to make the Bible good is to just completely eliminate the thing.
Okay, so in the biblical book, God tells the Israelites to annihilate the Canaanite inhabitants of the land, and in VeggieTales, as is appropriate for a vegetable-themed show aimed at children, does not depict dead kids or raped women or any of the human cost of conquest.
And that makes perfect sense because it's aimed at children, right?
But that is actually, I think, the most boring way to make the Bible good.
And I think it's actually, I open with it in the book because it's sort of an easy to understand example.
And it's an easy place to see where Bible benevolence is happening and why they're doing it the way they're doing it.
And it is because they want to teach children a different moral.
And the moral that they want to teach the children through that show is be obedient to God.
So they center on the Israelite vegetables, doing what God wants them to do, even though they feel really silly doing it.
It really strikes me because as you say, these are stories and animations designed for children.
So I completely understand that some of the more graphic details might be left out, but that point in itself is worth highlighting.
Hey, the Bible includes things like sexual assault and like ravenous violence.
And so many other things.
Yeah, usually I don't think about teaching my five or six or seven-year-old.
It's really fascinating to think about, hey, let's make the Bible good and plattable for the five-year-old by way of vegetable animations.
And then when we go, I don't know, to the PTA meeting or talk about banning books or what should be in our libraries, it's, well, that's just not suitable for children.
I mean, I just want to make sure we make that There's a point that even if VeggieTales are the most boring version of Bible Benevolence, there's a really, really, really crucial issue at play in our public square at the moment surrounding this kind of very thing.
Now, one of the things that happens and one of the core, I think, ideals in the book is that when you redeem the Bible, if you do the work of Bible Benevolence as a white evangelical, as any other type of person interpreting it, you're also trying to redeem yourself.
Why is that true?
Yeah, so I actually did not start out in my research for this book thinking that this is where I was going to get to, but I followed the evidence of the things I was analyzing and came to the conclusion that if you do a close reading of the rhetoric
of these Bible benevolence projects, that really what the Redeemers are most interested in, and this is especially true for men who are writing, white evangelical men, it's they're engaged in a respectability project, not just around the Bible itself, but for themselves.
And it's a way of protecting moral authority because they want to be able to present themselves as authoritative when it comes to issues even that go beyond the church.
So one thinks of the Dobbs decision, for example.
This is something that their moral authority and influence matter for millions of other people.
And if the Bible can be held to account morally or historically or for any other reason, if it can be held to account for bad things, then the Bible can't be an authoritative guide.
And if the Bible can't be an authoritative guide, then the Bible believers who are holding it up as an authoritative guide themselves cannot be authoritative.
You really draw the lines, I think, so clearly, right?
Like, hey, I'm going to stand up in public as a usually a white male preacher, but often a male preacher and so on and say, because I'm a man of the Bible, because I'm a man of the good book, I'm a good man.
And therefore, all of you should listen to me, whether you are sitting in my pews or you are out here in the American public square.
Good book, good man.
Therefore, you should listen to what I have to say because I am a moral authority.
It makes total sense.
And this project of respectability is there.
I just want to interject here and say that It seems like what this does is set up a situation where you have to make the Bible good in order for you to be good.
Whereas there are other people, and I just want to acknowledge this, there are other Christians, there are other people of faith who are like, yes, I'm a person of faith.
And yes, I fully acknowledge the Bible is full of contradictions.
It is full of ancient text that is often hard to decipher.
It is full of episodes that frankly are quite disturbing.
Could be the battle of Jericho, could be David and Bathsheba.
And so as a person of faith, I need to reckon with those rather than ignore them or create some kind of sheen that says, no, of course, the Bible, good.
We will never consider the Bible anything else than that.
All right.
One more sort of meta question, and I want to dig into the kind of content of some of the chapters.
One of the frustrations many of us have, who have participated in evangelical circles, churches, traditions, is that we were taught to interpret the Bible literally.
Hey, it's the word of God.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
That's what happened.
Six days, six days.
10,000 years, that's how old the earth must be, and so on.
And yet we all know that other times it's more symbolic or allegorical.
This, I think, is most clear when Jesus says, if you lust with your eyes, poke your eye out.
I have been to so many churches in my life, heard so many sermons.
I have heard so many sermons on how women should dress modestly.
I have never heard a man stand up and say, Hey y'all, if you are struggling with lust, if you're the speaker of the house and you have some weird app on your phone to make sure you don't look at pornography, it might just be better to poke your eye out.
Why?
Because we take those words as not literal.
Can you talk about how this is one of the strategies used to maintain the goodness of the Bible?
Yeah, so, you know, deciding whether something in the Bible should be taken literally or allegorically or figuratively or some other way, that's an interpretive choice.
And so deploying one of those or the other, you can choose what is figurative or what is literal depending on the Which one of those is more strategic for making the Bible an effective guide to match up with your ethical expectations or even just pragmatism, right?
So it's like, it's not super pragmatic to ask people to pluck out their eyes.
They're not going to do that.
So if you start telling people to do that, you're going to wind up on YouTube and you're going to lose followers.
You're going to wind up on YouTube in a bad way.
And so another sort of way that I think about this difference or the strategic deployment of these categories is you often hear people talk about, and this goes beyond white evangelical, but it is something that white evangelicals also use, is a distinction between what is but it is something that white evangelicals also use, is a distinction between what is prescriptive and what And so they will say that some of it is prescriptive.
It's describing what we are supposed to do.
I mean, not describing.
It is prescribing what we are supposed to do.
So outlining a normative way of living, and then they explain the things that they consider to be bad by saying, well, that is descriptive.
That is just talking about, you know, sin and a fallen world.
And just because the Bible narrates it doesn't mean that that is what we are supposed to do.
So they're also categorizing things, items, stories in the Bible, not just strategically literal or allegorical, but also prescriptive and descriptive.
That's so helpful.
And I think it really brings to the fore what is happening in real time.
And sometimes we don't catch it when we hear a preacher, when we hear someone doing that.
All right.
I want to jump to a chapter that I think is going to be one that people are going to wrestle with.
And so let me explain what I think is happening up until this point.
We've been talking about 10 minutes.
And I think there's a lot of folks listening who are like, I'm with you.
I grew up in those circles or I've never understood how conservative Christians arrive at that kind of understanding of scripture or of the Bible, etc.
And that is why I'm not one of those folks, but I am a follower of Jesus because everything in the Bible about Jericho and David and Bathsheba and Abraham and Ishmael and we can go on and on about what Job's kids, it's all problematic.
Not Jesus.
I'm a Jesus guy.
I'm a Jesus follower.
You, in a chapter that I would characterize as wonderfully devastating, talk about how Jesus is often approached with good goggles.
Jericho may be hard to digest, but the Gospels, when you get there, it's all good.
You don't have to be critical.
You don't have to be worried about problematic material.
You use the case of Jesus and his relationships with women, his comments about women, to make the case that that good goggles approach is not one we should use or is part of the Bible benevolence project that we've already been discussing.
Would you help us understand that?
Sure, and let me clarify a couple things just from the outset, if I may.
First, is that white evangelicals are not the only people who are engaged in Bible benevolence.
And so what I am hoping to do is provide sort of this analytical term that can be applied for how lots of different folks make the Bible the good book.
And I'm focused on this white evangelicalism as a case study to sort of show how it could work.
So the second thing is that I think good goggle, as applied to Jesus, is also something that expands beyond white evangelicals.
But what I want to do in that chapter about Jesus is to really press on what are the consequences of making Jesus benevolent no matter what?
What are the stakes?
And how does it affect people?
And who are those people?
And I'm invested in this question of misogyny in the United States, in Christian communities and beyond.
So what I argue is that it's not... I argue that using Jesus as a model for special treatment of women or portraying him as an ally to women, portraying him as someone who is beyond the sort of patriarchal constraints of his time, and therefore as someone whose attitudes and actions should be followed.
I argue that that is using a very limited definition of what is good for women.
And so I use a moral philosopher named Kate Mann, who has developed what I think is a really useful paradigm for choosing to think about Christianity or the Bible, but for thinking about what misogyny is.
And the best part about it is that in her paradigm, if you think about misogyny as not as woman-hating, which means that you have to get inside somebody's head to see if they hate women, and like then it's easy to say that Jesus loves women because it's hard to make the case that Jesus hates women.
Okay, I wouldn't make that case.
I think it would be difficult.
But we can transform the questions when we think about misogyny as the experience that women and girls have in response to patriarchal norms.
And when they comply with expectations of them as women, they're rewarded.
And when they don't, they're often punished in a variety of ways.
And so I think that using Jesus in the Gospels as a model or at claiming that he is anti-misogyny is using a strategic definition of misogyny as well.
It's limiting it and that also put constraints on what can be thought of as good for women.
So if I may, one example.
Is that he, so Jesus in the Gospel of Mark calls the Syrophoenician woman who has come to him to ask to beg for him to exorcise a demon from her daughter.
She comes to him and is begging and he, in effect, calls her a dog or makes an analogy in which she's a dog.
And so that's like sort of a hard passage, I think, in terms of Jesus' treatment of women to make it good.
And one strategy that people who are making the Bible good use is to give Jesus credit for what the woman does in the story.
So, you know, she has what is often claimed to be a witty riposte, and that she sort of like wrestles the circism out of Jesus, and he does ultimately comply.
And so I think that we can ask a different question, not like, how did Jesus treat this woman?
But rather, what was her experience in trying to get what she needed?
She begs, whereas men do not.
And so those sorts of questions show us that women, especially in the Gospel of Mark, which is what I focus on in that chapter, women actually work harder and get less.
And it strikes me that, okay, someone listening is like, well, Jesus was operating according to the, you know, standards or structures of his time.
And then in the same breath that that person might be tempted to say, but when it comes to radical justice and the inclusivity of the kingdom of God, when.
In terms of race or something else, Jesus was way ahead of his time in revolutionary, right?
So what your scholarship here really does is it puts us in a place where it's hard to claim Jesus as a kind of revolutionary of universal justice and then have to massage these passages when it comes to gender and when it comes to women doing more and getting less.
None of this, friends, if you're listening, and I recognize this is sensitive material, is meant to be anti-Jesus, anti-Christian.
This is not us saying, well, the takeaway here is you should never be a Christian again or read the Bible.
That is just not what we're doing, okay?
But there is a case here to be made that, and I really was convinced as I read your book, that if you employ those good goggles with Jesus, But you think that doing so with the rest of the Bible is foolish.
You're taking all but one step in terms of the project of not doing the Bible benevolence thing that you've proposed.
All right, let's get to Paul.
So some folks are like, all right, I'll reflect on that.
That's a hard truth.
I'm going to have to wrestle with that.
Paul is a little easier.
Paul gets a lot of criticism from certain circles these days, but I think it's worth talking about Paul.
Most folks don't try to do like Paul's blameless like Jesus.
Nonetheless, they try to make him less bad.
That's what you say, right?
And so in order to do that, you have this fantastic phrase.
You say they have to enter into a fantasy about history in order to alleviate what seems to be Paul's sexism.
Why do you need a historical fantasy in order to make Paul less or not sexist?
Yeah, so Paul's the thorn in the side of people who are making the Bible good for women specifically because in a couple of places in the Pauline corpus, he tells women to be silent.
He's moderating what they're allowed to wear, how they should wear their hair, whether they can be in positions of leadership.
He tells women to submit or to be subject to their husbands as part of the household codes.
And so he says a bunch of things that are on the surface really difficult to claim in a modern setting where we have modern moral sensibilities that these are good for women.
And so there's a couple of options that white evangelicals engage in.
One, which is the boring one, but still I think important to point out, is they can just say, well, yeah, that stuff is patriarchal.
And patriarchy is good for women for a variety of reasons.
So they're sort of, I call them the patriarchy reputation managers.
And so they've got this stuff that's in the Bible that comes from Paul, and since it's in the Bible and the Bible's the good book, then patriarchy must be good for women.
Okay, so that's sort of like how the logic would go.
What's more interesting, I think, are the folks who think of themselves as, in the insider terminology, egalitarians, right?
So people in white evangelical circles who are committed to the idea that women are not supposed to be in a hierarchical relationship under men, either in marriage or in the church setting in leadership.
And so what they have to do is get really creative about the literal words that are on the page, because the literal words on the page say things like, you know, women should be silent.
And I also just want to mention that this is kind of a cool project for me to do, because as a historian of the New Testament, I don't often get to pretend like Paul wrote letters that are ascribed to him in the New Testament, but that we all say those are post-Pauli.
They're sued up at GrappleGulf.
But in order to write these chapters about Paul, I got to engage in this fiction that Paul wrote all of these letters.
And it was super fun because then if he's got a more expansive corpus that was actually written over a series of 100 years or so, it's like you have to be even more creative to make it all fit together.
So back to the fantasy about history.
Oh, sorry.
Go on.
So, friends, if you're listening and you're like, I don't know what they're talking about, there's just and many of you do, of course, but if you don't, There's a very commonly accepted, standardly accepted, you can correct me here, Dr. Hicks-Keaton, if you'd like, about the terminology, that if you're a New Testament scholar, I don't know what the percentage is, but 90-something percent, I don't know, you can tell me.
It's just common knowledge that Paul did not write all the books Christians think Paul wrote.
So, 2 Timothy, the book of Hebrews, Titus, if you dig into the history of the archaeology, Folks who I trust in terms of scholarship are all pretty unanimous, like, no, that was certainly not this guy that we think of as the Apostle Paul.
What I hear you saying is, when I did this project, though, I got to turn off that whole critical apparatus because I was just engaging in what folks say Paul did, even though I know as a historian and as a New Testament scholar, as a biblical scholar, he actually didn't.
So that's just a little explainer for those listening in.
What are they doing there?
All right.
Keep going, tell us more about Paul.
Yeah.
So the fantasy about history, now look, if the objects of analysis that I am analyzing in this book were taken to someone else, a historian in a secular context, they might say something on the lines of, this is inaccurate.
Okay, so this history is wrong.
Now, I'm not saying that that is not an accurate thing to say, but I think it's much more interesting to re-describe that as what are the fanciful historical assumptions or creative inventions about history that are required as building materials to reach the conclusion that Paul is less bad and therefore the Bible is good for women.
And so some of the examples that I give are that it is very common for these white evangelical writers to produce an ancient, what they call context, for the setting behind Paul's writing.
So the community that he is purporting or he's purported to be writing to.
And that context that they are, they say that they're excavating it, right?
That they're retrieving something lost.
But I re-describe that as sort of a building process.
What do they need to do?
And what they need to do are the sorts of things like take extra biblical sources.
So like ancient Roman writers, for example, or fiction writers, and take a work of ancient fiction and assume that all women in the Roman Empire were behaving like a woman in a piece of fiction.
And so I think my favorite modern analogy that I have, which is that doing so is a little bit like the Wedding Planner.
Remember that movie from, I think it's 2001, with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez?
It's a little bit like someone watching that movie now And then thinking to themselves, oh, two decades ago, it was really common for women to become wedding planners so that they can steal a man from the bride.
Right.
So nobody would think to themselves, I don't think that like we need to have a we need to be in a panic around what women are doing, because I saw this one woman do it in this this piece of fiction, this movie.
But that is actually what these white evangelical writers are doing with ancient pieces of fiction when they generalize a woman's behavior in a piece of fiction to all like real women in the Roman Empire in antiquity.
Okay, so that's the first thing they need to do.
The second thing they need to do is selectively quote from this extra biblical piece of material.
And so what I show is that when they describe an ancient setting based on this extra biblical material, that they're giving bits and pieces strategically to paint a picture that's convenient for them.
Um, when, if we read the whole piece of literature, we would see that that is not, that is not a good description from a historical standpoint or even a literary standpoint of what's happening in that piece of literature.
And inevitably, because why, why even tell girls and sex?
It's like, they're just so nervous about it.
Right?
So all of these are, um, sexualizing Women in the Roman in ancient Rome, the Roman Empire, and therefore the women who are purported to be the recipients of this advice from Paul or the subject of of Paul saying that they should not be leaders and so forth.
And that sexiness or the sexualizing is actually also introduced by these white evangelicals.
It's not something that is that is like really there in the ancient text itself.
And so I had this like fascinating Fascinating to me, a project of showing how they're introducing sex where sex is not originally in view.
Well, yeah, so much there.
They're introducing sex where sex is not in view.
And then I always find it telling if you like when you listen to a sermon or you listen to someone preaching about these issues and they have to go into an elaborate scene setting of like, well, here's what it says.
Sounds terrible, I know.
But let me just do this whole fantasy Roman Empire thing about how family and sex and gender worked, and then it's going to make total sense.
Just give me six minutes or so.
I find that so telling, and you just put the words that I've never had on the page, which are, you have to do a fantasy about history in order to make Paul plattable when it comes to gender and sex.
Really quickly, I'll just say, I spent the early parts of my career teaching in the South, and I taught these intro courses, included a lot of New Testament.
And my favorite, favorite time, my favorite day was like, y'all want to do the Bible and sex?
Let's do it.
This is, this is going to get spicy.
Let's have it.
And we would do 1 Corinthians 6 and 7.
And I would look at them and I'll say, look, I'm much a fan of Paul's y'all.
I know you grew up in Sunday school.
This is really important.
What he's saying to me here in these verses is don't get married unless you're weak.
If you're like a good Christian, if you're a real Christian, Be strong like him.
And if you need to get married, it's because you're second class citizen A. And if you need to have sex within that marriage, it's just to alleviate that desire.
I mean, don't enjoy it.
Don't think about it as a sacrament.
Please don't think about it as something God gave you to really cultivate as part of your relationship.
This is just alleviating a desire so you can get back to the real work.
So I know some of you want to get married someday, have a big wedding, really celebrate that soulmate you found.
But it's really hard to do that if you're a Christian.
So I would just think about that tonight when you go home.
And, you know, there was a lot of complaints from the dean.
A lot of students going to the counseling center after that day and saying that I hated Christianity and marriage and I had destroyed their dreams and etc.
So that was always fun for me.
Well, now you know how to make Paul good.
Yeah, my favorite tactic has always been to just give people what Paul actually is and be like, hey y'all, I'm ready.
Y'all want to do it?
Because I'm ready to do it.
Let's not get married.
Let's not be people who think that marriage is a Christian thing to do.
That's like for weaklings.
I'm not a weakling.
Are you?
All right, let's get on board, youth group.
And then, as you say, no one wants to come to your church anymore.
All right, here we go.
We got to do it.
You and I talked about this before, but we're going to do it again.
On page 139, you talk about Paul, but you also talk about a popular book.
And again, this is going to be a little bit, I think, of some hard truths for some folks listening, but I find this so important about your scholarship.
On page 139, you talk about Beth Allison Barr's approach to biblical womanhood.
And Beth Allison Barr has a really popular book that really says the reason we have patriarchy is not because of the Bible, but in spite of the Bible.
And I'll just be brief because I'm talking too much.
Your response would be, it seems as if you're doing some Bible benevolence when you say that the patriarchy in the world comes from us not listening to the Bible rather than us listening to the Bible.
Would you mind elaborating on this whole issue?
Sure, yeah, so I think that what Barr has done is a history project, ostensibly a history project, that hinges on Bible benevolence.
So because her claim is that patriarchy, or what she Perceives as patriarchy comes from the outside.
It's introduced by people.
It's not God's directive that communicated through the Bible.
The Bible has to be exculpated from blame for the development and institution of patriarchy as a social order.
And so her thesis can't be true unless the Bible is good, is a good book.
And so she's also engaging in what I would call creative history with fantasies and strategic readings of of extra biblical texts in order to make Paul specifically look better and to argue that he's actually only apparently supporting patriarchy.
Even though the words on the page sound like it, that's not really what's going on.
So she also develops an elaborate historical fantasy around Paul That can sort of explain his motivations and to separate the Bible out from blame for what she sees to be the ills of patriarchy.
It's compelling.
Your argument is compelling.
I have been convinced by it for a long time now, because you've been speaking about it for a long time, but I guess for me, it represents kind of the latter stages of Bible benevolence.
Hey, I'm willing to say the Bible in these places is hard.
I'm willing to say that over here, yeah, we really gotta, this is tough stuff.
Am I right, family?
Okay, let's do it.
When it comes to patriarchy, that's in the world not because of the Bible.
That's because we're sinners and we're not doing it right.
And if we did it right, there would be no patriarchy.
That's a kind of woke evangelical feminism that is not willing to examine everything on the table with no presumptions.
As you so forcefully point out in the book, it comes to the text with the assumption that there's no way this is bad.
So I've got to just proceed with it without ever questioning that thesis.
And I think that is what you're driving at.
We've got to sign off.
Let me ask you this in conclusion.
What is one cost of Bible benevolence?
What is one thing that it costs us?
We could talk about church, but I'm also referencing politically, socially.
What is people doing Bible benevolence work cost us in the United States or beyond?
Well, let me use my pithy line that I think that Bible benevolence, at least in the way that's being practiced by white evangelicals that I point out in the book, I think that they are sacrificing women to save the Bible, and ultimately that's to save themselves.
And if I could use Barr as an example, I actually think that what her project does, what her Bible benevolence labor does, which she presents as being liberative for women, I think that it is upholding patriarchal social order by making women more comfortable with misogyny.
And so it actually stands to do the opposite of her purported project.
And I think that that's bad for women.
I'll bring up the Dobbs decision again.
Because research has shown that the rhetoric that folks use to try to inhibit abortion access is more about controlling women than it is about having an accurate understanding of how the body works or of healthcare.
And so I think that if people are to Not be able to see that there's a problem of controlling women or of misogynistic regulation of women within a patriarchal social order.
If they can't see that that's what's happening, they're not going to be able to sort of solve any problem.
What I say is that people can't solve problems that they can't see.
And I think that the Bible benevolence, as white evangelicals are doing it, is making them not be able to see the cost on controlling women.
Yeah, that's just so well put.
That's fantastic.
I want to say that I was looking forward to this because I so thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I did not know we would get the most quintessential millennial pop culture reference in the form of The Wedding Planner.
That is like, you can't get better than that because I know that movie, I can picture it.
And there's people older and there's people younger right now that are like, what the hell are you talking about?
Like that is like a top five, like millennial, you know, pop culture reference.
So kudos to you for that.
That was really well done. - Thank you.
Where can people link up with you and your work as you talk about this book and everything else you're doing?
You know, they used to call it Twitter, but I think it's X now, and I'm at Jill Hicks Keaton with two Es.
I've not been super active there, but if anybody wants to find me, you can find me there, or my professional email address, which can be found on OU's website.
Wonderful.
As always, friends, you can find us at Straight White JC.
You can find me at Bradley Onishi.
We do this three times a week here at Straight White American Jesus and Access Moondi Media.
We're through and through.
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So if you can support us, that would help us.
You'll see all that in the show notes.
You'll also see a link to this book and some other book recommendations we have for this month.
So check that out in The show notes and our link tree.
We'll be back later this week with it's in the code and the weekly round.
