Decoding Christo-Authoritarianism, Ideology, and Propaganda w/ Dr. Scott Coley
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Brad Onishi converses with Dr. Scott Coley, author of 'Ministers of Propaganda: Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right.' Coley discusses the concepts of ideology, propaganda, and legitimizing narratives within conservative evangelical communities. They explore how these elements create and maintain social hierarchies, such as those based on race and gender, and the role of 'Christo authoritarianism.' Coley emphasizes how religious resources are used to justify and perpetuate these hierarchies. The episode also addresses how questioning or resisting these beliefs is often suppressed within these communities.
Buy Ministers of Propaganda: https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467466004/ministers-of-propaganda/
00:00 Introduction to Civil Rights Movement and Passive Resistance
00:51 Critique of Civil Rights Movement's Approach
01:43 Introducing Dr. Scott Coley and His Book
03:53 Understanding Ideology and Propaganda
07:48 Legitimizing Narratives and Social Hierarchies
17:26 Christo Authoritarianism and the Hermeneutics of Legitimization
25:03 Explicit and Implicit White Supremacy in Evangelicalism
35:08 Gender Hierarchies and Patriarchy in Evangelicalism
39:06 Conclusion and Premium Content Information
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Axis Mundi I don't know when it started, but the example of it would be the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King.
I'm not going to bash anything related to any of that or him, but his movement and the civil rights movement was largely kind of this passive thing.
Of course, it was active there in the streets and all that, but it wasn't It was more like it was passive in the sense that it was a sort of performance to get quite white sympathy.
So then people would see the hoses and the dogs barking and all that, and they'd have sympathy, and they'd say, no more, and then variations in.
So that was a, it was a path, it was like a passive in the sense that you're appealing, you're not achieving it yourself, you're actually doing something to then get other people to do something for you in a way.
That's the political theologian Stephen Wolf talking about the ways that the Civil Rights Movement was passive and not based on merit.
Instead, it was based on sympathy and getting others to do things for you.
It's not a generous way to read the courageous actions of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement and the ways they fought white supremacy by way of civil disobedience.
But it's indicative of a larger phenomenon.
Thinking of social hierarchies as justified and deserved in the eyes of God.
A way of living together as humans that puts some on top and some in the middle and some in the bottom, because that's the way God ordered it.
It's indicative of even a larger phenomenon, and that's an authoritarian approach to theology and practice.
An approach that says, this is how it is, this is how God wants it, and if you question that, it's probably you who's doing something wrong.
Today my guest is Dr. Scott Coley, who wrote a new book called Ministers of Propaganda, Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right.
The merit of Scott's book is that he takes time to break down concepts such as ideology and propaganda.
He shows us the ways that stories are told to legitimize.
Who benefits?
Who's on top and who's on bottom?
And the ways that religious resources are brought in to reinforce all of those stories and all of those beliefs and practices.
Scott goes into various examples related to race and gender, related to money and capitalism.
But I think one of the enduring legacies of this book is the way it provides people a portable framework to apply to any ideology, religious or not, to determine whether or not it's authoritarian, to determine whether or not propaganda is being used, and how to resist it.
For subscribers, I have 15 extra minutes with Scott where we talked about the ways that deconstruction, the act of questioning one's religious tradition and beliefs, is a matter of decoding propaganda and ideology.
That deconstruction is not simply a will to rebel or a desire to go out and do things that your religion won't let you do, but instead is an active mode of decoding.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
joined now by Dr. Scott Coley, who is the author of Ministers of Propaganda, Truth, Power, and the Ideology of the Religious Right.
Scott, thanks for joining me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Excited to talk about your book.
I'm going to be honest, I get to read a lot of books for this show, and there's a lot of books out these days about Christian nationalism, the religious right.
There's a lot of memoir about leaving those traditions.
But I really think your book is unique and singular, and I really appreciate the approach you've taken to it.
I think one of the things that I want to start with is these words, propaganda and ideology.
You, in this book, I think, and I'm happy for you to correct me and I'm happy for you to tell me where I'm off here, but I think you've really given us a framework for understanding how ideology and propaganda are often baked into religious social practices and religious beliefs.
And so when folks are trying to figure out like the toxic elements of their religious community or why it feels so hurtful at times to be part of these or why the leadership structure just doesn't feel like it should be because it's authoritarian or it is hierarchical in a way that feels inappropriate, Your book is, in essence, a decoder ring, I think, for understanding all of that.
So, let me start by asking you about the word ideology.
This is a word we hear a lot.
If you turn on Fox News, you're going to hear, the ideology of the far left is ruining America.
If you take an Intro to Philosophy class, someone's going to tell you what this means.
For your purposes, for today, what does that mean?
Sure.
First of all, I'm delighted to hear you say that the book is sort of transferable to a variety of contexts, because that was my intention in writing the book.
I do go in depth into a number of features of a sort of conservative evangelical ideology, but the idea is to provide a conceptual framework that's portable.
So ideology specifically, the way I use the term, is to describe a kind of feedback loop between belief and practice.
So if I had written this book, I don't know, 10 years ago, I probably would have said something like this.
White evangelicals, a majority of white evangelicals, prefer certain kinds of social arrangements and public policies That are morally problematic.
And the reason for that is that they're not thinking clearly about, for example, the moral salience of institutions.
And so what we have to do in order to embrace sort of what I would regard as morally appropriate stances on policy and social practices and so on, is to just sort of correct their thinking.
Now, I have an abandoned perspective, but I've come to recognize that it's incomplete.
Is it the case that evangelicals act in ways that I regard as morally problematic because they're not thinking clearly about things?
Yes.
But it's also the case, very importantly, that part of the reason why they're not thinking clearly is because they're not behaving appropriately.
So there's a feedback loop between belief and practice.
And that's how I use the term ideology.
So we have a situation where on this show, Dan and I say all the time that a lot of folks find their reasoning for their behaviors and practices post facto.
They want the world to look a certain way.
They want to act a certain way in the world.
And so they find beliefs that they can contour to fit that.
And I think what you show in this book is that that's true.
You have some of that post-facto reasoning, but it's also a feedback loop where the beliefs will then often also shape the social practices.
So they're just sort of continually interacting in a way That creates an ideology in a religious community.
And the next question then would be, how does propaganda fit into that?
Once again, I turn on Fox News tonight, I'm going to hear the propaganda of the far left coming from AOC, so on and so forth.
If I sign into X right now, I'm going to hear about the propaganda coming from Steve Bannon calling for victory or death this weekend, or whatever happened at the Turning Point Action Conference just two days ago.
Propaganda is a word we use a lot.
We don't often define it.
So how would propaganda work in your mind, and how is it connected to ideology?
Good.
So there's a kind of intermediate step here.
I'll come to propaganda directly, but I think there's an important intermediate step here.
Uh, which is the concept of a legitimizing narrative.
So, a legitimizing narrative is basically what it sounds like.
It's a story that we tell ourselves about why the social arrangements that we prefer are legitimate.
It's a story that legitimizes certain kinds of social hierarchy.
At the center of any ideology is a hierarchy.
Could be built around race, could be built around gender, could be built around economics.
As it happens, my book deals with all three of those and the ways in which they interact.
A legitimizing narrative is a story that we tell ourselves about why the social arrangements that we prefer are legitimate.
Because without a legitimizing narrative, hierarchy or stratification is just that, stratification.
Some people have stuff and other people don't.
So, as a way of sort of propping up those kinds of hierarchies, we have to have a story to tell about why these things are the way that they should be.
What would a legitimizing narrative be surrounding wealth in this country when it comes to why white people have generational wealth on average, statistically, and why many people of color, but especially black people in the country, do not have generational wealth?
Like, what's an example of how a legitimizing narrative would work in that case?
So the average, the median white family has about $160,000 more family wealth than the median black family.
And you might look at that and say, that seems problematic, right?
And it's not this straightforward, as straightforward as what I'm about to lay out here.
Because as I discuss in Chapter 2 of the book, there's a lot of coded language around this.
But the way that the allocation of wealth in our society is legitimized in general, is through this notion of meritocracy, which is to say the idea that wealth in our society is allocated on the basis of merit.
And as I argue in the second chapter of the book, again, I break it down sort of step by step because it's sort of bracing to put it straightforwardly in this kind of way without breaking down the ways in which white evangelicals sort of trick themselves into thinking this isn't the move they're making.
But the move that they're making is implicitly, and I mean logically here, the statement that wealth in our society is allocated on the basis of merit logically implies white superiority.
That-- I mean, that's just... If you think wealth is allocated on the basis of merit, and you recognize that the average white family has $160,000 more wealth than the average black family, then you are saying that the average white family deserves $160,000 more wealth than the average black family.
That's white superiority, white supremacy.
There's no other word for it.
I mean, that's about it.
But yes, in more general terms, the idea behind meritocracy is, look, the reason why rich people are rich and poor people are poor is that the rich people deserve to have more money than the poor.
This is very broad strokes.
It may be that a particular rich person maybe inherited their wealth and they didn't do anything to deserve it.
But the idea is that their forebears worked hard for it and then passed it down to them.
And that's sort of that's one of your choices.
If you work hard, you get to make sure that your grandkids are rich, whether they deserve it or not.
And that's part of the system.
But the salient point is that poor people deserve to be poor.
That's the salient point.
So we start with ideology, which is a an assumptions about social hierarchy assumptions about who should be on top, who should be in the middle, who should be on the bottom.
And ideology is formed and maintained through beliefs, like I believe these people should be on top, but also practices, like things we do to make sure those people are on top and they kind of reinforce each other.
And then we get to the legitimizing narrative, and that's the story we tell to make sure that the hierarchy we are defending makes sense and is defensible.
Like, yeah, here's why we should keep this hierarchy, and here's why that group deserves to be rich.
And in your first example, and this is really laid out powerfully in the book, there's no way to go through it in detail today, but the idea that if white families on the median have $160,000 more than the median black family, and you're saying that that's all a result of hard work, Then you're saying white people work harder and smarter somehow than black people, and that is the white supremacy you're saying is implicitly built into that.
And as you do in the book, it ignores factors such as redlining, such as so many legal and political dimensions that excluded black people from wealth and so on in the past, right?
So there's that.
So then what role does propaganda play?
If we go ideology, legitimizing narrative, What is propaganda?
So propaganda comes in a variety of forms.
You find propaganda in literature, in film, in various kinds of art, in oration.
I deal with a very specific kind of propaganda in the book, and that is rhetoric that appeals to some kind of moral or political or intellectual ideal in service to an agenda that actually undermines that very ideal, right?
And An example of this, the paradigm example, would be the way in which liberty was invoked by antebellum defenders of race-based chattel slavery, the way that the political ideal of liberty was invoked to defend that institution, right?
So within the ideology of white supremacy that served as the foundation for defenses of race-based chattel slavery, the idea was that some people own property and other people are property.
And the divide between the two broke down along lines of race.
Ending the institution of chattel slavery, in this view, amounted to depriving certain people of the right to own a certain kind of property.
And that property just happened to be people, right?
And so that is a violation of their freedom to own a certain kind of property.
Now, we look at this sort of in the 21st century and we say, but the whole argument against race-based chattel slavery is that it violates the ideal of liberty by depriving enslaved persons of their liberty.
So, the appeal to liberty in service to a defense of race-based chattel slavery actually undermines the political ideal of liberty.
Now, what makes this kind of propaganda so powerful is that if I manage to market the notion that liberty is more fully realized in the freedom to own slaves than in freedom from enslavement, Then what I've done is to appropriate the very ideal on which dissenting viewpoints are based.
And that's why this particular kind of propaganda is interesting to me.
Basically, what I'm saying is, is that me, me enacting and living and participating in a system that makes people enslaved, that enslaves people and thus limits their freedom to almost an absolute degree, is actually the system that affords the most liberty For everyone, right?
So I'm basically arguing for liberty on the basis of restricting liberty absolutely for a certain group of people and that's propaganda.
I'm using the concept against itself to kind of gaslight you.
And I think what's particularly interesting to me in these contexts is that there are some number of people who engage in transmitting this kind of what I call propaganda, who have sincerely embraced the ideology, and they don't recognize the propaganda as propaganda.
Yeah.
Now, are some people arguing in bad faith?
It's difficult to imagine that the answer is no.
But some number of people sincerely believe the legitimizing narratives in the propaganda.
And so I run through a number of more contemporary examples.
I mean, really, the examples I've given thus far are all from the beginning of the introduction in Outlying Framework.
Yeah, and so I think that that's a lot of what's going on when people sort of look at their faith tradition and realize that maybe something is amiss, is they're starting to sort of decode some of the language.
I want to go to the examples you've referenced and how they work in historical and contemporary context, gender hierarchies and racial hierarchies within evangelical ideology, but also just more broadly.
Before we go there, I want to recap and then point us to one more term that it's really important in the book.
So we have ideology, which assumes a hierarchy.
It says this is how it should be.
Certain people on top, certain people on bottom.
Certain people in the middle.
You get a hierarchy because of practices and beliefs working together.
And then you have a story that legitimizes that hierarchy.
This is how it is.
This is how it should be.
These people deserve to be on bottom and life is better when we just have the order God made in place and everyone is more free and has more peace.
You hear this all the time from From PastorsEven2024.
Life was better during the pre-war era because even though people were enslaved, there was a peaceful order.
Things were ordered in a way that there wasn't so much division.
Blah, blah, blah.
Great.
That's the story that legitimizes the ideology.
And then propaganda is used to defend it in a way that is really tricky and it is really, in many ways, to use the terms against themselves.
One of the things that I think you point out with propaganda is that it makes it such that you're not allowed to question the reasoning if you're in the system, that you have to submit to it.
You have to accept it if you're in this community of folks who are part of the propagandizing leadership.
In many cases, this leads to something you call Christo-authoritarianism.
And would you mind helping us understand how all the three vocab... We're going to have a quiz later, people.
All right?
I'm going to quiz you.
I'm going to give you a poll on Twitter.
We've got three vocabulary terms.
Those working together are a recipe for Christo-authoritarianism.
Help us understand that one before we go to these examples.
And about the terminology, I just want to indicate, the book is, I think, generally light on jargon.
There are a few places where I felt it was important to introduce certain terms because, as we said at the outset, I want these concepts to be portable into other contexts.
So you can identify these moves, and then in some contexts maybe I've never heard of, but certainly contexts I don't cover in the book, it's like, oh, this is the move they're making here, right?
Yeah.
You're right.
So, I just want to tell everybody, if you've not read the book, it is not a jargony book.
Don't worry.
I latched onto these, Scott, because to me, if we get these right, anyone listening can be like, oh, that's why my evangelical context felt that way.
Or that's why my Mormon context or my traditional Catholic, right?
People can take these concepts and go, oh, I'm going to go apply that to what I experienced.
And really, so yeah, I don't want to make your book sound like a vocabulary test.
It's not by no means.
So, Christo-authoritarianism, and that term is, I admit, a bit clunky.
I mean, it's a number of syllables.
So, Christo-authoritarianism is an authoritarian ideology that presses the resources of Christian theology, hence Christo, presses the resources of Christian theology into the service of its authoritarian objective.
The analogy I use in describing the term is, there's nothing inherently fascist about Islam.
And there's nothing inherently Islamic about fascism.
Islamofascism emerges when you take the theological resources of Islam and press them into the service of a fascist ideology, right?
Same thing going on with Christo-authoritarianism.
There's nothing inherently Christian about authoritarianism.
There's nothing inherently authoritarian about Christianity.
Christo-authoritarianism emerges when you take the theological resources of Christianity and use them in service to an authoritarian ideology.
As I outlined throughout the book, right, you put the different elements of sort of contemporary conservative evangelicalism and, more broadly, the religious right, and you line them up, and it ticks all the boxes for authoritarianism.
Rigid gender hierarchy, sexual anxiety around racial purity, unreality, anti-intellectualism, and on and on.
OK?
One more, if I may, term that I think will sort of fill out the picture here that illustrates this connection between Christian theology and authoritarianism in the way that the former is used to serve the latter is this concept of the hermeneutics of legitimization.
So, having described what a legitimizing narrative is, this idea is similar.
Hermeneutics is just the study of interpretation, and particularly the interpretation of sacred texts.
So, I argue that conservative evangelicals—and I mean, I give example after example, I could have written a book just Right.
But I argue that conservative evangelicals have, in many ways, sort of turned the Bible into this inexhaustible well of legitimizing narratives that serve to prop up and perpetuate
So one of the things you do in the book is you point out that evangelical leaders and pastors and theologians will use a motivated literalism, so they'll use a kind of ad hoc When they need it, literalism.
Dan and I have decoded this, debunked it, like for hours on this show.
How come you don't interpret the Bible literally here?
How come it's a metaphor there?
How come this is an allegory over there or a parable?
But here, when it comes to reinforcing that women submit to men, It happens to be literal.
Or, when you want to tell me that any queer desire, love, or relationship is sinful, you seem to have your literalism in place.
Ha!
Surprise, surprise.
It really plays into what you're saying.
And it's authoritarian because when you question that interpretation or leadership, You're not met with, let's see what it says.
Let's as a community really dialogue about the meaning of our sacred text.
You're met with either submit and obey or go away.
And I think many people listening have experienced that too.
I started to question.
I started to kind of poke around and I had a choice.
Stay and accept.
Or leave because I was now a threat to the leadership.
And I think that's how authoritarian systems work.
This really shows up in the way that biblical authority is invoked.
And as I argued, that's another example of the very kind of propaganda that I am concerned with that appeals to an ideal in service to an agenda that undermines that ideal.
The ideal of biblical authority in the way that it's invoked in contemporary evangelical context, that ideal goes back to the Reformation, this idea of sola scriptura.
And the idea is that scripture is sort of a sovereign authority.
It's not that there are no other authorities, but scripture is sovereign, right?
And this ideal is meant to attenuate ecclesial authority.
So if you've got someone in the church in a position of power who says, you have to do this, or you can't do that, You can look at the Bible and say, "That's not how I read the Bible.
I think you're making stuff up that isn't in the text or telling me something that actually contradicts the text.
So it's meant to attenuate ecclesial authority.
The way that this operates in contemporary evangelical institutions is actually to amplify ecclesial authority.
Why?
Because these people get to decide what the Bible means.
And then once they've decided what the Bible means, then they can invoke the sovereign authority of the Bible in order to basically say, agree with me or leave.
That undermines the ideal.
The sovereign authority of the Bible means the sovereign authority of the guy standing up front interpreting the Bible.
And that's how it plays out, if I hear you correctly.
Exactly, exactly.
And one of the things I take great care to do in the book, because one kind of analysis says, well, look at these theological positions and look at how they're actually just serving the interests of people in positions of power.
So isn't that really suspect?
And that's interesting, but I think a lot of folks might find that unfulfilling, because it could be the case that someone is advancing an argument for a position that serves their own interests, and yet that position is still correct.
Right?
So I actually address the arguments on their own terms.
And I say, like, here's the theological positions that these folks lay out.
Here's sort of like the logic of it.
And it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
The theological arguments are not good.
Then it's interesting to say, OK, if the arguments aren't good, then why do they keep making them?
You know, OK, look, as it happens, their power is reinforced and perpetuated by these positions.
We've talked about this on the show at length.
You can spend your life Debunking, going through the arguments, and finding that they're so bad on so many levels, and somehow it doesn't threaten the authority of the people, at least within the community.
Now, those who are seeking to understand and have questions and are suspicious, they find great aid in that exercise, but it often does not lead to the reduction of authority on the part of that guy standing in the front who says, I'm interpreting the Bible how it should be, and either accept that or leave.
All right.
We've done a ton of really, for me at least, fun work here around concepts, around ideas.
Let's apply these.
So in Chapter 2, you have sections on the ways this works with explicit white supremacy coming from evangelicals and implicit white supremacy coming from white evangelicals.
Now, You would think that the explicit white supremacy is out of bounds in 2024, but it's 2024 and we all know that's wrong.
So we have voices in the country like Stephen Wolf and Doug Wilson who border on, and many in their reformed Conservative Orbit, who really border on a theology of segregation.
I mean, if you read Stephen Wolf's The Case for Christian Nationalism, he's going to tell you, it would be better if we all just lived separately and minded our own business.
And I'm talking to you, white European heritage men.
We should live together with our people.
Life would be better.
Talk to me about how explicit white supremacy is legitimized through the Bible, how it assumes a certain hierarchy, and the ways it's defended within and without these communities.
Okay, so I run through explicit white supremacy in the book.
But there is a history of saying, like, in the 50s and 60s, we could find so many evangelicals.
I mean, you point this out in the book.
So many evangelicals that are like, here's why we should be separate.
God made it.
Here's the hierarchy.
God made us separate.
Let's live separately.
And if you and if you are arguing for integration, if you're arguing for like schools being integrated, you're the one that's sinful because you're you're basically want a society that God doesn't doesn't envision as ideal.
So let me let me point to a legitimizing narrative that showed up in the 19th century.
And then how it reappeared in the 20th century to defend racial segregation.
And I think that'll illustrate a lot of the stuff we've been talking about in some interesting ways.
OK, so in the middle of the 19th century, I don't have to tell you or the listener, the United States was bitterly divided over the issue of race based slavery.
And some folks are apt to say, this or that guy who engaged in this practice with man of his times, this kind of thing, which is utter nonsense.
It is not as though it hadn't occurred to anyone that race-based chattel slavery was iniquitous.
And in fact, by the middle of the 19th century, all of our North Atlantic peers had outlawed the practice, right?
So if you're a white evangelical in the antebellum South and you want to defend race-based chattel slavery, what do you do?
I can tell you what they did, and this is a pattern that shows up again and again and again, right?
They go to the Bible and the hermeneutics of legitimization.
So they look at the ninth chapter of Genesis and they say, just to refresh your memory, what's happening in the ninth chapter of Genesis is the floodwaters recede.
And Noah plants a vineyard.
He then ferments wine.
He gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent.
Noah's youngest son, Ham, discovers Noah drunk, naked, and unconscious in his tent.
He goes and tells his brother, Shem and Japheth, "Hey, dad's passed out naked in his tent." Shem and Japheth are horrified.
They walk in backwards carrying a cloak to cover Noah.
And in case you're wondering what on earth does this have to do with racism and legitimacy, Just wait.
You just wait.
When I tell my students about this in class, they are agape, and they're like, nuh-uh, nuh-uh.
No one actually believes it.
Yes, yes, folks have belief.
First of all, though, I just want to applaud Noah because Noah's the one... Now, I'm sure going through the flood, not easy, Noah.
But you got out of there, you went in a tent, you got so drunk, buddy, that you woke up naked and you didn't know where you were.
And then your son finds you and you're somehow mad at him because he's... I think maybe Noah should have looked in the mirror here at this point and said, maybe I need to get my life together because I'm naked in the tent and I don't know where I am.
Nonetheless, he gets mad at him.
And then somehow this justifies hundreds of years of enslaving other humans.
So please finish the story.
Sorry for the interruption.
Yeah, so Noah wakes up and the text is a bit ambiguous about exactly who did what and what was problematic.
There are various interpretations, but Noah wakes up and he is upset and he curses not Ham, not all of Ham's sons.
Ham has four sons, but just one of Ham's sons, namely Canaan.
And so this narrative comes to be known as the Curse of Canaan or the Curse of Ham, variously.
And the curse is that the Canaan and its descendants, in perpetuity, will be slaves to the descendants of Shem and Japheth.
Now, Confederate theologians in the Annabella South, what do they do with this narrative?
They say, obviously, the curse of Canaan is still in effect.
And obviously, the defendants of Canaan wound up in Africa and are now enslaved in the American South.
Obviously, there is in quotes, right?
Because it's not obvious at all.
Okay.
Fast forward to the middle of the 20th century when the issue now is racial segregation.
And by the way, you see this feedback loop between belief and practice with white supremacy and racial segregation.
White supremacy justifies, allegedly, racial segregation.
And then the effects of racial segregation appear to legitimize white supremacy because, of course, you're denying people access to the trappings of wealth and success.
Okay, so in order to legitimize racial segregation, right?
Keep Genesis 9 in mind, right?
We go all the way back to Cain and Abel.
Yeah?
So Cain kills Abel.
God puts a mark on Cain, comes to be known as the Mark of Cain.
The text doesn't indicate that this mark is heritable, but according to this narrative, Cain passes the mark on to his descendant, and the mark is darkened skin.
So Cain is a black man, and he passes this mark on to his descendant.
Now, how did the descendants of Cain survive the Flood?
It turns out that Ham married a descendant of Cain, right?
And according to this narrative, this is actually part of the reason why God curses Ham's descendants, is this quote-unquote interracial marriage between Ham and one of the descendants of Cain.
And so this is used as evidence to support the notion that God disfavors racial integration, which is a sort of A step on the path to interracial merit.
I heard this interpretation in the 90s when I was an evangelical.
I heard it.
I mean, people taught this.
John MacArthur still teaches it.
Yeah.
And if you go to the Ark Encounter, which I don't encourage you to do, you can just go to their website.
You don't have to pay them any money.
You go to their website.
It's right there.
They have wax figures of Noah and his wife and their three sons and their wives.
So eight people in all.
One of those wax figures has an unmistakably darker complexion than the other seven.
And wouldn't you know, it's the wife of Ham.
So, is this coincidence?
It's not for me to say.
I don't speculate about anyone's motives in the book, but I will say this.
If you suspect that the museum's curators have sympathy for this racist, legitimizing narrative, then you would expect that the wife of Ham would be the one depicted with darker skin, and that suspicion would be confirmed.
I suspect there's as much coincidence here as there is in the elitos flying the appeal to heaven flag, but that's just me.
So that's a narrative that legitimizes racial hierarchies, racial segregation, and white supremacy.
It just tells you explicitly white people should be And it's no coincidence that you see John MacArthur at the forefront of white evangelical resistance to calls for racial justice.
Now, whether this is front of mind or it's just part of his sort of background information that he's approaching things with, I don't speculate about that.
But I will say that it's not a coincidence That he's promoting a narrative that's been used to legitimize racial hierarchy for centuries.
And he happens to think that structural racism is a myth.
Because he's got a story.
Whether he believes this consciously or not, he's got a story that explains why the average white family has $160,000 more wealth than the average black family.
And it has to do with sort of intergenerational moral turpitude.
That's a phrase that shows up.
In case it's not obvious, none of this is in the text.
None of this is in the text of Genesis.
And you can trace it straight back to Confederate theologians.
John MacArthur loves R.L.
Dabney.
He says as much.
And this is R.L.
Dabney.
R.L.
Dabney as, tell us who that is.
Oh, he's a Confederate theologian and about the most vile white supremacist you will ever read.
And there are quite a few folks in sort of reformed evangelicalism who love him.
I mean, can't get enough.
I once made a flowchart that I put on Twitter for like when you should quote a white supremacist theologian.
And so the first question to ask yourself is, is there anyone else I can quote who isn't a white supremacist?
If the answer to that question is no, right, then ask yourself, do I know of an argument Instead of an appeal to authority, can I just give an argument for the position?
If the answer to that question is no, right, so you don't have an argument and you don't have any theologians who aren't white supremacists that you can appeal to, then probably you just shouldn't be saying the thing, right?
So stop, just don't.
But the bottom line is, there's never a reason to quote a white supremacist theologian.
All right.
So we've got this legitimizing narrative that really explains for people.
I mean, and we can go back to the Civil War, but again, you can find it prominently in the 1950s and 60s.
I heard this line of interpretation in the 90s.
John MacArthur still teaches this.
He's a prominent evangelical leader.
Others I've mentioned, Stephen Wolf has said on Twitter, he thinks in most cases interracial marriage is sinful.
And it's along the lines you're guiding us with.
Let's, for sake of time, let's go to gender.
There's a sense within many evangelical spaces that it's just common sense.
God made Adam to have dominion over Eve.
There's the whole set of verses in Genesis about you will submit and so on and so forth.
We can point to Paul's epistles and various places where women are taught to submit to men as men submit to Christ and so on and so forth.
Tell us about that legitimizing narrative and the way it is basically justifying patriarchy in a religious sense.
Sure.
I mean, the idea there is that they just go to certain excerpts from Paul's letters and say, it's common sense that this is what Paul is saying.
You know, that's propaganda because appeals the appeal to common sense.
Right.
Common sense is meant to be this faculty.
A sense.
That's universal, or common, common to everyone.
Or all Christians, depending on who you ask.
The point is, it's common to all the relevant people who are parties to the disagreement.
So common sense is this universal faculty by virtue of which we can just read the Bible and intuit the correct understanding of the text.
So, the complementarian says, this is common sense, you read Paul, he says, I don't allow a woman to preach.
And then an egalitarian who disagrees, who thinks that Scripture promotes gender parity, says, well, no, that's not how I read Paul, right?
And the response is some version of, this is just common sense.
Why are you rejecting the plain meaning of tech?
The people who embrace gender hierarchy from reading Paul's letters, it seems in this case, they're the only ones who have common sense, right?
Because the people who disagree with them apparently lack common sense.
If the only people who have common sense are the people who agree with me, and everyone who disagrees with me lacks common sense, then it's not common.
It's not universal.
So it's an appeal to this universal faculty in service to an argument that presupposes that this faculty is not in fact universal.
And I would just I would point out that the term complementarian itself is is rather a remarkable piece of propaganda because it invokes this notion that men and women are They say ontologically equal.
I mean, if you can make sense of this, I congratulate you.
But this is the claim they make.
They say that men and women are equal, but they've just been assigned very different roles.
And it turns out that the vast majority of the roles that complementarians assign to women are things that men are capable of doing.
Men can cook and change diapers and prepare refreshments down in the church fellowship hall and all of that.
So basically women are just redundant men whose job in life is to do things that men often find unpleasant.
That doesn't mean that men and women are complementary.
It means that women are redundant men who just have to do the stuff that actual men don't want to do.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is propaganda, and it goes with everything you said about propaganda earlier.
So if you read the book, friends, what you're going to find are just really thorough textual analyses of both of these issues and the ways that white evangelicals And evangelicals in general, in many cases, are willing to use legitimizing narratives to justify a hierarchy of men having power and authority over women and bringing in the resources of the Bible, which, if you question, you are then seen as suspicious.
So it has all the markings of Christo-authoritarianism.
It's an authoritarian leadership structure.
It's an authoritarian social space.
Where if you question the dominant narrative, the dominant understanding of how society should be ordered and the church should be ordered, then you should just probably leave because you're causing trouble and polarization and you're dividing God's people instead of having an open and honest dialogue about what a sacred text means and says and how God would want people to live together.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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