It's in the Code ep 142: “Cherry-Picking the Bible”
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When those undergoing faith deconstruction appeal to the Bible to raise questions or level critiques against high-control Christianity, they are often dismissed as “cherry-picking” particular Bible verses to suit their purposes. What exactly does this accusation mean? And how does it relate to the ways in which the practitioners of high-control Christianity appeal to the Bible? In what ways does this accusation against deconstructionists amount to extreme gaslighting? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan explores these issues.
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Moondy. I'm going to introduce my kids and I'm going to share my numbers.
I'm going to share my numbers.
As always, I want to say welcome to It's In The Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, and as always...
My name is Dan Miller.
I am your host.
I am the Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you.
As always, this series, I think maybe more than anything we do on Straight White American Jesus, is driven by you, and so I invite you to reach out.
Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Thoughts, comments, ideas for upcoming episodes, questions, things that you want me to bring up in supplemental episodes, etc.
I welcome them all.
I want to dive in here.
We are continuing the series that I've been calling Who's Afraid of Deconstruction?
Again, an ongoing discussion of negative responses within high-control Christianity to what has come to be known as faith deconstruction.
And again, just to reiterate, these are responses that they all, in different ways, reflect efforts on the part of the practitioners of high-control religion to gaslight those undergoing deconstruction, to discredit them.
And thereby, by doing that, to insulate high-control religion, high-control Christianity, from the criticisms and critiques that they raise.
And this week, what I want to talk about is the accusation that people who are undergoing faith deconstruction are basically cherry-picking the Bible.
What does that mean?
This is the accusation that those undergoing faith deconstruction, when they appeal to the Bible, and not everybody does, But when they do, maybe they cite a passage that talks about, I don't know, some teaching of Jesus or something that Jesus does in his ministry.
They cite a passage about the teachings of Paul, whatever.
When they appeal to the Bible as the reason for raising the criticisms and questions they do, they are accused of being selective in their use of the Bible.
And basically the accusation is that they're only focusing on particular passages or verses, that they're ignoring others.
That they are purposely misconstruing the Bible to make the point that they are.
And the argument is, what they'll be told, is that if they looked at the Bible more fully, if they took a fuller view of the Bible, if they considered other passages and so forth, they would see that the critiques and questions that they raise are off-base.
And again, if you grew up within this tradition, and if you were one of those people, if you were like me...
One of those kids growing up in this tradition, you took it really seriously, and you read your Bible.
You knew your Bible.
You did your daily devotionals, your daily quiet times, as we used to call them, where you read the Bible.
And you did that, and you know, you're one of those people.
And you believed, as I did, that our religion should be based on the Bible.
That was my understanding.
So when I had questions and critiques about it, I would often come with, you know, sort of armed with Bible verses.
If you're one of those people...
And that searching of the Scriptures actually moved you toward faith deconstruction and, you know, out of the kind of tradition you were a part of, this will be familiar to you.
And this response, this response that you're cherry-picking the Bible, that you're privileging some passages over others and so forth, this may be the most gaslighty response of all the gaslighting responses to faith deconstruction that we'll look at.
And to see why, let's take a deeper dive.
Let's take a closer look at this, okay?
So, To understand how this response works, how it works to aid high-control religion to try to discredit those who are questioning it and so forth, to understand how it works, to understand what's actually going on within it, to understand why I describe it as the most gaslighty of gaslighting responses,
we have to once again consider the role of the Bible within high-control religion.
I know if you listen to this, you're like, oh my God, we're going to talk about the Bible again?
And the answer is yes, because I realize we've talked about the Bible a lot in the context of high-control Christianity, and I am not aiming to reproduce all of that here.
But the reason we have to talk about it is that within high-control Christianity, the Bible looms large.
Within the framework of high-control Christianity, the claim—in my notes, I have this in italics—the claim— Is that the church's beliefs and practices all come from the teaching of the Bible.
This is why, if you've listened, you know this.
If you're new to it, I'll tell you now.
This is why I describe this articulation of Christianity as biblicist in nature.
It's because of this claim that everything comes and should come from the teachings of the Bible.
Now, that involves a lot of claims about the Bible.
And here are a few of them.
Again, I've talked about all of these in greater detail in other places.
I invite you to go back and take a listen if you want.
And I'm going to move through these because I just want to lay them out because we have to keep these in front of us to understand this dismissal of faith to deconstruction.
So the first claim about the Bible is that it is inspired.
What does that mean?
It means that all the words in the Bible come directly from God.
If you want to get technical, it's a model of typically what's called plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible.
But it's the claim that all the words in the Bible come directly from God.
Even if they're mediated from human authors, even if they come through human authors, they are the words that God wanted in there, like down to the specific terms, the grammar, everything as God intended it.
And because God inspired the Bible, the Bible is also inerrant.
It is without error of any kind.
And I did a whole series about why I think this is not only not a convincing view of the Bible, but in my view, it's an incoherent view of the Bible.
And we're going to come back to that a little bit in what follows.
But just invite you, if you haven't listened to that, or that's of interest to you, or you want the deeper dive, go check out that series, okay?
So the Bible is inspired by God.
Every word is what God wants it to be.
Because of that, it is inerrant.
It is without error.
And you also get...
An assumption that the Bible is consistent or univocal.
What do I mean by univocal?
It speaks with one voice.
Because the Bible is all divinely inspired and it aims to teach the truth of God, because God is the author of the whole Bible, because the Bible is God's revealed truth, it is revelation, it has no contradictions and communicates a single unified message.
And that leads to the claim, excuse me, and this is really important, okay?
That leads to the claim that everything in the Bible is of equal authority or inspiration and so forth.
You will hear this claim often.
Every word of the Bible, because it comes from God, because it is without error, it is all revelatory.
It is all revelation.
It is all truth.
It all has equal validity.
It is all part of the inspired Word of God, etc.
Okay? And then finally, and this is one of the more convoluted and sometimes understated dimensions of the Biblicist's claim, but it is the claim that the teaching of the Bible is clear.
The idea is that because God is communicated through the Bible, because God desires humans to know whatever it is that he is communicating, that communication is clear.
Which leads to the idea that the, quote, clear teaching of Scripture is what's supposed to govern Christian life.
And you will hear advocates of high-control religion and Biblicist Christianity say often, we have to follow the clear teachings of Scripture, the clear and unambiguous teachings of Scripture, and so forth.
And the idea is that anybody who's a committed Christian ought to be able to read the Bible and discern what it is that God is teaching through it.
Okay? Now, we could open up all kinds of, you know, not just a can of worms, but like, I don't know, a store full of cans of worms, an entire bait shop on that claim and the way that it's actually practiced and why it is that you need mediators between humans and God and so on and so forth.
And we're going to come into that a little bit.
We could go into it in a lot more detail.
We just don't have the time here.
But the claim is that the teachings of the Bible are clear.
This is also why people can be held responsible for going against the teachings of the Bible, is because the teachings are clear.
So, against that background, with all of that in the background...
When someone experiencing faith deconstruction raises questions about high-control religion, and they do so by highlighting particular Bible passages.
One that comes to mind, you could have a whole bunch of them, is Paul's statement, for example, in the book of Galatians, that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
And they might say, well, hey, what Paul seems to be suggesting is that these worldly distinctions that have mattered...
Outside of the church shouldn't matter within the church, and we can look at history and see how Jew or Greek breaks down, and we've done away with slavery.
So maybe the male-female part means that we need to rethink stances on sexuality and gender relations and so forth.
And if you want to know what those are, I did a series on that.
It's the we've got to talk about the sex stuff.
Go back and listen to that if you want to understand what those teachings about gender and sexuality are.
So somebody might come and say, well, here's this Bible verse that says this, and I think that maybe, Maybe this is where it leads us.
It challenges the teaching of the church in some way.
What will happen is that their reading or interpretation will be dismissed on the grounds that they are cherry-picking Bible passages.
What does that mean?
It's a way of dismissing those challenges at a level from the Bible.
And the idea is, well, yeah, you're using the Bible.
Good for you.
You're citing the Apostle Paul.
You're citing the book of Galatians.
That's great.
But you're using the Bible wrong.
The idea is that...
For example, by focusing on a particular verse, they're giving it an undue priority over others, and it'll be the thing, well, yes, Paul says that, but if you look at the whole witness of Scripture together, the Bible as a whole, you'll recognize that that's not really what that passage means.
And that'll go on, and they'll say, you know, in failing to consult the whole Scripture, there's always this emphasis on the entirety of Scripture.
Why? Again, remember...
The entirety of the Bible is thought to be divinely revealed.
It is inspired.
It is without error.
The book of Timothy says all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching and rebuke and so on and so forth.
So all the Scripture has this authority.
So when you cite this passage, Faith Deconstructor, you are failing to consult the whole Scripture.
And you might come across the term where somebody says you're operating with a canon within the canon.
What does that mean?
That's something that's often used to sort of sound sophisticated.
Within the context of Christianity, the canon simply refers to the acceptance that the Bible is divine revelation, the idea of what should be in the Bible.
That's the canon.
And again, within this high-control, conservative Christian framework, because the Bible speaks with one voice, No portion of the canon should have more weight than another.
Christians should be drawing from all of it.
So deconstructors will be accused of illegitimately privileging some parts of the Bible over others.
People say, well, you're operating with a canon within the canon, and what that is is a criticism that says you're not taking the Bible as a whole.
You're not looking at the Bible as a whole.
You're privileging some parts over others.
Okay? I cannot tell you how many times in debates and discussions about various topics, I would raise concerns or just say, yeah, but what about this?
And somebody would come at me with this line of reasoning.
Okay? And if some of that doesn't make sense, that's fine.
That's okay.
What matters is this.
The response follows the pattern that we've seen consistently in this series.
It might, on one hand, convince the person raising the objections that they're actually misinterpreting things.
You tell them, well, hey, you know, I didn't say that, but, like, here's these verses over here, or what about this, or what about this, or you're not looking at the whole of Scripture.
You need to go back and read the whole Bible and come back when you're really, you know, and you've had a chance to do that.
It might convince them that they're like, well, wow, I mean, I thought that's what it meant, and I read this verse, but I understand that I don't know the whole Bible that well.
Maybe I need to go back and reread it and so forth.
But if it doesn't, if it doesn't persuade them, if I, for example, that Paul passage is one I came to, say, You know, maybe we need to rethink some of the stuff we think about gender and sexuality.
And they say, ah, you're not taking the entirety of Scripture.
I'm like, oh, give me a break, man.
Like, I know more about the Bible than you do.
I'm not convinced.
Well, then what happens then is that that response to you positions you as lacking insight, as not being credible, as not being teachable, and so forth.
So you are positioned then, especially in opposition to whoever the high-control religious partisan is, You are positioned as being unreasonable, something we've talked about, as not being teachable, another thing we've talked about.
You are discredited to the rest of the religious community so that, fine, you go about your business, you do what you want, but we have now insulated the rest of the community from you by discrediting you, and we have insulated the high-control religious structures that you are critiquing from your criticisms.
That's the mechanism involved.
So that's what will happen.
You come to somebody with a verse and you say, well, what about this verse or that verse or whatever?
And they say, oh, you're just cherry picking.
It's a biblical cherry picking.
You're just picking and choosing which passages you want to focus on.
You're just finding the passages that affirm the point that you want to affirm, and then you're bringing them out and you're ignoring the rest of Scripture and so forth.
I described this response a few minutes ago.
As the most gaslighty of gaslighting responses, and I think we're in a place now where we can understand why.
And here it is.
Because no one reads or uses the Bible the way that the partisans of high-control religion say it should be used.
Nobody reads all of the Bible with equal authority.
Nobody... It gives equal weight to every passage in Scripture.
Everybody who uses the Bible and wants to draw teachings from it, I recognize lots of people aren't interested in doing that, but if they do, they privilege some passages over others and so forth.
And that includes the partisans of high-control religion who claim, and I think often believe, that this is how the Bible works.
So the first reason it's a form of gaslighting is they're doing exactly what they accuse you of doing.
To discredit you.
And it's also an act of gaslighting because it's bad theology, even within the framework of high-control Christianity.
Okay, so let's start with that first point.
And it relates to some of the issues I raised in the series on inerrancy.
Again, obviously I'm not going to go back through all those in detail.
You can go back and take a listen.
But here's the issue.
And we could expand this list.
I know a lot of you are going to be thinking of other examples that I could add here, and they're all correct, okay?
No matter what one claims about the Bible, no matter what one says about its clarity, about its speaking with one voice, etc., it is an obvious fact that there are tensions or contradictions concerning the plain meaning of the text.
The same teachings are presented as happening in different contexts.
For example, in the Gospels, like one time...
Jesus gives a teaching and it's up on a mountain, another time it's down on a plane, or they happen in different chronological sequences or different parts of Jesus' life.
And so the question is, like, what do you do with that?
Which account is right?
The same historical events are described in really different terms.
Someone like Paul seems to say things in one context that contradict what he says in another context.
Different books written by different people clearly seem to advance really different teachings or doctrinal positions.
We could just go on and on and on.
I could give you specific examples of these.
I know that many of you could think of other examples, but you get the point.
Now, if one believes, as I do, that the Bible was created over millennia, that it reflects widely divergent perspectives and interests, that it is not inerrant or univocal, nor does it aim to be, that there is no reason to expect that the Bible presents one unified set of teachings and so forth,
none of this is a problem.
But if you believe or claim to believe all the things about the Bible that the biblicist, high-control Christians do, these are issues that need to be resolved.
So what do you do?
It means that conservative, high-control interpreters of the Bible do what you have to do in light of these facts.
They take particular teachings or passages as being the passages of primary importance.
So they take particular passages or particular thinkers or particular places in the Bible.
And basically they say, this is the primary passage, and we're going to use this passage to tell us how to interpret other passages, to try to reconcile those differences or distinctions and so forth.
And this becomes the obvious basis for reconciling these difficulties.
But here's the issue.
When they do that, which you have to do, when you're looking at the plain meaning of Scripture, you bump into places that do not seem to say the same thing, that do not seem to speak with one voice, that do not seem to be easily reconcilable.
You have to find ways of doing that.
You have to privilege some passages over others.
You have to use some as the sort of interpretive lens through which you interpret others and so forth.
But when they do that, they are doing exactly what they accuse deconstructors of doing.
They are, when I say functionally violating, or in practice they are violating the idea that all the Bible is of equal worth or value for teaching.
They are violating and really contradicting the idea that the Bible plainly speaks with one voice on all these topics.
This is a privileging of particular parts of the Bible over others.
It is exactly the kind of cherry-picking that other people are critiqued for doing.
So the conservative partisans of high-control religion absolutely employ a canon within the canon.
And usually it's the Apostle Paul.
It's usually the teachings of Paul.
That are the primary focus of how they read the Bible, and then within that particular portions of Paul, like the book of Romans in particular, and then everything else in the biblical text is interpreted through that.
So when they dismiss deconstructors for focusing on or privileging particular portions of the Bible over others, for not examining the entirety of Scripture and bringing it to bear, for having a canon within the canon, etc., this is exactly what they do.
They gaslight others into distrusting their reading of the Bible by doing exactly the same thing that they're critical of.
They simply insist that this isn't what they're doing, even though any close examination makes it obvious that this is how they themselves actually use the Bible.
So that's the first dimension of why I say this is the most gaslighty of gaslighting responses.
The second is this.
Not only are they gaslighting because of how they actually use the Bible, but their own theology, the theological traditions out of which particularly high-control Protestant Christianity comes, those theological traditions contradict that.
A key principle within Protestant biblical interpretation was that the basis for biblical interpretation is Jesus Christ.
The Jesus of Nazareth, because he was understood to be the incarnation of God, Jesus of Nazareth, in his person, was the highest and truest revelation of God.
Jesus, or the person of Jesus Christ, and the message of salvation through him, is supposed to be the basis of biblical interpretation.
It is what we might call the hermeneutical or interpretive key for understanding the Scriptures.
Well, what does that mean?
And, of course, there's debates about how you apply that, exactly how that plays out, and so forth.
But what it does is it enshrines the idea...
That all Scripture is not of equal worth and value.
It enshrines the idea that particular teachings and passages should be the basis of the interpretation of others.
Indeed, it enshrines the idea of a canon within the canon.
And this is built into the structure of the Christian Bible.
The Christian Bible is divided into what it called the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians have called the Old Testament.
What does that mean?
It means that the New Testament is given primacy over the Hebrew Bible.
The New Testament, the New Covenant, the testimony about Jesus is given an interpretive priority.
It has dominance over the Hebrew Bible.
But even within the New Testament, you get particular authors and teachings and so forth that are given preeminence.
So it's a core theological tradition.
Underlying high-control American Christianity.
So not only does the accusation that a biblically focused deconstruction doesn't listen to the entire scripture, not only does that accusation contradict the practice of high-control religionists, it even violates their own theological affirmations.
It's bad theology on the part of high-control religionists on the grounds of their own theological tradition.
It is bad theology to say.
That all scriptures have equal value and should be given equal authority and so forth.
So where does that bring us?
We've got to wind this up.
Let me just try to sort of tie some things together here, okay?
People can come to faith deconstruction for a lot of reasons and from a lot of different directions.
And not everybody who does so appeals to the Bible in the process.
And I am not here to advance an affirmative vision of the Bible or to defend the Bible or say that you have to use the Bible or anything else, okay?
But many people coming to faith deconstruction, precisely because they are coming out of Biblicist religious traditions, they do draw on the Bible to raise those concerns.
And when they do, they will almost certainly be accused of using the Bible selectively, of prioritizing some portions over others, of cherry-picking passages that suit their purposes, etc.
And what that does is it puts you in the defensive position of having to try to say, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.
I'm reading the whole Bible, and the whole Bible's authoritative and so forth.
When instead what you should say is, yes, I am doing that.
And by the way, pastor, you do that too.
It's why you don't preach tons of sermons out of the book of Numbers.
It's why you don't preach as often from the Hebrew Bible as you do the New Testament.
It's why you talk about Jesus all the time.
Because you're a damn Christian, and that's what Christians do.
That's what you think the core of the tradition is.
So it represents gaslighting of the highest order because it's exactly what the partisans of high-control religion themselves do.
And the way that they mask this is by critiquing those who do exactly what they do.
By attacking you for doing what they do, they deflect from the fact that that's actually what they're doing.
Highest order of gaslighting.
And as always, these accusations are not made in good faith.
They're not made to try to reconcile people.
They're not made to say, oh, that's an interesting perspective.
Let's sit down and rethink that.
No, they are made in an effort as a way to mask efforts of control and coercion that drive high-control Christianity.
So if that's you, if you've had that experience, if you're having that experience, somebody accuses you of cherry-picking the Scriptures, I just invite you to think about this.
And point out to those people who challenge you that that is exactly what they are doing, and that is inevitably the case.
Got to wrap this up, so I want to say thank you once again, all of you who support us in so many ways, especially subscribers.
We cannot do this without you.
We put out a lot of content trying to do the best we can in what feel like dark and challenging times to keep doing what we're doing.
You allow us to do that.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something that you might be in a position to consider doing, I would invite you to do so.
But certainly, thank you for listening.
Thank you for reaching out.
Invite all of you, please, if you've got thoughts, comments, feedback, ideas for other episodes, let me know.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
If you have access to our Discord, I do float around in there from time to time.
I don't always make my presence known, but I do float around.
