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In the third chapter of her book attacking “toxic empathy,” Allie Beth Stuckey mounts her argument against gay rights and, in particular, marriage equality. Throughout her chapter, she asserts that marriage equality marks a departure from “biblical” or “traditional” marriage, from a model of marriage that has decisively shaped the Christian West from the time of Jesus and before, and that it should therefore be resisted at all costs. As Dan argues in this episode, the problem with this view is that it simply isn’t true. There has never been a clear, unequivocal “biblical” view on marriage, and understandings of marriage within the Christian tradition have evolved and changed from the time of Christ right up to the present day. Listen in to hear more about this, and why this matters for confronting the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of Stuckey and those on the religious and cultural right.
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Hey everyone, it's your two favorite horror podcasters, professors, and nerds.
We're so excited to tell you about a new series from Horror Joy called Meet Your Maker.
This is a series dedicated to horror creators, their words, and their worlds.
We'll be sitting down for 30-minute interviews with some of horror's best-known authors and some of the best authors you don't know, like Clay McLeod Chapman, Victoria Dolpe, Kat Silva, John Langen, Sadie Hartman, Mother Horror, Emily Hughes, Thomas Ha, Matthew Trefon, Jake Try, and so many more.
Whatever we do, we can both try to do so many more at the same time.
And so many, many more.
No.
I don't think that's working.
Our goal is always to find joy in horror, and this gives us the opportunity to introduce you to new authors and creators and to discuss new books, stories, and movies with your old favorites.
This also means that we'll be dropping episodes every week.
So, get ready, yins, for more horror, more joy, more horror.
Horror joy!
*music*
Welcome to It's in the Code.
The series is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Glad to be with you, as always.
As I always want to thank all of you who listen, everybody who contributes.
This is a listener-driven series.
The topics we talk about are topics you've suggested.
The insights often come from you.
The directions we go are determined by you.
So I want to thank everybody for the suggestions, the ideas.
Continue to read over the emails and map things out for the future, as well as looking at what we're doing now.
And I also want to thank our subscribers.
You help us to do so much of what we do.
And we thank you.
Anybody else who isn't a subscriber, if you like what you hear, invite you to consider that.
If you can't subscribe, like us, recommend us, hit the social media, let people know that we're here.
This is what lets us do what we do.
So I want to just dive in.
We are continuing our exploration of, you know, the cultural and religious rights recent turn to attacking empathy.
Just sort of a side thing here.
I was thinking about this.
I was talking with a colleague recently who like, you know, sort of doesn't follow this discourse.
Like, what do you mean attacking empathy?
Like, is that a thing?
Like, is that a thing that's been going on?
I'm like, nope, this is another new thing.
It's one of those things that, you know, religious conservatives like to like trumpet these causes and present it as if, you know, it's always been a concern of theirs.
And we've talked about this, whether it's abortion, which, you know, it's a decades old issue now, but it's only decades old or other topics.
And really, this is novel.
This is a novel line of attack that it's evil and bad and even sinful to empathize with others.
Anyway, that's what we're exploring.
And we're doing it through a look at Alibeth Stuckey's book, Toxic Empathy, which warns, you know, I guess good Christian conservatives not to fall prey to being toxic and empathizing with others too much and so forth.
And again, we're looking at this, number one, as I say, I'm reading the book, so you don't have to.
But we're also reading because she is typical of so much of this discourse on the right.
Her book is organized around five, what she calls lies, right?
The lies that toxic empathy lead us to believe.
And we've looked at her views on abortion.
We've looked at her views on trans exclusion.
I've said multiple times, I'll reiterate it here.
All five of these things that she calls lies are things that I believe and hold to.
And I think that that's important to know.
So we're continuing looking at her.
And again, looking at her because she's typical of so much.
And so this week, we are looking at the third of these five chapters, Love is Love.
And if you're familiar with the slogans and terms at all, you'll know that this is her chapter taking on a specifically gay identity.
And more than that, specifically the issue of marriage equality or so-called same-sex marriage, if you want sort of the older nomenclature of that.
And that's really the focus here.
And that's what we're going to look at this first episode.
Okay.
Now, there's a lot, again, to consider in this chapter.
I've been spending, you know, about three episodes per chapter.
You could do more.
It's just line by line by line.
It is bad.
And I'm a, you know, I'm a textual analyst.
I'm a discourse analyst at heart.
I like going through with a fine-tooth comb and looking at these things.
I could spend so much time.
There's so much there.
The reasoning is so bad.
But this chapter in particular is, it's very well-worn terrain if you're familiar with this discourse.
Some of the topics she addresses in her book, you know, issues like trans identity or social justice, or if you're talking about other issues on the right, like opposition to vaccines or this turn against empathy, these are really sort of new kinds of concerns on the right.
And so the discourse is a little bit evolving and has changed over time and so forth.
But attacking gay people, attacking what once upon a time we refer to as the gay lifestyle or the homosexual agenda, these were the words.
That line of inquiry, that's been a fixation, excuse me, a fixation on the religious and cultural right for decades.
So if you're of a certain age, certainly my age or older, and you're acquainted with this tradition, if you grew up in these churches, if you heard these sermons, if you were taught to read the Bible in this way, if you were part of just popular discourse in, say, you know, the Clinton years and prior, this is well-worn terrain.
You will have come across a range of arguments that still persist and that are still present in Stuckey's chapter.
So that's just worth noting.
We're going to spend some time on this chapter again.
Today is just the first of probably three episodes looking at this.
And what I want to start with is just the notion of marriage, because a primary basis for Stuckey's argument in this chapter is marriage.
And in a way that is typical of the right, she argues that marriage equality represents a quote-unquote redefinition of marriage or a departure from traditional marriage or an attack on traditional marriage.
And you can put redefinition and traditional there in quotes if you like.
And for her, this also means, of course, that it represents a violation of quote unquote biblical marriage.
So the standard line on the right is there's a biblical model of marriage.
That is what has defined Western, or for some of them, even just human culture from time immemorial.
And this novel claim that people should be able to marry those of the same gender or who are not gender binary or gender fluid or what have you, right?
That this is novel and this is an egregious break from this well-established biblical norm that has always governed Western society.
Okay.
And so what I want to do in this first episode of this chapter is I want to offer a brief look at some of the ways in which this appeal to traditional or biblical marriage completely overlooks the actual history of marriage, particularly within the Christian tradition.
Okay.
And I'm doing this in a number of different ways and for a number of different reasons, but two of my favorite areas of scholarship and exploration, these are areas that I don't specialize in, but it's the kind of scholarship and the kind of studies that I love to read, are historical theology and cultural history.
Historical theology, for those who don't know, that's the branch of theology that examines the historical development of Christian teaching and theology.
You'll trace a doctrine like, you know, Christology, the doctrine of who Jesus of Nazareth was or whatever, and you'll trace how it develops over time or the doctrine of the atonement or what have you.
Cultural history is a kind of historical approach that looks at the historical development of various cultural forms, right?
Or cultural ideologies or institutions and so forth, sort of over time.
So maybe, I don't know, maybe it's the discourse of rights or justice.
And you say, okay, it's like, what is this concept of justice?
How is that looked over time?
What is the cultural history of this concept?
And I love reading scholars who work in both of these areas.
I'm so grateful for the work that they do.
And both of these approaches or fields are informative if we want to understand how the concept and institution of marriage has actually developed and changed over time.
Obviously, in one episode, we're not doing a deep dive on the cultural history of marriage or the doctrinal development of marriage as a sacrament, if you're in a sacramental system or as some sort of religious rite and so forth.
We're not able to do that.
But we are going to talk at least on some of the broad overarching themes that these kinds of fields show us about marriage.
And the reason is that these approaches are really significant because they counter the carefully cultivated ignorance of history within conservative Protestantism and within contemporary high control American Christianity.
And it is almost impossible, in my view, to overstate the significance of this as a core component of high control American Christianity is a carefully cultivated historical ignorance.
And it can strike some as strange because those same Christians will tell you that Christianity is the most history-minded tradition.
They will say, we believe that God is involved in history.
We make a claim about the historical Christ and all of this sort of stuff.
And they'll pat themselves on the back for being sort of historically attuned.
But there's a carefully cultivated ignorance of history within this tradition.
And I think there are a lot of reasons for this.
But one of the most significant is the claim that the Bible is inerrant.
And again, I did a whole series on this concept of inerrancy, what that means, what I think the problems with it are.
I invite you to go back and listen to that.
Okay.
But there are some core components of this understanding of the Bible that is always, always operative within these high control models of American Christianity.
The first, an explicit claim is that the Bible is without error of any kind.
That's what inerrant literally means.
A second explicit claim is that the Bible is the source of authentic Christian teachings, that the Bible is the word of God.
It has no errors.
Therefore, what Christians do and say and believe and so forth should be based on the Bible.
The Bible is their source.
And there's another teaching of inerrancy that I think is often implicit.
It's not often explicitly stated.
I've talked about this in the past, but as I've reflected on this, it stands out to me more and more.
And that is the idea that the Bible is clear and unequivocal.
So not only is it without error, but it's clear.
You can read it.
You can understand it.
To say it's without error would imply it's not contradictory.
There's no equivocation and so forth.
Okay.
So if that's your core claim about your tradition, then any meaningful historical analysis, you have to cultivate ignorance of it because any meaningful historical analysis renders these views completely untenable.
Completely untenable.
And I say that without qualification.
If you are attuned to history and to historical analysis, those claims about the Bible are simply untenable.
There's no way to meaningfully hold to them in any credible way.
So there's a strategic interest in ignoring history within these traditions.
Now, one way that that historical awareness would undermine the idea of inerrancy involves the historical formation of the biblical texts.
And I know many of you are familiar with this.
You find out that the first five books of the Bible weren't written by Moses or texts weren't produced in the timeline in which we traditionally thought that they were, or that they were composites over different times and so on, all that kind of stuff.
It's all important stuff.
I want to set that aside for now because that's not the kind of historical inquiry I'm interested in today.
What I want to think about in this episode is the significance of the historical development and inconsistency in Christian practice and teaching, specifically on marriage, right?
When you study the historical Development and changes in Christian practice and teaching, I already think that that makes it impossible to hold to a clear, unequivocal teaching of the church or Christianity or whatever.
That's a role of historical theology.
But I want to specifically talk about this related to marriage.
Okay.
And so let's start with something that Ali Beth Stuckey says.
She says, quote, it's page 71 of her book, she says, we don't need studies to tell us what we already intuitively know.
The same people needed to make a baby are needed to raise her.
Only men can be dads and only women can be moms.
End quote.
And so then regarding what she describes as biblical marriage, she says it is, among other things, reiterated throughout scripture.
In the Bible, she says, quotes, parents and families are defined in terms of fathers, mothers, and children.
Excuse me, children, end quote.
And so marriage is about a man and a woman having a child, all the cis heteronormative stuff, all the gender normativity that we talked about in her chapter on trans identity.
It's all there.
This is the basis of marriage.
This is what marriage is.
The Bible is clear and consistent on this and so forth.
Okay.
But of course, and that's about history.
I mean, you don't have to go far in history.
You don't have to do like real historical work because anyone who's read the Bible knows that this claim is patently false.
Anybody who wants to say that the model of what she calls biblical marriage, and again, biblical marriage for her, one man, one woman, lifelong monogamous marriage for the purposes of raising children and so forth, it's patently false.
There are almost no explicit instances of marriage in the Bible.
Even the creation story of Adam and Eve, which is taken by the Christian tradition long before stuck here, this is a tradition that goes back almost two millennia.
It's taken by the Christian tradition as a sort of the primeval marriage.
It doesn't actually mention marriage.
There's no ceremony.
There are no vows.
There's no prescriptions.
There's no officient.
All the things that we would define as marriage or say define a marriage now, none of them are there.
Okay.
Polygamy is common in the Bible, especially in the Hebrew Bible.
Relationships with concubines is commonly presented as a norm, at least for the elite.
Most people don't get to have concubines, but for the elite, and like the prime, like probably the prime example of this is King Solomon, whom the Bible describes as the wisest man who ever lived.
It extols his wisdom, despite the fact that his policies led to a civil war in Israel that broke the kingdom in half.
He was a terrible domestic policy king, but he's described as the wisest king who ever lived.
He's described in the book of 1 Kings as having had 700 wives and 300 concubines.
There are passages where marriage is presented as a recompense for rape.
For example, Deuteronomy chapter 22, if somebody rapes a woman, they have to marry her to make recompense.
So there's a model of marriage.
Even in the New Testament, Jesus doesn't have much to say about marriage according to the gospels, and his views contrast with dominant Jewish perspectives of the time.
And Paul, Paul who writes like half of the New Testament, he only grudgingly even allows for marriage on the part of those who can't manage their sexual impulses.
Paul is basically like, you know, if you're a good, strong Christian, you're spiritually grounded, it's better to not be married.
It's better to be celibate.
But, you know, if you need to have sex, then I guess if you just, if that's a thing you have to do, then you can get married.
It's this grudging acceptance.
Again, a view very much at odds with traditional Jewish practices at the time.
And of course, both Jesus and Paul are Jewish individuals.
So, I mean, that's just a quick cursory glance at the Bible.
So the notion that the Bible is unequivocal and consistent in how it defines marriage is it's laughable.
Okay.
But the actual history of Christian practice as it relates to marriage also undermines the claims that the Bible is clear or inerrant on this topic.
And the reason I say that is a presumption of mine is that if people really believe the Bible is authoritative, if they really believe it's inerrant and so forth, and if that inerrant text presents a clear, unequivocal, consistent vision of something, one would expect that it's something that would always have been present in the Christian tradition.
And that's just not what you find.
For hundreds of years after the New Testament period, for hundreds of years of the Christian era, for hundreds of years after the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were known and had happened and so forth, there was no formal, consistent, or uniform church teaching about marriage.
Opinions within, you know, among church leaders and so-called church fathers and theologians, opinions ranged from rejection of marriage to taking lifelong monogamous marriage as a Christian norm.
It covered a full range.
Reflecting Paul's attitude, early Christian communities often advocated celibacy and they looked down on marriage.
Right?
I mean, the reason was that in the New Testament, it's presented as if, you know, the second coming of Christ is sort of imminent.
It's going to happen.
And so there was this emphasis on remaining in an unmarried state so you could be focused on the kingdom of God and ready when Jesus comes and so forth.
It's only when Christians start to figure out that Jesus doesn't seem to be coming back anytime soon that that begins to change.
Okay.
Saint Jerome, a fourth century theologian, he comes close to explicitly condemning marriage, reflecting that same view.
Saint Augustine, giant name in Western Christian history, fourth and fifth century, his views on marriage ultimately become normative in many ways, but people who study us will say, look, his views were inconsistent and they shifted a lot.
And if you know anything about Augustine, you also know he had like really, really weird hang-ups and problems with issues like embodiment and sex and gender and sexuality and his own guilt because he had a child out of wedlock, all this kind of stuff.
But, you know, if that's your model, then fine.
But his own views were shifting.
And so forth.
And I just want to say, like Augustine, I just said a lot of his views become kind of a norm in the Western tradition fourth to fifth centuries, 400 to 500 years after that period.
Folks, that's like taking the period of time during which the United States has existed and doubling it before coming up with some view.
It's a long ways from quote unquote the biblical view or the time of the Bible.
When marriage did begin to be brought into church practice through formal ceremonies and rites, and historians of theology will tell us this, these often originated as kind of baptized versions of pagan or secular practices, particularly taken from Roman law.
So the notion that they were quote-unquote biblical, they weren't drawn from the Bible.
They were drawn from existing cultural practices in the non-Christian world.
And a telling example of this that I came across, again, just a quick cursory reading.
There was a guy named Clovis.
I've always thought Clovis is a cool name.
He was the first Christian king of France.
And early church historians who praised him for his wisdom and for his piety.
And Clovis was king around the same time as Augustine, fourth, no, I think fifth into sixth centuries rather.
And I say France, it was the Gauls at the time, right?
But Clovis, this guy, in case you don't happen to know who Clovis is, he was praised for his wisdom and his piety.
He was a polygamist.
And clergy polygamy.
So polygamy among Catholic church clergy members wasn't banned until the eighth century.
Okay.
Hundreds of years after the New Testament period before somebody comes along and bans clergy polygamy, which also tells us that guess what?
There were clergy members who were polygamists for hundreds of years or they wouldn't need to ban it.
Okay.
During the Middle Ages, again, hundreds of years after the biblical period, it was during the Middle Ages that marriage increasingly comes under the purview of the church because everything increasingly comes under the purview of the church.
Again, we're talking about sort of quote unquote Western or sort of European history here.
And it's not until the 11th and 12th centuries that this pattern really becomes standard and normative.
So 1000 to 1300 or so.
Now, that's a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong.
That's a long time ago.
1300 was a long time ago from our perspective.
But it's almost a millennium and a half after the biblical period.
So that model that develops in the medieval period does become standard in the West, right?
From around 500 to 1500, the numbers I've seen are like between 400 and 1400, 500 and 1500.
In that timeframe, there is a set of norms and patterns of marriage that does become normative.
But number one, it takes a thousand years for that pattern to emerge and become normative.
It's not simply quote unquote biblical marriage.
It's much more complex than that.
And what it suggests to me when you say, wow, why did it take a millennium and a half to get to this?
Why did it take a thousand years for the church to kind of settle on what the practice is?
It's because the Bible wasn't informative on it.
The Bible certainly did not give a clear, unequivocal view of what marriage is.
Okay.
And even after all of that, marriage didn't become a formal part of Catholic canon law until the Council of Trent in 1547, the 16th century.
It's the early modern period.
And the Council of Trent, why did the Council of Trent happen?
It happened because it was a response to the Protestant Reformation.
The reason why it becomes a formal part of Catholic canon law is that there were many Protestant arguments that there was no basis for understanding marriage as a sacrament, that it actually wasn't the kind of religious rite that the Catholics said that it was.
So now you have competing Christian groups within the West with differing understandings of marriage.
Okay?
So that's just like a quick historical survey.
And like, even once we get to this model, even once you get, I don't know, 16th century forward, the contemporary kind of Christian, you know, American Christian understanding of marriage as being a formalized expression of love and mutual commitment between a man and a woman, the aim of raising children or valuing a love for their own sake and not as property or workers or a status symbol or future heirs or whatever.
And with the aim of raising them to be fulfilled, autonomous individuals, things that we all value, that is an even more recent historical innovation.
Elements of that developing since like the 1950s in the U.S. Historian Stephanie Kuntz, who does a really great book on the history of marriage, she argues that the vision of marriage that Stuckey advances, she's not talking about Stuckey.
She's talking about a vision of marriage that is consistent with what Stuckey advances.
She argues that that vision that Stuckey advances and the vision that Stuckey claims is the biblical model of marriage, quote, is in fact without historical precedent, end quote.
What the Christians in high control religion tell us is the biblical model of marriage has never existed in human history until very recently.
And if you doubt that claim, we would have to take a deeper dive and talk about, okay, like what were children understood to be?
What was the nature of the relationship in marriage supposed to be?
Why did men and women get married?
What status did they have?
And so forth.
You have to tease all of those things out.
Okay.
Here's the point.
There has been a constantly evolving understanding of marriage, and it reflects numerous cultural and social realities beyond the Bible.
It represents religious and social and cultural changes.
It represents demographic changes.
It represents economic and political changes, all kinds of historical change for hundreds and at this point, thousands of years.
So there has never been a consistent model of marriage.
Okay?
That's the historical development of which Stuckey is carefully ignorant and completely silent.
And she is not unique in this.
She will be typical of everybody you will encounter on the religious and cultural right who wants to use this language of undermining marriage or attacking traditional marriage or departing from historical norms of marriage or whatever else.
Okay.
And a reason, and I want to, I know I'm staying at this kind of meta level here, but it's an issue that is worth thinking about, not just with marriage, but more broadly, is why it is that inerrantists, the people who say that they believe the Bible, the people who make these historical claims, why they need to ignore history.
I think this is important to understand because for my money, If you want to take on high control religion and the claims it makes, history is a vital resource for doing so.
I think it's really, really important to understand that.
And here's why inerrantists can't confront or explain historical variability.
Any explanation that they would give, and this is the way to do it.
If you want to have the argument with somebody, say, well, you know, you say this about marriage, so like, I don't know, how come it took 500, 400, 500 years for some of these views to develop?
Why wasn't there a consistent thing?
Why wasn't it part of canon law until the 16th century?
Like, why, why, why, why, why?
In my view, inerrantists can't respond to that historical variability without undermining their own claims to inerrancy.
The one that they can do, fundamentalists have done this for a long time, conservative Protestants in particular will still do this.
It's always possible to claim that Christians before them weren't real Christians.
Okay.
So you can always say, well, yeah, they weren't real Christians.
They didn't really do what the Bible said.
Well, you can do that, but most inerrantists don't want to do that because, number one, it undermines the notion that there's a tradition of inerrancy within Christianity.
And most of them still want to appeal to certain people.
We see this in contemporary Christian nationalism that there's this sort of strong Augustinianism, Saint Augustine.
They want to appeal to Augustine.
They don't want to say that he invented something or did something new or that he wasn't really following the Bible.
You could suggest that, but that's not what they usually want to do.
They can also, and this is the more nuanced, sophisticated thinkers will say, well, you know, it took time for the church to discern what the biblical teachings actually are.
But here's the problem.
I said that one of the implicit claims that an errantist will make is that the teachings of the Bible are clear and unequivocal.
And if you're going to say it took the church not a little time, not a lifetime, not a generation, but hundreds or thousands of years to figure out what the Bible said about something, you undermine that notion of scripture's clarity.
If what you're saying then is that the Bible isn't, maybe it's actually really hard to understand what it says or it doesn't say one thing clearly.
And if you're an inerrantist, you don't want to say that because what's going to happen is it opens up the possibility that will keep you up at night of, well, what if I'm wrong now?
I can claim my Bible is inerrant or without error and it's inspired and all of that, but what if I'm misinterpreting things the same way the Christians did for the first, I don't know, 400 years or whatever?
You open yourself to that challenge.
That's something that kept me awake.
When I was a strong biblicist, evangelical Christian and I recognized that historical variability, it kept me awake at night and say, wow, what are things that I take as just self-evident Christian truths now that I could be wrong about?
It sows those seeds of doubt.
So it is, in my view, it is not possible to maintain an inerrantist position and to take historical variability and development seriously.
The evolution of these ideas over time, in my view, undermines biblical inerrancy.
So the more typical conservative response is a carefully cultivated historical ignorance.
And so how do you do that?
Well, you do exactly the things that Ali Beth Stuckey does.
She makes proclamations about the consistency and the universality and the antiquity of the positions as she advances.
She just asserts this.
And yeah, if you read her chapter, we're going to talk about this some next week because we're going to get into like what she actually says about the Bible.
Yes, you can find some Bible verses to cite.
But I already threw some out earlier.
Those are the Bible verses she's not going to cite.
You just assert this unequivocal stance.
You just say, this is what Western culture has always done.
This is what it has always meant to be a Christian.
And the average person doesn't have the resources or the background or frankly the time or inclination to go check you on all of that.
You just assert it.
And we see this on the right from Donald Trump all the way down.
Stuckey just does the same thing.
She simply asserts this.
And we talked about this and other things.
That's part of the reason why something like the abortion myth that Christians have always been opposed to abortion.
This is a core Christian teaching.
It's a core Christian teaching that life begins at conception and so forth.
I've talked about that in connection with Stuckey.
We've talked about that on the podcast.
I don't know how many times.
It's part of the reason why something like that can gain the status of unquestioned truth so quickly.
You just ignore it and you do it studiously.
And this is what Stuckey does throughout her chapter on marriage with her insistence that there has always been a consistent, stable Christian definition of marriage despite the historical diversity we've already discussed.
And I'm willing to bet that Alibeth Stuckey has no idea that that diversity exists.
It's not secret knowledge.
It's not hard to find.
You can spend a few minutes, literally a few minutes, Googling around and type in things like cultural history of marriage and some great, reputable, solid resources will come up.
I have very little doubt that Alibeth Stuckey has simply internalized the same myth-making denial of history that she espouses in her book.
Whether it's intentional or not, the effect is the same.
You simply assert that there has always been this one stable definition of marriage, and then you say, see, look how weird this is.
Look how dangerous this is.
Look how pathological this is.
The people in our society are moving us away from this.
That's why understanding the history of it is so important.
What emerges from a study of the cultural and theological history of Christian marriage, and again, I realize I have scratched the tiniest surface of this.
What emerges from a study of that is something marked by extraordinary contingency.
Excuse me, contingency.
Something that is marked by change, something that is marked by sort of starts and stops, something that is marked by inconsistency, something that could have been other than it ended up being.
It is contingent.
Even patterns that have been broadly consistent for a millennium, let's say that pattern that develops from 500 to 1500, even those patterns, they're only well-established cultural habits, folks.
Now, to be sure and to be clear, I want to be clear about this.
It makes sense to look at our reasons for overturning well-established cultural habits.
I am not saying cultural habits are bad and there should be no norms.
Like you cannot have a society of people living together without norms and expectations and cultural habits and so forth.
And if you get ones that hold on for hundreds of thousands of years, it's worth, you know, it's worth pausing before simply throwing them away.
I get that.
Okay.
But they still remain cultural habits, nothing more.
And we are not obligated to defer to cultural habits just because they're old or it's how we've always done things.
We just are not.
Especially if we're not concerned with maintaining conservative Christian morality or social structures.
And especially if we actually think that conservative Christian morality and social structures are pernicious and that they are high control and that they are damaging to people.
We have no obligation to hold to well-established cultural habits.
We're not obligated to do that.
And we are certainly not obligated to accept the myth that these cultural habits, these things that are nothing more than contingent, historically contingent cultural habits, simply reflect God's will or the innate nature of things or the way that humans are made or whatever.
And if you want evidence of that, if you're listening to this, you'll probably agree.
If you're a high control religionist, you might not.
There are lots of well-established cultural habits that we, that non-high control religion kinds of Christians, there are lots of cultural habits that we don't accept.
Misogyny, well-established cultural habit, not just in Western culture, but globally.
Patriarchy, one of the most pervasive cultural patterns in the history of humankind.
Slavery, until like 200 years ago, a mainstay everywhere on the planet.
Child exploitation, on and on and on.
There are all kinds of well-established cultural habits, some of which have much clearer patterns and much more consistency than marriage has.
All kinds of long-established cultural habits that we want to overturn and challenge.
We are under no obligation, even if there's a cultural habit of a certain understanding of marriage, to maintain it just because it's there, which is exactly why the inerrantists simply assert that it's God-given, that it's universal.
There are natural law arguments that are made.
I haven't even got into those.
The reason they're doing that is they have to mask that historical contingency.
And the ones who know, the ones who are sophisticated know that if that historical contingency comes into view, their arguments crumble.
So that's where I want us to take us.
Hey, I'm going to just tie together some of these threads.
Okay.
I feel like today's been a little bit wonky with the history stuff and different saints and all this kind of stuff.
The accusations that traditional marriage is being undermined by those who advocate marriage equality, it's simply misplaced.
There has never been a quote-unquote traditional understanding or expression of marriage, Christian or otherwise.
There have been periods of relative stability in how that's understood, but they're only relative and it's been marked by constant change and evolution.
The mythical vision of marriage on which Stuckey relies founders completely on the actual history of the institution.
And again, this is not a secret or unknown history.
You don't have to be an esotericist to find it.
The cultural evolution of marriage has been well studied from multiple disciplines.
It has been studied cross-culturally.
It has been studied in the West.
It has been studied within Christianity.
It has been studied from extra-Christian sources.
It has been studied from every angle.
And yet, within the myth-making machine of high-control American Christianity, this is almost entirely unknown.
There are those who know it and remain silent.
The masses within high-control religion, including many pastors, including many advocates and spokespeople like Ali Beth Stuckey, are completely ignorant of this by design.
And again, after just a brief survey, we're in a position to see why, because a historical analysis completely blows up any appeal to quote-unquote biblical marriage, which means it blows up one of the primary arguments that conservatives use to oppose marriage equality.
That's why I'm sort of staying at this meta level today.
I'm saying like, you want to take somebody on who opposes marriage equality and queer equality?
Start with that.
Don't let them get away with defining marriage a particular way and then having to defend yourself for why it's a departure from that.
Start with that because their assumptions about a marriage are already wrong.
And that's why this matters.
A huge element in traditional arguments against queer inclusion and marriage equality rests on assertions that these represent seismic, unprecedented departures from a norm that has defined Western or even human culture from time immemorial.
You can hear any GOP senator or representative or podcaster or vice president or whomever you want, those are the claims that we'll make.
From the shades of antiquity, this is what marriage has always been.
This is an unexamined historical claim.
It is a historical claim.
It almost always is presented as a mere matter of fact.
So demonstrating the contingent, fluid nature of marriage within Christian history undermines this central pillar of anti-queer activism.
Because then they're the ones who are on the defensive.
They're the ones who have to say, why the normativity of this contingent historical form?
And oh, by the way, now, Mr. Biblical and Errantist, you're the one appealing to theologians and medieval arguments and Catholic canon law, even though you're a Protestant, why would you accept those when you say that they're not authorities and so forth?
Okay?
So it applies to Stuckey and her arguments, but the relevance of that history goes far beyond her.
So next episode, we're going to go in more.
We're going to look at more specifics.
Like what specifically does she say?
What rationale does she offer and so forth.
But I want us to do that against this backdrop that says there is this sort of meta-level issue, this presumption that she makes and to which she appeals throughout her chapter to quote unquote biblical or quote-unquote traditional marriage, and to just recognize that she has already smuggled in a bunch of assumptions that simply can't stand up to any kind of intellectual curiosity, let's say.
And certainly not to historical inquiry.
Got to wind this down.
Thank you for listening again.
Please keep the ideas coming.
You can reach me at Daniel MillerSwedge, DanielMiller, S-W-A-J-A-Gmail.com.
Value your questions, your insights, things you think I've overlooked, questions, clarifications.
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Hey everyone, it's your two favorite horror podcasters, professors, and nerds.
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