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In her homophobic attacks on “toxic empathy” as it relates to marriage equality and queer sexuality, Allie Beth Stuckey spends more time addressing the Bible than she has in the previous chapters of her book. But what, exactly, does she think the Bible is, and how does she believe we should read it? She gives us an important insight into this when she claims that everything in the Bible is what Jesus taught. But what can that possibly mean? And how does it relate to her promotion of a homophobic reading of the Bible? And what problems and ethical issues arise if we understand the Bible in these terms? And finally, does the Bible really advance the homophobic teachings Stuckey says it does? Check our this week’s episode as Dan dives into these issues.
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Axis Mundi Welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast, Streetwide American Jesus.
My name, as you probably know, is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased as always to be with you.
As always, I want to thank everybody for the support in so many ways, whether you're a subscriber, whether you're just passing the word, whether you are hitting the likes on social media and podcast platforms to keep people coming and to keep people giving us a chance, whether you are reaching out with ideas and thoughts and topics that you think we should be exploring in this series.
Can't do it without you.
This series in particular is driven by you.
The ideas come from you.
So I always welcome those.
And with that in mind, you can reach me best way.
Old school email.
I realize it's old school, but I guess I'm old enough to be old school.
Daniel Miller Swedge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com.
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Love to hear from you.
Respond to as many folks as I can.
I realize that's not enough, but thank you for that.
And a last thank you.
Prior to recording this, had our first live bonus episode for subscribers where people could join us online and kind of watch and be a part of that as we record it and enter questions and give us, you know, allow us to sort of respond in real time.
Great event.
Thank you all for participating in doing that.
I want to dive in this week, continuing our dive into the really awful right-wing denunciations of empathy as the path to ruination.
The idea that what is wrong with America, what is wrong with progressives, everything that confronts us, everything that's problematic for us is that we are too empathetic.
And we've been looking at Alibeth Stuckey's book, excuse me, Toxic Empathy, and her articulation of this.
And so we're continuing on with a look at the chapter on her book called Love is Love, where she seeks to show why acceptance of gay people and specifically marriage equality is a mistake brought about through excessive empathy.
And again, she calls the chapter Love and Love because she believes that's a lie.
That's one of the lies that toxic empathy leads us into.
I, of course, accept the sentiment behind the slogan and what it means for marriage equality and so forth.
But this is the chapter where she takes this on.
And last episode, we considered some of the overarching claims she makes about so-called biblical marriage and by extension, sort of Christian marriage, claims she makes about what marriage is.
And I tried to show briefly, there are volumes and volumes and volumes written about this and really invite you to go take a look or reach out if you're interested in more of that.
But I showed briefly that there has never been a single Christian perspective on marriage.
It has never been consistent.
And this goes all the way to the Bible itself.
And so basically trying to say that this perception of what marriage is and the self-evident nature of that doesn't hold up.
The latter point's important, as I say, where that goes all the way back to the Bible itself.
We talked about Paul and so forth.
That latter point's important because this episode, we're going to consider more of what Stuckey has to say about the Bible.
And as we've noted repeatedly, she insists that her book represents her take on those issues, but her take viewed through a quote-unquote biblical lens.
But in the chapters we've looked at so far, again, this is the third chapter, she's been pretty thin on actual discussion of the Bible.
And that's a notable feature.
And I've talked some about why I think that is.
That's a pattern I think we'll see going forward.
But it's a little different in this chapter.
It's still not the bulk of the chapter.
It's not the first thing that she talks about.
It's not something she foregrounds.
But she does talk more about the Bible and specific Bible verses than she does in previous chapters.
And what I think this might reflect is the fact, again, I noted this last episode, but I want to keep it in front of us, the fact that critiquing gay sexuality has been a right-wing hobby that goes a lot further back than the other issues that we've looked at, like trans identity and abortion access.
And it's just, if I think back to when I was a kid and growing up in evangelicalism and when I was a pastor and so forth, there was no anti-vaxing.
Trans people weren't on the radar screen.
Back then, opposition to what we would now call social justice or DEI was not as out in the open and it was coded very differently than it is at present.
So that stuff has changed.
I think the articulation has changed.
Opposition to queer sexuality has not.
And so I think that might be why she spends more time talking about the Bible.
And this chapter spends a lot of time rehearsing the typical evangelical list of anti-gay Bible passages.
There's a pretty typical list.
And if you pick up a book, and I'll reference this again later, there are a lot of books written to try to counter the anti-sort of homophobic reading of the Bible.
And there's just a sort of fixed set of verses that are going to show up in every discussion, and they show up in her discussion.
But she also confronts a typical liberal or progressive Christian counter argument.
In other words, an argument that queer affirming Christians will also make.
And I want to start with a consideration of what she says about it because it tells us, Again, more of sort of what she thinks about the Bible in general and how it works.
And again, we're talking about Stucky because it's not just about Stucky.
Uncle Ron is Stucky in a lot of ways.
Her podcast is called Relatable and she refers to men who listen to it as Relatabros.
Not kidding.
She says that in an interview.
Uncle Ron could be one of those people.
She is significant because she is typical in so many ways of this mindset.
And so what she says about the Bible is important here.
Okay.
So here's the argument.
This is the argument that a lot of liberal or progressive Christians will make.
I've heard this argument many, many times.
They will say in the Gospels, the first four books of the Christian New Testament that detail the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Okay, that's what's important.
They'll say in the Gospels, Jesus does not condemn homosexuality or same-sex attraction.
So, the argument continues, if he is silent on the issue, we are wrong to condemn a form of sexual identity and expression that he himself does not condemn.
Now, even if I'm speaking as a queer affirming Christian, I've never found this line of critique all that convincing.
An argument from silence is not the best argument.
So I've never found it all that compelling.
Not for the reason Stuckey doesn't, but I haven't.
But her response to this line of critique is really telling, and it's what I want to spend a fair amount of time with in this episode.
So here's what she says to this response.
Her response to this argument from liberal and progressive Christians.
She says, and I'm quoting her, it misrepresents Jesus because he is God.
Therefore, whatever God says in the Old or New Testament, Jesus also says.
Jesus' words aren't limited to what we read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
End quote.
Basically, she says, appeals to the incarnation.
Jesus is God, and because Jesus is God, everything in the Bible says is what Jesus says because the Bible's biblically divinely inspired and so forth.
Okay.
Last week, as I was prepping to put together this episode, I read the transcript of an interview that Stuckey did for the New York Times.
And in the interview, she really pats herself on the back for being a reformed Christian.
That is, a Christian who speaks from the position of the theology of John Calvin.
I talked more about this in our bonus episode, if you get a chance to listen to that about the way that being reformed is coded within conservative Christianity.
And most of what she said this meant, right?
So she talks about, you know, that she would identify as reformed and what this means for her.
Most of what she said it meant isn't actually unique to reformed theology, but that's not why she really identifies herself as reformed.
The real reason is, again, to reiterate this, that within contemporary conservative American Christianity, reformed is code for really conservative.
Within a Christian subculture where the more theologically conservative you are, the better you are, the better you are as a Christian, calling yourself reformed is essentially a form of theological virtue signaling.
And this is what we hear from her in the interview with two particular points that are relevant for us as we look at what she says about the Bible.
So she affirms that being reformed implies, quote, a really big emphasis on theological study, end quote.
And she says it includes the affirmation of, quote, biblical literalism in a lot of ways, end quote.
And this appeal to literalism, of course, is a reference to anerrancy, a view that I've spent a lot of time discussing.
Why do I highlight these two points, particularly the one about theological study?
Well, it's because of this.
The understanding of the Bible she outlines as a self-professed reformed, you know, Christian person who really studies theology, the understanding of the Bible she outlines is really bad theology on Protestant Christian grounds.
It's just really bad theology.
It also ties in with the failure of people like Stuckey to know anything about historical theology or the traditions they draw from, which we talked about last episode.
And here's why I say it's bad theology.
The classical Protestant theological position, and Protestants have long held to this principle, it's phrased typically in Latin, sola scriptura or scripture alone, that everything we do should be based on scripture.
And it's that idea that often forms the core of appeals to inerrancy.
Okay.
But that phrase or the classical Protestant position is not that, quote, everything in the Bible is what Jesus said because Jesus was God.
It is not, quoting, Stuckey again.
It's not what she says.
It's also not inerrancy, by the way, which is really a 19th century doctrinal innovation.
But that's a discussion that would take us a lot further afield.
But it's not the claim that she makes that, well, Jesus is God, so everything in the Bible is what Jesus said.
The classical position is that Jesus becomes the principle of interpretation for the rest of scripture, that his life and teachings are the basis for interpreting everything else the Bible says, which means, in my view, that the liberal Protestants who contest or revise understandings of scriptural passages in light of Jesus' teachings are actually more consistently Protestant than conservative inerrantists are.
Because that has been the Protestant principle.
And I'm talking about Protestantism.
The issue is really complex in Catholicism.
I don't mean to leave that out, but Stuckey's a very, very Protestant Christian thinker.
So Stuckey adopts a theological approach that has had no place in historical Christianity, despite her claims to express a universal, timeless, and unchanging theological approach.
Despite her patting herself on the back for, you know, being a reformed Christian who's into theological study, this is watery theology that she's got.
Okay.
But let's grant this approach just for the sake of argument.
Let's set all that aside.
Let's just say, okay, stucky, I accept your argument and let's say for the sake of argument that everything the Bible says is what Jesus says because Jesus was God.
Okay.
Even if we accept this weak ass theology, it's a hugely problematic approach.
And here's why.
It's going to make Jesus say everything terrible in the Bible.
The Bible says a lot of things that even the inerrantists have to wrestle with.
And Stuckey just put them all into the mouth of Jesus.
With the specific aim of, you know, making Jesus condemn homosexuality.
That's the cost that comes with that.
She's going to put everything else into Jesus' mouth and teaching.
So I want to take a few minutes and I want to listen to some of the other things that she's now committed to saying Jesus affirms.
And fair warning, some of this is pretty intense and it's not pleasant to think about.
Okay.
On one level, and I'll return to this in a while, but on one level, there's just the basic part of the Hebrew legal codes that most Christians don't believe are still in effect.
So, yeah, there are passages condemning men who quote unquote lie together, end quote.
And Stuckey wants Jesus to affirm those.
But she's not talking, I don't think, about prohibitions about eating shellfish or where the Hebrew Bible says you can't eat pork or eating meat with blood in it, which is actually reiterated in the New Testament.
So if you're into like, you know, eating a rare steak, that's out.
Certain forms of body modification and decoration, specifically listing tattoos or not cutting the hair on the sides of our heads or wearing cloth of more than more than one, fabric of more than one fiber, right?
Things like this.
The list goes on and on and on.
So she's going to say everything in the Bible is what Jesus says, but are you sure?
Are you sure you want to say that?
Those passages are just sort of issues of consistency.
The issue that keeps me up at night, the issue that kept me awake as an evangelical theologian, the issue that anerant is still to wrestle with, it's the violence in the Bible.
So just some examples.
When the Hebrews were told to take the quote-unquote promised land, the land of Canaan, there were commands placed in the mouth of God to commit genocide, to kill every living thing in the land.
There's the story of the destruction of the city of Jericho.
We've talked about that on the podcast before.
It's in Joshua 6, where, you know, the city walls fall and the Israelites go in and they slaughter everybody in the city.
It also includes patently misogynistic passages that focus on violence against women.
There's a modern classic, a book written in the 1980s by Phyllis Tribble called Texts of Terror that offered an early feminist critique of particular Hebrew Bible stories.
And at least since then, I mean, these stories have been problematic, but this has loomed large in people's minds.
So an example, the story of a woman named Hagar.
She was an Egyptian slave woman who was handed over to Abraham to bear him a male heir when his wife could not.
And then when his wife Sarah, miraculously become pregnant, becomes pregnant, Hagar is forced to flee into the wilderness with her son.
She's basically abandoned.
And the whole story is in Genesis about this, but an awful story.
There's the story of Tamar.
Tamar is a daughter of King David, who is raped by her brother Amnon, I believe half-brother.
She becomes a desolate woman, and her father is quote-unquote angry that this happened, but can't bring himself to punish his son because he loves him.
So you get this story of incestual rape, and basically the victim just has to deal with her trauma as best she can because her dad won't enact justice for her.
There are a couple stories, awful stories about sacrificing women to gang rape.
There are two separate Hebrew Bible passages with strong parallels.
One is in Judges.
In Judges 19, a Levite is traveling with his concubine.
When the men of the town that he's staying in, they threaten him with sexual violence.
He hands over his concubine together with his host's virgin daughter, quote unquote, and they're raped to death.
They basically throw these women to the wolves to save themselves.
An earlier story in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 19, this is a story a lot of people might know.
The story of a guy named Lot.
He invites two mysterious figures who, in the story, they're like angels in disguise or something.
He invites them to stay into his home, offers them hospitality.
It's an ancient Near Eastern conception of hospitality and a principle you're supposed to follow.
The men of the town surround the house and threaten the visitors again with sexual violence.
So what does Lot do?
He offers his two virgin daughters to the mob to save the strangers.
They're not handed over in that story, but he offers.
He basically says, let me give you my two untouched daughters and you can do with them what you will.
Hmm.
Good parenting.
Beautiful stories.
There's a story of a guy named Jephthah who vows to God, makes a vow to God that he will sacrifice whomever he first sees if God will grant him victory over his enemies.
So they have this battle.
He gets victory.
And of course, the first person he sees is his daughter.
So he follows through on the promise and sacrifices her to God.
Here's the point.
And we could elaborate other stories.
We could talk about other things.
Here's the point.
These stories and these appeals to Hebrew law, they have long been vexing and difficult passages of the Bible for Christians.
And in my view, inerrancy heightens the difficulties.
It makes them more problematic.
When you want to say everything in the Bible is everything God wanted to say and so forth, what do you do with those passages to say nothing of historical difficulties and so forth?
But here's where we're at with Stuckey, right?
Attributing these passages as direct teachings of Jesus, it makes the issue even more problematic.
What does it mean to say Jesus is directly teaching the stories of Tamar or Hagar or Jephthah's daughter or sacrificing women to gang rape?
What does that mean?
This is the cost of her really facile and simplistic assertion that everything in the Bible comes from Jesus.
That's what that means.
That's what it means if you follow through on that.
And so she puts what have long been morally objectionable passages in the position of core Christian teachings, in my view.
That's what it is.
If you're going to say, well, Jesus said everything that's in the Bible, all for the purpose of being able to condemn gay people.
That's what she's doing.
So that's the first thing.
And again, I realize in this chapter, maybe more even than the others, I've spent a lot of time to do these kind of overarching meta-issues, but they're going to come up because they're core to how she reads the Bible and how she reasons.
Okay?
So those are some general Bible things, but I want to take some time and dive into some of the more specific things that she says because I think it's important to do that.
We're not going to give a full treatment of this, but I think it's important to address it.
Okay?
When Stuckey and people like her make use of the Bible in their anti-queer arguments, there are a couple of patterns that they follow, and it makes all of these problems worse.
Okay?
And the first is the collapsing of biblical descriptions with biblical prescriptions.
And I hope that that makes sense, that way of phrasing that.
What do I mean?
Most of the Hebrew Bible in particular, a good chunk of the New Testament, most of the Hebrew Bible is narrative.
It contains stories.
And inerrantists believe that these stories are accurate descriptions or accounts of events that happened in the past.
Okay?
So, and so if somebody wanted to say, well, you know, they're just stories that Jesus is telling, you know, if they wanted to sort of defend Stuckey's view, we're not saying Jesus thinks these things are good.
They're just stories that he tells.
But, and here's the but, at the same time, inerrantists and conservative Christians, they take many of these descriptive narrative accounts as normative prescriptions of the way that things should be.
In other words, they don't see them as merely descriptive.
They're not just an account of what happened.
They are telling us how things should be.
And we talked about this in the last chapter of her book.
Sorry, not the last chapter.
In this chapter, last episode, excuse me.
She appeals to the biblical account of the creation of the first human pair as male and female.
That is not taken simply as a description of what God did.
It is taken as a norm, a prescriptive account of gender and sexuality and sexual identity and so forth.
It's the whole basis of anti-trans readings.
It's the whole basis of heteronormative readings of the Bible.
But none of that's explicit in the text.
It's just a story.
The text doesn't say this is how every human pair has to be.
This is, I don't know, the only kinds of humans that are created.
It's not explicit.
It doesn't tell us how to interpret the narrative.
The narrative is taken as normative in its description.
And the difficulty for the inerrantists, because you could say, okay, well, so everything in the Bible has to be taken as normative.
The difficulty for the inerrantists is that they don't actually interpret all the narratives this way.
So a great example of this is in the book of Acts in chapters 2 and 4.
There are passages that describe the early Christian community, and they say that they shared their possessions in common, and they did away with private property, that they sold all of their stuff and gave the proceeds to the poor and so forth.
You want a test of not taking narratives as normative as the way things ought to be?
Just go and talk about those passages with a conservative Christian.
Because any conservative Christian, certainly in the affluent, wealthy United States, any conservative Christian will dismiss that story as having any normative force, and they will say it is merely descriptive.
It's descriptive of what the early Christian community did.
It is not binding on the contemporary Christian community.
Any suggestion that it is binding, it'll be dismissed as socialist or now as being woke.
They'll dismiss that reading.
In Matthew chapter 5, there's a passage where Jesus says famously, not to resist quote-unquote evildoers, but to turn the other cheek and so forth, not to enact vengeance on one's enemies and so on.
Just go to a temporary Christian conservative and suggest that maybe that tells us how, I don't know, the government should work or how we should respond to other people who we perceive to be attacking us or that this is what foreign policy should be about.
Just try it.
They will tell you that this teaching is at best about individual ethics and doesn't have anything to do about society at large or government or anything like that.
And I've had these conversations on both of these issues with conservative Christians for decades.
Here's the point, and we could elaborate more examples again.
The same conservative Christians like Stuckey, who assure us as they read the Bible supposedly literally, that it is without error, that they assure us that that's how they read the Bible, when she says everything in the Bible is what Jesus says, and when they say a narrative passage like the beginnings of Genesis tells us how things ought to be,
it turns out that they're super selective about what passages those principles actually apply to, what passages they actually think should be taken literally, what passages of narrative and story they actually think tell us how Christians have to practice now.
And that's why so many of those other accounts I highlight is a problem.
Because conservative Christians will often respond by saying, well, you know, the story of Jericho, it's just a story.
It's not saying that, I don't know, in Christian warfare, we should go in and slaughter everybody.
The stories about men throwing women to a pack of wolves to be raped to death, that's not normative.
That's not telling us like how men and women ought to relate to each other.
It's just a story.
But they have no way to distinguish when narrative passages should be read as mere descriptions and when they're prescriptive, except that it's easier for them.
If you are going to say that narrative is a normative, prescriptive part of scripture, that it tells us how things ought to be, you're going to need to do better than just picking and choosing when you decide to apply that principle.
They have no way to distinguish when narrative passages should be read as mere descriptions and when they're prescriptive.
And Stuckey's insistence that they're all Jesus' words, it only makes this worse.
She just takes what's already, in my view, one of many fatal flaws in contemporary conservative understandings of the Bible, and she makes it worse.
So if we apply this to the typical anti-queer interpretations of the Bible, any of the narrative passages to which they appeal can essentially be dismissed on these grounds.
In other words, when Uncle Ron says, well, you know, the first male and female show us that God intended humanity to be men and women and to be unified in lifelong heterosexual marriage commitments and so forth, or he commanded them to be fruitful and multiply, which means that, you know, procreation is the purpose of marriage and it means that marriage can only be between two people who can procreate, which are all arguments Stuckey makes.
I'm putting them in the mouth of Uncle Ron because they are typical conservative arguments.
When they make that, just point out the book of Acts teaching the Christians to be socialists.
Okay, Uncle Ron.
Okay, Ali Beth Stuckey, you want to take narrative passages as normative?
Well, let's go all the way then.
And they're not going to do it, which means that they're not going to do that.
We got no reason that we need to play their game and respond to those other narrative passages as if they have normative force.
Okay?
So that's one of the difficulties that these appeals to anti-queer passages in the Bible make is that they appeal to narrative portions, descriptive narrative portions of the Bible.
And the conservative Christians just can't give us any reason why we should accept their interpretation of those.
Okay.
Let's talk about the other difficulty here.
And this is well recognized.
None of this is unique to me.
Okay.
The second very well recognized difficulty is the appeal to the Jewish law.
And I referenced this earlier.
And so if you're not familiar with the term or it's been a while, law here refers to a huge portion of the Hebrew Bible that offers various commands that have to do with like ethics and cleanliness and sort of ceremonial and ritual purity and so forth.
And there's a passage in the book of Exodus, excuse me, in the book of Leviticus, which is one of the law books that supposedly condemns gay sex.
It's the one that says that two men shouldn't lie together.
It's a favorite of the anti-queer crowd, and it is taken from Jewish law.
But as I cited above, there are a lot of other passages that conservative Christians do not think apply to Christians.
And so they always, and I, when I was an anti-queer, conservative Christian, and I would throw out the Leviticus passage, somebody would say, okay, but does that mean that you think God prohibits eating shellfish or pork or blood with meat in it or cutting the hair on the sides of your heads or what have you?
That's the standard rejoinder.
And the reason why conservative Christians don't think that these other passages apply is that one, there's the Christian teaching that Jesus fulfilled the demands of the Jewish law, so it no longer applies to Christians.
It's a teaching that's drawn from interpretations in the New Testament.
That is a standard Protestant and typically Catholic piece of theology.
And in Acts 15, there was a council of early Christians that met in Jerusalem, and they argued that Christians don't need to follow the Mosaic law in the Hebrew Bible.
They gave a few exceptions, but that's what they said.
So when Stuckey or Uncle Ron or whomever throws a verse out from Leviticus to you to argue that queer people are sinful, just throw out the passages about tattoos and shellfish and so forth, which they don't accept as binding.
They have no basis for just picking and choosing when they're going to apply these passages from the Hebrew Bible when they don't apply all of them.
And again, Stuckey saying everything in the Bible is a teaching of Jesus arguably undermines this core theological principle of conservatism for the reformed Christian who tells us how into theological study she is.
Okay.
So those are broad issues of her appeal to the Bible, broad issues that poke holes in it.
There are a few other passages that typically come up, and I'm not going to pretend to take them all on here beyond offering a couple general observations, but again, I think they have to be mentioned.
As noted before, and to be clear, and I've said this lots of other times, I'm just really not, I'm just not going to go to a text that's thousands of years old to develop my views on sex and gender or psychology.
Okay.
I'm just not going to do that.
So my more standard approach is to, you know, if somebody says, well, the Bible says, I don't really care what the Bible says.
I think we know better things about sex and gender and psychology than the Bible has to tell us at this point, especially when it comes to these issues.
But, okay, but Christians will draw on these.
And if you have to respond to them, if you have to engage, here are some thoughts.
Many of the passages which anti-gay opponents appeal to are those that condemn quote-unquote sexual immorality.
Sexual immorality is a thing that's condemned a lot in the Christian Bible.
The trick is that it's ambiguous and ill-defined.
It doesn't really tell us what that is.
There's no like catalog list of exactly what sexual immorality is.
So when people appeal to it, it's often question begging or they're using circular reasoning.
In other words, one starts with the assumption, in this case, that queer sexuality is sexually immoral.
Then they go to the Bible and they say, up, up, sexual immorality.
One of the things in the Hebrew Bible that has said Christians were still supposed to do was avoid sexual immorality.
There we go.
But it doesn't tell us what sexual immorality is.
Okay?
And I know we can get more detailed about this.
If folks want to email and get into more discussions about Bible passages, we can.
But that's my general take is one of the key things that they appeal to is just, you have to have circular reasoning.
You have to presuppose what the Bible is supposed to tell you to make it work.
And another of the key passages for the anti-gay biblical activist is Romans chapter 1, verses 26 and 27, where same-sex attraction is presented as an expression of lust.
But those who are interested in defending a queer, inclusive reading of the Bible, they'll point out that passages like this, they don't actually say anything about the idea of committed, faithful, same-sex relationships.
So they don't apply to issues like marriage equality.
And this is a pretty typical argument, again, among those who are interested in or concerned to affirm a sort of queer inclusive reading of the Bible, who want to say the Bible actually affirms queer sexuality.
Again, that's just not the game that I'm trying to play, that I'm interested in playing.
I want to be fully queer inclusive, but it's not because I think the Bible tells us we have to be.
Okay.
But they'll point out and say, you know, even if we accept that the Bible condemns, you know, lust or sexual immorality, we're talking about committed relationships.
And when we talk about marriage equality, that's what we're after and so forth.
And I realize that there are plenty within the queer community and elsewhere and allies that contest the whole notion of marriage because of those presumptions of lifelong commitment and so forth.
But this is the argument that they'll make.
And they're right.
It's anachronistic to take the concept of marriage equality, especially if it does presuppose, you know, faithful same-sex relationships, you know, for life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the traditional marriage stuff, and project it onto these passages in the Bible.
Here's the point.
The Bible does not condemn same-sex attraction or queer identity the way that Stuckey thinks it does, unless you have a really problematic view of the Bible.
And she does.
You take out those Hebrew Bible passages, you stop appealing to narratives, you stop appealing to the law, you stop presupposing what sexual immorality is.
You are left with a very, very small number of Bible passages that have anything to do with queer sexuality.
And that's the last point that I want to bring up.
And it's something I want us to hold on to for a while because we're going to revisit it a couple chapters from now in her book when we get to the last chapter.
The Bible puts forward at most, even if you accept all the passages that Stuckey is going to throw at us, all the passages that Uncle Ron is going to cite, all the passages I grew up hearing that condemn queer sexuality, even if you accept all of those, it means that the Bible puts forward at most, it's like a handful of passages that form the basis for conservative Christian opposition to queer inclusion and marriage equality.
It's a small number of passages.
By way of contrast, there are hundreds of verses advocating economic and social justice.
If you want to just say, you know what?
I mean, you know, okay, so let's say that everything in the Bible is what God says.
Everything in the Bible is what Jesus says.
Man, God spent a lot more time advancing economic and social justice than talking about queer sexuality or abortion or gender identity.
Like way more, literally hundreds of times more time and effort.
Yet, conservative Christians, the same conservative Christians who will insist that the Bible is clear on condemning abortion access, on condemning transgender identity, on condemning queer sexuality, they will dismiss any notion that the Bible actually demands social justice, despite the fact that there are hundreds of verses.
And this is another point to bring up.
For me, this is an even, you know, a really weighty point to bring up with the Stuckies and Uncle Rons of the world.
You insist that the Bible's quote unquote literal, that it's inerrant, that everything in it is what Jesus says?
Why do you focus on these issues that it hardly says anything about and elevate those and lift those up while you just dismiss a range of issues that it spends hundreds of verses talking about?
You make something the Bible addresses at best only really sparingly the central core of your moral and social teaching, but you take what is a central teaching of the Bible and you relegate it to the side or you deny it altogether.
Explain that to me, Alibeth Stuckey.
Explain that to me, Uncle Ron.
And we're going to revisit this point when we get to the final chapter of Stuckey's book where she gives her argument against contemporary social justice movements.
And I haven't read the chapter yet.
Again, I'm reading this as I go.
I'm really curious to see how she's going to respond to that recognition that the Bible says lots and lots of things about justice.
I can tell you right now, she's going to try to make it something about how the vision of justice in the Bible is impartial and applies to everybody.
And I'll give you my reasons why I think that's a bunch of bunk.
But that's another point to bring up.
You want to make all these claims, conservative Christians, just be consistent.
You want to have some narrative passages that have prescriptive force that tell us the way things have to be?
Cool.
Just articulate a clear teaching on like why that is and why you've chosen the ones you have and you ignore others.
Just do it.
Okay?
Tie these things together.
I know there's sort of a lot of ground today and a lot of Bible stuff and bringing this together.
To sort of reiterate why we're spending this much time on these issues in this chapter in particular, a lot of the culture war issues that currently engage the right, again, they're relatively new issues.
Anti-vaxing, anti-masking, anti-trans activism, open opposition to social justice, etc.
They're relatively new culture war issues.
But again, opposition to same-sex attraction has been a central point of contention for a long time.
It certainly predates, by the way, contemporary conservative Christianity.
This is an issue that the Christian tradition going way back has very typically condemned.
So this is an old habit for conservative Christians.
Even if the explicit topic of marriage equality gives kind of a new dimension to this, the general issue goes way back.
And so to an even greater extent than some of those other issues, I think the Bible looms large here.
And I think that's why Stuckey's appeal to the Bible is more explicit and forceful in this chapter.
So it gives us a good opportunity because she's appealing to the Bible, I think, more forcefully than she has, because this is the chapter where she puts forward this silly notion that, well, Jesus is God, so everything in the Bible is something Jesus said, it's a good place to talk about that.
But I want us to keep in front of us, this is not relevant just for this chapter.
This is relevant for the things that she said in the first two chapters.
It's going to be relevant for the things she says in the next two chapters.
It's also relevant because Stuckey is never speaking just for Stucky.
There's a reason why she gets millions of downloads of her podcast, and it is because what she says resonates with millions of conservative Christians.
She identifies her core demographic as Christian women, conservative women, rather, she doesn't say Christians, as conservative and Christian, women ages, I think she says, 25 to 45.
What she says, the way that she says it, the reasoning she puts forward, the reason those people listen is because it resonates with them.
It makes sense to them.
It is how they also think.
So it's worth taking the time to understand what it is.
I hope I'm putting forward some reasons why I think it's a really, really problematic way to speak and why those same Christians like Stuckey who pat themselves on the back about their theological and biblical sophistication just are lacking both.
Okay.
A homophobic reading of the Bible, it just doesn't hold up the way the conservatives think that it does.
And for me, that's true at the meta level on just the understanding of what the Bible even is and how we should read it and what it can tell us and what it can't.
But on the more specific, granular level of the Bible passages that she cites, I think it doesn't hold up either.
And again, we don't have time to get way into that.
There are lots of great resources out there.
Okay.
More significantly, I think when we look at how they use the Bible, it reveals the very problematic use of the Bible at the core of everything they do and say.
And for me, the interest of this series and the work that I try to do here, it reiterates or reinforces a point I've made many times, which is it's not really about the Bible.
Conservative Christians don't hold the views they do because they're in the Bible.
They read the Bible the way they do because they hold those views.
We could make that statement more complex.
We could make it more nuanced.
It's a discussion I'd be happy to have.
If that's something that's of interest to you, hold on to that for the next bonus episode when we meet live, and I'd love to talk about it.
Tells us a lot.
Got to end this.
These episodes have been long as we go through Stuckey.
There's just so much to say, but thank you for listening again.
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I say this a lot.
If you're spending time listening to this, you could be spending that time doing something else.
