It's in the Code ep 159: “No Human Is Illegal, Pt.2”
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 850-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Allie Beth Stuckey advances a typically xenophobic, right-wing immigration agenda, focused on using misinformation and scare-mongering to justify keeping (primarily) non-White immigrants out of the US. And she says that she does so for “biblical” reasons. But what are these reasons? What biblical rationale does she offer? And how does she deal with the numerous Bible passages that command care for the “foreigner,” the “sojourner,” the “stranger among you”? Listen to this week’s episode as Dan tackles these issues, uncovering a pattern of selective appeals to the Bible that is typical of high-control conservative Christianity.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
www.feyyaz.tv Welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, your host, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
college glad as always to be with you and as always want to start by saying thank you for listening thank you for supporting us in so many ways this series in particular uh is driven by you uh please let me know what you think daniel miller swaj daniel miller swaij at gmail.com welcome your thoughts on these episodes welcome your uh input on your sort of new episodes new series we are continuing to look at alibeth stucky's book toxic empathy but we're coming to the end of that and
i've got some things lined up for upcoming weeks and months but i'm always looking out and looking to the future so if you've got other topics series that you would be interested in other books that you think are worth a look.
I'd love to know, would love to hear that.
So Daniel Miller swag, Daniel Miller swa jgmail.com.
I do also haunt the discord for subscribers when I'm able.
So I want to dive into today.
As I just mentioned, we're continuing to look at Alibeth Stucky's Toxic Empathy.
And again, the reason we're doing this is not because of Alibeth Stucky.
We're doing this because of, on one hand, this kind of right-wing attack on empathy at present.
It's something that is sort of, I don't know, emerged as a cause or an interest for those on the right.
But also because the way that Alibeth Stuckey does this in her book, she touches on a bunch of issues, five main topics that are sort of part and parcel of the right-wing culture war at present.
And what she says and the way that she says it is so typical of so much of this discourse.
And so I think it's worth decoding it and diving into it.
And that's what we've been doing.
Her book, again, is organized in terms of five what she calls lies.
As I've said multiple times, I affirm all of these lies as truths.
But we've been looking at lie number four, which is, quote, no human is illegal.
In other words, this is the fourth chapapter of her five chapter book where she is presenting her, basically her anti-immigration policies and the rationale for those.
And in this episode, we started this in the prior episode.
We're continuing on.
In this episode, we're going to look at the supposedly biblical reason she gives for her opposition to immigration.
And the reason we're going to do that is, as a reminder, Stucky has insisted that what she presents for us in her book is a biblical lens through which to view all the different topics she discusses.
Now, it's interesting that she really, frankly, in this book, I think, presents herself as a conservative first and a Christian second.
I think she would challenge that way of describing it, but I think that that's how it actually plays out in the book.
But she does say that it's all there in a biblical lens, that this is a Christian perspective, a Christian worldview.
And of course, if you have engaged the religious components of American Christian nationalism and right-wing ideology, you know.
that the argument is that these are biblical positions.
And I talk about the Bible a lot and what it means to be biblical and inerrancy and all of that.
You know that that's a standard part of this discourse.
Okay.
So we're looking at that as it relates to immigration.
And as we've seen, her chapters are pretty light on actual appeals to the Bible.
They're usually pretty long, and her sections on the Bible are like less than 10% of the chapter, and they come pretty late.
And the same thing is going to happen in this chapter.
And the reason I think that that's significant is that her actual use of the Bible illustrates patterns that are common within American high-control religion, especially when they claim to be And when they do, it's not in that much detail and it's not that consistent.
This is a typical pattern.
Why?
The reason is simple.
They hold the positions they do because they are typical of political and social conservatives, not because they come from the Bible.
And this is something that I think a lot of people understand, but I also encounter people routinely who say to me, they say, look, Dan, I get it.
They believe the Bible.
They think it's literally true, whatever.
But like, where do they get this view on, I don't know, gun rights or immigration or whatever?
My answer is, it's not actually coming from the Bible.
It's wrapped up in their political identity.
And then they will go to the Bible and they will look hard for passages.
that if you squint at them real, real, real, you know, just the right way and you look at them from the right angle and you ignore a whole bunch of other Bible passages, they can say it's a biblical perspective.
It's not originating in the Bible.
And we have seen this in her book, In Spades.
And this chapter, for me, provides the clearest illustration so far of this.
And the reason is simple.
It is very, very difficult to put forward any form of quote unquote biblical rationale for the xenophobic kinds of anti-immigration policies that Stucky advances.
And so looking at how she actually interacts with the Bible in this chapter, how she actually responds to that issue, illustrates why those Christian conservatives who insist that they draw their views from the Bible, they'rere not acting in good faith.
It's not what they're actually doing.
And yes, this means all the people in your life who probably mean well and are good, good Bible believing people, and they think that the perspectives they hold are held because they come from the Bible, but they're not.
They're not acting in good faith, even if they think that they are.
So let's start with this, okay?
Why do I say it's difficult to defend Stucky's xenophobic view on biblical grounds?
The answer is really simple.
The Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, but not just the Hebrew Bible, in multiple places, admonishes its readers to protect and care for those whom they would identify as refugees and migrants.
We want to translate that into today's language.
Lots of passages.
It's a central theme, again, especially in the Hebrew Bible.
And Stucky knows this.
So the really telling point is like, you're not going to score points against Stucky by saying, well, you know, there are Bible verses that say this.
She knows that.
The really telling point is to see what she does with that.
How does she deal with that?
And that's what we're going to take a look at.
Okay?
So.
As a first point, again, the pattern that we've seen in other chapters as well.
This chapter is about 31 pages long.
Stucky does not get around to giving us her quote unquote biblical perspective until 23 pages in.
And again, it's about four pages of text.
Okay.
Relatively short section, two-thirds of the way through a chapter before she gets around to giving her so-called biblical perspective.
I just find that telling from somebody who claims that she's presenting basically a social theory through a biblical lens.
Okay.
But when she does get to it, this is what she says.
She opens up her section.
This is on page 120 of her book.
She opens up her section by saying this, quote, some Christians who oppose stricter immigration laws argue that the Bible orders us to love the foreigner end quote and she goes on to acknowledge grudgingly it seems to me that that this is in fact the case she goes on and says this quote scripture indeed contains several verses about respecting and loving the sojourner and foreigner and then she goes on to cite a grand total of two of these
passages so she says she acknowledges yeah there are several she cites two So I want to look at a number of moves that she makes in this chapter to basically get around these verses, verses that very clearly, very explicitly say, say if you're a conservative Christian who says the Bible is speaking to you and so forth that you're supposed to care for the foreigner, the sojourner, the migrant, what have you.
So here's move number one on her part.
Okay.
World relief, to give one example, you can Google this, you can look around online, but world relief identifies 21 such Bible passages.
No, she said, yeah, there are several.
Yeah, there are few.
And then she cites two.
It gives the impression that, yeah, there are a couple of verses that say that, but, you know, no, there are 21.
So her first move is by, in my view, is by noting only two and describing them as several, she gives the impression that these passages are.
fleeting and scattered.
In fact, there are many more such passages than there are dealing with abortion or anything having to do with queer identity.
Issues that she's already addressed.
Queer identity, you're talking about maybe a handful of passages in the entire Bible.
Abortion, fewer.
It says almost nothing.
And we've looked at what she says about those.
You have to try really hard to make the Bible talk more about these topics than it does.
Here there's at least 21 verses and folks that's verses you could talk about other themes I'm not going to have time to get into it here but we could bring up the whole thing about the nativity story of Jesus being born and Mary and Joseph and what are they they're persecuted by King Herod so they flee into Egypt.
They're like, they're refugees.
They're asylum seekers.
We could talk about the theology of the book of Nehemiah with the emphasis on walls and maintaining the people and so forth.
And the Hebrew Bible book of Ruth, which is this like counterbalancing text where this person who's not even part of the Hebrew people plays this central role in preserving them and then is later like in the lineage of Jesus.
the sort of theological message here that says that we shouldn't just focus on quote unquote our people.
And maybe I'll time to look at that a little bit next episode.
I'm not sure.
The point is there are also broader themes in the Bible that don't reduce to particular verses.
We just want to look at verses.
There's like 21 of them.
Okay?
So if you were engaging with someone like Stucky, or you're having a chat with Uncle Ron, if you're engaging with someone who's constantly throwing Bible passages at you, telling you that they hold the views they do because of the Bible, et cetera, This would seem to be a big deal.
For example, you could cite Leviticus 1934.
This is one of the two passages that Stucky notes.
Here's what Leviticus 1934 says.
It says, quote, Treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
In other words, it hearkens back to the Hebrews being slaves and quote unquote strangers in the land of Egypt and says you should create space for those who are experiencing this kind of oppression and marginalization and so forth.
So the same Bible that conservative Christians are constantly using to denounce queer folk and to deny abortion rights is unequivocal in stating repeatedly that God's people are commanded to care for refugees and migrants.
Argument about immigration settled.
And again, I've had this conversation with people like, you know, they're like, yeah, I've got to argue or discuss or whatever with my family members.
So I do all this looking and I find all these.
Bible verses and on this topic, it's like really, really clear.
And so I go and I think I've got the knockdown, dragdown arguments because they're always telling me that their positions are biblical.
And you unload all these verses, maybe you go through the full litany and what does it do?
Nothing.
Of course they don't change their immigration views because you cite those verses.
Why?
Because conservative opponents of immigration, even and especially those who claim to be quote unquote biblical in their perspective, they will find all kinds of ways to disregard these biblical commandments.
And it's not unique to these.
Another one is when Jesus says something like, it's harder, excuse me, it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven.
Man, you want to try to convince conservative Christians in America that God could actually be saying that it's easier for poor people to get to heaven?
Nah, they'll just dismiss that out of hand.
Even though the verse is right there, that's what it says.
They'll find ways to say, well, yeah, that's what it says.
It's not what it means.
That's what they do.
They will find all kinds of ways to disregard these biblical commandments.
And this is what Stucky does.
So her first way is just to sort of trivialize it by giving the impression that there are very many and that they're few and far between.
Here's her second strategy.
Her second strategy is to blame liberals or progressives of being hypocrites.
Okay?
Here's what she has to say.
So you can imagine somebody talking to her and being like, oh, yeah, Alibeth Stucky.
Well, what about this?
What about all these places where the Bible says you should care for the foreigner or whatever?
Here's what she says.
She says it should be noted that many, particularly progressives, who use these passages as support for liberal immigration policy regularly criticize Christian conservatives for using scripture as support for our own policies, condemning us as tyrannical theocrats.
End quote.
What she's basically saying is, oh, well, how dare you liberals and progressives cite the Bible after criticizing us for doing the same thing.
Who are you to cite Bible passages and throw them at us if you won't let us say that, you know, I don't know, everybody has to obey the state because Paul said so in Romans.
Okay.
It's an evasion.
It doesn't actually deal with the fact that those verses are there.
It's a way of evading it.
And so here's my response to that.
And I've had this discussion with people.
I can't speak for everyone, so I'll speak for myself.
Okay.
So to be clear, I don't cite passages like this because I believe we need to have a quote unquote biblical reason to support inclusive immigration policies.
I do not care at all if people are drawing their immigration policies from the Bible or somewhere else.
And I don't think you have to have biblical reasons.
But I do cite passages like this when I'm engaging people like Stucky or Uncle Rohan because that's what they say they believe.
They are the ones who claim that the Bible is inerrant and authoritative.
They are the ones who say it forms the basis of all of their views and social policies.
They are the ones who say that they vote their conscience because of the Bible and that they voted for Donald Trump and everything he said about immigration because of what the Bible tells them.
the ones making that claim.
So I highlight passages like this because on those grounds, on their own terms, on the terms of what they claim about the Bible, there is simply no way to affirm the kinds of immigration policies that they do.
None.
So quite simply, if we can show that people like Stucky actively disregard what the Bible says much more clearly, explicitly, and insistently on a topic like immigration than it does on the pet topics that they like to attack, like homophobia, or that they want to advance, homophobia, transphobia, anti-abortion policies, and so forth.
If we can show that they disregard what the Bible says somewhere else, it brings into view how selective and self-serving their appeals to the Bible actually are.
And occasionally, it will change someone.
Folks, these kinds of verses are part of what moved me out of conservative, high-control Christianity because I just could not square them with the rest of what I saw within that religious community.
So sometimes it really makes an impact.
Okay.
So when she accuses liberals and progressives of being hypocrites, she misses the point.
The reason we're piloting these passages is because she and those like her are the hypocrites.
So that's her second way is to try to evade it by just calling you a hypocrite.
Here's her third one.
Okay.
Because she has to find ways to actually dismiss the relevance of these passages.
So here's her third strategy.
She accuses those who cite these passages of, quote, completely disregarding the historical and biblical context of the command to love the foreigner.
End quote.
Number one, 21 times at least, mostly throughout the Hebrew Bible.
There's more than one historical context or historical circumstance.
This is a command that cuts across genres and time periods in the Hebrew Bible, Alibeth Stucky.
There's not just one context, you don't get to dismiss it so easily.
Okay.
But even so, this is beyond hypocritical and typical of her and the people like her.
Conservative biblicists, and if you've engaged people who cite Bible verses, you know this, and I've talked about this before.
They routinely appeal to Bible passages and like stitch Bible verses together without any concern for historical context or linguistic analysis or the history of the textual composition.
or consistency or anything else.
They disregard all of that.
And if you bring that up, they'll say, well, you know, the Bible is all God's word.
God is the author.
So yes, even if you use different human authors in different times and places for different reasons to state these things, ultimately it's all God's word and so it all applies here and now and forever.
And Stucky says this elsewhere in her book.
But when they encounter Bible verses that clearly say things they don't like, then they're all about using historical context to try to render those verses irrelevant.
And this is a central contradiction in my view of inerrantist conceptions of the Bible.
They can only affirm the Bible is without error or consistent or whatever by finding ways to disregard huge swaths of scriptural te teaching.
That's a big statement.
I can't go into it.
Let me know if that's something we should follow up on sometime.
But that's what they do.
So she's going to find ways to try to disregard these passages.
So she is suddenly at pains to show that if we attend to historical context and so forth, biblicalist Christians don't really need to worry about commands like these.
Again, even if there are more of them than anything related to abortion or queer identity.
Now, I could say more.
I could go through and I could look at what she actually identifies as the historical context and so forth.
We can do a little bit of that in just a second.
But I want to just pause here to remind us and to bring into view the hypocrisy of Stucky here, to remind us of her absolute disregard for these considerations earlier in her book.
If you've been listening to this series, you'll remember that in her transphobic chapter, or chapter against queer rights, trans rights in particular, it's in chapter two, she cites Isaiah 45, 9 as an argument that people need to accept the gender they're assigned to birth as God-given.
And here's the verse.
This is what the verse says as a reminder.
This is what she said in, or cited in chapter two.
Here's the verse.
Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots.
Does clay say to him who forms it, what are you making or your work has no handles?
End quote.
And her point there is to try to say that, see, we need to accept the way God made us.
We're like pots, and we can't criticize the potter for making us who we are and the gender we are and so forth.
But as I pointed out in that episode, the verse, if you look at the historical context at all, the context of the Bible passage in which it occurs, the verse is about opposition among some within the Hebrew community to reliance on the Persian king who is allowing them to return to their homeland after the exile.
That's the context.
Nothing at all, even tangentially related to gender or like, I don't know, not being angry with God about the way he made us as individuals or something like that.
No connection at all.
But there, Stucky had no interest in historical context or background when she needed a verse that she could use to advance her transphobic agenda.
And the reason she can do that is that number one, most regular people don't know the Bible very well and don't know how to go find that context.
And number two, because the biblicists are used to just stitching Bible verses together.
They don't pay attention to context.
But here, In this context, when she needs to be able to disregard biblical passages, she is suddenly a historian and a linguist.
Suddenly that stuff matters.
So here's the point.
Those who claim that the Bible is inerrant or literally true or whatever, they only do so right up to the point where they need it not to be inerrant or authoritative.
And then they do everything in their power to explain why they don't have to take particular passages literally or do what they say.
And again, if you have engaged folks that argue this way, you have run up against this wall.
And this is the point at which you just pack your stuff up and go home.
Take your toys and go home because there's no point in playing anymore.
Yay?
All of that, that strategy for disregarding the package, excuse me, the passages, it brings us to her fourth strategy which is really the crux of her dismissal of these these passages in this chapter here's what she offers as an overarching statement about these passages she says quote god's command to love the foreigner and the sojourner must be understood against the backdrop of god's character namely his orderliness folks
there is so much going on with this assertion First and most basically, it once again illustrates the kind of God the stucky and high-control religionists actually worship.
What she's saying is to interpret these passages, we have to understand God's character and make sure that we interpret them in line with God's character.
But what is God's character?
What is God like?
It turns out that for her, God's character is not, again, love or compassion or forgiveness or redemption or welcome or anything like that.
No, it's orderliness.
God's defining feature is orderliness.
And we have seen this consistently from Stucky.
We've talked about this before.
She's made the claim throughout the book that divine love and compassion are secondary to divine truth.
She subsumes love under authority routinely.
I've talked about this in other episodes.
This is part and parcel of the same pattern.
The high control Christian's God is an authoritarian, pure and simple.
It's that simple.
And every other characteristic of their God is secondary to this.
So, yeah, she'll be like, well, yeah, I got to love the foreigner, but only the way an authoritarian God would do that.
So, second, the second piece of this to say that God's defining character is orderliness.
is that this is what I call an empty signifier.
That is the word orderliness.
You say, well, God is a God of order.
Okay, cool.
But we can fill that word in in different ways.
Order can mean a lot of different things to different people.
So simply appealing to it doesn't actually tell us all that much.
So what Stucky does, and again, this is typical on the right, she basically, she takes the word order, and for her, order is all about the exercise of authority and power and punishment.
And we're going to come back.
We're going to take a deeper dive into this notion of order and how it plays out in immigration policy and stuff.
We're going to look at that next episode, okay?
But order is all about the exercise of authority and power and punishment.
So what she does is she takes this word order, she fills it in in a particular way.
She gives a particular set of contents to it.
Again, authority, power, and punishment.
But then she frames that in the whole discussion as if that's all that order could be, as if it is self-evident that order means authority and power and punishment.
It could mean something else.
And so this is a move that Christian conservatives will make to say, well, God's a God of order, so you can't just have, you know, inclusive immigration policies without having to actually tell you what order means.
let alone defend the position of the conception of order that they're putting forward.
Let alone defend the idea that that is God's defining feature.
Okay?
She says it is.
That's what she says.
This is what order is for her.
And then third, and this brings us back to the last episode, we talked about the false either or logic that governs her discourse about immigration.
Again, this is typical on the right.
And it maps on to that.
So for her, for example, there is either order, quote unquote, in the sense of absolutely closed borders, keeping everyone out, or there's radical disorder, open borders, which don't exist and no one supports.
rampant lawlessness, which doesn't exist and no one supports, et cetera.
It's an either or.
There's either order or chaos.
That's it.
That's all there is.
by mapping that onto that sort of the false choices that she wants us to make thinking about immigration is to draw the conclusion and paint the picture for us that anything other than the immigration policies of conservatives represents disorder.
And we've seen this.
Likewise, we see in this chapter that undocumented immigrants are presented as inherently a form of disorder within society.
God is a God of order.
Immigrants, undocumented immigrants are a disorder, a sign of disorder within society.
Therefore, we as good Christians need to oppose them because God's all about order.
And so she says this, going back to what she sees as the historical context of these verses, she says when she talks about these verses about treating the foreigner as the native and so forth, she makes a big deal out of the fact that they were to be subject to the same laws as the Israelites.
And basically she says, see, that's the limitation.
That's the order.
They have to be subject to the same laws as the Israelites.
And that brings us back into her fear-mongering from that we talked about last episode about the lawlessness of undocumented immigrants and how undocumented immigrants are an inherent threat and the threat of lawlessness is always there and so forth.
So a standard piece of logic for her, and again, this is typical of the right.
If you listen to the discourse on the right about immigration, if you talk to people, you will know this.
A standard piece of logic is that undocumented immigrants are somehow not subject to laws in the U.S., that they come here and they're just lawless.
It's like their unlawful entry into the country has somehow rendered them utterly beyond the reach of law.
So undocumented immigrants' very presence within the nation is disordered.
So then if you say, well, God's all about order.
and welcome and affirmation of immigrants needs to be about order.
This gives us license then to oppose all undocumented people because they're inherently disordered.
But of course, folks, this is nonsense.
I'm going to say this.
I'm going to revisit this next episode.
I hope.
I hope I have enough time to do everything next episode I want to do.
Everyone within the borders of the United States, documented or not, citizen or not, is subject to the same laws.
That's how national sovereignty works.
And we're going to talk about sovereignty next episode because it's one of the things Stucky talks about.
Everyone is subject to those laws.
There is no inconsistency between affirming quote unquote law and order and affirming an expansive inclusive immigration policy.
Even the horrific examples Stucky finds of violent crimes committed by people who are undocumented immigrants, they're all examples where the people were prosecuted and punished.
It wasn't rampant lawlessness.
So this is false, but this is how it works, is to say immigrants by their very nature, if they are undocumented, they are a disorder within society.
God is a God of order.
Therefore, we as good Christians, no matter what the Bible says about affirming foreigners, we have to first remember order.
So the appeal to divine orderliness maps onto the false alternative she proposes.
and her xenophobic presentation of all immigrants as inherently threatening, inherently lawless, inherently dangerous, inherently violent, that we talked about last episode.
So these are her strategies for basically trying to disregard these Bible passages.
And as always, there's more that we could say here.
Again, next episode, we're going to pick up with this theme of order and how it plays out in sort of concrete social and political terms in her views.
But for now, I want to just, again, I want to pause and highlight just how telling.
this discussion is if we want to understand how the Bible really works for someone like Stucky.
Because the main thrust of her reading of the Bible in this chapter, it is not to defend some perspective, it is to try to argue why Christians don't need to follow the commands of particular Bible verses.
This is something sort of a different nuance than we have seen in the other chapters.
Here, her discussion of the Bible is really how to sort of mitigate the force, to blunt the force of Bible passages.
And I think it highlights how despite high control Christians' claims to adhere to an inerrant and completely authoritative Bible, in practice, They often adhere to vague notions such as divine orderliness, whatever that is exactly.
And then they use these as a license to find whatever it is that they want within the biblical text.
That's how it actually works.
And that's what we see in this chapter on immigration.
And I had been very eager and interested to read this chapter because I knew that the Hebrew Bible says all these things about the foreigner and the stranger.
And I was curious how Stucky was going to navigate that.
We now see.
And as always, there's nothing anomalous about Stucky here.
Everything she says in this chapter is typical of the broader discussion on the right.
And if we're talking in a more sort of specifically religious nuance, it is typical of how Christian conservatives actually use the Bible and appeal to it despite their claims that it is inerrant and authoritative and so forth.
Got to wind this up.
I need to say goodbye for this episode.
So again, thank you for listening.
In particular, thank you for the subscribers who support us and help us do all the things that we do.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something that you might be in a position to consider, I'd ask you to do so.
But again, however you support us, all the different ways, please keep doing that.
Thank you for doing that.
Like us.
Follow us, tell people about us, suffer through the ads, do all the things that you do because all of that helps us to keep doing what we do, putting out content three times a week as an indie show.
And we've been doing this for a long time now and we want to keep doing it and we can't do it without you.
So thank you so much.
As always, reach out Daniel Miller swaj Daniel Miller swaj at gmail dot com dot We'd love to hear from you.
