It's in the Code ep 174: “From Adam to…King Arthur…?”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, your host, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you coming back after a couple weeks of, frankly, needed R and R, some holiday time, some time with family. So thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for listening to a couple episode reruns. But we are back, and as always, I want to begin—I guess not as always, beginning the new year—but now we're beginning the new year. I want to begin the new year by thanking all of you for listening, for being a part of this. Again, danielmillerswaj@gmail.com, you can reach me there. Always looking for new ideas, new concepts, feedback on episodes, ideas for future series and so forth. Have a few things that I'm looking at for when we're done with Josh Hawley's book, which is where we're continuing to live. Never get to respond to enough people, and I'm sincerely sorry for that, but thank you so much for reaching out. As always, if you're a subscriber, you can also find us on our Discord and invite you to join us there.

I want to dive in. This week, we're back exploring the mysteries of manhood and masculinity. And fortunately for us, I still have our trusty guide to walk us through a biblical, quote unquote, biblical model of manhood, Senator Josh Hawley. In case you're really, you know, not conversant in sarcasm, I'm being very sarcastic. Here we are still reading Josh Hawley's book Manhood, in which he puts forward a vision of masculinity and manhood and the masculine virtues he thinks will save America. Again, the reason we're looking at Hawley is not because he's unique, but because he's not. That so much of what he says is a window into a lot of the discourse on the right about masculinity and manhood and what ails America. His critiques of, quote unquote, liberalism—which is, we talked about, just anybody who doesn't think what he thinks is just liberals, this giant umbrella term for everybody who disagrees with Josh Hawley. It's a way to be able to diminish any viewpoint other than his and put it in a simple little box that he can attack. I think we're going to talk more about that, explore how that plays out in our current chapter next week. But this is what we're picking up on, and we are again in the fourth chapter of his book.

His book is divided into two parts, two main sections. The shorter section is chapters one through four, where he kind of gives us this, I guess you could call it the overview of what he thinks masculinity is and the problems with it in contemporary America and so forth. And then the second half of the book—it's more than a half, the second part of the book—he's going to go through six kind of roles that men have to play. And so we're getting ready to dive into that. But right now we are in chapter four, and in the last episode, I talked about—we started chapter four, and I talked about the fact that it's a little hard to figure out just what this chapter is really about, because so much of what Hawley offers is just indoctrination masquerading as analysis. We talked about—I think ostensibly the concept is leadership, and he talks about being a coach for a rowing team and different things like this. But this chapter just feels kind of convoluted, and that's for me, like I read this kind of stuff a lot. I look at how these people think, I decode this stuff, and I still find the chapter to be convoluted.

And I found myself thinking like, if I sort of shift spaces and imagine—imagine I'm somebody who wouldn't normally read or engage with somebody like Josh Hawley. So somebody who doesn't come from the kind of background he comes from religiously. I don't know everything about his background, but the religious world in which he is a part is a religious world in which I was once a part, and I was thinking, oh, this is convoluted. Like, what would this feel like or seem like to somebody who doesn't follow this at all? And I know that for some of you listening, that's you. You probably listen to this, like, what the hell is this guy talking about? I have students who are like that when we read things like this, who just don't come from that thought world at all, and they're like, what in the world is this?

And what that made me do, as I was reading this chapter, and had a couple extra weeks to kind of think about it, is I was struck by one of the components, one of the dynamics of Hawley's book that makes this such a feature. This idea that, again, if you are not conversant in the thought world out of which he's coming, you can read this and be like, dude, what are you talking about? Like, what are you even talking about? This makes no sense. And some of those comments, also, thoughts on my part come from some interactions I've had with listeners who've had exactly that reaction, like, where's he going with this? What is he talking about? Where is he getting that? Why is he drawing these connections? And so thank you for that, and that's what I want to pick up on.

And what I want to pick up on is, I think, a fundamental feature of his reasoning. And people like him—again, we're looking at Hawley because he's not unique. He is offering the same kind of reasoning that millions of Americans offer. Want to appeal to good old Uncle Ron. He might reason this way as well, and it's a feature of his reasoning that makes these kinds of arguments intelligible to people who agree with him. It's why people who agree with Josh Hawley, who share his views, who share his ideology, who share his cultural background, who share his politics, could come away from this book saying, man, it's a knock-down argument. Mic drop. He's shown what masculinity is. He's shown what the problems are in America. He's shown why masculinity matters, and they'll be just utterly convinced by it. And people like you or me, or somebody who's not Josh Hawley or his crowd, might read it and be like, how does anybody believe this? Why does anybody find this compelling? To those outside of that kind of thought world, it's going to appear unintelligible, while to those inside that thought world, it's going to feel well reasoned. It could well feel like a knock-down argument, as I say, a kind of mic drop moment.

And as I was thinking about this, I wanted to try to untangle that some, and it brings up an issue that's come up a lot of times before, and we're just certainly not going anywhere. And it's the way that he uses the Bible to justify the things he says. Now he very clearly presents his book as developing a biblical vision of manhood. It's there, front and center. These four chapters have all sort of hovered over the first two chapters of the book of Genesis. That's what they are ostensibly about. Really is the vision of manhood there at the origin point, the creation account of the Christian Bible. And this comes through really clearly at the end of this chapter, where he lays out the road map for the second and longer portion of the book. He's going to basically, I think, as he develops these—let's say roles that men are supposed to play—he's going to highlight, I think, biblical heroes that sort of model this for us. So we're going to see that.

And you hear me talk about the Bible a lot, and the reason is that within this kind of high control American Christianity, you just simply cannot, I think, overstate the centrality of the Bible, the appeals to the Bible, okay? And this is the trick, and this is what I want to pick up on. Is because if you were to talk to Hawley, if I had him with me, and he might say something like, well, you know, you can take offense to this, but all I'm doing—all I'm doing is telling you what the Bible says, just telling you what the Bible teaches. He might believe that. I don't know if he believes that. I have met—I don't know how many Christians in my life who would say exactly that, who'd say, hey, I'm sorry. This is not a popular view. And they might even say, you know, I wish I could believe something else, but I'm committed to believing what the Bible says. That's all I'm doing. I'm just putting forward biblical teachings, and they believe it.

But it's more complicated than that. And I talk about this all the time, that it's not simple—as simple as saying that some group of Christians just, quote unquote, teaches the Bible, or takes the Bible literally, or whatever. It's more complicated than that, and it's exploring that complication that I think can highlight what it is that he's doing and why it might make sense to those who share his perspective, but why it's unintelligible to us. And so what I want to look at, as we've done before, but in a new way, is the issue not just simply of Hawley appealing to the Bible. Fine. He appeals to the Bible. If you don't accept the Bible as the kind of authority that he thinks it is, that appeal is not going to do a damn thing for you. Fine. I've had that conversation with lots of Christians doing well—the Bible says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I can argue about what the Bible says, or just be like, well, okay, cool, but like, I'm not beholden to the Bible. I don't kind of care what it is that it says. Like my views of contemporary gender and sexuality, they're not primarily shaped by the Bible. I got sources that I think are better and more contemporary and more correct that I'm going to go to. I'm not going to go to a 2500-year-old text to try to understand the nature of gender. Just not going to do it.

Okay? The issue is how he actually uses the Bible, not just that he does it. And again, I know I talk about this a lot. I've done whole series on this and so forth, but it's because it is the biggest legitimizing feature of their ideology. They're taken for granted. And sometimes knock-down argument is: the Bible says X. If they can convince somebody, or they are convinced, that the Bible teaches X, Y or Z, it's an authority. Those are authoritative teachings. They are beyond question, and they legitimate any actions that might be taken. So that's what I want to look at. But I don't want to repeat everything we've looked at here. I want to approach Hawley's use of the Bible in a slightly different way, a different way than I have before, and I want to highlight what sort of two things here. First is elements that again, those who might encounter a book like this, and if you don't understand Hawley's way of reasoning, pieces of his argument that might seem the most baffling, but I want to highlight a way that the Bible functions in these kinds of communities that has struck me as I've read Hawley, and I don't think I've formulated it before. This has come in a combination of my engagement with Hawley, it has also come in some, you know, some conversations and exchanges that I've had with listeners. So thank you to all of you. You're helping me to sort of see another dimension of what I've called biblicism, or biblicist Christianity, or those kinds of Christians who claim to be quote unquote biblical—things I've talked about a lot. There's another dynamic to this that I haven't talked about before. I haven't really formulated before, and I want to formulate that today, because I think this chapter has brought it into view for me. And so I want to thank you for that, as always, invite your comments, you know, for that going forward.

So let's dive into this. I want to start with this, like, what is Hawley doing with the Bible? And I want to start with something that I have talked about in other episodes, is that people who encounter folks like Hawley or Allie Beth Stuckey or Uncle Ron or whomever, often note that when it comes to the Bible, they just string together Bible verses. They'll quote a verse from Genesis, they'll quote a verse from like somewhere else in the Hebrew Bible, they'll quote a verse from Paul, they'll quote a verse from the Gospels, they'll quote a verse from the Psalms, and just sort of string them together, stitch them together into this kind of, you know, tapestry of Bible verses. And one of the reasons that they can do this is because they believe that the Bible is quote unquote God's word. It's all created by God. God is its author. So it's like they can stitch together these passages that in their production, they were separated culturally. They were separated often by hundreds or 1000 years of time, written for completely different purposes, different genres, different languages, different intended audiences, all of that kind of stuff. They can ignore all of that and just stitch these verses together because they all come from God. Okay, we've talked about that. That's one element in which the way that they use the Bible works.

But what occurred to me as I prepared this episode is there's another dimension to this biblicist understanding of the Bible that's also vital to see, and I don't think I've really ever formulated this before, and that is that the Bible, for them, also transcends time. It's not temporally located. What I mean by that is, you find a verse you say, well, that was produced in the fifth century, BCE, so, you know, 2500 years ago, and it was in this context and so forth. For biblicists like Hawley, that's not relevant. It doesn't matter when it was produced. The Bible transcends that temporality. It is in no way actually conditioned by the historical circumstances or context in which it was written.

And what he says—and here he's completely typical. This kind of Christianity highlights this. So here's something he says in this chapter. He says Genesis is not content to tell a story about the past. The Bible tells us about the here and now, it carries a message for our lives as men today. That's the quote. Couple things there. Number one, Genesis is not content to tell a story about the past. He's been hovering over the book of Genesis. But for him, he's saying it's not really about the past. That's not the focus. We can talk about Ancient Near Eastern culture in the context it was produced and so forth. That's not really what it's about. Then he shifts and says, the Bible tells us about the here and now. Notice the shift, the expansion from Genesis to the Bible. Not just the book of Genesis tells us about the here and now, but the entire Bible does. And then that's the key. The Bible tells us about the here and now. It carries a message for our lives as men today. The Bible is written for us now, here and now always. The Bible is perpetually and permanently about the present, not the past. It always applies, and that's what I mean when I say it transcends temporality. I don't think Hawley would formulate it in that way, that the Bible transcends temporality and is not limited by context and place, but that's what he's claiming. It's always relevant. It speaks to us here and now.

So the Bible, as God's word, as he understands it, is always written for us, whoever us is. That's a real key there. Whenever somebody says the Bible is written for us today—which means that no matter how much high control biblicists talk about the Bible being historically accurate, or about Christianity being a religion that foregrounds history, or how much time conservative Bible scholars spend talking about the historical context of different biblical texts, etc., none of this actually determines what the Bible means for Christians. It would be like a sort of a divergence. It'd be a real rabbit hole to go down. But it would be interesting to think about the role of conservative Christian Bible scholars who spend their time teasing around all this stuff about historical context and so forth, but exist within a religious subculture in which none of that is actually what the Bible means. The Bible's meaning is not really about the past and so forth. Separate issue. The point here is that the fundamentally orienting presupposition of this kind of Biblical Christianity is that the Bible has a message for us now so we can spend time again talking about the historical context and situating it. But that doesn't really tell us what the Bible means.

And in fact, I would suggest that for the Allie Beth Stuckies of the world, the Josh Hawleys of the world, certainly for the Uncle Rons of the world, those things can be conveniently ignored if they become a hindrance for finding a message that's relevant for us. Now, I've had this conversation with people where they cite some favorite Bible verse that says, you know, that God has a plan for your life or whatever. And you say, well, okay, cool, but like, that's in this book, and it was written in this historical circumstance. And so the obvious referent that the author is talking about when he talks about God having a plan for your life and so forth is this and this and this. And he's like, well, I don't know about all that, but I know that God speaks, and he speaks through the Bible, and this is what he's saying to us now. Just set all that aside. It's a bunch of wasted time.

In fact, when I was in that conservative Christian world, they would get really concerned—pastors and like parishioners and stuff would get really concerned about young men, typically young men, going to seminary or going off to Bible college or whatever, because they would be worried that you might learn too much about that historical context, you might pay too much attention to those questions of history and authorship and so forth, and you might question the meaning of the Bible for the here and now that it would disrupt your faith. Became almost an article of faith to ignore those factors or to not let them stand in the way of a good, contemporary biblical message. I heard that a lot when I was in seminary. And to be fair to those people, they were right, because I started paying attention to historical context and meaning and so forth, and no longer a biblical inerrantist.

Okay, so this is what they're saying. So why does this matter? This is all wonky stuff. Why does it matter? Here's why it matters, because it allows Christians like Hawley not just to stitch together Bible passages, different passages in the Bible, but also to interweave non-biblical insights and perspectives into the Bible. They can take insights or claims or beliefs from all different cultural and historical spaces, including those long after the Bible was produced, and nevertheless insist that they are biblical, because the Bible still speaks, because the Bible is a message for us now. There's an old distinction from my evangelical Biblical Studies days between what's called exegesis, which is drawing the message out of the Bible. Ex is just the Greek prefix that means out of, so you're taking the message out of the text, which is what conservative Christians claim that they're doing. And what we would call eisegesis, eis is the Greek word for into—of reading a message into the Bible, of essentially bringing our presuppositions to the Bible, then finding what we want to find there. And it's useful, because by pulling the Bible out of history and temporality, by insisting that its real message is for us now, what this allows is for people like Hawley to license eisegesis. That is, it allows people like Hawley to take their own views and their own opinions and their own ideologies, their own deeply held convictions, and read them into the biblical text.

And why does that matter? It matters because it's like a form of ideological or religious money laundering. When people launder money, they put money from illicit sources into a company or an enterprise that then allows them to sort of take that money back out. It comes out on the other side, and it's cleaned in the sense that it now looks legitimate. It's accounted for and so forth. It masks its illicit origins. Hawley and people like him, who read the Bible this way, who use the Bible this way, they do the same thing. They take ideas and beliefs and practices that have no Christian basis or authority, that have no origin in the Bible, they then feed them into the Bible, and then when they take them out, they sort of feed them in, and then they look at the Bible, say, aha, here's this idea, and they pull it out. And what does that do? Well, if you believe that the Bible is God's word, it's authoritative and so forth, what that does is essentially baptize, wash those ideas, and you bring them out, and they're now sanctified. They are now Christian ideas. They are now religious ideas, and it's that way that people like Hawley smuggle in all kinds of their contemporary concerns, give them a veneer of quote unquote biblical authority, which means to paint them and give them divine authority. And that explains the kind of mashed-up reasoning that Hawley uses. That's what got me thinking about this. That I read this chapter is the really mashed-up examples that he gives. So that's what I want to do. So that's the dynamic of essentially taking the Bible out of history, denying that it's historically conditioned in any way. So what? So we can put our own ideas into it and pretend to find them in the Bible. Okay, pretend is too strong. I should say, like people who do this, they believe that they're exegeting the Bible, that they're saying what the Bible says. But this is the dynamic, and so I want to decode some of the elements of this chapter. I want to sort of put my lenses on and pretend that I'm just a regular person who doesn't study this stuff for a living, reading this chapter and trying to make sense of it.

I want to highlight some of the things that seem the most disjointed or baffling about what Hawley is doing. And I want to show how it is that this way of using the Bible matters. And the first and most obvious here is the entire theological anthropology he builds around Adam. That is the theological account of humankind that he builds around Adam, this sort of supposed first human person, human man, and all this sort of stuff. If you read the Bible, the Bible doesn't talk about Adam a whole lot. And certainly, if you look at the—it's a big book, it's a thick book. There's not a lot about Adam there. But everything Hawley has said to this point, it's like a third of the book, or something like that, is taken from small portions of the first two chapters of the first book of the Bible. In other words, he's covered hardly any biblical ground at all, and he has managed to develop this entire theological account of manhood and the key ideas he takes from that, the key core ideas that he has on this vision of manhood, they're actually not found in the Bible.

So for example, we talked about this before. He covers a lot of ground about humans being created in the image of God, and this means that they're God's representatives. Men are God's representatives. They're God's icons. He calls them. They are called to represent God in the world and all of this sort of stuff. Genesis does say that humans are created in the image of God, but it famously doesn't say what that means. So Hawley's or anybody else's interpretation, I don't care how far back this interpretation goes. I don't care what community produced it—any interpretation of what exactly it means to say humans are created in the image of God is just that. It's an interpretation. Nothing he says about humans being God's representatives or icons is in the text. The text doesn't say that anywhere. But he has built that entire idea out of it. They come from somewhere else. Where do they come from? Some probably—he hasn't developed this, but they probably come from later biblical teachings from St. Paul, who says, for example, that Adam represents all men. So I'm sure that that's there. They also just come from a broadly patriarchal Western culture, a western culture that has always been predominantly patriarchal. And you just read those patriarchal norms back into the text. So that's what he does. He takes those cultural norms, they're just cultural norms, they're just human habits. That's all that they are, reads them back into Genesis. And then when he's like, aha, look in Genesis. And here are these ideas, boom, they're washed, they're baptized, they're sanctified, they're now Christian ideas. So it's not that I'm a person who likes patriarchy, reading that into the Bible and defending patriarchy. No, I'm finding the patriarchy in the Bible, and I'm pulling it out, and that makes it God's ideal.

Similar points in this chapter on his focus on leadership. There is no—no reference to a word like leadership anywhere in the text. Nothing that could be translated that way, I think, nothing that could be interpreted in the way that most contemporary people would think about leadership. There's oversight, there's dominion, etc., but not leadership. And if you're a kind of a cultural outsider to this, Hawley's attempts to read these in terms of guidance and models of leadership, it's forced at best, especially for somebody who claims to simply be offering biblical teaching. One of the things I might do in one of our supplemental episodes is spend some time talking about how you engage people like this, because it can be hard to do, but there are also ways to do it. But if Hawley were sitting—be like, cool, thanks, Josh. I'm glad to know that it's all about leadership. Can you show me in the text where you're getting that again, please? Because I don't see that word anywhere. And why? Because that focus on leadership doesn't come from the Bible. Where does it come from? It comes from corporate America. That's where it comes from. This focus has bled its way into conservative church life for decades. When I was in seminary, I had to take a seminary course on leadership and people of my generation. If you grew up in churches, you remember all the stuff taken from the corporate world about vision statements and mission statements and the purpose of your institution and all of this that was all like corporate tease stuff. It was the corporatizing of American religion. It's not coming from Genesis. But what is Josh Hawley doing? He's taking a very contemporary focus, a contemporary idea, an element of contemporary culture. You blend it together with this idea that the Bible is speaking to us now. He reads that into the Bible. Thinks he's getting it from the Bible, and voila, all of a sudden, the Bible's teaching us a bunch of stuff about leadership, even though that's not a focus of the text remotely.

So the insistence that the Bible has no temporal limit, that it's not conditioned in any way by its history or context, that its message is always for us here and now. That's what allows him to make that kind of move. That's how he's using the Bible. Hawley and again, millions of Christians like him—Hawley is not the issue, millions of other Christians are. They can take their own ideologies and their own political, social views, read them back into the Bible, launder them, and then bring them out as divinely ordained teachings, and then they defend them to the rest of us on the ground that they're just teaching what the Bible says. Well, you know, you might call it patriarchy, but hey, I'm just teaching what the Bible says, or, you know, I believe in strong leaders. And I'm just saying what Genesis says about strong leaders, even though Genesis doesn't say anything about strong leaders.

All of this, again, it's a thing I harp on all the time. This is why I think it's a mistake to describe this kind of biblicism as literalism, or these people as literalists. And so this dynamic, it also explains some other favorite examples and illustrations from this chapter. And here a couple that made me laugh, a couple of note that he talks about are the Romans and King Arthur. So just to pause in this chapter, you got Genesis, you've got Adam, you have the Romans, you have King Arthur, you got all these things mashed together. That's what I mean when I call it a mash up. And I can see somebody reading something like, wait a minute, he said we were talking about, like, the book of Genesis, and what it says about men and like, so why? Why are we talking about the Romans all of a sudden? And, like, I thought he was a Christian, but like, the Romans weren't Christians. And, like, he's talking about King Arthur like, what does King Arthur have to do with like, what the Bible teaches about masculinity. That's the mash up. And you just see somebody being like, I thought we're talking about Genesis. Why are we talking about Romans? All right, talking about King Arthur.

Well, here's the point, or here's what I think explains this. There was a book from several—written several years ago. I've used it to teach a few times, and it looks at the understanding of masculinity among Christian men. Looks from, including from conservative Christians, over to liberal Christians. It's called Does God Make the Man? And one of its findings that has always stuck with me is that conservative Christian men will affirm concepts like, quote unquote, male headship, a concept taken from Pauline writings in the New Testament, and they'll insist that their understanding of masculinity comes from the Bible, because all their beliefs are supposed to come from the Bible. But what the authors found is that when they interviewed these men, they did like long, you know, in-person interviews and things. And they asked me, like, what are some examples of masculinity and so forth, those men typically didn't actually point to the Bible. They pointed to sources like popular culture. Braveheart figured prominently in their analysis. The point is that we find the same thing in Hawley.

And so this is when he starts talking about King Arthur. So he tells the story of reading to his kids at night. Nice story. And he says, this—I'm gonna read a couple sentences here. He says, I came across a small volume about King Arthur and his knights. I tried this out on the boys who loved it. By now, we've read about Camelot, Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot and their deeds of derring-do. I have to pause. He actually says, their deeds of derring-do. I don't think I have ever heard a contemporary, living person, in a non-ironic way, use the phrase derring-do, but there's Josh Hawley. Their deeds of derring-do. Then he returns, he says, which returns me to Genesis. Note that shift. So I'm reading all this stuff about King Arthur and their brave deeds, and the Knights and Lancelot and Merlin and all that to my kids, and they love it. And that brings me back to Genesis. How the hell does a piece of medieval folklore—and that's what the Merlin and Arthurian legends are. Almost no scholars think that they're—no one thinks that they're actually historically accurate. But there's a lot of debate about whether there ever even was somebody like King Arthur. These are just local tales, etc., etc., maybe coming from Wales, maybe coming from somewhere else, pre-Roman times. What have you—the point is, it's a piece of European folklore.

What in the world does this piece of medieval folklore about kings and knights have to do with Genesis? Josh Hawley, how does it return you to Genesis? And here's the short answer, folks: it doesn't. There is no natural connection between the two. In addition, Hawley doesn't even actually connect them. Here's what he says. So you look over this as it brings me back to Genesis, and you might be like, wow, that seems like a leap. Can you connect those dots for me, Hawley? Here's what he says next sentences. So he says, brings me back to Genesis. And then he goes on and says this: the Arthur legend revolves around the relationship of knights and kings, of servant warriors who pledge themselves to a liege lord. Even Arthur is a servant, a vassal, in a sense, he is to serve Camelot and God. Where's the connection? Hawley, where's the Genesis connection? You just said it brings you back to Genesis, and then, like, he literally doesn't spell out why or how it connects to Genesis. He just presupposes a connection.

What is going on? Here's what's going on. He obviously likes the medieval vision of a hierarchically ordered society where vassals serve their liege lords, and everything is supposed to embody a Christian order and a chivalric code of manhood and all of this stuff. He likes that, and lots of people like that. There's a reason the Arthurian legends and myths still have the cachet that they do. I enjoy reading them. I've taught them. I've gone to the UK in places where the legend says that Arthur was and so forth. I find that stuff fascinating. He likes it. A problem is, of course, among many, that that social vision is fundamentally incompatible with a modern democratic republican social order. A modern democratic republican social order explicitly arises, in part as a rejection of medieval, feudal social order.

So what does Hawley do? These guys like, I got this vision of a social order that I really like, but it's at odds with what most Americans are going to want. So what does he do? He reads it into the Bible. He reads it into Genesis, and the implication, though he doesn't actually spell it out, is that Adam is God's vassal, and God is his liege, and so he's called to serve Him and so forth. And then likewise, because he's our representative, and we're all like this, we are all called to be vassals of God. So what does he do? By doing that, he takes this social order completely removed in time and context from both the biblical text—the social order presupposed in the Arthurian legend has nothing to do, nothing to do with the biblical text—and it's completely removed from our own social context. Has nothing to do, no compatibility with a democratic, republican social order. He takes it to Genesis, he sort of launders it through there to sanctify and baptize it, and it comes out as a biblical teaching for Christians. So what he can now do is say, what I actually want is a medieval social order, but that's what God wants, because Adam is God's vassal. So we're called to be vassals of God. That vassal-lord relationship, that's how society should be lined up. He doesn't offer any evidence for that. He doesn't connect any dots. It's just the assertion that the Bible is intended for us now that allows him to do this.

And then finally, there's the appeal to Rome. We've talked about this before. Rome has come up a lot in this book. It's going to come up a lot more. We know that one of Hawley's primary visions of masculine virtue is drawn from ancient Rome, not the Bible. When he has to actually look and say, what are the masculine virtues? He keeps pointing to Rome, not to the Bible, to an ancient Rome that was not Christian in its orientation. And this is common on the right—people on the right which often appeal to a mythologized past of Roman glory as a kind of ideal. And it fits into a broader Western cultural pattern that has valorized Rome since the fall of the Empire. Western culture has looked to Rome as this kind of exemplar since it fell. Okay, but Rome comes up again in this chapter, and Hawley uses the same dynamic. He appeals to the Romans again. And so what he does is he just sort of slides. He slides from talking about Genesis, talking about King Arthur, to talking about the Romans. Just slides from one to the other. Completely different cultures, completely different historical periods, completely different linguistic models and political models and different religious understandings and everything else, he just slides between them as if they're all fundamentally the same. How does he do this? He does it because what he will do is he will take those ideas that he valorizes, that he likes, that he values that are not Christian, read them into the book of Genesis, and then pretend to pull them out, and all of a sudden they're Christian ideas. They are the same. The ancient Romans, the Arthurian legend, the ancient Near Eastern text about, you know, primordial story about the origin of human beings. They're all fundamentally the same thing, and they come from God, so they all have authority for us here and now. And that dynamic is what allows him to do this, that understanding that the Bible has no temporal location. And so it becomes this kind of magic box that you can just put all your favorite things into and take them out, and all of a sudden they're transformed into Christian ideas. That's what he's doing.

Got to wrap this up and sort of try to tie together these threads. So conservative, high control religionists like Josh Hawley or Allie Beth Stuckey or, again, millions of other Americans, they'll insist to you that they are just reading the Bible, okay? And setting aside the fact that that's irrelevant. If you don't believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God or whatever, you don't care if they're quote unquote just reading the Bible. Your answer is gonna be like, I don't care. That has nothing to do with me. Okay? But setting that aside, it simply isn't the case. Even if they think it is, it is possible, entirely possible, that Josh Hawley truly believes, in his heart of hearts, that he is just elaborating the teachings of Genesis. But anybody on the outside reading this, anybody with a critical eye reading this, anyone reading with an awareness that he is eliding and sliding together all of these different ideas. It's very clear that he's doing more than just reading the Bible, right? You don't get concepts of Roman virtue from the Bible if you're just reading the Bible. There's no straight line there. You import those ideas as values that you already hold, and then you work really hard to find ways to read the Bible that way, and then you pretend to draw them from it. That's what he's doing.

So this kind of Christian—they are importing their own views into the biblical text, then appearing to draw them from that text, to sanctify them and to give them divine authority. And part of what allows them to do that is this untethering the biblical text from any kind of history or context. This is why, as I say, it's important to understand how they're using the Bible, because we're going to see this. We're not going to talk about the Bible every episode, I promise, other than the extent that Hawley does. I'm confident—again, I'm reading this book as we go along. I am confident we are going to see this pattern play out over and over and over again as he takes his own contemporary concerns and values and perspectives and ideologies and magically draws them out of the Bible. Why? To give them divine authority. I say this all the time in this series that when people say, hey, I'm just doing what God said, I'm just doing what the Bible said. You're like, cool, but I'll never see me get to God. I just keep getting to you. I keep getting to your interpretation. That's what we find in Hawley here. It's like, sorry, Josh Hawley, I read the Bible. I don't see Merlin and Arthur there. I've read the Bible. I don't see Roman virtue there. I see a lot of things. I don't see that, and some of the things I read in the Bible are really bad, and I don't like them. That's what he's doing.

So I wanted to highlight that again this week, because I think it really highlights what he's doing. And I think that as I've talked to people and read a couple emails, talked to a couple people, when they hear this say, like, I don't understand how he makes these connections. That's how he makes these connections. If you're sort of saying, what is the connective tissue? It's the way I talk to my students when they're writing. Sometimes they'll put these ideas together. Be like, there's nothing connecting these. Show me the connection. The Bible is the connection. You read all that stuff into the Bible, you put what you want into the magic Bible box. You pull it back out, and all of a sudden you've got this integrated, holistic worldview that has been magically transformed into a Christian teaching. That's what Hawley is doing.

Next episode, we talked last episode about leadership in this chapter. This episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about how he's using the Bible to get at the points that he's getting at. Next episode, I want to take a look at again, how he presents those who don't share his view, the kind of caricature that he puts forward. And that's going to set us up to move into the rest of this book. I want to thank you for listening and watching. If you're doing that, everything we do on Straight White American Jesus depends upon you, and we are so grateful for everything that you do for us, for your support, for all the forms that that takes. This series in particular is driven by you. It is driven by your ideas, your insights, your questions, your comments. Please keep those coming. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com

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