It's in the Code ep 191: “Does it REALLY Say That?”

Dan Miller: Hello, and welcome to the series. It's in the Code, the series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. I am your host, as always. Glad to be with you, and as always, I want to start by saying: thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for supporting all the things Straight White American Jesus does. We continue to try to expand our offerings and do some new things. Going to be doing more live streaming and live events, so keep your eyes out for those.

We are also coming up on the end of this series on Josh Hawley's book, Manhood. We're almost done, and it means we'll be starting a new series. The focus will be questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church, or questions I wasn't allowed to ask in church. Please send those to me — Daniel Miller, SWAJ, danielmillerSWAJ@gmail.com. Put it in the header: "questions I wasn't supposed to ask," and let me know what those were. The questions that got you in trouble, the questions that got you talked to, the questions that maybe just became too much — and that you had to rethink your religious and spiritual understanding after that. Whatever those questions were, send them my way. We're going to work our way through those. I've got several of my own, and I'm looking forward to talking about the ideas that all of you have as well. So thank you for that in advance. Send it my way.

Let's dive in here. As you know, as I mentioned a moment ago, we are in Josh Hawley's book on manhood. We are in the final chapter — at long last, we have made it to the final chapter of his book. We are ready to receive Josh Hawley's final wisdom on the masculine virtues that will save America and help us to recover authentic American manhood. These are the promises he makes us. And as a reminder, the final section of his book is written in two parts, and the second part consists of an examination of what he sees as six distinct roles that men are called to play. This is the last of those roles. It is the role of king — that's right, king.

And, as always, I have a lot of thoughts and questions about how Hawley envisions this masculine kingship, and we're going to get into those. But before we do, since this is our last chance with this chapter to really delve into Hawley's book, I want to highlight a couple of broader strategies that he utilizes throughout the text. As I've emphasized multiple times, I've been reading this text as we go, so I'm coming up to the end of it at the same time that we're talking about the end of it. These broader textual patterns are starting to emerge, and I want to highlight a strategy that he uses. It ties in with a theme we've come across before, but I think it also highlights a mechanism that is at play in how conservative Christians — Christians who appeal to the Bible, Christians who call themselves "biblical Christians," Christians I've called on this show lots of times biblicists — the ones who will say that the Bible is inerrant and claim that all of their beliefs come from the Bible, and so forth. I want to highlight a specific mechanism that they use when they're appealing to the Bible.

I want to highlight that again not because Josh Hawley is special or unique — he's not — but because he illustrates a principle that goes really, really deep. And if you engage people in this world, if you grew up in this world, if you are familiar with this world, I think that this mechanism will make sense. I want to try to bring out something, to decode something I think is usually implicit in the practice of how high-control religionists and biblicists actually use the Bible, and sort of bring it into view.

So what I want to think about for a few minutes is a phrase — or a variation of it — that occurs over and over and over in this book. It is: "the Bible says whatever," or "the Bible teaches whatever," or "the Bible tells us," or "according to the Bible." The Bible says, the Bible teaches, the Bible tells us, according to the Bible — however you finish those sentences, that kind of introductory statement. If you've spent any time around conservative biblicist Christians, again, if you grew up in that world or you just engage people, you've heard phrases like that. You've heard people say, "Well, the Bible says," "well, the Bible tells us," "well, the teaching of the Bible is whatever." And lines like those just pepper Hawley's entire book throughout the text — these little openings to statements. And what do they do? Obviously, they operate to assure us that he isn't just telling us what Josh Hawley thinks. No, he's telling us what the Bible says. That's the aim, that's why he's doing it.

And I bring this up because we really need to decode that language — that phrase that seems so simple: "the Bible says," "the Bible tells us," "the Bible teaches," whatever. The reason we need to decode it is that there are some dimensions to this that I think are really important.

Here's a first point: it's a claim to authority. Why does Hawley say "the Bible says," "the Bible teaches," "the Bible tells us"? Because it's a claim to authority. If you didn't grow up in conservative Christianity, if you didn't grow up in a community that appeals to the Bible all the time, if you didn't have people in your life who do that, and you're talking with someone and they say, "Well, you know, the Bible says," you might be like, okay, but who cares what the Bible says? Well, they care — because within these biblicist forms of Christianity, there is no higher authority than the Bible. So if the Bible says it, or the Bible teaches it, or it's what the Bible tells us, that gives it an unquestionable authority. If it's a teaching of the Bible, that settles it.

So on the flip side of this, within these Christian circles, we're supposed to think that the things we do on really important issues, the things that we believe, the positions we hold — we are supposed to hold those things because the Bible says so. That's the flip side of it. Whatever the Bible says is authoritative, and it is supposed to be the basis of why we believe the things that we do, do the things that we do, hold the views we do, and so forth. So when Hawley assures us that the Bible teaches something, or the Bible says something, he's claiming authority for whatever it is that he claims to find in the Bible. And that's why — we've talked about this before — that's why he's so eager to take his own ideas and kind of read them back into the Bible, so that he can pretend to find them there, so that they have authority — as a way of sort of sanctifying his own views.

So that's the first part about decoding this language. "The Bible says," "the Bible teaches," "according to the Bible," "as the Bible tells us" — whatever it is — is a claim to authority. It's a claim that is supposed to be beyond question. If the Bible says it, that settles it. We're done.

In fact, there was an old bumper sticker. I remember the bumper sticker — or T-shirt — back in my young evangelical days. The bumper sticker may be around somewhere; you might still find it on cars. It said: "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." Period. Bible says it, that's all there is.

So this is why not only Josh Hawley, but millions of American Christians can advance ideas that are often just outlandish on any topic and insist that it's true — even if there are mountains of counter-evidence, even if there's no scientific proof for what they're saying, even if there are mountains of scientific evidence against what they're saying, even if it goes against accepted principles or medical practice or what have you. If they believe that it's coming from the Bible, it has a higher authority, period, than any other source of authority or information. The Bible says it — that's all the evidence we need.

And sort of as an aside, I think it's also worth commenting on what can happen in a conversation if you're engaging somebody like this and you don't just fall in line with their perspective. Maybe you've had this experience. I bring this up — this is an experience I've had lots of times. I think it's an experience I once had as a conservative Christian who believed that everything the Bible said was true and authoritative, and so forth. You have this kind of exchange, and it goes something like this: when you've had a conversation with somebody and they play the Bible card — assuring you that they're simply repeating what the Bible says, "Well, you know, the Bible says" — bam, there's the trump card, the card you're not supposed to be able to respond to. Oh, well, the Bible says that — that's supposed to settle it. But when you respond with some version of, "Okay, but like, so what? What if I don't care what the Bible says?" or "Please tell me what the Apostle Paul says, because I really, really disagree with the Apostle Paul on some things" — they're at an absolute loss when you engage somebody with that view of the Bible and you don't accept the authority of the Bible the way that they do. They're an absolute loss. They're sort of like, "Yeah, but the Bible clearly says," and you're like, "Cool, great, I get that, but you accept that as an authority, I don't — what else have you got? Let's try to find some common ground here, some way to convince each other."

Or, if you wanted to be a little more sophisticated, you would say something like, "You know, the Bible's not an authority for me, doesn't work for me as it does for you. Do you have any other evidence?" And that'll just bring them up short. I've had that conversation so many times, I can't tell you — because for them, that's all the authority that there is. The Bible says it. And when they engage somebody who doesn't care what the Bible says, they can be really brought up short.

So I bring that up just to illustrate: number one, the way that this operates, and number two, that if you engage these people, that's one of those things — don't give into their tacit assumption of the authority of the Bible. Question that authority, and you question what it is that they're putting forward.

Okay, so appeals to the Bible are an appeal to authority. It's the kind of thing that conservative Christians and biblicists will always reach for. Great. But there's another important — and I think more complicated, but probably more important — dimension to this. I've talked about the Bible's authority for these people a lot. Most people have some sense of this. People come to me all the time and they're like, "You know, my brother-in-law says this and this and this, and he says that he believes the Bible — but like, I don't know, where does he get it in the Bible?" or something like that. We have a sense that they accept it as an authority, but there's another dynamic to this that I want to get at.

It's another kind of discussion that comes up with reference to these topics. When somebody says, "Well, the Bible says whatever," let's imagine this: you're talking to somebody and they say, "Well, the Bible says x, y, or z," and you say, "Well, okay, I mean, that could be one interpretation of the Bible, but another interpretation is blah blah blah, whatever it is" — you're debating some topic, somebody says the Bible says this, you say, "Well, maybe that's your interpretation, but I would read it differently." And what they might say is: "No, no, no, no — nope, I'm not interpreting the Bible, I'm just telling you what it says. You're the one twisting it around."

I've had this exchange. I was talking with some colleagues recently, and they were recounting conversations with this kind of Christian person and this kind of exchange. It's this claim that they are not interpreting the Bible when they tell you what it says. So here's what's going on when they do that. The biblicist is essentially saying that whatever truth they say they find in the Bible, they're finding it because it's simply what the text says — it's the obvious, plain meaning of the Bible. And within these circles, the "clear meaning of scripture" or the "plain meaning of scripture" is like a shibboleth that they'll hold onto. The meaning of scripture is clear, it's unambiguous. And so they will often say, "No, no, nope — I'm not offering an interpretation, I'm just telling you what the Bible says."

What they're saying is that what they find in the text is just what the text says. It's this kind of immediate, completely unmediated engagement with the text. They are just picking up the clear and obvious meaning — which for them means that they're not interpreting the Bible. They make a distinction between interpreting the Bible and just reading it. There's this idea that they're just a mirror — the meanings and teachings are there in the Bible, and they're clear, and they're just reflecting that back to you. They're not interpreting, they're just reflecting the clear, unambiguous meaning of the Bible to you. And so when you come with a different interpretation, they'll say that you're doing something different. When you read the Bible differently or disagree with their reading, it's not because there are possible multiple interpretations, in their view. It's not, "Wow, there are different ways of reading this text" or "there have been different interpretations" or "there's a whole history of interpretation and people who read the Bible have disagreed about what it means." No — it's because you are interpreting the text rather than just reading it. So "interpretation" becomes a code word for something like "twisting." When you say, "Well, I would interpret that passage differently" or "I have a different reading," they'll say, "No, no — you're twisting what the Bible says. I'm just reading the Bible. You're the one interpreting it, you're the one twisting it."

I hope I'm drawing out this distinction. It's a strange distinction, but that's what they're trying to do. Because if you acknowledge that you're interpreting it differently — if you use the word "interpretation" or "I'm reading it differently" — the idea is that you are departing from the clear and obvious meaning they're putting forward and giving it just a "human" meaning, or reading something into it, or whatever.

So this is an incredibly naive way of thinking — this notion that they're just reading but you're interpreting, that when they engage the text they're not interpreting it. It's incredibly naive, but rhetorically the aim is to protect the authority of their preferred interpretation, because it is an interpretation. The distinction they make between just reading the text and interpreting it — it's nonsense. Any engagement with the Bible, or any other text — I use the word "text" even for things I've just written, and we even talk about social engagements as reading, when we say "reading the room" or "reading a social situation" — all of that involves interpretation.

So what they're doing when they say, "Hey, I'm just reading the text, I'm not interpreting it" — they're just taking their preferred interpretation and lending it that biblical authority. That's all they're doing. But any engagement involves interpretation, and we all know this, because we know all the times we've misunderstood what somebody says — they make a sarcastic comment and we miss it — or, like, texts are maybe the best example: you read a text and you're like, is this person mad at me? Are they joking? Are they short on time? Why are they writing in capitals — are they yelling at me, or do they just want to emphasize a word, or whatever? We have to interpret those. Interpretations go on all the time, and most of the time in our day-to-day interactions, our interpretations are correct. Somebody says something and we understand it, we're interpreting it, we're making sense of it. It's just that we do it in the way that they intended — we're picking up the meaning they wanted to convey and we go about our business. Most texts are fine, emails, whatever, social situations. But those times when the communication breaks down — those are when that interpretive process that we're always undergoing comes into view. When we have to actively pause and try to figure out exactly what somebody meant, or we're reading an instruction manual that's just not clear and we're like, is it saying this or is it saying that? When we have to pause and actively think about it, that's when the interpretive process sort of comes to the fore and we become aware that we're trying to interpret. But it's a process that's always going on.

So when someone — whether it's Josh Hawley or Uncle Ron or whomever else — when someone says, "I'm not interpreting the Bible, I'm just telling you what it says," it's bullshit. They're not just telling you what it says. They are interpreting it. They are offering an interpretation, but they are trying to insulate it from critique or criticism or question by claiming that it's just a reading — "I'm just repeating what the Bible says, I'm not interpreting anything."

Okay, so that's one dimension to this, this gap that they open up between reading the text and interpreting it. But that's sort of the JV — the junior varsity version of this mechanism. Hawley's appeal to what the Bible says or what the Bible teaches — he's using the same mechanism, but he's taking it to the next level. It's the varsity level, instead of the kind of claims that maybe Uncle Ron is going to make. It's the claim that Uncle Ron's pastor is going to make. Same logic, but kind of turned up a little bit.

And here's what they do: they take that logic — "I am just reading the Bible" — and they combine it with the fact that most people — and this is really important — most people, including those biblical Christians, those same Christians who appeal to the Bible, those same Christians who will insist that they believe all the things that they do because the Bible teaches them — they don't actually read the Bible and know what it says. Very few people actually read the Bible, even when they claim that they should. Claiming the authority of the Bible is as much a kind of virtue signaling among conservative Christians as it is an actual claim to having read the Bible.

So here's how this works. Josh Hawley says, over and over and over, "the Bible says," or "the Bible teaches," or "according to the Bible" — but he does it without actually quoting the Bible. If I had the time and inclination — I don't have either right now — I would go through this book with a fine-tooth comb. Actually, I guess the digital version would be easier. Go through it and find every place where he says "the Bible says," "the Bible teaches," "the Bible tells us," without then actually referencing the Bible, without quoting it. And here's why he does that — or here's why a pastor in a church will do this, here's why a spiritual advisor will do this: say, "Well, you know, the Bible teaches..." but they don't actually read the Bible or tell you where. Here's why: it's because it almost never says what they're telling you it says.

And Josh Hawley is the same here. So often when he says, "Well, the Bible says," "the Bible teaches, whatever," and then continues on with whatever he's going to claim it teaches — it's because the Bible doesn't actually say that. If you wanted to press him and say, "Wow, okay, Josh, that's interesting. Can you give me the references for that? I don't remember reading that verse. Can you find it for me?" — and if he did, you'd find that it doesn't seem to say anything like what he tells you it says.

For example, his whole theory that biblical figure after biblical figure after biblical figure is a recapitulation of Adam and Adam's calling — he calls it the "Adam cycle" — and so all of these Bible figures he tells us about are a sort of recapitulation of Adam and the calling of Adam and the tasks of Adam, and so forth. He repeatedly tells us that the Bible teaches this, but the text never says anything like it. And he didn't invent this interpretation, I'm aware of that — but when he says, "Well, you know, the Bible teaches this Adam cycle" — if you go and read the Bible, it doesn't. It doesn't say anything like that. Adam's name hardly ever appears in the Bible. So what's going on with that?

In these cases, what's obvious is that Hawley is presenting us with a very specific and very debatable interpretation. The Bible, the text, does not say Joshua was a recapitulation of Adam, David was called to recapitulate the tasks of Adam, Solomon — who's the focus of this chapter — was called to recapitulate the teachings of Adam. It doesn't tell us any of that. It's an interpretation.

But by stating that "the Bible says" or "teaches" this, what Hawley is doing is taking a complex interpretation — when he says, "Well, you know, the Bible teaches us about the Adam cycle, or the Bible teaches us that Adam was this, and that all these other figures are a recapitulation of this, and that's what the Bible says" — he's taking a really complex, and for me highly debatable and very unconvincing, interpretation and essentially masking the fact that it is an interpretation. He's trying to convince the reader, trying to convince the audience: "Hey, this is what the Bible says" — to grant it that authority. To mask the fact that it's an interpretation, and in doing that, to just grant it the authority of "what the Bible says." By doing that, he gets to take his interpretation and just make it the meaning of the Bible.

And to illustrate this again: Hawley is doing something here that we're also familiar with in our daily lives. Essentially, what he's doing is opening up a gap that exists between what something says and what something means. If that sounds strange, I want to suggest that this is something we've all experienced. Think for a minute — I know it sounds like I'm doing some sort of guided exercise here — think about maybe a disagreement with somebody, a heated conversation, and maybe it's about something in the past. Maybe you have this kind of heated exchange, and a couple days later you cool off, you come to talk about it, and as you recall this conversation, they say something to you. You're like, "Man, I don't know, I was trying to say this and you got so upset with me," and they said, "Well, you said whatever." And you're like, "Hold up, I didn't say that. The words I used were this and this and this." And someone might say, "Well, that may be what you said, but it's not what you meant."

You know, my mom — like virtually every mom of her generation — spoke passive-aggressiveness as a second language. So you'd have a conversation and you'd be like, "Well, I mean, you said this," and she'd say, "No, no, I just said this," and you'd go, "Well, but what you meant was whatever," trying to tease out that passive-aggressive comment. Or somebody says something really offensive, you get offended, and they say, "Like, what? It was just a joke." "Well, yeah, but you said that." "Yeah, I said that, but I didn't mean it. What I meant was this."

What I'm trying to highlight is the distinction between saying something — the literal words that are used — and meaning something. You can say, or use, one set of words but mean something different than what the words by themselves literally say. This is the kind of point that opens up when it comes to "reading the Bible," because we interpret things all the time. Communication gaps can open up between what someone or something says and what it means. And that is what Hawley is exploiting. What he's doing is giving an account of what he thinks the Bible means.

It's why he spends almost his entire book really focused on literally just a handful of verses in the first book of the Bible and can say "the Bible teaches" — because he thinks those first few verses are kind of the meaning of everything that comes after. But he doesn't say "this is my interpretation of the Bible" or "there are other ways to read it." He says, "Nope, this is what the Bible says." He masks all that complex work going on in there. He masks the claim that he knows what the Bible means — even if it's not what it says — by just telling us that it's what it says.

Okay, so I can hear somebody now — that's pretty wonky stuff — going like, "Okay, Dan, cool, that's interesting, I guess, but why are we spending this much time on this?" Here's why: because again, this isn't unique to Hawley. This is conservative Christian interpretation and preaching 101, from Uncle Ron all the way up. If you engage conservative, high-control religionists who appeal to the Bible, this is the way they use it. This is the kind of mechanism at work. I have sat through hundreds of sermons in my life where complex and ideologically loaded interpretations were passed off to parishioners as simply being what the Bible said.

Anticipating this new series of "questions you weren't supposed to ask in church" — the number of times that I would push back on some sermon, or be like, "Well, you know, in your sermon you said this, but the text actually says this." You could get even more technical and be like, "You know, the ancient Greek word for this is this, and it's in this verb tense, so I don't think it can mean what you're saying it means." And just the defensive reaction: "That's what the Bible says. This is the teaching of the Bible" — masking that interpretation, masking their interpretation, and clothing it with the authority of the Bible by claiming it's just what the Bible says.

This is not unique to Josh Hawley. I think this is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of how that kind of conservative Christian appeals to the Bible. And I think it is one of the most significant mechanisms of how high-control religion works, because within high-control religion, the Bible — among other things — is used to control people. And if you can convince people that your mechanism of control, your view, is just, just, just what the Bible says, you get to exercise that authority within that framework of people who believe that the Bible is an authority.

Okay, gotta wrap this up. So let's talk about where we are. Why this focus? It's just that it stands out to me over and over in this book as Josh Hawley keeps advancing these weird readings — they're weird — and we're going to talk more about that next episode. We're going to get into what he actually says about kings and stuff. Another weird reading. I mentioned he's going to talk about King Solomon, and he's going to reference Solomon as the culmination of the Adam cycle. That's weird for a number of reasons — mostly that there's a lot of Bible left after Solomon, and for Josh Hawley to basically say the key to the Bible is from Adam to Solomon is a weird reading.

He's advancing very specific interpretations of what the Bible teaches and the claims that it makes, but he's masking that interpretive work by telling us over and over and over: "Hey, the Bible says this. Hey, the Bible teaches." And he's doing it, I think, in a sort of low-key way. What I've encountered lots of times in Christian conversations: "Well, hey, I don't know, I don't know what you want me to do. It's what the Bible says. I'm a Christian. I believe the Bible. I need to do what the Bible says. Hey, you know, it's just what the Bible says — what else could I do? Got to do what the Bible says." It's a really complex rhetorical — and I think ideological — mechanism to control, to coerce, to take one's preferred meanings and read them into the Bible, and then convince others that they need to take them as authoritative because they are "just what the Bible says."

So I think that that's important. What he's telling us is what he thinks the Bible means. I disagree with his meaning. But when somebody tells you, "I'm reading this text and it's hard to understand, but here's what I think it means" — you're allowing a kind of give and take, and you're allowing the possibility that your reading could be wrong. Just reading the text — that's not what biblicists do. They want to assure us that what they are saying is what the Bible says, which means it has divine authority, and they're not interpreting, they're simply repeating it. Josh Hawley does that in spades.

In this chapter — next episode, we'll start looking at how that plays out in specific terms of what he's calling kingship, and so forth. Buckle up, it's going to be another weird ride. In the meantime, again, thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for supporting us in all the ways that you do. Again, keep your eye out for some new things that we're doing, new initiatives. We put out a lot of content and we're trying to continue expanding that and expanding the ways that we deliver that content. Please keep your eye out for that in the near future.

Again: Daniel Miller, SWAJ — danielmillerSWAJ@gmail.com. Any thoughts, feedback, comments, as well as your ideas for the upcoming series, send those my way. And as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.