[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that makes total sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice. But the how sometimes eludes usually that makes total sense, is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Okay, Scott, I feel like, I don't think I've ever laughed out loud or annotated as much during an acknowledgments section than I did when I started your book.
It was amazing. I posted on instagram that I was reading your book. I'm going to name this book as I'm saying this, because I feel like the irony should come out with people, ministers of propaganda, truth, power, and the ideology of the religious right. And I'm reading. I began this book in the lobby of a Southern Baptist convention, megachurch, on good night, and it was amazing. And I felt like, please nobody look at me. Please nobody see what's in my hand. But thanks for writing it. It was amazing. I could just hardly put it down. It was a joy to read, and it's a joy to have you on.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It's delightful to be here, and I'm glad you appreciate the, I think, what might be called a single entendre.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: In the title.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it was. I mean, we have to. We have to get into this. Um, I. What I appreciated about your book over the overarching thing, so I just kind of want to prep folks for this conversation. Um, Scott is a philosopher, so I am not. This is not my mo. I'm not generally just sitting around engaging with philosophers about christian faith stuff on a regular basis. I'm engaging with theologians, I'm engaging with pastors. These are my peers and colleagues. And to read this book from a philosopher's perspective felt like a game changer in a lot of ways for me. So I just want to throw that out and say, thank you for that. And also why you put your kind of name in the hat for this. You put your hat in the ring and it's like, oh, my goodness.
Maybe that's not a super great opening question, but it's like, help us understand why this value of a philosophy helps us understand this a bit better.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Sure. So my training is in contemporary analytic philosophy, so a lot of people are hitting the off. You know, they're switching to a different podcast.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Don't do it, stick around.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Which means that, you know, among other things, one of the things that interests me is looking at debates or conversations where there's some confusion and bringing sort of order to the chaos. That's one of the things that I enjoy doing.
And I think also in terms of social position, I grew up in the sort of evangelical tradition.
I know it well.
I grew up in the shadow of a major southern baptist seminary.
I am personally acquainted with quite a few of the people who, well, let's say you would know their names, right.
So I have that background, and then I have a certain kind of academic training, and a whole lot of people who have that background and the kind of academic training that I have end up working at evangelical institutions, which means that they can't really say what they think often.
Now, there may be, I'm sure there are some folks in that situation who have no desire to say anything that might be, you know, controversial or jeopardize their employment. But I also know personally quite a few people who are not at liberty to say what they think about what goes on. And so I'm, I think, fortunate to be at an institution that has no connection to, you know, the kinds of, well, I just, I'm being a bit vague here. Let's say you get a PhD, right? You might go work at a seminary if you're working at a conservative evangelical seminary, you know, you get a job, you have kids, you have a mortgage, you don't want to lose your job. So there are certain things you don't say. You just keep quiet about it at the very least. Right.
Because you don't want to find yourself on the academic job market. Hey, that's a place no one wants to be.
So, you know, that's not my situation. So I felt that I was in a position to write the book and that it might be of use to the church, broadly speaking.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm really appreciative of that. And I want to call out another book that I kept, I kept thinking of as I was reading your book, and I think she's an endorser. Kristen Kovz dume. I think, yes.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: She was kind enough to endorse the book. Yes.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Yeah. She wrote Jesus and John Wayne, which was one of those books that came out and recreated a lot of stir. It's still, I think, creating a lot of stir.
But from when I read that book, I read it pretty quick after the release date, and my husband read it first and he handed it to me and said, you have to read this. And this is not like, normally like him. He's like, oh, I think you'd think it was good or this or that. And he reads books that. Let's just be honest there. I have no interest in reading generally. Like, he's into, like, ancient near east history, and so. And even as a seminarian, I'm like, nope, I'll take my credit and be done with it, you know, like, appreciate you. I'm glad we just don't have the same entertainment taste at all. He handed me this one and said, you have to read this.
I read it.
I felt sick to my stomach, probably about two thirds of the book, especially when she started getting into my timeframe. So for folks who haven't read it, it's. I mean, it's not the best way to describe it, but it is kind of a survey of evangelicalism from, like, you know, Billy Graham through kind of, you know, when. When the book came out, american white american evangelicalism. And when she gets into the nineties and I'm a teenager, I'm like, we need to stop. But, of course, at that point, I couldn't stop. So I read through it and, you know, took my tums or whatever and just kept going.
But what her book did for me similarly to yours was, I'm not a historian, so I'm used to looking at these kinds of things through theological perspective, pastoral perspective, but not through a historical perspective. And what I have said of Kristen's book is I feel like she just. She just grabbed the curtain and pulled it back and kind of said, this is what was happening behind the scenes. And. And it was, again, a game changer. And. And I kept thinking about that when I was reading your book, because I'm not a philosopher. And so this gave me insight into a lot of, you know, this culture is very familiar to me. I grew up in an SBC church in the Bible Belt, and I was youth grouped in a lot of the ways that, you know, that you address in the book. But I had not looked at things. I don't have the training to look at things through this philosopher perspective, this philosophical perspective. And so it was incredibly helpful for me to see a lot of the same things I was familiar with in culture and am familiar with in culture and just look at them through a slightly different lens. So Kristen's book, through a historical lens and your book through a philosophical lens.
And I want to dive into that a bit because you.
A lot of these topics that you address, gender hierarchy, racial injustice, I'm sitting here with my husband in the next room, who is a PhD research geologist. And you have two chapters dedicated to creation science. And I had to run in and show him. But, you know, these kinds of things, we're used to this. You know, I've had, you know, people ask me, you know, questions about my husband's faith because he is an earth scientist. And, you know, and it's so deeply ingrained in our culture of how these things are completely incompatible.
And so when I'm familiar with these things, but you come in and shine a light, kind of like Kristen pulled back the curtain, you shine a light on the arguments themselves. Themselves. So I'm used to engaging with them from a theological perspective. Is that really what the scripture is trying to say in this void? Right. And you do it differently and say, well, let's look at what they're saying, you know, and so can you talk about, you know, I know that's. We'll talk about that a lot, but what were some of the starting points for the reader as we get into how you're shining a light on these topics?
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Sure, sure.
So one thing I try to do is to address some theological or theologically adjacent arguments sort of on their own terms before getting into questions about how certain positions serve, you know, particular interests.
Because I think, I mean, there's some value in noting how a particular position might serve some person or another's interest, but that's not really a complete argument until you've dealt with the reasons themselves.
So I try to do both before getting into, well, look, here's this kind of hierarchy, and here's how this theological position or that theological position serves the interests of people in power. Let's talk about the reasons they give for why everyone ought to embrace this or that theological position. Let's look at their reasons in terms of biblical interpretation. Let's look at their reasons in terms of overall argumentation. And in many cases, it turns out that there really is no argument there, and the biblical interpretation is actually quite poor.
So that's.
Yeah, I think that's one unique feature of my book, is that it sort of does both of those things.
And in terms of, I guess, how to situate the project and what motivated the project overall. That seemed like sort of part of your question there. So I think the sort of animating question that got me working on the project was this. Why is it that a majority of white evangelicals appear to inhabit an alternative reality?
I cite a bunch of stats in the beginning of the introduction. Majority of white evangelicals think the 2020 election was stolen.
A whole bunch of white evangelicals think that climate change isn't, that there's no evidence for climate change. And then a lot of evangelicals think that even if climate change is real, that there's no evidence that human activity has anything to do with it. You know, something like 20% or 25% of white evangelicals give some credence to QAnon. Qanon.
Qanon. Right.
This is alarming. Now, at the same time, you've got a whole lot of white evangelicals embracing sort of regressive or retrograde social commitments.
They think that peak America was the 1950s or whatever, right?
And for a while, I thought, I'm not. You know, when they think. When they think that the middle of the 20th century was peak America, I think they're forgetting that that wasn't that great a time for a lot of people in America. And then I've come to realize, you know, in the last few years, that.
No, they know that.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. That's right.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: That's a feature, not a bug, as they say.
Okay, so we've got the fact that a lot of evangelicals seem to be thinking poorly and the sort of parallel fact that a lot of evangelicals appear to be acting poorly.
I think these things are connected. And if I had written this book, say, ten years ago, I would have said, oh, evangelicals act poorly because they think poorly. Right? So here's the problem with the thinking, you know, and gone out from that, because my sort of deepest area of expertise is in moral epistemology, you know, moral knowledge, that kind of thing. So, you know, I put on my analytic philosopher hat and say, here, you know, here's. Here's the problem with all of this. But I've since come to realize through engaging with, you know, scholarship, like Kristin Dumas book Whitehead and Perry's work on white christian nationalism, Jamar Tisby, you know, a lot of the folks I mentioned in the acknowledgments, I've come to understand that actually, yeah, that's part of the explanation. Right? Thinking poorly leads to acting poorly, but that's not a complete picture. Acting poorly leads to thinking poorly because we want to justify our bad behavior.
We come up with stories about why what we're doing is okay. And this is what sociologists call a legitimizing narrative.
And so what ends up happening is a kind of feedback loop between the way that we think and the way that we act and the kinds of social arrangements that we prefer and a paradigm example of this would be, say, the way that white supremacy and segregation, the practice of segregation interact in, say, the Jim Crow South.
I mean, this dynamic operated all over the country, but it was sort of most explicit in the American south. So you've got this idea that white people. Well, first of all, there's such a thing as white people, but that white people and white people are superior people of color.
And that legitimizes this practice of social segregation for reasons to do with sexual anxiety and racial notions of racial purity and this kind of thing, that we've got to keep people separate, you know, and then the fact that you keep people separate separate. And that, you know, white people have access to, you know, educational opportunities, financial instruments like home equity that people of color don't have access to, which leads to socioeconomic stratification, then that sort of perpetuates the idea that white people are superior. Well, I mean, white people do better economically, educationally. Never mind that people of color aren't even permitted to apply to all these universities.
And so there's a feedback loop there, right? White supremacy legitimizes segregation, and segregation reinforces white supremacy.
And this feedback loop, I call ideology. The term ideology is used in a number of different ways.
You know, I won't quarrel with that. But the way that I define ideology is as this feedback loop between cognition and social practice.
And so ideology is based around some kind of social hierarchy. It could be gender hierarchy, it could be racial hierarchy, some other kind of social or economic hierarchy. But there's a hierarchy at the core of it.
And social hierarchy without some kind of justification is just stratification, right? Some people have privilege, power, wealth, opportunity. Other people are impoverished, disenfranchised, oppressed.
And that's all it is without a story about why this is. Okay.
And so what we do is we come up with, this is just how the human brain works, right? This isn't unique to white evangelicals, but ideology functions in this kind of ecosystem, right? Where you've got this social hierarchy, and then you've got to tell a story about why the social hierarchy is legitimate. Otherwise, it's just hierarchy. And people are going to say, well, why should I be oppressed, you know, or why should we be oppressing these people? So we come up with a story to legitimize the hierarchy. That's called a legitimizing narrative.
And one of the threads that I draw out in the book is the way that white evangelicals mine scripture for legitimizing narratives that justify social arrangements that work to the benefit of white evangelicals themselves, often to the detriment of historically oppressed or disenfranchised groups.
And so I suppose part of the reason I wrote the book is because that frustrates me.
I don't think that's what the Bible is for.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: And you call this or part of one of the terms that you introduce is the hermeneutics of legitimization. Right?
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Right. So, having explained what a legitimizing narrative is, and the book is light on jargon, but one place I did think it was important to name something.
My hope is that the book introduces some concepts that are portable, that can be transferred into other conversations, because I think in certain places there, you know, I hope to have captured concepts that are.
That are important insofar as they expose certain kinds of tactics that are pretty typical, you know?
But one tactic is, as you say, the hermeneutics of legitimization. So hermeneutics is the science or the study of interpretation, particularly the interpretation of sacred texts like the Bible.
For those interested in greek mythology, Hermes is the messenger of the gods. So, you know, a medium of communication between gods and people. Okay? Hence hermeneutics, the study of interpretation.
And so this is a method of interpreting scripture that produces legitimizing narratives for social arrangements that benefit, you know, the reader or the interpreter in this case. And I point to sort of three pillars of the hermeneutics of legitimization, one of which is proof texting. I think probably everyone in the audience is familiar with proof texting, but very briefly, that's the practice of taking a passage, in this case, a passage of scripture, and taking it out of its context. And if you like, imposing a meaning on it or using it to confirm something that you already think. I mean, I think most people are familiar with that practice. The other two pillars of the hermeneutics of legitimization are motivated literalism.
And I meant there with that term, to evoke the concept of motivated reasoning. So motivated reasoning is reasoning that's motivated by one's own interests. It's the reason that we expect referees to be neutral, right? It's the reason that we expect judges to recuse themselves in cases where their own financial, say, financial interests might be impacted. Not because we think that the referee or the judge necessarily lacks integrity and would intentionally cheat, but because we understand that our interests affect our very perception of things. Go to a sports bar in some neutral city, like, let's say, when the Super bowl is on, and there will be fans there for each team because it's a neutral city and watch a close play unfold. Half the bar will think that one thing happened, and half the bar will think that another thing happened. It's not performative. They don't think they're going to impact the call that actually happens by insisting that they think one thing happened rather than another. They genuinely believe that one thing happened. The other half of the bar genuinely believes that a different thing happened. Right.
And so that's just one way that motivated reasoning shows up. Okay, so motivated literalism is the practice of reading scripture, quote unquote, literally, that is to say, according to its plainest, most straightforward sense, as you understand it, but only in cases where it doesn't affect your own material interests.
So this is what enables a lot of conservative white evangelicals to insist that we have to read the first couple chapters of Genesis to say that the earth was created in a 624 hours days a few thousand years ago, which, as I document in the book, is not even necessarily the. Even if you're reading the text in the plainest, most straightforward sense, it's not at all clear that that's how you should read it. But in any case, they insist that this is how you must read the text.
But then they get to Christ's admonitions about wealth, and all of a sudden things get very complicated.
The text is very complicated, right? Because capitalism is complicated. And obviously that's, you know, the very best kind of system or whatever, right?
I do favor competitive markets, by the way. That's not. But. Which isn't the same thing as capitalism. But a lot of people don't know. So just to be clear, I'm not communist. Anyway, they get to the stuff Jesus says about wealth or even, like, I cite this in an end note, but like, John MacArthur has very interesting views about what exactly Jesus is saying at the sort of toward the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he says, go and do likewise.
Apparently, according to John MacArthur, Jesus doesn't actually intend for us to go and do likewise, so that's motivated literalism. And then finally, we have the theological paradigm of authority and submission, according to which one of the central questions that scripture sets out to answer is which humans should be in charge of other humans. You know, boys should be the boss of girls and so on. And so, you know, you take proof texting motivated literalism, and you add in the notion that one of the things you should be looking for scripture to tell you is who should be in charge and pretty quickly, you're going to arrive, I think, quite naturally, at a situation where the Bible is just a source book for legitimizing narratives, for justifications, for social arrangements that benefit yourself.
And that, I argue, is how a lot of conservative white evangelicals approach scripture and how they approach scripture vis a vis politics and sort of their social agenda.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: So I want to pause there for a moment, because these three pillars that you just introduced, one of the things I'm grateful for with this philosophical approach is to say, is for me, as a reader going, I have lived this culture. I understand this culture.
But to give a name to what I'm seeing, this makes more sense.
It's kind of like years ago, I was reading Pastor Daniel Hill, and he was talking about kind of white culture for him being, like, neutral, like, it was kind of the no culture until one of his friends from India pointed out, white Americans definitely have a culture. Right? Like, it is. It is a thing, but. But because you swim in it, you have to have someone point out to you that it is a thing. And so for these three, I'm not even thinking about, you know, my education. I'm thinking about, you know, my upbringing, or I'm thinking about why people have told me certain things in this culture. You know, I'm mixed hispanic. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a white evangelical that I went to church with tell me that all Mexicans should go home, like, I could have paid my tuition at seminary, you know, because. But this is part of it. It's. It's these things that. That you listed are all wrapped up in that, you know, if I am a woman, obviously I am a seminarian. I preach. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me that the Bible, clearly, in kind of scare quotes, told me I shouldn't do that again. Mortgage paid off. Right.
But it's when I see these things laid out in black and white, I go, oh, yeah, I can see that. That's. That's what's happening. Namely, um, one of them. One of the biggest, because I had proof. Texting. Yes. Kind of like, check. We can see this motivated lyralism. Absolutely right. Like, we can. We can see these kinds. Like, you don't. You don't take this part of the psalms literally. But you. You know what? But you. But you're taking this particular thing literally. Right? Like, we can see these and we go, okay, okay. But this authority and submission pillar was really big for me. And I I agree with you that much of what's happening inside this white evangelical hermeneutic is the belief that the Bible is answering that question, who is supposed to be submissive to whom else? What other group? Whether it is wives submit to your husbands, whether it is, you know, this curse of ham and Canaan as you, as you bring out that, I have to be honest, the first time I read that several years ago, I just thought, is this real life? Yes, this is real life. People are actually quoting this.
[00:29:47] Speaker B: Don MacArthur still teaches.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: It's just wild to me that this is a thing. But then it's also embedded in a lot of ways in american exceptionalism. It's embedded in Christian Zionism. It's embedded in all of these other things. Because where the question is being asked inside of this hermeneutic, who's in charge? And, you know, I would even say my husband could give you examples of people asking him, kind of trying to make sure, literally, that our house was kind of in order, right? Asking him who gets the final say, like, who is, you know, because that that's the most important question in a family or in a household in white evangelicalism is who's in charge? And it's this, you know, your, but if you, and I would just say this on the, on the flip side, if you don't believe that the Bible, that part of the Bible's job is to answer those questions necessarily. If you're not looking at it in that way, you know, then you start to ask, would you come up with the same conclusions? Would you read some of these texts and come up with the same answers? If that wasn't on your radar, if you didn't necessarily think that this is what the Bible is trying, is trying to do. And I think similarly with the beginning chapters of Genesis, I just happened to mention, I read a few of the paragraphs in your book out loud to some of my kids because they're at that age, kind of teens and tweens. And I said to a couple of my kids, hey, you've studied poetry this year in english class.
Are you supposed to interpret poetry literally? Like when you read it, they busted out laughing. Like, are you kidding me? Does the sun actually smile at you?
Were the person's eyes, did they actually have fire inside of them? They're just laughing. And I said, well, you do know that the first few chapters of Genesis really are just a poem, right? And if it's a poem, does it make sense to, you know, and I just started kind of asking, you know, those questions, and they're like, just dying laughing right. Like going, of course not.
But if you come into it, like you're saying, like, you have to have this legitimization. If you come into it saying, the Bible is intended to answer my scientific questions, but if you don't, then you might draw different conclusions when you're reading the same text. And so I just want to pause there and say that I really appreciated that being named those pillars, being named, especially the authority and submission pillar there, because that was really helpful for me.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Good.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: I'm wondering if we can talk about common senseism right inside of white eventually, because that was another thing that I'm like, yes, I see this all the time, and let's just call it what it is.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: So I would say that that's sort of the most.
I start out the first chapter, you know, following the introduction, talking about this notion of common sense.
I tried to make it as palatable as possible by using lots of examples and, you know, from social science research and, you know, historical examples, contrasting history and sort of contemporary beliefs and so on. But there was. I realize there's really no way to properly account for ideology and propaganda without addressing this notion of common sense because it's so, so integral to the way that white evangelicals approach scripture and morality, and, for that matter, science and the natural world.
But common senseism is the idea that common to all people. There are variations on this. It could be common to all people who are among the electricity, right? All people who are Christians. But there's this universal feature. So that. I'll leave that bit, that caveat, sort of implied hereafter, that on some versions of the view, it's just christians. Because actually, it doesn't matter to the viability of the position. But as I document. So the idea is that there's this feature of human cognition by virtue of which we can look at, particularly the Bible questions of morality and to some extent, the natural world and just know the truth because we just sort of perceive it. It's just, you know, you just sense the truth. And this faculty is common. So it's common sense.
Right.
And as I note in the book, I mean, the principal difficulty with this view is that all available evidence seems to indicate that no such faculty exists.
Quite the opposite, actually. We see quite a lot of disagreement about morality over, I mean, look, you devote a moment's reflection to it, and it immediately sort of the plausibility of it starts to fade, right? I mean, you know, that people from, you know, different, who live in different times and places and different cultural contexts disagree pretty dramatically about questions of morality.
Right.
Okay, so let's just stick to christians then, you know? And in fact, let's just stick to the evangelical tradition, for that matter. And indeed, we could stick to a single institution within the evangelical tradition in the United States, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The founders of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary were enthusiastic white supremacists who insisted on the moral legitimacy of race based chattel slavery.
There's not a single person on the faculty at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary today who would publicly, anyway, attest that they think that race based chattel slavery is legitimate, morally legitimate practice or that it's justified by scripture.
Right. And actually, maybe this example is a.
I give lots of examples in the book. Right. But perhaps it'd be helpful to drill down on this particular example because it illustrates the hermeneutics of legitimization and a variety of other things. So in the introduction to the book, I also cite at least one founding trustee at southern seminary endorsing the narrative that I'm about to lay out. No one there now would endorse this. So this illustrates both morality and biblical interpretation in terms of this notion of common sense just not being viable. Right. Because if there were common sense, then we would. We would. We would agree on basic questions of morality and biblical interpretation, no matter. You would see a lot of agreement over time across culture and so on. But to illustrate the point, that's not what we see. So there's this. There's this narrative that's referred to variously as the curse of ham or the curse of Canaan, found in the 9th chapter of Genesis. But to back up just half a step in the middle of the 20th century. Sorry, in the middle of the 19th century, the United States, I think I don't need to tell the listener, was bitterly divided over the issue of race based shadow slavery.
It's what led to the Civil War, obviously. Well, I mean, I suppose it's not.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Depends on what politician you have.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: That is what led to the civil war. And that should be obvious, although, sadly, it's not.
Depending on where you went to high school, I guess.
And there's a tendency in some cases to sort of excuse the behavior of some enslavers by saying, well, men of their times, this kind of thing, that's utter nonsense. So it's not as though it just hadn't occurred to anyone in the middle of 19th century that race based child slavery was bad. All of America's north atlantic peers had outlawed the practice by the middle of the 19th century.
And as I said the United States itself was bitterly divided over the issue. You had denominational splits among Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians.
Plenty of people were saying, this is wrong.
Some of them were actually enslavers. Thomas Jefferson knew it was bad.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: And.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: Yet he did it anyway.
In any case.
Well, what do you do? What do you do as a white evangelical in the antebellum south when you need to defend the indefensible?
Well, you turn to the Bible.
In point of fact, that's what they did. Right? So there are various proof texts that were used to legitimize chattel slavery, but one stands out as sort of a particularly prominent historically, and that is the 9th chapter of Genesis. So what's going on in the 9th chapter of Genesis is the floodwaters recede. Noah gets off the ark, he plants a vineyard, he ferments wine as one does. And then he gets very drunk one day, and he ends up drunk, naked, and passed out in his tent. His youngest son, the youngest of Noah's three sons, called Ham, walks into Noah's tent and finds Noah in this state. And he goes and tells his two older brothers, Shem and Japheth, guy's dad, is drunk, naked, and passed out in his tent. The two older brothers, Shem and Japheth, they walk backward into Noah's tent to avoid seeing their father naked.
And they have a cloak that they're carrying backward into the tent, and they drape it over their father to cover his nakedness. Well, Noah wakes up and he is unhappy. The text is a bit ambiguous about exactly who does what, but Noah is upset and he curses not Ham, not all of Ham's sons, but just one of Hams sons called Canaan, hence curse of Canaan.
And the curse is this, that Canaan will and Canaan's progeny in perpetuity will be slaves to the offspring of Shem and Japheth.
Not clear why Noah curses Canaan rather than one or all of Ham's other sons or Ham himself. We can infer from the context that Noah is probably hungover.
And the 9th chapter of Genesis tells us a few verses later that Noah is approximately 600 years old at the time. So it seems like Noah's confused. At the very least, that could account for it.
At no point does God endorse the curse. Right? The curse is for, like, Noah wakes up, he's got a headache, and he's confused and he's mad, and he curses one of his grandsons. Right? That's kind of. That seems to be what happened according to the most straightforward reading of the story. Well, in any case, if you're sort of an antebellum confederate theologian, what are you going to do with this narrative?
I can tell you what they did with it. They said, obviously, this curse is still in effect.
So the descendants of Canaan are still in bondage according to the terms of this curse. And obviously the descendants of Canaan, this obviously is in scare quotes here. It's not obvious at all.
Not at all. But they said, obviously, the descents of Canaan wound up in Africa, and they now find themselves enslaved in the south, in the american south, you know, millennia later.
Just to round things out, what ends up happening in the middle of the 20th century in justifying the practice of segregation is that there's another layer that shows up here, right? Which is. Okay, you remember earlier on in Genesis, when Cain kills Abel, he gets the mark of Cain. They say, obviously, this is darkened skin. Again, obviously, scare quotes here, right? This is darkened skin, and the mark of Cain is heritable. The text doesn't actually say that, but they say that the mark of Cain is heritable. And the way that the. And so basically, Cain and Cain's descendants are black, that's the mark of Cain. And the way that the descendants of Cain survived the flood was that ham married one of Cain's descendants.
And they go on to claim that this is sort of one of the principal reasons for ham and hams progeny being cursed is this quote, unquote, interracial marriage between ham and a descendant of Cain.
And this is leveraged as sort of a legitimizing narrative to support segregated schools. Because if, you know, you let kids of different races go to school together, then before you know it, they'll end up marrying each other. And obviously, this is bad because look at Genesis and the curse of ham and this sort of interracial marriage, right? I mean, it's really fantastical stuff.
Last point here, because the listener or the reader might be wondering sort of, okay, but, like, why does this matter, right? You know, this is 2024. Surely none of this is operable anymore, right?
Would that that were. So, the Ark encounter, which is a creation science museum, one of two that's operated by answers in Genesis, both found in Kentucky.
The Ark encounter is a.
I mean, as its name suggests, right? It's all about flood geology, which is how. How creation scientists explain the geological record.
But in any case, it's a creation science museum. And the Ark encounter has wax figures of Noah's family. That is Noah Noah's wife, Noah's three sons and their wives.
One of these eight wax figures. So eight in all. One of these eight wax figures has observably, an observably darker complexion than the other seven. Would you care to guess which of the eight is depicted as a black woman?
[00:45:10] Speaker A: I died when I read this.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: I'll give you one guess.
It is the wife of ham. Is that a mistake? Is that an accident? Is that just coincidence?
You know, I'm not going to comment on that. But.
[00:45:27] Speaker A: But this is real. This is.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: But that would confirm the hypothesis, right? I'll put it this way. That would tend to confirm the hypothesis that the museum's curators have sympathy for this story that was used, a legitimizing narrative that used to justify race based chattel slavery and racial segregation.
And. Sorry, I know I said this last point, but this is related. As I say, John MacArthur also promotes this idea. Now, he says that he doesn't because he's like, it's not the curse of ham. It's the curse of Canaan.
Well, those are two different names for the same thing. That doesn't mean you're not promoting the curse of ham. It just means you're calling it the curse of Canaan, which is probably more technically correct given that Canaan is the one who's cursed. But why does this matter? Is this just bad behavior?
Am I just pointing out that people have these commitments that may not even be sort of consciously racist?
It's just been sort of handed down based on these white supremacist legitimizing narratives? Okay. I mean, that's part of it. And that's interesting to note. It's a good thing to know. But as far as how this shows up socially and politically, I mean, folks like John MacArthur, and for that matter, the people that answers in Genesis, Ken Ham, I mean, look at his twitter feed. He spends 90% of his time talking about culture war stuff, you know? And John MacArthur is at the forefront of the latest wave of evangelical opposition to racial justice. That's not a coincidence. When you have a narrative that explains, to quote one of MacArthur's favorite theologians, the sort of intergenerational moral turpitude of people of color, right? Because that's what the confederate theologians said. They said it was just that God cursed the descendants of ham because they're morally and intellectually inferior. And you see, I mean, this shows up all over creation science, literature, right, in the work, you know? But in any case, when you've got a narrative that explains, you know, in your mind why one group of people is inferior, then you're free to dismiss claims about systemic racism, you know, as a myth.
Right? So you're free to say, well, it's not the case that the average white family has $160,000 more wealth than the average black family because of systemic racism or racialized oppression.
It's because of this other thing that maybe John MacArthur isn't going to say it quite that explicitly because that would be untoward.
But he's got a story that explains things like the racial wealth gap, and so he can, with a straight face claim that systemic racism is a myth.
I just talked a lot. I don't know if that made sense. I'm glad was easy to follow.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: No, I'm glad, and it was.
And I don't have to be as creative as I thought to get to the next place that I'm hoping we'll go. We've got two more places left and probably not that much time. But let's see. Let's see how we do.
Because I couldn't for all kinds of personal reasons, but I can't leave the creation science alone. And so I'm going to kind of present, try in one or two sentences, kind of present. What I took away from this, from your discussion on creation sciences being kind of the places that hit me most profoundly. And again, it's one of those things where I'm like, I see this, and now I can kind of better put my finger on a name or what I'm observing when I'm observing this.
So inside of this creation science narrative. And again, this is something my husband and I have been married for 20 years. He has a PhD in geology. He works in this. And because we met and married in the Bible belt and now live in Texas, he has been asked questions pertaining to this subject more times than he would care to count. More times than I would care to count, probably starting back when he was in grad school, which a lot of them, like I said, have surrounded this. How can a person, they're, they're pointed towards him. So it's specifically, how can he. But how can a person negotiate these things? You know, you, you must compartmentalize a lot, or how can you, you know, how can you possibly do this and that? Because, and then I'm reading Scott Coley's book, and it's because as a Christian, I'm supposed to look at creation science and the conclusions that creation science draws and say, this is the biblical way to look at creation. This is the biblical way to look at this part of science. And I do like how you break it down and say most christian. Now, we did see some serious science issues when it came to, like, vaccines and stuff like that in the COVID-19 pandemic.
But generally, it's like people are seeing their doctors and they are, you know, I would say simple things like wearing eyeglasses. Right. And like driving their cars with engines that are filled with gasoline. Anyway, that's a whole other thing. But, you know, we're, we're embracing science. You mentioned, like talking to Siri. Right. Like these things are happening, but at the same time, the biblical. We're using lots of scare quotes. I wish you had video for this. But like the biblical way to, to view this part of science and creation is this, as you mentioned, this 624 hours day. Now, there's a few variations which you bring in. It's gap theory, maybe, or it's something else, but there's a way that it needs to be reconciled. And there are a few acceptable ways to reconcile this. And those are the biblical ways.
[00:51:43] Speaker B: Well, the line from creation scientists and from a number of prominent sort of theologians and celebrity preachers is that there's one acceptable way to read it, which is sort of young earth creationism.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:52:00] Speaker B: And that these old earth views, you know, according to which.
Well, I group it in sort of young earth creationism, which is the idea that the earth was created in 624 hours, periods, you know, less than.
I mean, the exact number differs depending on who you ask, and it doesn't actually matter relative to what the scientific establishment says, but anywhere from seven to 15,000 years old, something like this, the difference is moot relative to the actual science.
But, yeah, it's a sort of a young earth. And to be clear, when we say young earth creationism, we don't. It's. Yes, it's a view about the age of the earth, but it's relatedly a view about how to interpret the first few chapters of Genesis. So, for example, I had someone on Twitter tell me that Augustine was a young earth creationist. Right?
I mean, not really. Right? Yes. He thought the earth was a few thousand years old, but not because he thought you should read the first few chapters of Genesis as like a scientific or journalistic or historical account of how the earth. In fact, quite explicitly, he says, you should not read it that way. Right. So, no, Augustine is not a young earth creationist. And I think we can say pretty comfortably that if he had access to, like, the geology that we do. Now, he would not have thought that the earth was just a few thousand years old. Right?
In any case, so that's young earth creationism. It's a view about the age of the earth that is very explicitly motivated by a certain approach to the first few chapters of Genesis. Then creation science is a different but related sort of enterprise or set of views. So, I mean, you could imagine being a young earth creationist and then just sort of ignoring the scientific establishment, right?
Creation science is about trying to undermine scientific findings regarding the antiquity of the earth.
It's a systematic effort. And this is a classic example of the kind of propaganda that I analyze in the book. So there are different kinds of. If I could just make a quick. Have a quick sort of aside here.
There are lots of different kinds of propaganda. You know, there's propaganda in film, propaganda in, you know, painting could be propaganda, a novel could be propaganda.
I'm interested in one particular kind of propaganda which is sort of utterances or claims that appeal to a moral or intellectual or political ideal in service to an agenda that undermines that very ideal.
Right?
And creation science is a classic example of this. It appeals to the ideal of scientific rigor in service to an agenda that is aimed entirely at undermining the findings of legitimate science.
Creation science is not science. It's not.
It's just not.
And to call it science is propaganda.
[00:55:17] Speaker A: There's no other way. I appreciate you clarifying because I was mushing them together, young earth creationism and creation science. And it's super important that you did that. And I'm. And I'm grateful that you did that. And for this aside to say exactly what you said, it's not science.
This is something I hear from. I have heard from my husband over the last 20 something years, is when you try and do XYz with this, as you're saying, you're just doing bad.
[00:55:52] Speaker B: Science, and it's confirmation bias is what it is.
[00:55:55] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:55:56] Speaker B: Which is undesirable.
It's, you know, but Ken Ham calls it historic, quote unquote, historical science, and he calls it historic. It's not. It's not. It's. I mean, you could call it historical science if you want, but what other. What academics call it is confirmation bias.
It's not a good thing. We actually go to a lot of effort to avoid it, you know, or to mitigate its effects because it's unavoidable, you know, some kind.
The confirmation bias is a tendency to believe things that confirm other things that you already believe. People really don't like being wrong, you know, and so we tend to. This is just, again, this is not just white evangelicals. This is human cognition in general.
You know, some people are a little bit better about it than others, but this is just true of people generally. We tend to believe things that confirm things that we already believe. And so this is why we have all sorts of systems in place. Like, we go to great expense and invest a lot of time in different systems that mitigate the effects of confirmation bias on research, not just in science, but in all sorts of other fields. But this, according. According to Ken Ham, the point of scientific inquiry with respect to things that happened in the distant past is to come up with evidence that supports your sort of worldview.
Right. Because we can't actually witness, you know, the beginning of the universe. And so I guess, according to his way of thinking, we can't reliably.
Yeah, I mean, it's actually. Yeah, we can't. We can't sort of reason about it very well. We can't in the way that we do with, you know, scientific experiment. He takes a really elementary understanding of scientific method and leverages it along with other things, like popular misconceptions about the antipathy between religion and science.
And he paints this picture of the scientist who's going to work day after day trying to prove that the Bible is false, you know, and I mean, like, there are a few celebrity scientists who kind of, like, go on the lecture circuit, like Richard Dawkins, who is, I'm sure, a world class biologist. You know, he was. He's a professor of biology at Oxford, professor emeritus now. But when it comes to, like, philosophy of religion, he's not like, he's a hobbyist. He's not. It's not good. So.
But professional scientists, in their capacity as professional scientists, they don't care. They're not thinking about the Bible, whether it's true or false or whether God exists, you know, and generally, they're not thinking about whether the earth is billions of years old. A few scientists ask questions about that, but most other scientists who deal with adjacent questions, like when they're looking at ice cores and things like that, they're not like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go in today and prove the earth's billions of years old. No, that's not even relevant to the evidence. You know, the earth is. That's physics. You know, it's a totally different discipline. But the point is they go and they do their. They examine ice cores, and I explain in detail about ice cores in the book.
By the way, what did your geologist husband think about my explanation of ice cores?
[00:59:14] Speaker A: He actually hasn't read that part yet.
[00:59:16] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[00:59:16] Speaker A: I haven't thrown this, I haven't thrown this book his way yet, although he's super eager. And I had to, kind of, had to kind of keep it in my, in my, in my space. But I did walk in with both of the creation science and I was like, scott's about to hit it, you know, with this, in this creation science section. But you're right. I mean, and I think this is the thing I would say even as so being in just interrupt briefly being in white american evangelicalism. And we got married like super young. We were in, he was in grad school when we did. And so I'm kind of going in, asking wide eyed, asking all these questions like, oh my goodness, I bet, you know, because I've got these preconceived ideas about all of his colleagues, right? All of his colleagues must be exactly as you've just described. They're coming in and they're like, hee hee hee. They hate God, they hate God, they hate God. They're gonna, they wake up in the.
[01:00:10] Speaker B: Morning, they're just angry at God.
[01:00:11] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. And he's kind of like exactly what you said, actually. Like, this isn't even on the table. This isn't something that we discuss. And it's just like, it's just kind of a given that he's like, if I were to walk into the lab with the idea in my head that now we were even maybe younger earth around younger earth creationists than you because I'm saying 6000 was the number that I kept hearing. Right. But if, you know, he's like, if I were to walk into the lab, he's, he can edit out anything, Seth. Edit out anything I misquote on you. But, you know, but like, he's like, if I were to walk into the lab and be like, I'm operating under the assumption that the earth is 6000 years old. Like nothing that he did in that room would make any sense.
[01:00:53] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:00:53] Speaker A: Like he wouldn't be able to do his job.
[01:00:56] Speaker B: Right. So, and I come at sort of from the, from the opposite end but making a similar point, which is that these scientists that have no, they're not really interested in like exactly how old the earth is. And they're not interested in whether God exists or whether the Bible is true or they're not. They're not even thinking about Ken Ham.
[01:01:14] Speaker A: Right.
[01:01:15] Speaker B: They probably most of them never heard of them, I would imagine.
I was speaking of Seth editing things. Edit that out because. I don't know. I'm joking. You can edit out if you want. I don't know whether they've heard of Ken Ham or not. But in any case, it's not that they're going in with these antipathies in mind. It's that they are going in and conducting their research. And at no point do they come across any evidence that the earth is anything less than hundreds of thousands of years old. Right. Just. Just talking about ice cores, you know, without getting into other disciplines, it just. It just seems apparent that the earth is very, very. It's a lot more than six or ten or 15,000 years old. It's inescapable.
[01:02:03] Speaker A: Right, right. And I think what was most interesting to me about this is not even necessarily the young earth creation or the creation science discussion, although I am not unfamiliar with this. I've been having it for 20 years just by my personal proximity to someone who happens to practice earth science.
But what.
And I, like, almost never do this. But I'm going to right now, if it's okay with you. Read just like a real short snippet. Because I dog eared it. I dog eared a lot of pages, but I dog eared it. I have like a annotation on the side in all caps that says, louder, you know. Yes. And then I'm writing these notes of this. My note was creating a cultural monolith and its gatekeeping. So please, please. You're talking about.
I'm wondering if this is your second. This has to be. Is this creation science and the culture war machine? So this is chapter four. So it's like second paragraph. And you referenced the paragraph prior. And you're saying by means of this fiction, which is. Which is what you just described, you say the creation science industry has come to inhabit a kind of intellectual no man's land in which creation scientists advance ostensibly biblical and scientific claims while avoiding substantive engagement with either biblical scholarship or legitimate science, which is what you named specifically on the legitimate science. And this is what I hear Seth say over and over again, is if you try and do this, you're doing bad theology. And if you try and do this, you're doing bad science. Right. It's kind of like they're doing both bad theology and bad science. Over time, this intellectual no man's land has proven to be. This is the part for me, has proven to be a hospitable base of operation for enterprising theologians and ambitious ministers who exercise social control by framing their opposition to secular, in quotes, expertise as a definitive, quote, biblical view of gender, race, parenting, politics, public school curricula, Walt Disney, aggressive income tax, financial capitalism, international relations, and so on and so forth. And my notes here are saying, yes, because in my perspective, and you correct me if I'm reading this incorrectly, but it's. But kind of going to the chapter previous, when you. When you lay out these arguments and how they are in quotes, like, biblical, and then they undermine at the same time this secular science, this, like, these scientific, you know, industry here, then we. Then we say, okay, now that, for me, I'm like, okay, now that I have your attention and I've told you that this is the biblical way to read this, and I've created a litmus test. I've said I have. I am now a gatekeeper. And I say, if you don't believe in young earth creationism, then I can't really trust your judgment on this because obviously, you are not reading clearly how biblically, how we're supposed to interpret this. Um, but if I have your attention and you can do this now, I've convinced you that this is the way to read this, then all of these other things open up to me. And I can say, now, obviously, well, then you must have this perspective. I mean, let's hit some hot button issues. This. This perspective on gender hierarchy, this perspective on racial injustice, but also maybe this perspective on vaccines, capitalism, wealth, economic injustice, all of these other cultural things, immigration, all of these other cultural things that I can now point to places in the Bible, going back to your hermeneutics of legitimization, and I can proof text if I want. I can use this, a pillar of authority and submission. I can use this, motivated literalism. And I can say, we can clearly see that the Bible was created in six days. Can't you clearly see that? And then, obviously now, since we can clearly see that, we can also see that white people are meant to be superior to black people or people who are under this curse, or we can also clearly see that men are supposed to have authority over women, or we can also clearly see that this is the way that these certain relationships are designed, or this is the way that these certain cultures are designed. And I have this now list of things that I can say clearly in scare quotes. This is the biblical in scare quotes way to look at these things. And somehow creation science with younger creationism at its kind of the core interpretation, is now a mechanism by which I guess I can start to control these other narratives from this perspective. Did that hit me? Right? I mean, help me, help me kind of process.
[01:07:03] Speaker B: I mean, I don't. I think I would. I don't think I would go so far as to make the claim, not because I think it's false, but just because I don't think I can demonstrate that it's true.
I don't think I would go so far as to assert that the sort of young earth creationism, creation science, industrial complex, as it were, is the linchpin of this whole dynamic of social control.
But as I note at the beginning of, I guess it's chapter four there in the passage that you read, it's certainly a prominent feature of it, and it's anecdotally, I mean, it's helpful if you can, from the first couple chapters, establish that this is how we're going to approach this.
And, you know, a couple generations into this kind of litmus test thing, and I'm thinking here of sort of the conservative resurgence in the southern baptist convention, and I think I can point to situations where it looks to me as though the litmus tests have become the theology.
Right. So it used to be that, you know, a certain reading of a certain passage was, you know, was considered a litmus test because it was an indication of how you might sort of, you know, attitudes you might have about scripture more generally. Right.
But as far as I can tell, in a lot of contexts, if you don't toe the line on every single thing, then you're, like, considered heterodox. Well, that's no longer a litmus test.
I'm not saying you misapplied this term. That's exactly what it sort of started out as. It's a litmus test, but now it's like, that's just the theology, you know, and it's just these boxes you tick, and there's really nothing systematic about it except insofar as it's.
It has a kind of system or a kind of paradigm through which it all fits together. But I would say that that's authority and submission. It's not even really a theologic. It's not like it's not theologically systematic.
[01:09:33] Speaker A: Right.
[01:09:34] Speaker B: It's a system of thinking applied to theology, and that system of thinking is about, you know, authority and submission and these other things.
[01:09:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
All right, Scott, I feel like.
I mean, I feel like I could just take advantage of having you on the phone right now and could just, like, walk through the rest of this book. But I won't. I won't what I will ask you to do as a teacher, because I feel like I've been the, I've been the kid in the class who's like, oh, but what about this? And, ooh, ooh, but what about this? And it's like, okay, did he actually get to talk about what he wants to talk about? So I'm gonna ask you, like, if you could. If you could help, like, wrap it up, close it. If we were in class, like, what would you say? Think about this before we come back next time. Think about this before you get your hand, you know, your hands on the, on the text.
How would you kind of help us draw these things, these many things that we've talked about together as we end our time together?
[01:10:39] Speaker B: Sure.
So I've enjoyed the questions, by the way. And it's all been, it's all been germane and salient, so it's been delightful.
Let's see, I've got a couple of chapters in there on sort of the rise of the new. Right.
Some economic dynamics there and how that contributes to an affinity for authoritarian populism. And then in chapter six, I talk about some of the alarming networks that are emerging there.
But I would say, in general, the dynamics that we've been tracing are, I mean, one of the patterns that emerges is this tendency to pursue one's own interest and to use the Bible in pursuit of one's own interests. And I suppose I would just say that from my perspective, that is anti christian.
That's not how I understand the sweep of scriptures, sort of imperatives for me.
And I talk about this in the last chapter of the book, as I note in the last chapter of the book, which deals with justice and questions of moral knowledge.
I'm not particularly optimistic about how these things are going to go with respect to white evangelicalism or our political community more generally.
We're in a tight spot, and it's because of white evangelicals more than anyone else.
But I do think that at least one way of overcoming this kind of authoritarian social and political movement that has been legitimized using the resources of christian theology.
I do think that one way of overcoming it is to recognize that what we are called to do is to pursue justice.
And I think a really simple way of capturing that idea is to imagine going into the voting business and thinking to yourself, who am I going to vote for and why? And one kind of motivation is to say, well, I'm going to, you know, which politician or party or platform is going to give me things that I want that are good for me and then, you know, voting accordingly. We could call that a kind of special interest approach to politics, because what you're trying to advance is a special interest, your own interest. You know, that's one way of doing things. And I think, by the way, that's what when a politician says something like, well, I'm going to do stuff for Christians, or I've done more for christians than any other politician, my initial thought when I hear that is, what does that even mean, doing stuff for christians?
But the kind of voter to whom that appeals is the kind of voter who goes in the voting booth and says, who's going to do stuff for me? And that's how they vote. I would suggest that there's a different way to approach the voting booth, which is to say, and by the way, if that's your approach, that first approach, and that's everybody's approach in the United States, you know, in different special interest groups or whatever, we're in real trouble as a political community because we're we if that's where we are, and I think by a lot of indications that is where we are. If that's where we are, then we might share a piece of geography, but we do not share a horizon as a nation.
We're just a bunch of competing interest groups that view those whose interests are not aligned with our own as our enemy.
Now, there's a different approach to voting, which I think would be commended by scripture, in which incidentally or not incidentally, would also present a kind of example of how we might, as Christians, and indeed as a political community more generally, get out of this sort of quagmire that we're in with the competing interest groups. And that approach is this, to walk into the voting booth and say which politician or party or platform is going to give people what they deserve, which is to say which politician or party or platform is going to enact laws and public policies that bring our political community into greater conformity with the truth about justice.
And then voting for that politician or party or platform, even if it means you have to pay more taxes, by the way, it probably won't, you know, statistically speaking, because you're probably not.
Just probably, maybe you are, but probably not. I'm speaking to the listener here in the top 1% or 10% or whatever. So probably your taxes.
But even if they do, the point is we want to achieve justice. I think that's what we're called to do as christians, not to pursue our own interests. I'm tired of christians pursuing their own interests. It's antithetic to scripture. It's antithetic to the gospel.
So my plea would be, please stop pursuing your own interests. And for the love of all that's sacred on earth, please stop proof texting.
It's a bad practice.
[01:16:48] Speaker A: Bad practice. But that's a good word. It's a good word to end on. Scott, I'm so grateful. I'm grateful for this conversation, for this time that we had together and, and for the book. I really did. I found myself, I found myself laughing out loud in the, in the acknowledgements at the beginning and laughing to keep from crying in some places as I continued it. But it was wonderful. A delight to read and a delight to be with you today. It releases three eardmans on June 4, I think. Is that the right pub date?
[01:17:21] Speaker B: That's right.
[01:17:22] Speaker A: And I'll have a link, of course, where people can pre order this, but it's called ministers of propaganda, truth, power, and the ideology of the religious right by Scott M. Coley. Thank you so much again, Scott, for being with me.
[01:17:36] Speaker B: It's been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for inviting me.
[01:17:40] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes, music and podcast production by Seth Busetti. Be sure to give us a review on iTunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit
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