Arguing with people who want the US to be a theocracy of their beliefs

Someone asked me about arguing with someone who says we should have the death penalty for homosexuality because Leviticus 20, and it turned into my writing a blog post I’ve been thinking about for a while.

How do you argue with someone who says they’re Christian, and who cites Leviticus 20:13 as proof that “conversion therapy” (using the cover of psychology to abuse people) is good, and allowing non-het people full civil rights is bad?

Trying to argue with people who use Leviticus (and other “clobber verses”) to support homophobia is hard because they don’t understand their own argument. They’re just saying something that makes them feel better about the commitments they have for reasons not up for argument. Persuading them to understand the problems with the various claims they’re putting forward isn’t about refuting those claims, but about getting them to notice those claims don’t add up to a coherent position.

Too often, we think that persuasion involves changing what people believe, but, in my experience arguing with extremists all over the internet (and all over the political spectrum), persuasion requires getting people to reconsider how they believe.

Let’s imagine that you have a friend, call him Rando, who has cited Leviticus 20:13 as to why we should not allow gay marriage, “conversion therapy” is good, and overturning Obergefell v. Hodges is only slightly less important than overturning Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board. Oh, sorry, that last one isn’t supposed to be said out loud (although it too was a Supreme Court decision that prohibited white Christian evangelicals from dragging their religious beliefs into the civic realm).

I have to start by pointing out that Leviticus 20:13 says nothing about whether conversion therapy is effective, nor whether we should allow gay marriage. But it does say that the death penalty is involved. Pretty clearly.

Rando has a serious problem with his citing that text as authoritative unless he wants the death penalty for homosexual acts. If he sincerely believes that Leviticus 20:13 condemns consensual gay sex (it probably doesn’t), and we must follow it, then, then he’s insisting on the death penalty for gay sex. If he is citing that Scripture as authoritative, and he isn’t advocating the death penalty for homosexual acts, then he is cherry-picking bits of the verse he is citing as authoritative.

He’s cherry-picking Scripture, while pretending he isn’t. Rando does that a lot.

So, how do you argue with him? The rhetorical problem is that Rando believes four things: 1) his interpretation of Scripture is right because that interpretation makes sense in light of everything else Rando believes; 2) he can find reasons to support his interpretation; 3) if you “just look” at the evidence, and you’re a good and reasonable person, you can see the truth (naïve realism); 4) if you don’t think the truth of any situation—including the true interpretation of Scripture—is immediately and completely clear to people of good will and intelligence, then you’re a hippy relativist who thinks all interpretations are equally valid.

If you’re trying to persuade Rando to change his mind, then it all comes down to the first and fourth. Arguing with Rando about his interpretation of Leviticus 20 is really arguing with him about how he reads Scripture and how he thinks about belief (the binary of certain or clueless). If Rando believes the first and fourth, then he believes that being open to persuasion about his reading of Scripture is a sin–he thinks being less than fully committed to what your church tells you is right is being a hippy smoking dope and saying people can believe whatever they want.

That’s why arguing with Rando so hard. You aren’t arguing with him about claims; every argument in which he engages is an argument about whether he’s totally right or there is no right and wrong at all. That’s why he digs in so very, very hard.

What follows is drawn from my experience of arguing with Rando over the years when it comes to the Leviticus argument.

Rando might be the kind of person who wants the US to be a theocracy (he’ll call it a “Christian nation” but that isn’t what he means—he has zero intention of including Christian denominations with which he disagrees, let alone that asshole who argues with him in Bible study). He wants the US to enforce his reading of Scripture. What he wants isn’t a “Christian” nation for a couple of reasons. The first is that Christians disagree about a lot of things, so many that Christians benefit from the notion of a separation of church and state. After all, a lot of the crucial rulings about separation of church and state were because Christians were being legally disadvantaged and prohibited from practicing their religion by other Christians. Keep in mind the number of times that Christians have killed one another in the name of religion, the Albigensian massacres through the death toll in Ireland.

Rando doesn’t want a “Christian” nation—he wants a “nation that makes my way the only way.” In my experience, if you point that out to Rando, he won’t understand the point. When you point out that he wants a nation that would persecute other Christians, and not allow them to practice their religion, he’ll say that those practices aren’t really Christian. He’ll say those people are rejecting the Bible, cherry-picking, or reading it in a biased way. His model of exegesis is (and various Randos over the years have said this to me), “Just read the Bible.”[1]

One interesting strategy is to point out that even figures like Augustine, Luther, Jerome, and Calvin don’t agree on crucial aspects of Scripture, and all of them said that Scripture is unclear at parts. So, is Rando claiming to be smarter than Calvin? A better reader of Scripture than Calvin? (It can also be fun to point out that Calvin didn’t use the King James translation.)

Everyone picks and chooses from Scripture—does Rando’s church ban pearls in church? Or braided hair? Does the altar follow the rules laid out in Deuteronomy?

A lot of times the impulse is to ask if he eats shellfish, but argument isn’t a great one–Paul explicitly rejects the rules about food (and animal sacrifice).

But there are strategies that sometimes work. One is asking Rando if he follows all the laws in the Hebrew Bible. Does he have to marry his sister-in-law if his brother dies? In my experience, he’ll say that those rules are cultural, and peculiar to the time, and then you can point out that homosexuality is also very much a cultural issue. (That argument can get pretty weird, even unintentionally funny on Rando’s part, and you get extra points if it gets around to when Rando shows he spends a lot of time thinking about what gay men do in the bedroom.)

Sometimes Rando will admit that Scripture requires a process of interpretation, but he’ll insist that his process is not something he is imposing on Scripture, but something in Scripture. He’ll say that Scripture has two kinds of laws, civic and moral (this is just the cultural argument above, but you don’t end up getting TMI about Rando’s thoughts on gay sex). Civic laws are time and culture-specific, but the moral laws are timeless and endorsed by Jesus. This is not a distinction that appears anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, even implicitly. It’s just a way that Rando can rationalize his cherry-picking.

Leviticus 20 , for instance, has a prohibition that is often read as prohibiting same sex relations (it doesn’t). Rando wants to keep that one as a moral law. But Leviticus 20 also prohibits seeing one’s aunts naked, having sex with the followers of Moloch (how worried should we be about that?), having sex with a menstruating woman, or mixing up clean and unclean beasts. Those prohibitions are interspersed in with the rest—it isn’t as though Leviticus 20 is only about what Rando wants to call “moral” laws (unless he’s squeamish about pigs, I guess). And that’s the way all the various prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible are (and quite a few in the Epistles)–if there is a distinction between cultural and moral, it’s a distinction that we, as interpreters, choose to make. There’s no reason to think that the authors of it saw themselves as creating two different kinds of prescriptions and proscriptions.

Jesus rejected some of the Hebrew Bible laws (such as the imposition of the death penalty), and strengthened others (such as loving our neighbor), but he never did so by saying, “Well, those were just cultural, but these are moral.” He did it on his own authority. And, tbh, if you’re Jesus, you get to do that. Rando isn’t Jesus.

Since Jesus never condemned homosexuality, then its inclusion in the moral laws that Jesus strengthened is a bit vexed.

Here’s the final point I’ll make about the cultural/moral distinction being a filter we impose to make sense of Scripture, rather than one Scripture commands us to use: were that distinction in Scripture, and were Rando’s application of that distinction not motivated reasoning, then there would be unanimous (or nearly unanimous) agreement in the Christian tradition as to what rules we should keep and which ones we shouldn’t. Or even agreement on one of those categories. And there isn’t. To pick one example from Leviticus 20, Calvin was very strict about Sabbath keeping, Luther not so much. Major American denominations (*cough* Southern Baptists *cough*) treated the presence of slavery in Scripture as proof that it was God’s will, while rejecting various specific practices (such as jubilee) as cultural.

So, once again, Rando’s position—that his reading of Scripture is Scripture, and anyone who disagrees with him is imposing their prejudices onto Scripture—necessitates that he say he’s better at interpreting Scripture than major theologians in the Christian tradition.[2] No one in the history of Christianity got that distinction right, but Rando has? Once again, he’s smarter than Calvin? Rando’s distinction isn’t in Scripture; it’s in his head.[3]

A variation on the strategy of trying to make Rando take seriously his own reliance on the Hebrew Bible rules is to ask if he wants the US to have as legal code all of the rules in the Hebrew Bible. Again, his answer is no. If you ask why he wants the US to follow the rules he personally thinks matter, you get one of two answers. Both are dependent on the way he reads Scripture (and thinks about belief) mentioned above—that he (or his church) has the unmediated correct interpretation of Scripture (a belief belied every adult Sunday school class). After all, if Rando is right that it’s from God’s mouth to his ear, and he’s right that homosexuality sends you to Hell, then he could just not have gay sex. Why prohibit other people engaging in it? Or keep them from getting the material benefits of marriage? He could just let them go to Hell, or even spend a lot of time thinking about them in Hell, and thinking about the acts that got them there. Whatever floats your boat, Rando.

Why get the nation-state involved? In my experience, the most common answer is that my neighbor not behaving the way I want will involve my being punished. And now we are on the topic of Sodom and Gomorrah—the notion that God will destroy the US for allowing sin. Sodom and Gomorrah are stories of God saving the righteous–there is no Scriptural text of which I’m aware that has God destroying righteous people because of the sins of the people around them. Rando is not going to be destroyed because he has gay neighbors who are allowed to marry, and nothing in Scripture says he will.

And Sodom wasn’t destroyed because of what came to be called sodomy (this is discussed in three of the links included above). If you’re arguing with Rando, you can point out that even the most hardcore fundagelicals have given up on the argument that God destroyed Sodom for homosexuality—it was for oppressing the poor. Hmmmmm….should the US worry about whether we oppress the poor? Is Rando up in arms about the poor? Or does he spend more time thinking about what gay men do in bed?

As an aside, the whole notion that God will destroy a nation for being sinners is Scripturally vexed, but that’s a long argument and not very productive in the short run because it’s so complicated. If Rando is a follower of the “just world model,” and he thinks it’s endorsed by Scripture (prosperity gospel), then persuading him out of that model is something that takes years. As far as I can tell, people who are strongly attached to the just world model and give it up do so because of lived experiences.

Every once in a while (it’s pretty rare in my experience), you get the argument that it’s for their own good—that you’re saving people from damnation by keeping them from sinning. It’s John Locke who has the best answer to that, in Letter Concerning Toleration. If a person goes to church just because they’re forced to by the law, they’re still going to Hell. If they behave well just to avoid going to Hell, that’s where they’ll end up.[4]

If the disagreement does go in the direction of using the power of the state to force people to behave as you think they should, you might have a good discussion of the principle of liberalism. A lot of people seriously believe (because they’ve been told) that they will be forced to have a gay pastor or something. Their church will not be required to perform gay marriages—we don’t even force churches to perform “mixed” marriages, or second marriages. Churches can allow or prohibit whatever members they want—this is about civil society. This isn’t about what Rando’s church is allowed to; it’s about what Rando will allow my church to do. In my experience, Rando doesn’t understand that you can believe that what someone is doing is wrong, and not try to use the power of the state to force them to stop.

And the issue of using the power of the state to force others to behave as you think they ought brings up what can be the most productive strategy, when it works. This is only worth pursuing if you have some hope for Rando.

If he is open that he wants a nation that has as its laws the rules he thinks are important in Scripture, rejecting any other Christian readings, then ask if he thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a theocracy of their religion. When he says no, then say something like, “So, you want to be able to force people of other religions (even other kinds of Christianity) to live by your reading of Scripture, but you don’t want anyone to treat you that way?”

When he says yes, as he usually does, then you can say, “So, you want to be able treat others in a way that you don’t want to be treated. Someday, you will be face to face with someone who said you should do unto others as you would have them to do unto, and you will get to explain why you decided to ignore what he very clearly said. Good luck with that.”[5]


[1] This is why I always end up on the question of epistemology. He thinks his perception is unmediated. Other people are biased, but he isn’t. And he knows he isn’t biased because he knows his beliefs are true. He knows his beliefs are true because 1) he can find evidence to support them, and 2) he can ask himself if his beliefs are true, and he always get a YES!
[2] I’m tempted to say every theologian, but I’m not sure that’s true. I’m pretty sure I could find some belief of every theologian that they identified as central and necessary that he wouldn’t, but I’m not certain.
[3] I’m not saying that we are hopelessly lost in our own projections when it comes to reading Scripture, but that we are all humans, and humans are prone to motivated reasoning. Rando’s mistake is thinking that his method of reading is unmediated by his own political and personal commitments. In my experience, Rando is a binary thinker, and so he has the binary of certain/clueless. He believes that, if he isn’t certain about what Scripture means, then he’s clueless, and all interpretations are equally valid. That’s like saying that, if you aren’t certain about what a complicated contract means, then you have no clue, and you can believe whatever you want.
[4] In my experience, Rando believes in Hell—yet another belief not well-supported by Scripture.
[5] Almost all of also this applies to how people often talk about the Constitution, and their reading being unmediated.