Tag: prosperity gospel

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

Ollie's bbq
Ollie’s bbq, the subject of the SCOTUS case, Katzenbach v. McClung (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1964/543) [image from here: http://joshblackman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/scan0001.bmp]


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.

Abolitionist conspiracies, leftists as the “ruling class,” and the pleasure of implausible scapegoating

In the mid-1830s, the British writer Harriet Martineau visited the United States, and she found many slavers who were up in arms about the American Abolition Society having “flooded” the South with an anti-slavery pamphlet. She asked whether any of them had actually seen the pamphlet, and was met with outrage—how could she doubt the word of gentlemen? A lot of people didn’t doubt the word of those “gentlemen,” and the myth of the 1835 massive pamphlet mailing remains in history books (Fanatical Schemes, see especially 149-150, and Gentlemen of Property and Standing). It never happened. Martineau had already met with the people who had sent pamphlets to one post office, and who had agreed to send no more, so she suspected (correctly) that it hadn’t. She didn’t tell the slavers they were wrong, but she did ask what evidence they had, and their “evidence” was that their personal certainty, and the certainty of reliable people, all grounded in what their media said.

This mythical event was brought up in the next Congress, and people acted on the basis of a thing that never happened. The antebellum era had a lot of instances of that kind of thing—the fabricated Murrell conspiracy, various non-existent abolitionist plots, Catholic conspiracies against democracy.

People believed those myths for two reasons (which might actually be one): those myths were repeated endlessly by in-group (us) media, and those myths fit the overall narrative of that in-group media.[1] That overall narrative was one common to cultures of demagoguery: yes, we have a lot of problems, and it might look as though those problems are the consequence of slavery. But they aren’t! All of those problems are caused by the actions of Them.

Slavery had an almost endless number of ethical, practical, and rhetorical contradictions. People who claimed to be Christian rejected and deflected Jesus’ very clear commandment to “do unto others as you would have do unto you” (all cultures of demagoguery fail that test); they ignored, denied, and deflected very clear rules in Scripture about how to treat slaves; they reframed the very clear instructions about caring for the poor and weak as the need to enslave them. In short, Scripture is pretty clear: do unto others as you would have done unto you, take care of the poor and marginal. The problem for people who want to enslave, exterminate, or oppress others and yet want to see themselves as Christian is always how do we reconcile the cognitive dissonance?

We reconcile that cognitive dissonance through myths. And, oddly enough, the people who are now rationalizing a system that grinds the faces of the poor engage in the same non-falsifiable and extraordinarily self-serving myth in which slavers engaged: that people who are oppressed deserve their oppression.

This is an example of the just world model, the notion that bad things only happen to bad people, and that people who succeed earned that success, and that poor people are poor, not because of structural inequities, greed on the part of the wealthy, but because our system is too kind to the poor, making them choose to be poor.

From a Judeo-Christian perspective, the notion that we should be crueler to the poor in order to inspire them to be less poor requires a lot of intricate dancing in regard to Scriptural interpretation, with some ignoring or engaging in intricate explanations of anything Jesus said, in favor of open cherry-picking of the Hebrew Bible. It also requires a lot of intricate dancing in terms of data, with some serious cherry-picking. But, really, when people have decided that Jesus’ saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” doesn’t actually mean, well, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, they can swallow a camel.

And they swallow a camel by swallowing circular arguments. Given that people whom we oppress are inferior, we can conclude they are inferior. Given that people who are poor deserve being poor, we can conclude that they deserve to be poor. Given that POC should be treated differently, we can conclude that they are different. Given that only inferior races are enslaved, we can conclude that those races are inferior. Given that we need to believe that slaves are happy, slaves are happy.

There are similar myths now: the American military is unbeatable, the free market solves all problems, government does everything wrong, cutting taxes boosts the economy, if you have enough faith you will be healthy and wealthy. People who are or were deeply committed to those myths have (or had) to explain slave rebellions, military quagmires, famines, situations in which even libertarians want the government to intervene, such as the Tea Party political figures who were outraged with what Obama did in 2008, but are now voting for a bigger bailout.

Failure presents people, and a community, with an opportunity to reflect sensibly on what we’ve been doing and thinking. The collapse of a relationship, failing a test, getting fired–these are all opportunities for us to tell stories about ourselves in which we behave differently.

Or not.

I had a friend who kept getting dumped because, his girlfriends said, he was too critical. I tried to suggest that maybe he should be less critical, but he insisted women were wrong not to appreciate how he was trying to help them. I used to have friends who lost money on timeshares multiple times. Maria Konnikova’s fascinating The Confidence Game describes how con artists con the same people multiple times.

Instead of reconsidering our commitment to an ideology, narrative, or sense of ourselves (a path that would admitting to people we were wrong, losing face, reconsidering all sorts of beliefs and relationships) we have the option of treating this situation as an exception. And it’s an exception either because of a lack of will—so if we recommit to our problematic ideology with greater will, then it will work. In other words, instead of the failure of a policy or ideology being an indication we should reconsider it, the problem is that we didn’t beleeeeeve in it strongly enough, and the failure is proof that it was the right course of action all along.

(No matter how times I see people react that way—and it happens in all the communities I’ve studied that ended up in train wrecks—it surprises me.)

Recommitting with greater will is almost always paired with scapegoating some group. They are the reason that our flawless plan keeps failing. And because They are so cunning and nefarious, we are justified in more extreme measures.

Normally, we tell ourselves and anyone who will listen, we would be kind to slaves, take care of the poor, respect the law (and so on), but we are forced to be heartless and suspend laws by Them. And what continually surprises me about the effectiveness of this scapegoating is how completely implausible the scapegoats are. Slavers picked on abolitionists—who, at the time they started getting scapegoated, were a tiny group of mostly Quakers. Hardly very threatening, and extremely unlikely to be fomenting race war.

Mid-19th century fantasies of a Catholic conspiracy to overthrow the United States involved a highly improbable collaboration among Irish, Italian, and German Catholics (the Irish wouldn’t even let the Italians worship with them in New York, let alone share political power) led by the Hapsburg Emperor and the Pope.

The Nazi fantasy about Jews had them as both communists and capitalists, a neat trick, and was persuasive enough that people accused any critic of Nazism of being either a Jew or a stooge of the Jews. As the scholar of rhetoric Kenneth Burke pointed out, that there appears to be a contradiction was taken by true believers as proof of the cleverness of the Jews.

Rush Limbaugh scapegoats liberals, who are “the ruling class.” As with the scapegoating of abolitionists or Jews, this scapegoating is simultaneously an elaborate and contradictory narrative, in which government employees, university professors (especially in the humanities), and environmentalists (hardly people with a lot of economic or political power), funded by George Soros and Bill Gates, are more powerful than actual billionaires who are actually in political office.

That this narrative is implausible and incoherent—if libruls were that powerful, they wouldn’t be grading first-year composition papers—just shows the cleverness of the libruls (as the apparent impossibility of an effective conspiracy of abolitionists, Catholics, Jews was evidence of the brilliant plan). Libruls are like the evil villains in old movies, who, instead of just shooting the hero, create Rube Goldberg machines to kill the hero and his sidekick.

The inchoate nature of the conspiracy (what, exactly, is the goal of the librul conspiracy? To work in the Post Office? Surely clever people would come up with a better endgame than that) means that Limbaugh can’t be proven wrong, that anything and everything can be blamed on the ruling elite, and no evidence that the GOP is actually the problem needs to be considered.

The American Anti-Slavery Society never flooded slave states with pamphlets; the problems with slavery weren’t caused by abolitionists.

[1] “In-group” doesn’t mean the group that’s in power, but the group people are in.

“I sent you a rowboat:” Prosperity gospel and throwing others into the flood

chart of deaths from covid
https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en?fbclid=IwAR0ooEsBuC0WlYcZ3byJ1Sz7CA2WfFEuMSYp3rkvPuMHNDiN0otLnErBRA4

The fundagelical Governors of Mississippi and Alabama have decided to resist expert recommendations about COVID-19, with the Governor of Mississippi going so far as to prevent any cities or counties from enacting policies grounded in expert opinion. And many people are shocked that governors would reject expert opinion, but, from within those governors’ imagined world, it makes perfect sense.

I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time arguing with fundagelicals, and they are yet another set of people who argue so badly that their consistent inability to argue well should make them reconsider their beliefs. But they don’t, because they think they’re arguing well.

They believe that they’re arguing well because they are making claims that they feel certain are true, and they can find evidence to support those claims. [As a side note, I’ll say that far too many high school and college courses in argumentation would confirm that sense of what it means to make a good argument.]

What fundagelicals can’t see (nor can other people who reason badly) is that their way of reasoning is one even they reject as a bad way to reason, but they only reject that way of reasoning when other people reason that way.

For the sake of argument, I’ll stick with fundagelicals, but this toxic approach to deliberation is all over the political spectrum (and also slithers through other fields in which people make bad decisions, such as people who keep having disastrous relationships that don’t make them rethink their way of thinking about relationships).

Fundagelicals believe that everything about your life can be changed if you have enough faith. New Age grifters who have killed people also advocate that narrative that, as do get laid quick and make money fast grifters. Nazis also made that argument. So did Maoists. And Stalinists.

Fundagelicals believe that Scripture is not just soteriological, but politically eschatological. That is, many Christians believe that Scripture tells us about the spiritual journey we as individuals must make (soteriology). Fundagelicals believe that Scripture tells the story of political history (political eschatology). For people who read Scripture as eschatalogical, Revelation is neither a time-specific political allegory, nor a celebration of individual faith, but a perfectly accurate narrative of what is yet to come. The notion that Revelation is a codebook that, if we read it correctly, will tell us when the world is ending, is much more controversial than many people realize.

Fundagelicals have an oddly flat reading of Scripture—Scripture means what it seems to mean, as long as that meaning supports the political agenda they now have. Thus, when conservative Christians supported slavery and segregation, they cheerfully dismissed “Do unto others” (fundagelicals still evade that one) and the very clear rules about treatment of slaves, and they equally cheerfully insisted on odd readings in order to justify racism. In my experience, fundagelicals opt for the literal reading, except when they don’t—there is no coherence to their exegetical method, except political. That is, when reading literally gets them the “proof” they want, they read literally; when it doesn’t, they read metaphorically (or dismiss the passage as a cultural blip).

For instance, arguing for Hell on literal grounds is more vexed than many people realize, and, so, people who want to argue for it have to read a fair number of verses in a non-literal way.  They’re literal (to the English translation, a serious problem when you’re talking about a literal reading) when it comes to “homosexuality” (neither a word nor concept that is in Scripture), but dismiss as “cultural” the equally clear proscriptions regarding women wearing makeup, people wearing mixed fibers, the death penalty.

When I’ve argued with fundagelicals about this point, the argument gets hung up at exactly the same place. For instance, on the issue of homosexuality, they cite the clobber verses, and I give them various links showing they’re relying on vexed readings of those verses, and they say, “That is what it says.” (In English, of course, not in Greek. Let’s set that aside.) I point out that they are citing one item from a list of behaviors that are condemned, and those lists always include behavior they allow, such as divorce, women wearing makeup in church, wearing mixed fibers, or benefitting from money loaned with interest). And they say, “Those are just cultural values of that moment.” And, then I say, “So were the practices you translate as ‘homosexuality,’” and they say, “No, those are universal.” They can’t say why they’re universal without engaging in a kind of simultaneously narcissistic and circular way of reasoning: they’re universal because I think they’re universal, and these other things are culturally specific because I think they’re culturally specific.

They can’t identify an exegetical method that they apply consistently, other than the narcissistic and circular one, because that’s how read Scripture in a politicized and narcissistic way: they approach Scripture expecting to see their political agenda confirmed, and so they treat every interpretation/meaning as real that confirms their political agenda, and dismiss every one as just an appearance that doesn’t. In rhetoric, this is called dissociation. In psychology, it’s considered an instance of “motivated reasoning,” and most of us do it. I’m saying that, in my experience, fundagelicals–again, like many people–won’t admit that’s what they’re doing, and that is the problem.

That their exegetical method is politicized from the beginning is why they accuse their opponents of politicizing Scripture. Projection is the first move of people who can’t reflect on their own processes.

This discussion of exegesis might seem a long way from why fundagelicals are dismissing the advice of experts (except when they aren’t), but it isn’t.

What I’m saying is that fundagelicals are yet one more instance of conservative Christians for whom being conservative matters more than being Christian. Here’s the best evidence that they are in-group first, and thoughtful exegesis second: when people try to criticize their reading of Scripture, they dismiss those criticisms on the grounds that the critics are bad people. That isn’t Scriptural exegesis—that’s demagoguery. That’s an admission that they are thinking about protecting their political in-group more than being honest and reflective of their methods of reading Scripture.

Or, tldr; they cherry-pick data. They cherry-pick Scripture; they cherry-pick “science.” And, just as their interpretation of Scripture is not defensible as anything other than “whatever supports our political agenda is true,” regardless of method, so is their way of citing “science.” They’ll cite a bad study as true because it agrees with them, while critiquing a study with the same (or better) methodology—on methodological grounds (Family Research Association is a great site for seeing this contradiction).

This cherry-picking of data while pretending to have a principled stance is not restricted to evangelicals. (Do not get me started about raw foodies.) But their cherry-picking of data is important because fundagelicals are politically powerful right now, despite their perpetual and ridiculous whingeing about being victims (talk about “snowflakes”—another instance of projection).

What I think a lot of non-fundagelicals are having trouble understanding about our current political moment is the dominance of prosperity gospel (an example of the “just world model”).

Prosperity gospel is a non-falsifiable interpretive frame that says that, if you have enough faith, you can get anything you want. It’s non-falsifiable in two ways. First, if you don’t get what you want, then you didn’t have enough faith—there’s no way to disprove this explanation of success/faith. Second, if something happens that simply cannot be explained as a lack of faith, it’s just a temporary setback, just God testing our faith. (Although most people tie it back to 19th century movements, it’s close to the muckled 17th century New England Puritan doctrine of signs.)

Just to be clear: I am a person of faith, and I think faith enables us to do extraordinary things. It also enables us to put one foot in front of another through difficult times because faith is the belief that things will turn out all-right. I also tithe. But, I don’t believe that faith guarantees us the outcome we want—that we are entitled to all of our desires being fulfilled by having perfect faith (or giving enough money). Such a belief substitutes our will (our desires, really) for God’s; that seems blasphemous to me.

I’ve also seen that kind of faith, not in God, but in our ability to get our way if we have enough faith, do great damage. It’s the old joke about the person of faith who refused to heed warnings, with the “punchline” of a drowned person of great faith asking God, “Why did you let me drown–I had perfect faith in you?” and God answering, “I sent you a warning, a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter–what more did you want?”

Paradoxically, the just world model, especially when coupled with the notion that we can get whatever we want if we have enough faith, leads to tragedy. People don’t help others because we blame the victims. We ignore systemic failings on the assumption that any problem is always a failure of individual faith. Thus, people who believe in the just world model tend not to recognize systemic problems like poverty, racism, sexism, and they don’t support systemic solutions, such as communities supporting infrastructures (good schools, roads, healthcare). The just world model increases us v. them thinking, The paradox of the just world model is that it leads to an unjust world—whether religious or not (as mentioned above, the idea that you can get whatever you want if you have enough faith/will/confidence is the basis of philosophies as diverse as Libertarianism, Nazism, get rich quick schemes, pseudo-mystical success schemes).

Once a person or community has stepped into this ideology, it’s hard to get out. Rejecting the rowboat and helicopter becomes how one demonstrates faith. The difference between our situation and the guy who rejects the flood warnings is that he drowned; if we sit on the roof, and reject the epidemiologists, public health experts, social distancing, and ventilators to demonstrate our individual (or church’s) faith, we aren’t the only ones who drown. We may not drown at all. But health workers will. Police, EMT, the vulnerable.

We aren’t just sitting on the roof risking our lives. We’re throwing others into the water. Being Christian should mean we care for the vulnerable—we’re being given that chance. God sent us the epidemiologists; let’s listen to them.

Avocado toast, Orwell, homelessness, and prosperity gospel

When I was teaching first year courses in argumentation, one of my favorite texts for sparking interesting arguments about poverty, homelessness, and working conditions was George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. His description of poverty usefully vexed a tendency to approach the issues in “liberal v. conservative” ways, and helped students move beyond thinking about an economic issue in terms of feeling or not feeling “sorry” for the homeless, let alone overworked and underpaid dishwashers. The book shifted the argument from whether the homeless are or are not “bringing it on themselves” (that is, whether their identity is villain or victim) to policy arguments about strategies. On the whole, the self-identified Christians in the classes at Berkeley tended to argue for some kind of intervention, with disagreements (even among themselves) as to what it should be. I liked that. I don’t like binaries.

I moved to a much more conservative region, and discovered the book didn’t thwart the “they brought it on themselves and therefore don’t deserve help” argument, for some self-identified Christian students. The first time it happened, the student (call zir Chester) was really angry with Orwell. Chester said something like, “Well, of course he’s homeless; he’s wasting money.” My response was, “How so?” Chester answered, “He talks about smoking, so clearly he’s spending money on cigarettes.” Other students pointed out that Orwell very clearly said he (and other “tramps” as he called them) were picking up discarded cigarette butts, and smoking them, or picking out the last bits of tobacco and re-rolling them. There was no evidence he was spending money.

Chester argued that meant that Orwell and the tramps must have been spending money on rolling paper. Some students argued that we don’t know that, but one student (call zir Hubert) said, “Even if he was, that would have been a few pennies.” Chester said, “He should have saved those pennies.” I liked Chester a lot, but at this point even I was confused—“And done what with them?” Chester said, “Save them.” Hubert asked how—Orwell couldn’t open an account with a few pennies, and it wasn’t as though he could buy stock (or whether buying stock at that point was even a smart investment—this was the 30s). Chester brushed off any of those questions about how, practically, Orwell could have taken the few pennies he might (or might not) have spent on rolling paper (or perhaps even tobacco) and invested it for financial security.

That was my first exposure to prosperity gospel.

Orwell’s situation wasn’t some consequence of his personal failings or lack of work ethic; it was the consequence of a world economic situation, and the ways his government was (or was not) responding to them. Hubert didn’t see how Orwell’s refusing to smoke would change the worldwide and systemic factors that caused homelessness and poverty—Hubert wanted to know what to do with the pennies.

The Huberts of the world now post on Facebook and tweet about how bizarre it is that some political figure argues that “millennials” or “urban poor” (do I hear whistling?) or “that person using WIC” (that whistling is really loud) or “immigrants” (why are my dogs barking?) aren’t really poor because they eat avocado toast, have nice shoes, bought chips, have i-phones.

The Huberts of the world point out that there is no practical action a person could take that would mean forgoing avocado toast, chips, i-phones, or nice shoes would enable that person to gain financial security.

But for the Chesters of the world, getting economic security isn’t an pragmatic (and economic) system of taking money from one place and investing it; it’s a spiritual system (an issue of “character” or “will”). Orwell’s mistake, for Chester, wasn’t spending money on smoking—it was smoking. Smoking is an indulgence.

In this world, smoking, avocado toast, nice shoes, chips, i-phones are all indulgences. If you are the sort of person who engages in indulgences, you will never be rewarded with wealth. Had Orwell refused to smoke, he would have … I don’t know, something. This whole way of thinking seems to be so blazingly irrational, and theologically indefensible, that I’m still unclear on the relationship of claims.

This notion that being a person who resists smoking (but doesn’t always resist sexual assault) also has to do with the current fundagelical obsession with control (largely Strict Father Morality). In this world, good people, especially good men, control their desire for indulgence (they also control others, but that’s a different post). If they are in control, they are rewarded with wealth (which, oddly enough, enables them to have all the avocado toast they want, but no one claims this ideology is internally consistent). The assumption is that being a rigid person who believes in God and engages in strict self-control means you will prosper.

So, it isn’t about what you would do with the money you saved by not smoking or not eating avocado toast. It’s about being the sort of person who doesn’t indulge in smoking or avocado toast. We don’t need an argument about avocado toast; we need an argument about prosperity gospel.