Episode 242: Spot the Propaganda and Logical Fallacies feat. Scott Coley

Ever heard people say, "The Bible is crystal clear" or "if you don't believe that, you don't believe the Bible?" Quite often people equate their interpretation of the Bible with the Bible itself--with bad results. Today Scott Coley joins us to talk about his new book Ministers of Propaganda, and to look at how many evangelical leaders have used logical fallacies to keep themselves at the top of the power hierarchy. Plus let's look at how to get back to the way of Jesus!

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Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast. I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And we have been in the middle of a deconstruction series. For the last three weeks, we’ve been listening to different people’s stories of why they’ve had to deconstruct some things from the evangelical church especially around gender and women’s roles and dating and marriage and where they’ve ended up. And we’ve heard from people who have ended up in all kinds of different places. And today we’re going to focus a little bit more in a different way on deconstruction. We’re going to have Scott Coley come in, and he is a professor of philosophy, to talk to us about some of the methods that a lot of churches and teachers use in the evangelical church which actually keep people trapped in which actually what he calls propaganda. And that’s what we need to deconstruct from. So Keith and I—we just recorded an amazing conversation with him, and I’m excited to bring that to you in a second. Before I do that, though, I want to say thank you to some special people. So, first of all, I want to say thank you to our sponsor for this podcast episode, Ryan George and his book, Hurt and Healed by the Church, that we talked about last week. Ryan’s story is just—it’s sad and encouraging and inspiring all at the same time because he was deep in fundamentalism, deep in an independent fundamentalist Baptist church. And then he found out that his pastor father had been sexually abusing women. And he turned him in. He had to deal with that. He went public with it. And it took a real toll on his faith and his family and everything. And so church was the place that hurt him because church was the one that built up the walls that allowed his dad to do what he did. But he also found that in his deconstruction and in allowing himself to question he found the real Jesus. And so he found that not only was he hurt by the church he was also healed when he found a healthy place where he could honestly get to know Jesus. So it’s a really inspiring story. And if you’re just in the middle of that deconstruction and you don’t know where you’re going to end up, I highly recommend just taking a look at this one because he deals with some really big questions. Let me read you one thing that he said. “Unsafe churches convinced me that God’s voice is hidden behind arbitrary walls, but the Holy Spirit whispers to all of us in our own heart languages.” And I thought that was so true. If you are in a church that says that only the pastor can hear from God or that you need to obey what that pastor or that church says instead of listening to the Holy Spirit in your own life, that’s not safe. And that’s not right. And Ryan started asking questions, and I hope that you will too. So thank you to Ryan George, the author of Hurt and Healed by the Church. And I also want to say thank you to our patrons, who support us and give money on a monthly basis. You can do that too for as little as $5 a month. You can support what we do and get access to our Facebook group. For a little bit more, you’ll get our unfiltered podcasts and all kinds of other fun things so head on over to patreon.com. And we also have the ability for you to donate money and get a tax deductible receipt within the United States at the Good Fruit Faith Initiative. And the links to both of those things are in our posts. And, of course, we have our merch including our be a biblical woman merch, which is super fun, be a biblical man and more. So you can take a look at our merch and our courses in our store and support us that way as well. And now, without further ado, I would like to welcome my husband on the podcast as we talk to Scott Coley. As you’re listening to this, just a little bit of a warning. There are some—a few audio issues. Scott was looking after his kids at the same time as he was recording this. So sometimes you can hear them in the background. But, hey, we love dads involved with their kids. We’re all in favor of that on the Bare Marriage podcast. So let’s just pretend we’re all sitting around a house and with the chaos that sometimes ensues and listen in on this conversation. Well, I am so delighted to bring on the Bare Marriage podcast Scott Coley, who is a lecturer in philosophy at—is it Mount St. Mary’s University? Hi, Scott.

Scott: Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Sheila: Yeah. And now we kind of got to know each other on Twitter. I always had fun with you on Twitter. And then when your new book came out, Ministers of Propaganda, I was really excited for it. And you read it too because it’s totally your thing.

Keith: Yeah.

Sheila: Because it’s so into logical fallacies and let’s just look at the logic of this stuff. And yeah. Really, really fun and right on brand for us. Do you want to just sum up what the book—what you’re trying to say in the book? And just to put you on the spot.

Scott: Absolutely. So the basic argument of the book is that a large percentage of white evangelicals—conservative white evangelicals tend to use the Bible as a kind of inexhaustible well of narratives that legitimize social arrangements that they prefer. And, in particular, we see things like gender hierarchy. I think that’s probably something that will occupy a lot of our focus today. But there are other kinds of— economic, racial hierarchies and that kind of thing—built in there as well that I sort of trace the history of and the history of white evangelical efforts to use Scripture to reinforce social arrangements that benefit themselves often to the detriment of, historically, marginalized groups. And I’ll just say, for the record, that I am—identify with the evangelical tradition and am, myself, white and male. So yeah.

Sheila: Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Part of your basic thesis seems to be words lose meaning because they—when they appeal to ideals to justify undermining those very ideals. And there’s this awesome quote I have to read, okay? From page three of your book, you said this, “What makes this form of propaganda especially potent is that it forecloses the possibility of dissent by appropriating the very ideals that animate dissenting arguments.” So here we go. Listen to this, people. “Liberty cannot serve as the basis for outlawing slavery if true liberty consists in the freedom to own slaves.” Yeah.

Scott: Yeah. So there are a lot of different kinds of propaganda. It shows up in literature, in film, in various art forms. My book focuses on one kind of propaganda in particular, and that’s rhetoric that appeals to some ideal in service to an agenda that undermines that very ideal. And the example that you just pointed to there appeals to liberty in defense of race-based chattel slavery in the antebellum South. That sort of paradigm example of this kind of propaganda, right? Appealing to the notion of liberty in defense of one’s claim to—the freedom to own other human beings when, of course, chattel slavery undermines the ideal of liberty, namely by depriving people of their liberty. Yeah. But if that ideal can be appropriated by people who are defending the institution of slavery, then it’s sort of unavailable to those who object.

Sheila: So what is your definition of propaganda? I mean you kind of said it a little bit there. But just clearly, for everyone, what is the propaganda that you’re calling out in this book?

Scott: Good. So I don’t offer a definition of propaganda broadly, but I do define the kind of propaganda that I’m interested in. And that’s propaganda that appeals to some moral, intellectual, spiritual, or political ideal in service to an argument or an agenda that undermines that very ideal.

Sheila: Wow. Okay. So I know this is deep, people, but listen to this because this is really fascinating. Yeah. Because when I was reading your book, it’s like oh my gosh. They do that. It’s almost like watching a train wreck because it keeps getting worse and worse and worse. They’re actually doing that.

Keith: Well, it’s a little bit of an intellectual shell game too, right? You’re sort of presenting one thing with your right hand, but you’re hiding something else in your left hand. And you’re trying to fool people because we talk about justice and liberty. We use these words that resonate with people and get people thinking, “Oh, yes. This person is speaking for the right.” Yeah. We, in the South, should be allowed to keep our way of life. We should not be deprived of our liberty to own other people which are now deprived of their liberty. And it’s like until you investigate it you don’t realize the self-contradictory nature. And that’s pretty obvious, but your book actually touches on a lot of more modern examples like gender hierarchy and how the same way of things—they’re using an argument, which is emotive because it has such a resonance with the human spirit. But when you actually investigate the claim, the goodness or the virtue that they’re appealing to is undermined by the thing they’re trying to get as an end goal.

Scott: Right. So there are a number of layers of propaganda in conservative evangelical debates around gender hierarchy. One that I think is among the most brazen is the term complementarian itself because it evokes this ideal of gender roles according to which men and women are equal. But the tasks that they’ve been assigned are very different. They’re complementary, right? And as I argue in the book, the truth is actually quite the opposite, right? Because basically all the roles that complementarians assign to women, apart from, say, childbirth, right, are things that can equally be accomplished by men. Men can cook. Men can clean. Men can change diapers. Men can supervise small children. I’m supervising—

Sheila: As you are doing right now.

Scott: - a child right now. You can hear in the background. Yeah. But as it turns out in a lot of cases, this is—men might regard this as—well, I mean it’s stuff they don’t want to do. So it evokes this ideal of gender roles that are equal but different in service to defending social arrangements that, in fact, treat women as basically lesser men, right? I mean which is—a better term for it would be redundancy. Women are redundant men, who just have to do the stuff that men don’t really want to do. So it’s not—they’re not equal, and they’re not different.

Sheila: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So what you’re really doing in the book is you’re building this argument that the whole foundation on which a lot of evangelicals claim power or authority or the right to determine what is biblical is actually a false foundation. It isn’t based on the things they say it’s built on. It’s based on something else. And that’s kind of the argument that you continue to make in all these different realms. And I think one of your starting points is that evangelicalism is really obsessed with who gets authority and who gets to submit. And we see that in all kinds of different areas.

Keith: Well, yeah. Because it’s about making sure society is organized the way we want it to be organized so that we’re on top. But we have to justify that somehow, and the Bible can give us a handy way of doing that.

Sheila: Right. And whenever people start to call this out, they then call for what they see as a higher thing. And I have to read this quote. This is from Jerry Falwell, and you quoted it, where he is saying that he’s basically not supporting the Civil Rights agenda, right? So this was in the 1960s. And this is what he says, okay? “Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else including fighting communism or participating in Civil Rights’ reforms. As a God-called preacher, I find that there is no time left after I give the proper time and attention to winning people for Christ. Preachers are not called to be politicians but soul winners.” So here he is—

Scott: That is Jerry Falwell senior, by the way.

Sheila: Yes. I am not going to support the Civil Rights agenda because I am doing something so much more important. I am promoting the Gospel. And in that, he’s making several assumptions, which you call common sense assumptions, right? Which aren’t actually necessarily true. One is that the Gospel is only about telling people that Jesus died for their sins so that they don’t have to go to hell and can go to heaven instead, right? And that the Bible is very clear that that is the most important thing. I mean there’s so many things that are packed in there, right?

Keith: Yeah. Plus the blatant hypocrisy that I don’t want to support this political agenda because I don’t have time as a preacher. However, I will support the opposite political agenda whenever I get the chance to because that’s part of the Gospel for some reason. It’s bizarre how that works out.

Scott: Yeah. So Falwell went on to—I think that quote is from maybe the 1960s. And he went on—yeah. Because he would have been giving that—that would have been around the time—

Sheila: Yeah. 1965, you said. 1965. Yeah.

Scott: Yeah. So he went on to change his views rather dramatically in terms of his understanding of the biblical mandate for political action, and he reversed his position on things like racial segregation in the—he went on an apology tour kind of. It’s sort of vague exactly when his positions on these things changed. He was very visible in—particularly in 1960s and then sort of disappeared for a bit in the 1970s and recalled a lot of his tracts and copies of his sermons that had been distributed all around the country. And then he sort of reemerges toward the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s as a political activist and no longer explicitly promoting racial hierarchy kind of thing. But yeah. That quote is really rich, I mean, when you see who it’s coming from. I didn’t feel the need to point any of this out in the book because it just feel like gilding a lily, at a certain point. I mean if you’ve heard of the guy you’re reading this and you’re like, “Wow. That’s remarkable.” But yeah. He frames biblical interpretation as a matter of common sense, which is pretty—that also is pretty remarkable for a person who changed positions so dramatically on a number of really important issues.

Keith: Well, yeah. Which was common sense. What you believed in 1965, or what you believed in 1985? Well, they’re both common sense because I change my views depending on what works for me at this given time. But then they deny that they’re changing their views. They’re appealing to the eternal truth of Scripture that does not change both times.

Sheila: Okay. So listen. Here’s Scott. Again, this is Scott’s book, Ministers of Propaganda. This is page 30, and this just shows what a philosopher Scott is here. This is you talking about common sensism. “Common sensism invokes the ideal of university human reason in service to an agenda that effectively denies the universality of human reason in order to silence dissenting viewpoints.”

Scott: Yeah. This shows up particularly in debates around gender hierarchy in evangelicalism, right? So common sensism is this idea that there’s this universal human faculty, so it’s a sense, right? It’s a faculty perception, right? It’s a sense. And it’s common in that—according to this way of looking at things. It’s common in that everyone has it. It’s common to everyone, right? So it’s a universal faculty that allows us, for example, shows up in a variety of areas that I have covered in the book. But the salient point here is it allows us to just look at Scripture and sort of intuit what the text is saying and what the truth is, right? But it turns out, right, when common sense is invoked, for example, in debates around gender hierarchy, it turns out the only people who seem to have common sense are the people who think that Scripture commends gender hierarchy. And those of us who think that Scripture commends gender parity evidently don’t have common sense. Well, if the only people who have common sense are you and the people who agree with you and anyone who disagrees with you lacks common sense, then common sense isn’t common, right? It’s limited to you and the people who agree with you. So you’ve got to go back to the drawing board. You’ve got to find something else to appeal to because, evidently, common sense isn’t common. And, of course, ultimately, it’s just this rhetorical move where you invoke this faculty to perceive the truth in contexts where you really don’t have an argument to give.

Sheila: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No. I love it. So these are all the ways that often people insist that their interpretation is correct. They say well, they try to go higher. I’m preaching the Gospel. I’m not going to do all these side issues. Or we all know the Bible says this. We all know this. And, in fact, those things are not true. It’s a way of discounting other people’s opinions and prioritizing yours, but it’s actually not logical. It’s not logical. It doesn’t hold any weight. Yeah. It ends up being just propaganda.

Keith: Well, and I think two people come to the Bible, and they have a worldview. And they bring it to the Bible, and then they see in the Bible what they want to see. And they say, “That’s what the Bible says.” And then everyone says—people who come to the Bible with a different worldview and see a different thing in the Bible say, “I disagree with it—disagree with you then.” Their response is not, “Okay. Well, let’s argue the merits of each of our positions.” Their argument is, “Well, you just don’t believe the Bible because you don’t see it the way I see it.”

Scott: Well, even the worldview language, right? I mean what they would say is that they have a biblical worldview, and you have a secular one. And that’s why you disagree, right? They’re not even going to countenance the possibility that maybe they’re bringing priors to the text that influence how they read the text. And this really unfortunate discussion that comes up every once in awhile on maybe biannually on Christian Twitter about David and Bathsheba and the nature of their—how to understand their relationship. I mean I’ll just say this. (cross talk)

Sheila: Wait. Wait. Before you do it, for everyone listening—yeah. For everyone listening, the problem is that it was a case of rape. And so was it rape? Or was it not rape? That’s what comes up—yes. Biannually. On Christian Twitter. Mm-hmm.

Scott: Yeah. So I started to call it a debate, but it’s really not a debate. I mean it’s a difference of views between people who have really studied the text and people who were told to think a certain way by their fifth grade Sunday School teacher and won’t let it go. But in any case, you really haven’t lived until you’ve been accused of eisegesis by a guy, who insists that Bathsheba was immodest because she was bathing on the roof. And it’s like man. Do you think that she—what do you think is happening there? You think she dragged her bathtub up to the room because she just felt like bathing on the roof. What do you think is happening?

Sheila: First of all, she wasn’t even on the roof. David was the one on the roof.

Scott: David was on the roof. Exactly. Exactly.

Sheila: It’s like the song has it wrong, right? The Hallelujah song.

Keith: Everyone is quoting Leonard Cohen when they think they’re quoting the Old Testament.

Sheila: Totally. Okay. Yeah. Because you have this logical framework—well, it’s not logical. But this framework that people often use that's like the Bible is true. The Bible confirms my moral beliefs. And so, therefore, my moral beliefs are true.

Scott: And there is a kind of internal logic to it. Yeah. I mean it’s coherent in its own way. It just doesn’t necessarily look all that coherent once we scrutinize it a bit. But yeah. So I argue that there’s—and I don’t want to give the impression that the book is heavy on terminology. But I really tried to avoid jargon. But there are a couple places I do introduce some terms where I think it’s important to have a concept that’s portable to different contexts and different debates because I go in depth on gender hierarchy and other kinds of hierarchy in the book. But really what I’m hoping to provide is a kind of framework that’s transferable to other contexts and see how this thing works. But in any case, one term I do introduce is what I call the hermeneutics of legitimization. And hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, particularly the interpretation of sacred texts like the Bible. And then legitimization is just—it’s—I’m invoking there the idea of legitimizing narrative. A story that we tell ourselves about why the social practices that we prefer are legitimate. So the hermeneutics of legitimization is a method of interpreting Scripture that consistently produces justifications for social arrangements that benefit oneself, often to the detriment of historically marginalized groups. And I argue that this is how a lot of conservative evangelicals interpret Scripture is through the hermeneutics of legitimization. And a very important element of it is this paradigm of authority and submission. It says one of the principle questions that Scripture sets out to answer is which humans should be in charge of other humans. Who has authority, and who must submit? And I mean look. If that question is front of mind when you sit down to read the Bible, in addition to some other aspects of the hermeneutics of legitimization I point out, then it’s really easy to use the Bible to produce justifications that legitimize your social preferences.

Sheila: Yeah. And we see that so much—

Scott: And it’s being (cross talk) by racial hierarchy and on and on all throughout—I document throughout history.

Sheila: And we see this so much in the gender hierarchy, which you do spend a chapter on in the book, where you talk about how—and I encounter this all the time. If I say we’re meant to mutually submit and follow after Christ together, I’m accused of not being biblical. I don’t believe the Bible. I’m ignoring the Bible. And so they appeal to Scripture. But in that appealing, they actually undermine their own argument because it’s not appealing to Scripture. It’s just appealing to common—what’s the word? It’s just legitimizing hierarchy. That’s all it’s doing.

Scott: So yeah. So one interesting thing that comes up is you’ve got appeals to the authority of Scripture that show up all over the place, right? Particularly in contexts where what’s at issue is not the authority of Scripture but sort of how to understand Scripture. So that’s the first red flag. It's kind of a non sequitur. We're not disagreeing about the authority of Scripture. We're disagreeing about how to understand what Scripture says.

Sheila: Yeah, so they're saying that we don't believe the Bible, but we don't. We do believe the Bible. We just have different interpretations.

Keith: Yeah, but because we don't have the same interpretation as they do, that means we don't really believe the Bible. We're trying to make the Bible say what we want it to say, but they are taking the pure, unadulterated words of the Bible. But what's really happening is some people are examining their beliefs, thinking about how they might be interpreting things based upon their biases, and other people are just blithely ignoring the idea they might even have a bias, and just totally saying with full chest confidence, "I believe only the Bible," when they actually are (inaudible) their beliefs.

Scott: One of the interesting things that's happening there right is the appeal to the authority of Scripture. Well, that evokes the ideal of the Reformation ideal, sola scriptura. In that context, this idea of biblical authority is meant to—meant to attenuate ecclesial authority. So if there's some person in a position of power in the church—a pastor, deacon, bishop, like whatever—and they're telling you that you have to do something, then according to this Reformation ideal of sola scriptura, I get to say I don't see that in the Bible. I actually see the opposite in the Bible so I'm going to go with what the Bible says. So this is an impediment to their exercising a kind of authority over me that might prompt me to do something that goes against my understanding of Scripture. Well, what we have in the contemporary context is ecclesial authorities who by virtue of this appeals to common sense who gets to decide what's common sense. It's people in positions of power in evangelical institutions. I'm happy to go into that a bit if you'd like. I'm happy to produce an argument for that, but that's who gets to decide what the common sense reading of the text is. So you have ecclesial authorities who get to determine what the text says, and then appeal to the authority of that very text to basically say you have to be quiet or you reject the authority of Scripture. Well, that is actually achieving the opposite of the Reformation ideal which is meant to serve as an impediment to ecclesial authority. The appeal to the authority of Scripture is my tool that I get to use when someone in a position of power is trying to make me do something that isn’t consistent with my conscience or my understanding of Scripture.

Sheila: But now the appeal to Scripture has become a way for those in power to say this is what Scripture says so you have to listen to me.

Scott: To amplify their authority because now it's no longer just them talking. It's God, and you can't argue with God obviously. Who wants to argue with God?

Sheila: Okay, you have this great passage on page 35 about egalitarianism, and I want to read this. "One," and you're talking about one person's line of argument, and you said, "One is that his appeal to the clarity of Scripture is hopelessly question begging. The notion that egalitarianism is inconsistent with the clarity of Scripture presupposes that Scripture clearly mandates gender hierarchy, but that's precisely the point at issue in the debate. Complementarians say that the Bible prescribes gender hierarchy, and egalitarians say that it doesn't so unless I've already accepted the argument's conclusion that I should reject egalitarianism, I have no reason to accept its premise that egalitarianism is at odds with the clarity of Scripture. But that's not how arguing works. An argument doesn't ask us to assume its conclusion in order to find its reasoning persuasive. It compels us to accept its conclusion with persuasive reasoning." Yeah. I love that.

Scott: I'm glad you enjoyed that. I enjoyed writing it so I'm glad you enjoyed reading it.

Keith: It's really good. I'm going to try and summarize it for people that didn't follow that because it can be intense. But what it's basically saying in my mind is if you assume certain things, you can go to the Bible and find those assumptions confirmed. If you assume other things, you can come to the Bible and find those assumptions confirmed, and what we really learn is when we say both of us are coming with these different assumptions, what's the weight of each argument? But what one side is saying is I don't need an argument because I'm just reading what the Bible says. So I don't need an argument, and any time you try to make me argue for this, it shows me that you are so far gone because you just don't believe the Bible. It just shows the paucity of their arguments because they don't have—they can't say why it's true other than the Bible says so. Why is it right that men should rule over women? Well, because the Bible says so. Well, tell me otherwise. No, the Bible says so. It's the same thing with the racial stuff from the '60s. It was obvious back then. It was obvious back then. This is the way God wanted things, and now 60 years later, they've been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world, and now they’ve all had to reverse their positions because it's now common sense even to them that it was wrong to own people, that sort of thing. But these other things which are still obviously unjust, they're still clinging to because it works for them and they're using appeals to authority particularly the Bible to justify it because it works for them, and they refuse to give up that ground. They're not going to give it up until we continue to drag them kicking and screaming to justice.

Scott: And I'm sorry to say that there are actually still those within the—I don't know why I'm sorry to say—it's not me. I'm just pointing it out, but it is—

Keith: It's sad to us.

Scott: —an ugly state of affairs—rather ugly state of affairs, yeah. But there are people like Douglas Wilson and John MacArthur who still promote the same sorts of legitimizing narratives that were used to justify racial hierarchy. Douglas Wilson in particular seems to relish the tether between arguments for the legitimacy of slavery—they're drawn from Scripture—and arguments for gender hierarchy. So all that to say, there are people who still want to suggest that the institution of slavery is somehow legitimate. Let's just say that all of those people are well within the complementarian camp. There's a reason for that. The—it's the hermeneutics of legitimization. It runs straight through the arguments that justify race-based chattel slavery allegedly and the arguments that are used to justify gender hierarchy. It's the same interpretive lines, and what I want to see from the folks that promote gender hierarchy who claim to reject allegedly Scriptural legitimizations for slavery, I want them to tell me why their method of interpreting Scripture is consistent with saying that Scripture supports gender hierarchy but is inconsistent with saying that Scripture supports the institution of slavery. That's what you don't see from them. They love to quote white supremacist theologians even ones who say that they don't regard slavery as legitimate. They say—they'll bemoan the fact that these theologians who they respect argue in favor of race-based chattel slavery, and they will—but they'll still quote them offering the very same sorts of reasons, the same style of reasoning to support gender hierarchy. I just want to say why are you quoting that guy, and how is your method of interpreting Scripture any different from his? Or is it simply the case as you point out that they were just dragged kicking and screaming away from their arguments for racial hierarchy?

Sheila: One of the things I find—

Scott: I argue in the book I think it's fairly clear that they just realized it was no longer tenable to defend those positions.

Sheila: Yeah, and like you said, you have a bunch of quotes—like recent ones from big name people who are saying slavery wasn't that bad. But one of the things I think is so funny when some of these people like John MacArthur or Doug Wilson talk about slavery is they always picture themselves as the masters. They never picture themselves as the slave. Like if they talk about what slavery would have been like, it's kind of like I would have treated them well. Well, yeah, because you're picturing yourself as the powerful one.

Keith: Yeah, slavery wasn't that bad in a world where the idea that I could have been a slave is not even in my mindset, but it's a very different world if you think you could have been on the other side of that. Then obviously the injustice of it is clear.

Sheila: So just to be clear, one of the things—we're not going to touch on all of this because we've done this on the podcast so often, but you very clearly show how the biblical basis for complementarianism is to take a bunch of prooftexts out of context. You take 1 Timothy 2:12 about women not having authority over men. You take 1 Corinthians 14 about women not speaking in church. You take these little texts, and you say therefore, but you ignore the story of Scripture. When you look at the breadth of Scripture, when you look at what Jesus actually did, when you look at how Paul actually acted with the women around him, you get a very different picture. It's not that we're saying that you should ignore the Bible and believe in gender equality. We're saying no you should read the Bible and believe in gender equality because the Bible actually supports it. You make a very good case for that. You also make the case which many people have made that it's actually easier as we were just saying to defend slavery biblically than it is to defend gender hierarchy. Yet so many people have given up slavery and not the hierarchy, not the gender hierarchy. Can you explain a little bit about what you mean by that?

Scott: Well, just in terms of prooftexts. There are more prooftexts that support the legitimacy of slavery than the legitimacy of gender hierarchy. Apart from that I think the cases are basically identical so it's just a question of how many prooftexts can you point to. Because according to the people who do this kind of thing. I mean—so when I say that you can make a better case for slavery—I'm not sure exactly how I put it in the book—but I think it's right there where I transition from discussing gender hierarchy to authority of submission and the connection with justifications for slavery, the point I make is basically there are a lot more prooftexts to support slavery. (inaudible) to look at the New Testament. If we look at the Hebrew Bible, I mean I don't know what the ratio is, but there's a lot more prooftexts to support the institution of slavery. But the cases are essentially the same.

Sheila: Yeah, and I don't think people realize that. So that’s something really important to keep in mind. If you were to read a pamphlet and I've seen them from like the 1800s defending slavery, it reads almost exactly the same as John Piper defending male hierarchy today. They're the same arguments.

Scott: Well, the theologians who these guys admire are the ones who wrote those pamphlets, and it's as if they think they can take the whole theological system and just take out some (inaudible), and everything is fine. But you can't—that’s not how any of this works. That's not how it works.

Sheila: Okay, so I really want—I mean what you've written here is—I loved it because even though I've studied this stuff for so long, I hadn't seen things this way, and so I really want our listeners to hear this. You've already said this, but let's just say it clearly again. "When pastors appeal to the Bible, appeal to Scripture, what they're actually doing is increasing ecclesial authority or the authority of church leaders, not the authority of the Bible because when they're appealing to the Bible what they're really doing is saying, 'I have the right to tell you what the Bible says.'" Is that what it is?

Scott: It's layered a little bit. So they're appealing to the authority of Scripture, but the Scripture, the authority of which they're appealing to is Scripture sort of according to their interpretation. The way that this works in evangelical institutions is that there are people in a position who get to say what constitutes the common sense meaning of the text. This shows up in a variety of ways, but just to take a quick example. Evangelical seminaries are pretty important here because they play a sort of outsized role in sort of determining the bounds of what constitutes orthodoxy, what passes for orthodoxy in sort of the evangelical fold. Well, you’ve got folks who work at these seminaries, and I'm friends with a lot of them. I have more friends amongst seminaries than the median person by several standard deviations more. You get your Ph.D. You go and get a job at a seminary, and you're teaching there. You have kids, and you buy a house. You've got a mortgage, and you don't want to lose your job because then you're going to be on the academic job market which is a place no one wants to be. You learn pretty quickly that there are certain things that you just sort of have to toe the line on. Now I want to be clear here. I'm not—because these people all of them are my friends. Some of them are very much not my friends, but some of them are my friends. I'm not saying these folks go into class and teach things that they believe to be false. They don't go in and assert propositions that they believe to be false. They have integrity, but what they do is they just keep their mouth shut about certain things. They learn that there are certain buttons that they're not going to push, and they don't—they pursue other research agendas.

Sheila: You should close that. That bird is really loud. You're right. I'm just worried that it's picking up.

Scott: This is how the stuff gets perpetuated over time, and no one objects to it because the people who are in a position to object—I'll let him get his earpiece back in—so the people who are in a position to object, don't because of potential threats to their employment, and then it just goes on and on. There are certain people who are out there promoting it like it's their job because it is their job. Then that's how it gets perpetuated.

Sheila: I think the story of the Southern Baptist seminaries is interesting because when Al Mohler took over, he actually fired a lot of the female professors and anyone who was egalitarian. So until then, until he took over, there were actually a lot of egalitarian professors at some of these Southern Baptist seminaries. Well, at his seminary, and I think the other seminaries have followed suit. But when he took over—and there was a lot of protests. There were protests. There were sit-ins. It was a really, really emotional time as a lot of beloved professors left and were pushed out because they were egalitarian. So now at the Southern Baptist seminaries it looks like yeah everyone is complementarian and so it must be just the way that everyone things, but it's because you're not hired if you don't think that way.

Keith: Yeah, and that's what I was going to say. There's two factors to that that perpetuated it. Even in the absence of people who dissent but keep their mouths shut, I mean there's two factors. The first factor is human beings are very social animals so if all you see are people who believe like you believe you very quickly believe that's the only way that reasonable people believe. That's the first thing. The second thing is that there's a lot of really good studies about cognitive science that we don't believe as rationally as we think we do. There's a lot of things that influence our belief, and even though I would never say if I start to believe in egalitarianism, I will lose my job and therefore get fired so therefore I'm going to stay a complementarian, I would never go through that thought process, but somewhere in the wiring, that's happening at a certain level as well too. When we have debates where you're just not allowed to believe certain ways, when we shut down sides by saying things like well, the Bible says this, or it's clear there, or common sense is, then we're going to create systems where people aren't allowed to think clearly. When they're not allowed to think clearly and freely, they're going to stay in these little bubbles, and it's not going to be able to be challenged. Then when it gets challenged, they just get their hackles up and go, "Well, the Bible says," because they have no argument because they haven't thought clearly and freely about the issues.

Scott: That feedback loop between belief and social practice is an important theme in the book so absolutely I agree.

Sheila: You lay out some of the problems like at the beginning of the book with this whole appeal to Scripture and people think they're being logical or not, gender hierarchy, and then you go on to racism quite a bit. We don't have time to go through the whole chapter on racism, but tell me about the basketball game analogy because I really appreciated that. So tell us the story of the basketball game.

Scott: Sure, so it's a thought experiment where imagine at some point in the distant future where basketball games are officiated by artificial intelligence. We'll call it Robo Ref, and Robo Ref surveils the court, every inch of the court at all times, and it's been trained to make the right call—foul, out of bounds, double dribble, whatever. Robo Ref is a totally impartial—artificial intelligence—I put this in a note because I'm an academic—AI, it does have biases, but we can safely set that detail aside. It's not as biased as a human official who can be like I really don't like that player or maybe it's not even conscious. They just don't like—or these fans or whatever. They're not going to be influenced by unruly fans or a coach who's whining or anything like that. Totally impartial. Well, in the thought experiment, I imagine some regular season game between the green team and the blue team let's say where Robo Ref is suffering from a glitch so that every time the blue team rebounds the ball, Robo Ref assesses a foul on the green team even if there's no blue player in the vicinity. Well, pretty quickly the green—did I say the green team gets the foul? It doesn't matter. Anyway the green team gets called—they get a foul called on them every time they rebound the ball. They're going to be at a significant disadvantage. Several of their players end up fouling out in the first half. They're let's say 40 points behind at halftime, and let's say the glitch is fixed at halftime, and the officiating in the second half of the game is totally flawless. Well, the green team is playing with a 40-point deficit. Now it may be theoretically possible for them to come back and win. Maybe they might even come back and win, but I don't think anyone—although it's very unlikely. Really they're playing different games at this point—the green team and the blue team because the green team is going to have to adopt high risk strategies that have a really low probability of success. The deck so to speak if I could mix metaphors is really stacked against them at this point. No one would describe this as a fair context, and yet when we look at the history of racialized oppression in the United States which is the context I'm dealing with in the book, when we look at the history of racialized oppression for some reason people want to say well we have fair and neutral rules now, which is obviously that's a contested question but let's suppose it's true that we have fair and neutral rules now. Everything should be fine. Individuals should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as it were because we've got a fair system now. Well, this ignores really important factors like intergenerational transfers of wealth, and the fact that people of color were barred from accessing home equity effectively for about 40 years, which just so happens to be a 40-year period during which real estate values went up a great deal. So if you bought—the Federal Housing Administration legally imposed—sorry, just a moment. Yes, sir, what can I do for you? I mean the way Americans accumulate and transfer wealth from one generation to the next is through home equity. Ninety percent of people who leave anything to their kids what they leave is home equity. The Federal Housing Administration from 1934 until 1968 officially as a matter of federal policy didn't just permit racial discrimination but imposed it at the federal level. It was another nine years until 1977 with the Fairness in Lending Act. The practice has carried on well after that so we're talking about four or five decades plus where people of color were denied access to the financial instruments with which the U.S. government created the white middle class. Somehow we want to say—some people want to say well we just need—without rectifying that in any way, we just need neutral policies. Well, carrying back to the basketball analogy. In that example, we have fair rules for the whole second half. Well, there's no plausible (inaudible) of American history on which we've had fair rules for anything like half the game. I mean even the—slavery wasn't officially abolished until 1865 which would be something like five minutes into the third quarter. If you want to go to discrimination in housing, I mean we're talking about something like five minutes left in the game.

Sheila: Right, right. Yeah, so these are just things that we need to think about when we talk about how we want color blindness is it's not that simple because you have to look at what came before. When people of color weren’t allowed to go to university, when they were discriminated against in school, and of course, how do we get people to university? We pay. So when they didn't have the equity to pay for that, when they lived in worse school districts, etc. etc. it all compounds. As Christians, we do need to consider all of this, and when our theology has been used to justify certain people being over others it really does compound it. Okay, I'm just going to rush through some of the other things you talk about in the book unless did you want to say anything about that?

Scott: About that I just want to say, I realize that there will be readers or at least I hope there will be readers who disagree with me perhaps pretty dramatically on certain issues of doctrine and on certain political policies. We don't need to agree on all those details. Life would be pretty boring if we agreed on all those details, but we don't need to agree on all those details I think to adopt a certain kind of orientation toward politics and Scripture that I think we should be able to agree on which is it's not the purpose of politics to just promote my own interests. It's not the purpose of reading Scripture to find divine justifications for promoting my own interests. I hope we can agree on that even if we disagree on everything else. I don't actually say anywhere in the book that complementarianism is false. I don't say that for example young earth creationism is false. The reader can probably infer that I don't have a lot of sympathy for the complementarian position, but whether you're complementarian or not, I hope we can agree that certain arguments for complementarian are really bad and actually kind of toxic.

Sheila: Yeah, exactly. So you do deal with young earth—the young earth debate. Again you're not taking sides. All you're saying is that young earth creationists make the argument that you cannot believe in anything other than young earth creationism and still believe the Bible. It's like you don't actually get that from the text.

Scott: Which is—this was actually sort of the core—this is what started the research project was a certain I guess prevailing evangelical attitudes toward we might say outside expertise, and then sort of tracing that. I would want to pause at causation because that's really complicated, but I will say there's always been an anti-intellectual sort of strand in evangelicalism, but it seems to get more acute and accelerate starting about the 1960s. Another thing that we see emerge in the 1960s is the creation science movement. Looking at some of the arguments that are put forward there, they're not new. But all of a sudden there's a whole lot of enthusiasm for them beginning in the 1960s. Young earth creationists—I mean there are young earth creationists around before the middle of the 20th century, but it was nothing like the prevailing or sort of orthodox view. Yet the folks that argue for young earth creationism try to claim that this has been the view of—this has been the Christian consensus for millennia. No, it hasn't.

Sheila: Augustine didn't believe it. C. S. Lewis didn’t believe it.

Scott: It's just not true. Billy Graham, James Montgomery Boice, the guy who—yeah, I mean I give lists of the stars in the firmament of modern evangelicalism who rejected young earth creationism.

Sheila: Yeah, it's really fascinating, but there's a funny part in the book where you do bring us in, which I appreciate that. Thank you so much. You give us a shoutout where you say that a lot of pastors make factual claims that don't rely on any factual support because we have this anti-science bias. So we don't look at these—we don't look at studies. We don't look at anything, but then they're still making all these factual claims. In the one that you use from us is the 72-hour rule where we found that James Dobson claimed that men need sex every 72 hours based on nothing, and then it kept getting repeated over and over again. All these Christian marriages—

Scott: Just made it up.

Sheila: Just made it up.

Scott: It's remarkable. Well, they manage to do that by—I argue—as I say, I want this framework to be transferrable to other contexts that I don't treat in the book and perhaps have never thought of. I just had a conversation the other day with some folks that are working on doing research in parenting—Christian parenting literature.

Sheila: Were you talking to Marissa and Kelsey?

Scott: Yes, yes, exactly. Yes.

Sheila: I'm so excited about their book. Shout out for Marissa and Kelsey's book that will be out next year with Baker.

Scott: Yeah, go on. I'm delighted that folks are finding an application for this sort of framework, but yeah, it's really, really an exquisite example of it is in the sort of creation science industry where once they've successfully marketed their position as the "biblical view" then all of a sudden they're in a position where they don't have to engage with legitimate biblical scholarship because if theirs is the biblical view then biblical scholarship that disagrees with them, well, they're liberals. They're not to be taken seriously. Of course, we don't have to worry about secular experts because they're secular. Of course, they're not going to agree with the biblical view. You just end up in this kind of intellectual no man's land where you're advancing allegedly biblical positions that have no basis in biblical scholarship and have no basis in any other kind of research and are effectively unassailable to expert critique. I've got to say this was one of the more depressing parts of writing the book was right there at the beginning of chapter four. I kind of knew this on some level, but to actually sit down and put it on paper and to have just this stone-cold realization that in many cases these guys are just making stuff up. Well-meaning people will accept it as biblical and go and act on it. It has no basis in anything other than just something they made up, but because they've marketed it as biblical it gets traction. I'd like to see less of that.

Sheila: So all of these things appeal to authority, appeal to Scripture, labeling things biblical so that I'm the one who can determine what is proper, enforcing ecclesial power by telling people that my interpretation of the Bible is the only interpretation, etc., etc., all of these things combine to allow people in power to legitimize their own power and to legitimize a certain social hierarchy. In the book, you show this in all kinds of different areas like in politics, in science, in gender, in race, but the point you're trying to make—and I want to end and land it here—is that the only way around this is to get back to the idea of justice. Can you elaborate on that for me?

Scott: Sure, I think—I mean to use a kind of illustration that I think I use in the book, a concrete illustration, if you could imagine yourself sort of going into the voting booth with a couple of different motivations. One motivation would be okay which politician or platform or party or whatever is going to do things that are good for me. This special interest model of which by the way in the United States our politics kind of presupposes is just going in pursuing their own interests. You see it all over the place, but look at any time we do this sort of person on the street interview around presidential election time, they stick a microphone in someone's face and why do you believe that this politician is going to actually deliver this or that thing that you want? But that's the assumption is that we all want things, and we're going to vote for the people that are going to give us the things that we want. Okay, that's one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is to say all right what is the truth about what people deserve and what we owe to each other regardless of my own interests. Of course, I would argue that ultimately it's in one's own long-term best interest to pursue justice, but just in terms of my immediate interest, setting that aside and saying what do people deserve and what do we owe to each other? Then voting for the politician or platform or whatever that is going to bring our laws and public policies into greater conformity with that truth about what people deserve and what we owe to each other which is to say justice. It may mean that a tax policy that is sort of less to my advantage. I mean I'm not super—ultra super wealthy so probably my taxes aren't really going to be affected, but yeah, I mean the point is that one is oriented toward giving others what they're due.

Sheila: And not just in politics but in church as well. How can our church be a vehicle for justice in the world as opposed to how can our church make sure that we stand for what the Bible says and that we never give an inch—

Keith: No matter how unjust it obviously is to all of us.

Sheila: No matter how unjust or unfair to everybody else, we are going to stand and make sure we keep what we think we should have which is I think a lot of the orientation of the church today.

Scott: Yeah, and I don’t—there's something really strange although it's really prevalent. There's something really strange about a pastor standing up in church and shouting until he's blue in the face about all the sinners out there. Can you believe? Yes, I believe. I mean what in Scripture would lead you to think that people who aren't—who haven't accepted our framework, outlook, whatever are going to act any other way? By the way, how does it benefit any of us to sit here and stew about it? I think it's important to recall that judgment begins in the house of God. Let's get our house in order, and then maybe we can talk about what's going on out there. But there's plenty of housekeeping to do here so why don't we focus on that for a bit or maybe a decade or something and just see what happens?

Sheila: Well, thank you so much, Scott. I really appreciate your call throughout the book you made showing all the ways the church has really gone wrong and gone off base and cemented power in ways that was never intended, but your solution is just to point people to Jesus and to justice. I do appreciate that. The book again is Ministers of Propaganda, which you can get anywhere. I'll put the Amazon link in the podcast notes. Is there anywhere else you want people to find you?

Scott: I am sort of intermittently active on the website formerly known as Twitter. The handle is just my name scott_m_coley.

Sheila: Okay, I will put that link in there too. Well, thank you so much. This has been great.

Scott: Thank you. I am a big fan of your work. I really appreciate your work. It's hugely important. You know that, but nonetheless, I’m grateful for it. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Sheila: Yeah, awesome. Say hi to Melissa for me.

Scott: I sure will.

Sheila: Okay, all right, bye-bye.

Bare Marriage

Episode 242: Spot the Propaganda and Logical Fallacies feat. Scott Coley

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