Identity for Me But Not for Thee

I found this video on Facebook the other day, and it's a concise account of the biblical scholar Dan McClellan's take on New Testament sexual ethics.  Because it's short and captioned, I transcribed it.

This is just a brief reminder that the sexual ethic of the Apostle Paul has no relevance to today and Christians already reject the majority of it anyway. There are really only a couple of main points that are still preserved: abstinence before marriage and condemnation of same-sex intercourse. And those are preserved not because "this is god's will" or because the Bible says so. They're preserved because they have become convenient identity markers, and because they have become useful in the structuring of power and values in favor of the identity politics and the boundary maintenance of the relevant groups.

But everything else that Paul said is dismissed as just not for us anymore. Paul was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate, and you should only get married if you could not hack celibacy your sex should not be passionate because the passion of desire was for the dirty dirty gentiles who did not know God. Christian sex was to be holy and to be honorable, and the point was prophylaxis. Paul - because of Greek philosophical frameworks - thought of desire as a problematic product of our base material existence that we had to overcome, and so you had to keep a tight lid on sexual desire, and sex within marriage should only happen enough to screw down that lid tighter, so it was to be passionless and prophylactic and rare. 

So it was not about procreation for Paul. He couldn't have cared less, he thought Jesus was coming back too soon for that to matter anyway. So Paul's motivations for these things are based on social historical ideological philosophical frameworks and circumstances that simply don't exist anymore.  And so the majority of it has rightly been dismissed by Christians who recognize that it does not serve us anymore.

What we hold on to, we hold on to for rhetorical purposes because it serves our structuring of power and values, and there will also come a time when those things are rejected as not for us anymore.  It's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of when enough of us will decide that the utility to our boundary maintenance and our structuring of power and values is not worth the damage it does to the lives, to the mental health, to the well being of the people who are put in the crosshairs by the deployment of those things as identity markers.

This is wonderfully incoherent. I agree with some of what McClellan says, such as that most of today's Christians reject Paul's teachings on sexuality, though it's less deliberate dismissal than blithe ignorance of what they find inconvenient - a process that isn't limited to New Testament teachings on sexuality.  Liberal Christians especially ignore the end-times teachings that permeate the New Testament, for example, displacing them onto the book of Revelation.

First, Paul's sexual ethic is also Jesus'.  Jesus also regarded abstinence as preferable, while recognizing that not everyone could attain his standard.  Matthew 19:12 is the most explicit example, though warnings that even feeling desire merited damnation appear elsewhere in the gospels.  Displacing the anti-sexual teaching onto Paul is a popular apologetic move.

Second, their ethic didn't work for most people in their own day, not even for most Christians. But then Jesus taught that most people would be damned, so it didn't matter.  Probably their teachings work, or are relevant, for the same proportion of people today.  As McClellan says, a similar hostility to the passions was taught by some "Greek philosophical frameworks" of Paul's and Jesus' day; it seems to have been in the air.  It can be found in Hinduism and Buddhism too, and some historians think that Buddhism may have influenced Greek philosophy.  But those frameworks weren't embraced by most people then, any more than they are now.  

McClellan says that Paul (and I would add Jesus) "was a dogmatically celibate man who thought everyone should remain celibate."  Of course.  We can see today that people tend to overgeneralize from their own experiences and hangups.  But "dogmatically"?  I don't think Paul would have been attracted by anti-sexual philosophy if he weren't already temperamentally in tune with it.  The dogma followed from his own inclinations rather than vice versa, just as people today latch onto biblical or other teachings they agree with, ignoring their context.

Best of all, McClellan acknowledges that Paul condemned "same-sex intercourse," which is not a biblical concept, but implies that Paul (along with other biblical writers) would have condemned "homosexuality," which is a subset of "same-sex intercourse," not a discrete or separate thing.  In other videos McClellan has claimed that the ancients (lumping together numerous cultures over a long period of time) didn't have "our concept of homosexuality" (lumping together numerous concepts within, presumably, the "modern West" or academic theorists).  

Apologists almost always do this, I've found (I've followed the debates for about 50 years): first they deny that the Bible has anything to say about "homosexuality," then they flip and say that it condemns "homosexuality." In the same way, orthodox Foucauldians will say that "homosexuality" didn't exist before the word was coined in the 1860s, then describe laws or attitudes that penalized homosexuality long before the 1860s, or use the word about cultures that have supposedly have no concept of homosexuality.  Before McClellan mocks antigay dogmatists for their incoherence and inaccuracy, he should consider the beam in his own eye.

McClellan is misusing "identity politics" again. Has he read the Combahee River Collective Statement yet? The way he uses it is what he calls a "credence," a shibboleth to show that one belongs to a given group: biblical scholars, say, or hard-nosed anti-dogmatists. It seems to be bad when others use credences, but not when he uses them.

There's an old witticism that if you marry the spirit of the age you will soon be a widow/er.  McClellan is aware of this, but he seems to think that he's exempt from it.  He seems to believe in progress.  The bad old dogmas will be abandoned, he says, because they don't serve us anymore.  But who's "us" here?  The values he rejects, he says reflect "our structuring of power and values," our "boundary maintenance."  What will replace them?  Won't their replacements also be about structuring power and values?  I don't ask this, obviously, because I want to retain Jesus' and Paul's sexual ethics; it's because I've observed that power is served by the culture of therapy whose values are served by elite professionals with their own dogmas, credences, and desires to control others.  All moral systems, including McClellan's whatever it is, including mine, are historically / culturally / ideologically influenced, no matter how sure their proponents are that they have risen above such constraints.  And the more sure they are that they are uniquely qualified to protect and help those who've been wounded by the bad old dogmas, the more wrong they usually are.

This Post Will BLOW. YOUR. MIND.

Hemant Mehta, the self-styled Friendly Atheist, has never impressed me.  He provides a useful service by tracking the Christian Right in his videos and blog posts, but it's hard to get a handle on his own politics.

In this video he reports on a youth minister-cum-junior high school basketball coach in Arkansas who told his church about the time he sowed the gospel to a student in the school library.  Someone apparently leaked a video of his performance to Mehta.

We had a student in our middle school library this last week and I overheard this and so I just jumped in. I was like, I don't really care, you can fire me. I don't care.  Right.  Where's Todd? He's on the school board.  Make sure it doesn't happen.  Um, but this girl was asking Miss Cheney. She's like, 'Hey, I'm looking for like a book. Uh, it's got mystery and suspense." And so I was like, "I got you, sister." And I said, "Are you looking for something that's romantic, something that has suspense, thrilling? There is some murders in there.  There's redemption, and there's a hero."  And she said, "Where do I find it?" Sits right over there. It's the Bible. And then I just walked out.  And I was like, I just teed off on that one, you know, and I was like, "Thanks, Miss Cheney, I'm so thankful."  Um, but right, seriously, like like God just provided that opportunity and I know the girl, but I mean I was like, "Are you kidding me? Yeah. Like if you're looking for a book, I can show you one, right?" And so I just want to encourage you. And are they always that easy?  Not necessarily, right? But I do want to encourage you.  The opportunities are there all the time.

Mehta then goes on a rant:

Hey kids, if you want to read a book with genocide and incest, have I got the recommendations for you?  What the hell is he doing?  Let the librarian handle that one.  That is not an opportunity that you need to tee off on. Like, no. No.  And don't encourage other people to take that opportunity.  No, that's not the proper time or place for that.

On the whole I agree with him - yes, the guy should keep his jobs separate - but one reason I included Mehta's video here was to let readers see his own tone and body language.  I think he sounds just like the Christian-right censors he usually opposes: The Bible has genocide and incest! It's filth! Don't expose our innocent children to it! I suspect that the kind of books the girl was looking for include some objectionable material too - if they haven't already been purged from the school library by adults who just want to protect kids.  I mean, I'm all for freedom of speech too, but next these Christians will have Our Children reading Shakespeare, the Iliad, Oedipus Rex and other Greek tragedies, Lord of the Flies, Maus, The Diary of Anne Frank, Twilight, and who knows what other obscenities?  I'd like to think that Mehta was deliberately parodying the style, but I can't see that here.  Even the sanitized retellings of Greek mythology I read as a kid in the Fifties included gory details such as Odysseus blinding the Cyclops with a burnt log and Procrustes torturing travelers to make them fit his guest bed.  These were available in the elementary school library, yet I seem to have survived.

Mehta goes on to ask if Logan McCourtney, the youth pastor and coach, tries to impose his cult on his junior high school basketball players:

But I do wonder if this guy's doing this to a random girl in the library. He said he knows her. Whatever. If he's doing this in the library, what is he doing as the junior high basketball coach? Is he telling them to pray before games?  Is he pushing his religion on those kids? Because we know what happened in the library cuz he bragged about it. We don't know what's happening when he's getting this team ready in a practice.

Fair questions, and someone connected to that school should ask them.  But you know, I'm not sure we do know what happened in the library.  We have only McCourtney's account, and braggarts shouldn't be taken too seriously whether they're secular or sacred.  Since he's a preacher, it's even more reasonable to suspect he's exaggerating; he might have made the whole thing up so he could puff up his chest and boast of his devotion to the Lord.  He dares the woke atheists to try to fire him (from the safety of a stage where they wouldn't hear him)!  He has a buddy on the school board!  Again, watch the clip: this is a stand-up comic at work, though there's not much daylight between a stand-up comic and a preacher.  If Mehta had talked to the girl or the librarian involved, it would be different, but it's odd for him to take the guy at his word.

Even if McCourtney's account is accurate, we also don't know what happened next, what the girl thought, what the librarian said to her.  As McCourtney tells it, he made a lightning intervention and got the hell out of Dodge. The girl might have rolled her eyes and said Geeyyyyy; the librarian might have rolled her eyes, told her not to be bothered, and made some helpful suggestions.  It would be different if McCourtney were her teacher or, goddess forbid, her coach, but he isn't.  Junior high students are already capable of independent thought, and we liberals want them to be exposed to possibly discomforting literature and ideas, even in class.  Don't we?

Mehta titled his video "A junior high basketball coach bragged at church about pushing the Bible on a kid."  I didn't think so right away, but after watching the video and reading the comments on it, I think "pushing" is an exaggeration.  Again, it's the kind of exaggeration I associate with Christian bigots (Woke teachers and librarians are pushing the trans agenda on our children!).  I'd already noticed this in comments on other videos and elsewhere, but a significant number of liberals consider any public advocacy of religion, whether directed at them personally or not, as 'having religion forced on them.'  (The same goes for booksellers offering recommendations online: that, to some people, constitutes refusing to sell any books they don't recommend.) Amusingly, they think that Jesus didn't go around pushing his beliefs on others, though that is exactly what he did according to the gospels, and he ordered his disciples to do the same.  (I've seen similar claims made of the Buddha; sorry, children, but Buddhism is also a missionary, proselytizing religion.)

Some of these people had strict religious upbringings, which did involve forcing religion on them.  I sympathize with them and understand why encountering missionaries makes them uncomfortable, but they are adults now, they often claim that they have left it behind and now think for themselves, and so on.  Like it or not, and they don't, they live in a country with constitutionally protected freedom of speech and freedom of religion. That means that adults have a right to try to persuade other adults, even to convert them; it also means that they have the right to tell missionaries to take a hike, or to argue with them and try to persuade them to give up their religious beliefs.  (Even more ostensibly open-minded Christians don't like that.)  Schools are different in degree, which is exactly what the struggle over library censorship is about; where to draw the line is always up for negotiation, not only on religion but on history, sex education, "race," and other issues.  Adults want to "protect" children, but they also want to control them. As students get older, the more discomfort they should be exposed to.  As the educator Deborah Meier wrote:

There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity."  First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories.  But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later." *

It was funny at first to watch liberals and the Right switch sides on "discomfort."  First Culture-of-Therapy liberals declared that no one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable; then they declared that if you're not feeling uncomfortable (mostly but not always about American history) then you're doing it wrong.  Then the Right decided that no one should be made to feel uncomfortable about American history.  But it's not really funny, because there are serious real-world consequences in these disagreements.  

One especially telling comment under Mehta's video was this one (all punctuation sic):

"Free will is gods greatest gift"
"Really then why do you all always want to take it away from people?"

A fair question, but in context the writer seems to think that simply declaring one's beliefs, or trying to persuade someone else to adopt them, is trying to take away their free will.  It isn't.  It's essential in a free society.  I understand why many people want to take away that freedom, but they mustn't be allowed to do it.  I think one problem is that they never learned to say "No, thank you" to such people.  It's not surprising, because school is largely based on the assumption that saying "No" is intolerable disobedience; at some indefinite point adults are supposed to learn otherwise, but that point never arrives.  Just this week I read another Miss Manners column where she explained that it is permissible simply to turn down unwanted or inconvenient invitations; "No thank you," amplified as "I'm so sorry, I can't," is all that needs to be said.  (It's a mistake to invent excuses, which will encourage attempts to persuade you.)  The other night a couple of Mormon elders knocked at my door; I said "No thank you," and they gave up gracefully. Not all missionaries are so agreeable, but they can be resisted and dismissed.)

Did I mention "safe spaces"?  I've written about them too, often, but I don't think I've heard about them as much lately.

It's good that Hemant Mehta objected to this pastor-coach's obnoxious conduct.  But what does he want to protect children from?  Does he want them to learn to think for themselves in a messy world? Or does he think it's enough if adults like him keep away any ideas that might make them uncomfortable?

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* The Power of Their Ideas, Beacon Press, 2002, page 81. 

Making the Homosexual More Modern and Relatable; or, Let's Go, Brandan!

 

 

The speaker in this video is Brandan Robertson, a queer progressive Christian minister and theologian, author of Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table (St. Martin's Essentials, 2025).  Several of his TikTok videos have appeared in my Facebook feed, and I've watched them with growing irritation.  TikTok videos seem to come and go, so I've transcribed this one:

And many of you will know the story because of the great work of the documentary crew 1946.  If you've not seen that documentary, you should watch it. Amazing, amazing! But obviously, a fairly innocent translation mistake in 1946 led those English Bible translators to render the mysterious word arsenocoitai which is just a reference to Leviticus 18:22, which is a clear reference to exploitative sexual practice. They innocently chose the word "homosexual' because they thought that was making the Bible more modern, more relatable and now decades later almost every English translation has followed suit and most people assume that the Bible condemns homosexuality.

I haven't read Queer and Christian yet, nor have I seen 1946.  In this post I'm going to address what Robertson says in this reel.

It's grotesque and morally tone-deaf to declare blandly that Leviticus condemns copulation between males as an "exploitative sexual practice." First, the Hebrew Bible has no objection to exploitative sexual practices, from selling young women into marriage (Genesis 29, for example) to concubinage to prostitution (Genesis 38) to the sexual enslavement of girls and women taken as booty in war (Numbers 31:15-20, Deuteronomy 21:10-14) to Yahweh himself grooming a girl child for his sexual use (Ezekiel 16). 

Second, Leviticus demands the execution of both the "exploiter" and the "exploited"; it's as if I were to rob Brandan Robertson, and he was jailed as well as me. There's no ethical concern there, only an obsession with ritual purity. The same is true of Paul, even if he's right about 'arsenokoitai'; Robin Scroggs proposed that reading in his well-meaning but homophobic 1983 study, and he too overlooked that Paul also condemned the supposedly exploited 'malakoi.'  So too did the RSV translators, by conflating the two categories under "homosexuals."

I haven't seen 1946 yet, so I don't know how the translators of the Revised Standard Version saw homosexuality. I do know that in that time and environment, the educated and compassionate view was that it was a disabling mental illness, but also that the homosexual was a predatory danger to the normal. I don't know, then, if their translation was "innocent" or accurately reflected their conception of the male bed. On Robertson's own reading, it still seems a reasonable translation, but like other apologists he wants to define homosexuality very narrowly, to defend styles he finds attractive and erase or demonize others.  There's still a great deal of confusion over what "homosexual" refers to, even or especially among academics, and it has been there all along.

Numerous gay Christian apologists have claimed that when Jesus healed a centurion's slave / boy / whatever, he affirmed a gay relationship.  I'll have to read Queer and Christian to see if Robertson is one of these. But by gay Christian apologists' criteria that relationship could only have been exploitative.

It's very dishonest to blame antigay sentiment among English-speakers on this one passage alone, given Leviticus and Romans, or the endemic Christian antigay bigotry of centuries before 1946. As I recall, reactionary Christians in the US mostly attacked the Revised Standard Version anyway, hewing to the Authorized (or King James) Version. The waves of antigay repression that swept this country in the 20th century had little or nothing to do with the RSV or the translation of this verse. Does Robertson believe that psychiatry based its hostility to homosexuality on the 1946 RSV rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9?

Premature Exultation

I'm glad that Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, but as usual I'm uneasy with the premature triumphalism a lot of progressives and leftists have indulged in.  He's not even mayor yet: he won't be sworn in until January 1. I remember similar exultation among Obama fans when he was first elected in 2008. Admittedly, the right is equally confused, as in the rumor that his swearing-in was canceled because he refused to swear on the U.S. Constitution.  Congratulations, comrades, you're on the same page as the Right!  I did enjoy this satirical swipe at the foolishness, though.

It's certainly satisfying and encouraging that Mamdani defeated a well-funded, viciously defamatory campaign by a corrupt establishment, including Democratic Party leaders who developed a sudden amnesia about their own "Vote Blue No Matter Who" slogan.  When he'd won they then exhibited similar amnesia about their refusal to endorse him.  Bill Clinton, for example, endorsed sex-pest Andrew Cuomo, like his co-Epstein buddy Donald Trump, but flipped when it was all over.  Hillary Clinton protested that she had no connection to New York, so why should she have an opinion?  (Because she's a prominent Democratic politician who still feels free to comment on national politics the rest of the time, that's why.)  The abrupt change of stance is classic doublethink.  Even Barack Obama only praised Mamdani's campaign on November 3 (a day before the election); he stopped short of a formal endorsement, but offered to be a "sounding board" later on.

What I find more encouraging is that Mamdani's wasn't the only Democratic victory this month. It was an off-off-year election, and numerous Republican candidates went down in defeat.  California voters passed Proposition 50 to redistrict in favor of Democrats.  I'm ambivalent about that, but with MAGA Republicans in several states pushing redistricting to favor themselves, it shows that the move can backfire.  Corporate media have tried to minimize the outcomes by declaring the Democratic winners "pragmatic" or "more pragmatic" than the "radical" Mamdani, but I call that damage control.  Those media usually favor right-wing outcomes; remember their determined anticipation of a Red Wave in the 2022 midterms that didn't materialize?  A lot can happen in the next year, but I doubt Trump will be able to buck the traditional midterm losses that Biden evaded.

At the same time, it's important to remember that Mamdani won his election with a 50.4 percent majority.  That's not a mandate, though the media have assigned mandates to winners with smaller or no majorities.  (Trump got only a plurality in 2024, and he lost the popular vote in 2016.)  That doesn't diminish Mamdani's success, since he came out of almost nowhere to defeat a favored (if unpopular) party choice in the primary.  Cuomo only got 41 percent of the vote in the election itself; even if Curtis Sliwa had withdrawn from the race, the votes he got weren't enough to defeat Mamdani, not even if all who voted for him had switched to Cuomo.  Mamdani has his work cut out for him, and many observers have noticed that.  He's already moderated his positions on some matters, such as the police, and his worthy "affordability" promises can't be fulfilled by edict. I want him to succeed, but winning the election was just the beginning.  His enemies know this even if some of his fans don't: the smear campaign against him is still going on.