#BLM
| Feminist | Prof
@AppState
| PhD Religious Stud | I study how ancient & modern Christians imagine history | Cycling | he/him |
@RDispatches
| OpinionsMine
Lance is familiar with the phenomenon of people being fired, shamed, and cancelled because he’s the bully who ruthlessly had people fired, shamed, and cancelled for years when they wanted to (checks notes) tell the truth about him.
Have we really come to a time and place where spirited debate is not only frowned upon, but feared? Where people’s greatest concern is being fired, shamed or cancelled? As someone all too familiar with this phenomenon, I feel I'm uniquely positioned to have these conversations.
Your God has made very clear what he thinks of your
#thoughtsandprayers
after yet another mass shooting:
"When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood" (Isa 1:15)
#Uvalde
@JennMGreenberg
Pastors and Church leaders should absolutely be mandatory-reporters ... like, legally speaking. They are in some states. Should be all.
@HistoryBrian
“Every single one of my classes aims to help students learn to think about justice, hierarchy, and history. So, yes, I teach something you and your Foxnews friends would probably label Critical Race Theory. The rest of us call it truth and thinking critically.”
@tisaiahcho
Folks saying “and from men” are really adding to the free-labor extracted from women on which churches rely since almost every example of male-free-labor depends upon additional free-labor from women (at home) to give that dude time for Session, teaching Adult Sunday School, etc
🧵🧵🧵
I am once again asking everyone to stop pretending the Bible is a radical, counter-cultural, anti-oppression, gender egalitarian set of texts
Like any kind of Exceptionalism, it requires erasing or downplaying violence that disrupts the fantasy. And that's a bad thing 1/
@GG_1105
@CharlesRobinson
@KenCarman
"War on Drugs" made lots of $$$ for rich white people.
Watson playing makes lots of $$$ for rich white people.
See, simple.
🧵I did not come up with the idea that White Evangelicals have always been Moral Relativists behind their public blather of "We stand for unchanging truth, not the relativistic winds of secular humanism." Black theologians have long made this critique 1/
White evangelicals have always been full moral-relativist. Herschel Walker is a notorious domestic abuser, serial liar, and (by anti-abortion logic) conspired to murder and dismember a baby. But yeah, let's just talk abstract about "lesser or two evils" compared to Warnock... 1/
@AOC
This is why us profs want to teach actual history: So our students understand that bans on interracial marriage were an edifice of a brutal, exploitative racial caste system in US/State laws, not just some benign personal issue. But if we teach history, the "CRT!!!" screams begin
@SarahSpain
Thanks. As a scholar of religious studies, I never ever tire of suggesting that we stop tolerating the “Don’t get angry at me. These are just my beliefs” line. The response should always be a firm, “So you’re saying your religion is dehumanizing & homophobic? How is that better?”
Oh look, tHE bIBle iS cLEaR crowd is again delegitimating us PhDs who claim that their readings of various biblical passages are wrong. True Story: these folks don't even seem to read their own Bible, which sometimes says (checks notes) that it's not clear 🤷♂️
Don't let PhDs convince you that you cannot, armed w/ basic common sense & ability to read, understand the Bible. Yes some things require more intensive study, but most of the Bible is perfectly clear. Claiming verses don't actually mean what they plainly say is academic grift.
@nhannahjones
When I discuss the Wilmington massacre with my college students here in NC, they (A) "can't believe it" and (B) are enraged, esp because they weren't taught about it in an accurate way, if at all.
The "White Declaration of Independence" really gets them
When the (white) Christian students march out of the
#AsburyRevival
chapel and mass-organize against the crushing homophobic and misogynist policies of their school, professors, and churches ... then maybe we can be open to calling this a revival.
Evangelicals who want to reinforce the exploitative subordination of women like to talk about their Bible's "inerrancy." It's because inerrancy has a long history of aiding their activism for white patriarchy.
Check out my latest
@RDispatches
I wrote to SBL and also
@vst_edu
about David Falk's misogynist slander of
@ProfFrancesca
. One of the letters is below in case its language helps anyone else who wants to write. Thanks to
@maklelan
@letsgosojo
et al for their critiques of Falk. Let's burn patriarchy to the ground!
CW: Sexual Violence
The Cleveland Browns press conference now that’s introducing Deshaun Watson as their accused-by-22-women serial sexual predator QB is a master class in where we are in Patriarchal Late Capitalism…
Watson keeps calling himself a “servant leader.”
#Browns
1/
@assignedmedia
Thanks for this. It’s also noteworthy that in another tweet, Armstrong authorizes himself as someone who was “cancelled,” which erases that his expertise in cancel culture is as the bully who ruthlessly had folks shamed, fired, and cancelled if they wanted to speak truth abt him.
Hello
@Jeopardy
. This
#FinalJeopardy
question makes me think you could use some better consultants. Let me know if you'd like some help on biblical and religious studies. We could have told you "Hebrews" (which Paul didn't write!) is not correct...
My turn...
People: "tHe bIBlE Is clEaR!"
The Bible: "No, I'm really not."
Jesus: "Hold my beer!"
More seriously: a 🧵🧵 about "The Clarity of Scripture" in Christian rhetoric. Let's go! 1/
@TalbertSwan
Just wait until WaPo runs a piece about how this racist dumpster-fire says she suffers from depression or ADHD, as though such actual parts of being human for some people just inherently make one a cowardly White Supremacist clown. 🤮
@marcorubio
@JoeBiden
Care to talk about how *you* eagerly helped create those challenges?
Enjoy the Primary challenge from Ivanka. The rest of us will get our popcorn ready.
It’s like Wayne Grudem woke up the other morning and decided, “I’m gonna prove everything that
@AntheaButler
and
@kkdumez
have been arguing about white evangelicalism!”
🧵I am once again asking folks to stop pretending Paul's voice in 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 is liberative and egalitarian for women. This requires erasing its participation in violently misogynist ideals about men and women. Patriarchy reproduces itself by erasing its violence 1/4
@ivadixit
In my previous life as a conservative seminary student, I once mocked the Five Love Languages craze. When someone asked me my Love Language, I said, “Oh that’s easy. Intercourse.” The purity culture folks were scandalized. Looking back on that…yay.
It’s nerdy Religious Studies and biblical scholar thread time about white Evangelicals🧵
Have you ever encountered something like, “Without God or Christianity, you don’t have a basis for morality or logic,” as though it’s a home run mic drop? 1/22
🧵On Bible, Christian History, and "Homosexuality"
Denny Burk's "entire 2000-year" homophobic history of "the church" erases biblical and Christian history he doesn't like, is ironically elitist, and confirms
@kkdumez
@AntheaButler
's points about White Evangelicals. 1/
Thank you for the fulsome explanation. I do think that this confirms the profound nature of our disagreements.
For its entire 2,000-year history, the church has regarded homosexuality as sinful. This is not an “agree to disagree” issue among Christians. It is a watershed.
/1
@_nomadic_soul
Though, what's wrong with women wanting to have sex with whom they want and have friends over to their place? And why is Neo assuming women would only want sex with men? Sounds like a bad version of Horace when he blamed the degeneration of Rome on (gasp!) women enjoying sex 🤣
My students when they read the classic "obedience is better than sacrifice" verse (1 Sam 15:22) in context:
"Um, so God was angry at Saul for failing to complete a genocide? That's the obedience God wanted there?!"
YES!
Now, shall we talk about "biblical morality"?
Folks: Inerrantist "scholarship" in a nutshell here
-Arguments that seem 'academic' to evangelical insiders who lack academic expertise to assess? ✅
-Failure to engage the most basic reasons us critical scholars think the Pastoral Epistles are forgeries? ✅
Time for a 🧵🧵
1/
Were 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (the Pastoral Epistles) really written by Paul? Doesn't the writing style and vocabulary of these letters prove that they were written by someone else using Paul's name? A 🧵. 1/8
My Open Access article "Ethnic Ethics: Paul's Eschatological Myth of Jewish Sin" just dropped in NTS. It won the Achtemeier Award from SBL.
I argue that, for Paul, Jewish and gentile sin have different histories and characteristics. 1/7
🧵Folks often say 'It was central to Jesus to call God abba, which means daddy & reflects tender intimacy.' Ummm..
A) Mark 14:36 only time 'abba attributed to Jesus
B) GMark likely got it from Paul's letters
C) 'abba doesn't mean daddy
D) It's patriarchal & imperial ideology! 1/
I'll play! "Men who have sex with men" is a (bad) translation of οὔτε μαλακοὶ οὔτε ἀρσενοκοῖται. What ἀρσενοκοίτης means is debated, but μαλακός means soft or effeminate and can refer to a man who lets self be penetrated or a man who excessively penetrates too many women 1/
How many years of study does it take to make “Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral…nor men who have sex with men will inherit the kingdom of God” mean “actually those folks totally WILL inherit the kingdom”?
@Vanessid
Biblical Scholar here: This tweet also takes propagandistic texts at face-value. He's reproducing-as-fact the claims of texts that were themselves written to invent traditions about ancestors, land claims, and legitimacy precisely to delegitimize others.
The Jews were returning to a land that had been theirs, in which their religion was born, their temple built, and their Matriarchs and Patriarchs walked. A land that was at the absolute centre of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood,and from which they had been forcibly expelled. (3/10)
Flattening "all sins" into "everyone's a sinner" is a rhetoric that erases the victimized and directs sympathy to exploiters in positions of power.
No, screaming at your parent is not the same as facilitating mass death, protecting sexual predators, or paying poverty wages. 3/5
@Nicole_Lee_Sch
It’s absurd that folks won’t do basic service for others like masking, and that they whine about it when they do. I taught all last semester in a mask. My students heard me just fine and it gave me the opportunity to help them think critically about how folks talk “freedom.”
This is the key point! The theater of lying chaos we are seeing from Trump and Rudy now was something state GOP legislatures deliberately engineered by refusing to allow early votes to be counted before election day.
As us religious and biblical studies nerds write our
#SBLAAR22
papers, please remember that the following sentence has never been uttered at the conference:
"Wow, I really wish that person's paper had been five to ten minutes longer and taken up the whole time!"
Slavery is not in and of itself wrong. The form matters. Man-stealing is forbidden, yet the Christian is rightfully a slave of Christ.
Also, we are all slaves, either of sin resulting in death or obedience resulting in righteousness. (Rom 6:16-18)
It's ordinary in public spaces to hear folks who promote homophobia talk about 'What the Bible clearly says'
Though Bible should be irrelevant for deciding if homophobia is terrible (It is!), it's instructive to dissect such problematic chatter and what it hides.
Let's go! 🧵1/
Historian of Christianity here with a basic, Historical Methods 101 lecture:
Stop talking about “Historic Christianity.” There is no such thing.
“Historic Christianity” is a strategy for excluding others and authorizing the speaker’s Christianity, not a phenomenon of history.
@JimTune
@erichoke
@iamfujimura
On Brand! Pastor reads a critique of churches and even acknowledges it's a common concern ("a very tired one"), and proceeds to brush off the critique and erase the voices of folks making it.
I guess this is your kind of "muscular Christianity": not taking responsibility? ✅✅
Biblical Studies and
@SBLsite
Twitter:
@fullerseminary
posted TT jobs in our field. There's been excitement and not enough asking of key questions like, "How much homophobia must one support to work at Fuller?" Homophobia is deadly and crushing to real humans. For Shame! 1/4
@kkdumez
Interesting. We could pretend to take Wolfe’s concerns about “associating with” abusers seriously if he didn’t keep lionizing enslaving/rapist theologians and attacking people who are trying to address (checks notes) actual living sexual abusers in his own institutional networks.
White evangelicals have always been full moral-relativist. Herschel Walker is a notorious domestic abuser, serial liar, and (by anti-abortion logic) conspired to murder and dismember a baby. But yeah, let's just talk abstract about "lesser or two evils" compared to Warnock... 1/
Leftists, like King, are weaponizing the evangelical desire for godliness to achieve their own political goals. Voting for the lesser of two evils in not an endorsement of the lesser evil. It’s an attempt to keep the greater evil at bay and in no way jeopardizes your godliness.
Something cool dropped into my inbox. We have a home for "Paul Among the Mythmakers: Gods, Sins, and Scriptures." To everyone who has helped or, better, urged me to continue banging my head against this ... I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!
@_nomadic_soul
One common 🚩 ‘argument’ is that men can’t just be friends with women because invariably they’ll have an uncontrollable lusting desire for them.
Ummm…that’s a dude saying he can’t be trusted around women, which means he needs to be the one removed from power and influence…
Let’s be clear about the current detonation of conservatives to deny David / Bathsheba is a rape scene: this reproduces rape culture now b/c it’s actively encouraging people to (a) ignore or downplay sexual violence and (b) blame the woman to protect dude’s reputation. STOP NOW!
When White Christian leaders enslaved, sexually brutalized their slaves, profited from enslaving, & tore Black families apart, Black leaders told their stories and denounced white Christian justifications for family-destroying evil. See
@diannemstewart
2/
@ElieNYC
And due to the politics of public media, it's difficult to talk about the asymmetry you discuss. With my students, we study the history of State programs like New Deal and they see the conservative drive only to help their 'their people' while exclude others, and they get angry!
Which biblical creation myth is truth & factual?
1) One in which plants were created first, then animals, then humans
2) One in which the man was created, then plants, then animals, then the woman
3) One where God created things after killing a monster and eviscerating its body
And when maintaining authority or reputation matter more than rejecting evil and hearing those crushed by it, then you're gonna be the kind of person, church, political party, and institution that acts accordingly.
Exceptionalism is not the way! Tell a friend. /fin
It is also a MASSIVE EVIL for society to normalize powerful men being able to abuse others without consequence. When you urge electing a Hershel Walker to public office, you are actively participating in a massive evil for everyone else in our country
#ChristianNation
2/
@thecachinnator
@AnnaCaudill4
The "But have you thought about what's happened to Josh?!" is straight Himpathy. So is the obsessive emphasis that he's "a good guy." Such himpathy erases the women harmed by the patriarchy he reproduces. Intentions aren't the most relevant thing, but actual effects.
When you're more committed to defending the Bible's or Christianity's exceptionalism than to rejecting evil, then you habituate an erasure, downplaying, or explaining-away of injustice, evil, exploitation, and gender/racial violence promoted by the Bible. 24/
@tressiemcphd
I teach my students to start with something as simple as, "I don't get it. What's so funny?" when folks are laughing at racist jokes. Privileged folks like to talk abt "standing for justice even when it hurts," but then we usually laugh instead of break the social "comfort" spell
@MaxwellFrostFL
Biblical scholar here. The un-truth goes deep: Moses likely didn’t exist, he certainly didn’t write the Exodus or Deuteronomy versions of the Ten Commandments, and biblical laws weren’t the earliest law codes. But most importantly, the US shouldn’t be a white male theocracy!
This should be simple: Hamas's reprehensible killing of Israelis does not legitimate mass atrocities against Palestinians in response. Full Stop.
Genocide against Jews was and is wrong. Same with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Never Again means Never Again!
"I'm not crying for my parents - I am crying for those who will lose their lives in this war. We must stop the war."
Powerful testimony from
@maozinon
on
@BBCNews
- just days after his parents, Bilha and Yakov, were killed by Hamas.
Come get your theologians!
If you think a dude's theology can be "ABSOLUTELY SPLENDID" when he's violently anti-Semitic and encourages the mass slaughter of exploited starving peasants, your Gospel and theology are worthless privileged trash. This is not difficult. 1/5
@michaelharriot
These dudes who love The Party of Personal Responsibility are giving us a great lesson on 'traditional gender' and 'real masculinity': throw your wife under the bus instead of taking responsibility ✅✅✅
@JennMGreenberg
Exactly. But one of the ironclad truths of history is that people in positions of authority often WILL NOT "do the right, ethical thing" unless legally compelled. Was the same with (checks notes) enslaving and Jim Crow.
@atrupar
I mean, if a jury can convict Trump in a criminal trial after he was defended by his own lawyers and able to cross-examine witnesses, a jury could convict any American!
My new article on how NT Wright's "Radically Jewish" and "Subversive" Paul is really a Christian who ventriloquizes narratives that are comfortable to Wright's readers while naturalizing Judeophobia & other exploitative hierarchies like enslaving, misogyny
@KevinMKruse
My car stopped working.
Is it because of DEI and Affirmative Action? Hard to say if that's it or my failure to refill it with gas.
But yes, it's because of DEI. I hear DEI can really get into the engine and clog things up...
If your idea of "understanding the biblical text in its original context" excludes the study of women, gender, and sexual violence, then you're erasing those stark facets of the text and doing bad history. This should be very simple.
Read Sara Parks!
@SLYProfessor
I'm concerned with understanding the Biblical text in its original context. Not trying to read modern issues and ideologies back into the text. I find such tactics to be intellectual masturbation.
🧵Let's talk again about
@SBLsite
advertising for misogynist & homophobic institutions. It's a small piece of the larger cultural machinery that normalizes the dehumanizing of others, not to mention discrimination in scholarship
Example now:
@PhoenixSeminary
President search 1/
The key issue with White Evangelical moral relativism is not hypocrisy, though that's true. Their "unchanging truth" propaganda erases the massive violence that their self-obsessed goals inflict on others while legitimating them as the ones who stand for truth and morality.🤮 8/
My dude, please name as many “Atheist NT scholars” who run the major NT doctoral programs as you can, so you can demonstrate they own the field and persecute the Christians. We’ll wait … like for a long time.
Do you know what the source of education was for people who claim they were once a Christian, now an atheist?
The opinions of atheist and progressive scholars.
These "scholars" do not provide proof that their assertions about the Bible are true. They dupe people by their PhD.
It's always exciting to see proofs, but this essay is particularly meaningful. Misogyny, sexual violence, and their erasure (esp by men in positions of power) are important to notice and resist.
@clcobb629
and
@evandeneykel
have been fantastic editors. Look for their volume soon!
🚨2021 All-Male-Contributor volume with convicted child sexual predator Jan Joosten as contributor. Preface written in Oct 2020 (ie, when he was in prison?) that doesn't mention this; no editor note in his chapter.
STOP THIS! We don't have to be this way!
I remain deeply grateful for receiving the Achtemeier Award this year. If you are free at 10 and registered for
#sblaar2020
, please join us. It is an honor to have
@JanetSpittler
presiding with Paula Fredriksen and Margaret Mitchell responding.
@jordanbpeterson
So
@maklelan
has a PhD in Hebrew Bible, a peer-reviewed (ie, scholars had to sign off on it) book with the press of the largest society of professional biblical scholars in the world, is trained in ancient languages … but yeah, listen to Jordan Peterson’s uninformed whining.
🔥🔥🔥"When Americans speak of 'religion' as an undifferentiated, unmarked category, they are usually understanding [it] as what white Christians do ... American religion is a religioracial category that assumes both whiteness and Christianity."
@mpgPhD
@minakimes
These refs have been bad today, and in ways that hurt GB a lot in key situations (non call on defensive holding in first half that led to pick and eventually TB TD before half).
@AOC
Us college professors just joined your club. Apparently our average salary is $143k, and within eight years I'll be making $5 million a year! Nevermind that us state university profs' salaries are public record and most of us barely early a living wage...
@ZachWLambert
@DallasSeminary
To be clear,
@DallasSeminary
has demanded that *graduates* sign a homophobic statement *years after graduating* or lose grad benefits?
Maybe later this week they can hold a conference decrying the tyranny of enforced liberalism and censorship on college campuses…
If erasure of violence and truth is a key part of making White Evangelical control of society feel like it's right and True, then no wonder White conservative leaders denounce any voices that try to tell the truth about history as "CRT!" But that's for another day /fin
If this list is intimidating, skip the next few Bible Conferences where White Evangelicals say the same things they always say at them, and read a different voice while you ponder how to disrupt White male Christian violence in our world. Try
@anp22fab
6/
@desiringGod
So many great options! Wow. Can we list a few?
1) Abraham and Sarah + Hagar (+ the Pharaohs).
2) Jacob and Leah + Zilpah + Bilah + Rachel
3) Ananias and Sapphira - We wouldn't want to forget the faithful martyrs against Socialism!
Exceptionalist approaches to biblical literature need to be canceled (!). But the scholars, theologians, and pastors committed to "the radically subversive Bible" have trouble thinking critically about how biblical texts participate in hegemonic ideologies. 2/
Since Peterson is just making things up with ancient Greek texts, can I play too? "Blessed are the merciful." Hmm, maybe it really means "Blessed are those who put migrant children into cages"? 🤮
Watch
@maklelan
critique JP's attempt to leverage biblical prestige for his trash.
It’s the Beatitudes &
@jordanbpeterson
’s take on meekness on today’s episode of the
@data_over_dogma
podcast! Check it out at , , or wherever you get your podcasts!
@roopikarisam
Quite revealing of how so many of our colleagues treat the classroom as *their* privileged space of constant access to student admiration and attention.
This kind of hegemonic bullshit is literally what we are supposed to teach students to think about critically.
@minakimes
You’re revealing something about yourself when your reaction here is, “Yeah, but who doesn’t say reprehensibly racist things in their private conversations?!?!?!?!?” Good gawd, people.
@tisaiahcho
Don't know about you, but at the Reformed seminary I attended, we were quite consistently taught by the Theology and Apologetics faculty that right doctrine matters so much more than things like slavery, genocide, and abuse that ... oh, wait, we didn't even discuss those things.
"The Bible Is Clear" should invite questions:
-Clear to whom?
-Why do some readings feel clear and others not?
-Who gets invalidated or erased from legit Christianity by this 'clear' reading, and who benefits?
This is Critical Thinking 101 and it helps you read texts too! /fin
@gwensnyderPHL
So we have reached the stage of Capitalist accumulation that there’s a market for people with so much extra $$$ that they want to go on election interference vacations?
CW: Rape / Victim Blaming
Daniel Block's Ezekiel commentary has an Excursus that offers his own thoughts on Ezek 16's depiction of God punishing Jerusalem with gang-rape. His answer: sympathetically affirm Ezek's reprehensible 'she is a whore and deserves it' misogyny.
🧵on NTS 'What if it were True?' brouhaha🧵
In a hypothetical world, in 2020 I may have published a critique of the field of New Testament studies as a "protectionist" space where it's common to identify with, take-at-face-value, and valorize NT texts 1/
@AlsoACarpenter
@TylerHuckabee
The “There was a real gate called Eye of the Needle!” may be the best known “Bible Backgrounds” (🤮) thing among White evangelicals. More seem to “know” about that than stuff like the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE or Platonist understandings of the soul.
@Esqueer_
The Venn Diagram of people justifying the genocide of Palestinians with "Try being LGBTQ in Gaza!" and of people demonizing LGBTQ humans as "Pedophiles!" is a circle!
It's the same folks who support endless GOP bills that dehumanize and terrorize trans people.
.
@kkdumez
's point in "Jesus and John Wayne" entails that moral-relativism has long been a technology in White evangelicalism to naturalize the abuse, exploitation, lying, greed, and violence of their people in the pursuit of White male Christian power. 7/