What the Bible REALLY Says About Abortion, Being Gay, and Other Stuff (with Dan McClellan)

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Introduction – 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This is Relationscapes. It's the podcast for intrepid explorers of relationships, gender, sexuality, race, and more. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode is Bible scholar Dan McClellan:

“I am fascinated by the Bible. I love the Bible. I think it has a lot of wonderful, wonderful things in it. However, I think we also need to acknowledge that there are plenty of things that are not so wonderful, and many things that are just straight up bad.”

BLAIR HODGES: The Bible. It's one of the world's most influential books. It impacts believers and non-believers alike. As Christian nationalists gain more power over American politics right now, it's as important as ever to understand how the Bible is used to justify positions on abortion, gay marriage, child abuse, and more. Bible scholar Dan McClellan has become wildly famous on TikTok unpacking what the Bible really says about these contentious issues.

His new book is called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong about Scripture's Most Controversial Issues. Dan joins us to talk about it with a little bit of commentary about comic books on the side right now. 

 

Getting Into Comics – 01:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Dan McClellan, welcome to Relationscapes.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Thank you so much for having me, Blair. I appreciate it.

BLAIR HODGES: Now, this is an audio-only podcast, but I see that you have on your DuckTales T-shirt today, and in your honor, today I wore my Frog and Toad.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Oh, nice shirt.

BLAIR HODGES: When did the T-shirt thing start? Have you always been a graphic tee guy?

DAN MCCLELLAN: I have. At my old job, if I didn't have to wear a shirt and a tie, I was just wearing T-shirts—and particularly graphic tees, and particularly graphic tees associated with comic books and stuff like that. And then in January of 2023, when I left my full-time employment, I didn't have to put on a tie again.

So it was just all T-shirts all the time. That's just become my work uniform, and it's great because I can get invited to go give a lecture at a university, and they're like, please wear a comic T-shirt. And I'm like, I was planning on it. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: That is the best uniform, I have to say. I love the nostalgia factor, too. I think we're pretty similar in age, and so we grew up with a lot of the same pop culture touchstones. I wasn't really that into comic books though. I don't really know why. My older brother wasn't, so maybe I didn't really have a portal into it. How did you get into comics?

DAN MCCLELLAN: I was the oldest of five kids that my mom had in five years, so I was the trendsetter in our family growing up. Don't tell my brothers or sisters that. But there were two things that really catalyzed my love for comics.

One, I was big into art growing up. My maternal grandfather was a professional painter. That's how he made his living. And I evidently inherited some of that natural skill. I began to draw in ways that surprised my parents very early, so they were always pushing me to explore those talents.

And then in 1992 I was at the All-Star Fan Fest in Baltimore, because I grew up in North Potomac, just outside of DC. And my friend Saurabh Mather and I were just kind of wandering around the fan fest, which is just a big convention floor with all kinds of vendors and stuff, and we saw all these big white boxes. I went over and started rifling through, and they were comic books. And I pulled out X-Men number one with the famous Jim Lee cover with Cyclops and Wolverine on it. And it was a revelation.

I was like, this is all that I want art to be, and I had to have it. And so I was immediately hooked on the art. And then that was right around the time they had the Death of Superman. So at school, somebody was like, did you hear Superman's died?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And so I had to figure out what was going on. And so I got into collecting the back issues. I got into subscribing to the four different Superman comics, so I got a new issue every week in my hold box at the comic book store in Longmont, Colorado, where I had moved to.

So it was a couple of different things that got me into it. And I've always just loved the way comics explore all kinds of different aspects of life—of being human—using these superhuman characters. I think they're some of the most exciting ways to explore a lot of the things that keep us up at night. And so it's always just been kind of the background of my internal monologue, of my lexicon. That and, you know, Mel Brooks and Chevy Chase movies—that's basically my lexicon.

 

When Dan Got Religious – 05:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: I don't see that as too far off from being interested in the Bible. I mean, comics explore these epic stories, and they're exploring, like you said, facets of humanity. They're also exploring moral and ethical dilemmas. Were you religious growing up as well, or were comic books kind of serving that world-building role for you?

DAN MCCLELLAN: I think comics kind of filled in that gap. I was born into a very religious family. However, when I was young things kind of went sideways, and I don't recall my parents ever really talking about religion much, except for occasional one-off statements. But I wouldn't say I was raised religious.

I would say I probably just kind of was a de facto agnostic growing up. And so yeah, the comic books were a way for me to explore the mythology of 1980s, 1990s, mostly smallish town America.

BLAIR HODGES: So when did you find religion then?

DAN MCCLELLAN: That was when I was around 19. Let's see, 19, 20 years old is when I started. This is when I'm starting to try to get out and live on my own, and I'm kind of getting out into the great wide world and realizing how small and insignificant I was, and starting to worry, have existential crises, and worry about things, wondering what else is out there.

And so I was exploring different philosophies, different religions, read the Bhagavad Gita, read a bunch of other texts, poked around in the Bible for a little bit and thought, this is a weird text. But it was a series of events that led me to be baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the LDS Church, the Mormon Church, when I was 20 years old.

And then a year later I left to serve a two-year proselytizing mission in Uruguay. And in that year I decided I needed to—I had a lot of catching up to do with the other folks who were going to be serving with me as missionaries. And so I decided to read the entire Bible and then all of the uniquely LDS scriptures.

And then I got out there and found out, oh, now I'm way ahead of the majority of the other kids.

BLAIR HODGES: Who are out there with me. I grew up Mormon, and, you know, I went on a mission as well. And by the time I went, I'd been through four years of LDS seminary, which happens during high school, and it's like one class a day. It's not an intense thing. And I still hadn't read the Bible cover to cover by then, even though our seminary covered the Bible, the Book of Mormon, kind of the LDS canon throughout those years.

And it wasn't until I was a missionary and I decided I should read this cover to cover, and I did. And I mean, I was not prepared, especially for the Hebrew Bible. I was like, I don't know what most of this is after I got out of Genesis.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, it's a slog to get through. A lot of people, they get into the baguettes and it's just like, flip, flip, flip, flip. We're going to skip a lot of this.

BLAIR HODGES: A lot of this is what was killing me. I was like, oh, this keeps going.

DAN MCCLELLAN: It can be very repetitive. That was one of the things that turned me off initially about it was that I was like, we just read this.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Why are we doing it again?

BLAIR HODGES: And it's a little bit different, maybe, but I'm not supposed to think that—like maybe I missed something.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, it's not a very intuitive read. Which is why I see a lot of people today—In fact, I was contemplating this. I saw a discussion, I forget what social media site it was on, but they were talking about how new Christians, they should not be instructed to start with Genesis and then read straight through. The concern was that this actually is a liability.

This creates problems for their grasping of the Gospel.

BLAIR HODGES: Give them the "greatest hits album" first before you give them the deep cuts.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, you got to get the "milk before the meat." And unfortunately for folks who think that way, a lot of the Pentateuch is quite meaty.

BLAIR HODGES: That's the first five books of the Bible.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Right.

 

Why Dan Loves the Bible – 09:03

 

BLAIR HODGES: So you start off your new book that we're talking about, The Bible Says So, and the first line of the book is, "I love the Bible." You start off insisting on that, and I feel like in part that's because of questions about you that you get on social media. You're a social media influencer. You talk about the Bible there. And there's a lot of Bible believers who feel like your mission is actually to attack the Bible, right?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, absolutely. I get that all day every day. Basically, you hate the Bible, you hate God, you're trying to tear down Christianity. That's the comments that I probably most consistently get. And I wanted to start off by saying, look, a lot of you are not going to believe me, but I am fascinated by the Bible.

I love the Bible. I think it has a lot of wonderful, wonderful things in it. However, I think we also need to take it on its own terms and acknowledge that there are plenty of things that are not so wonderful and many things that are just straight up bad in the Bible. And if we don't let it operate on its own terms, we're not really giving priority to the Bible as an authority.

We are imposing our own terms on it and compelling the Bible to fit whatever terms we bring to it. And I see there's a role for that in a lot of religiosity, but it's just not the way I have ever approached the Bible. One of the artifacts of joining the LDS Church as a 20-year-old reasonably well-educated person is that I did not come into the LDS Church with a lot of simplistic binary ideas about how the world worked, how I worked, how the Bible works.

I came into it just bringing in the perspectives that I have always had. And so I've always kind of approached these things, these texts, as things that are products of human industry, things that are not free from error and ideology and things like that. And no one ever disabused me of that within the LDS Church.

And I'm sure in no small part because the LDS Church doesn't really have a formal doctrine of inerrancy, and certainly not for the Bible.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, inerrancy, they don't believe the Bible's perfect.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Right.

BLAIR HODGES: In fact, there's an article of faith that says they believe the Bible is the word of God as far as it's translated correctly. So there's an acknowledgment in basic Mormon principles that says the Bible's not perfect.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. And I think the word translate there is used to mean not only render from one language to another but also transmit. Because even Joseph Smith talks about corruption in the transmission of the biblical texts and the need to try to restore plain and precious truths. And so no one ever sat me down and said, look, here's how you have to think about all of this.

Most of the sitting down and instructing on things was related to other things. And so I've always just approached it as I'm going to let it operate on its own terms, even if I don't agree with it. And so that's always come natural to me. And then when I got into formal education on the Bible and graduate education and a PhD on the Bible, that was all just constantly being reaffirmed by the things I was learning, the resources I was gaining, the skills I was developing.

And so I don't think that those two things are mutually exclusive: a critical engagement with the Bible on its own terms and appreciating the Bible for what it is.

 

Dan’s Relationship to Mormonism – 12:23

 

BLAIR HODGES: You say in the introduction of the book that you have kind of this dual relationship—and I don't know if you would separate it as a dual relationship—but you have the Bible playing a role in your own faith and your religiosity, which isn't a part of your book and doesn't play a big part in your social media activity either. And you've also dedicated your professional life as a scholar of the Bible—which is a huge moneymaker, by the way. I recommend anybody out there, if you want to make quick money, just go get a degree in the Hebrew Bible.

DAN MCCLELLAN: As long as you can parlay that into a successful social media career.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, there's a ton of content creation opportunities! I mean, you know, the Internet is just glutted with talking heads on the Bible all making money. [laughs]

No, but where does that relationship happen for you? And I imagine you get a lot of questions about it. And I know we kind of have similar backgrounds. We actually have similar connected social circles. And you and I have worked on a couple things before because of your art. So I've known you for a long time.

The number one question I get when people find out that I know you—and this is from the Mormon side of things—is like, how can he think the stuff he does about the Bible and still be Mormon? And I imagine you get that question a lot from a lot of different places or people.

Non-Mormons might, Evangelical Christians might say, oh, you're just a total Mormon. Oh yeah, you believe this because you're Mormon. Whereas Mormons are like, how does he believe that and be Mormon?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, it's interesting to get it from all sides of the spectrum because I'll make a video where I'm like, the New Testament does not present Jesus as the Adonai of the Hebrew Bible. And people are like, "Your Mormon is showing. Your Mormon is showing."

BLAIR HODGES: And I'm like, guys, have you read the Book of Mormon? It says Jehovah is Jesus.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Basically, it is official Mormon doctrine that Jesus is the Jehovah of the Old Testament. And yeah, so on Twitter, all the “Deznat” crowd, they're really not big.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, these are sort of alt-right Mormons—a small group. They're sort of white nationalist Christians who can't break through to the larger white nationalist Christian scene because they're Mormon, but they want to be them so badly!

DAN MCCLELLAN: And they just refuse to acknowledge that the main white nationalists really don't like them.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's very sad.

DAN MCCLELLAN: But yeah, I get an awful lot of that. I get a lot from the evangelical Christian side, but then an awful lot of feedback, both negative and seeking, from the Latter-day Saint side. I have people who say, "You can't… how can you say all these things and still be LDS?"

Or people who come to me and say, "Please tell me how I can think all of these things and still be LDS." And in addition to having set a very clear boundaries very early on in my social media career, where, look, my personal beliefs and faith are off limits, I don't talk about them. They're not relevant to the scholarly positions I take. And so that's out of bounds.

But at the same time, as I said, I came into the church as a critical thinker in a lot of ways and have never really been disabused of that stuff. That critical thinking has kind of been a through line in my relationship with the Bible all through my membership in the LDS Church.

And so I have never experienced, I don't think, the process of deconstruction that a lot of people are going through, particularly the people who reach out to me for help. I am not a deconstruction guru. I'm not going to be a good therapist for anybody who wants to know how they can maintain faith while also engaging critically with the Bible.

My experiences are entirely unique and also my own. And I have a variety of different reasons for not wanting to do that, but I get requests all the time to be somebody's guru, and I have to turn them down, which is something I don't like doing. I feel awkward doing it, but I think it's necessary for my channel.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I wondered, in part—both of us have worked for the church. I worked for the church's university, Brigham Young University. You worked for the church's Scripture translation department. And for me, I couldn't be as public about my political and religious beliefs where they differed from the church, especially on issues like women's ordination or LGBTQ rights.

And so for the sake of my professional job and the obligations I had, I wondered—as a church employee, because you started your social media influencing career while you still worked for the church—did you have to worry about that element as well? Like, was it protective to say, "I'm just looking at the scholarship here. I'm not getting into these questions of faith per se."

DAN MCCLELLAN: It was. I was able to say, "Hey, here are the boundaries of what I'm doing on social media." And this is part of my professional training. This is part of, even to some degree, what I did for the church: critically examine the linguistics and all of this and try to guide translators in interpreting and then translating not just the Book of Mormon, but also the Bible.

And so, yes, when people would call in and complain about me and I had to go talk with folks, it was always, "Here are the boundaries." And they said, "Look, as long as you stay within those boundaries, we're good." And because those were the boundaries that I established initially on my own for my channel, I didn't really have any trouble with that.

And so, no, I've not faced any kind of ecclesiastical discipline or anything like that. And then also, while I was an employee of the church, I also ran for the state legislature twice as a Democrat, which meant there's an additional dimension in which I'm operating in a kind of parachurch capacity.

I'm doing things that normally members of the church are probably not totally comfortable doing. But, you know, if you're running for office, it wouldn't really be above board for a church to be like, "How dare you defend the legality of abortion and things like that?" And so as a biblical scholar, I think I was doing the same. Look, this is my job.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: This is my side hustle, let's put it that way. But I'm a professional. I need to be able to act as a professional in doing that job. And everybody was okay with that.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. And you still, I mean, you still participate in Mormonism, as far as I understand it. But it's not something you tend to explore publicly, as far as I've seen.

DAN MCCLELLAN: No, no, this is my own business. And, you know, I am fairly open about certain things. I'm a primary teacher in my ward.

BLAIR HODGES: That means teaching, like, kids in primary-age children?

DAN MCCLELLAN: And then my wife is in the primary presidency. So, yeah, we’re doing fine. We don't need to, but yeah, this is my private…

BLAIR HODGES: What stake is business? People want to get an address, they want to write, they want to write to your leg…

DAN MCCLELLAN: I'm a stake president. I don't know how much communication my stake president receives about me. I'm sure it is nonzero, but I don't know exactly what it is. But we have a great relationship, so I'm not worried about that. But yeah, that's private stuff. I'm doing scholarship online, and I limit it to scholarship.

 

Data Over Dogma – 19:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, let's talk about that scholarship. "Data over dogma." That's also the name of your podcast where you explore the Bible, and it's kind of your slogan. You have shirts, you've got swag. Data over Dogma. And I wondered, can a commitment to data become its own kind of dogma? Like, how do you avoid dogmatism about data?

And we're talking about data. You're talking about, you're looking at the actual text, you're looking at how words are used. You're looking at scholarly consensus. How do you avoid falling into dogmatic data adherence?

DAN MCCLELLAN: I think that's a great concern. That's absolutely something that I think is real. And I think I would say that if there's one dogma that I allow on my channel that I will cop to, it is that all other things being equal, I will give the benefit of the doubt to the less powerful group.

So Data over Dogma has always been an aspirational motto. It's something that I don't think is achievable for, you know, us mortals. And people always want to know exactly what I mean by dogma and exactly define that.

BLAIR HODGES: What is dogma? What is that?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Well, I abjure definitions just in general, which is part of my scholarship as well. But what I usually describe it as is I tend to think of dogmas as things that are not supported by the data, things that you assert that you hold to, that you argue for because of your identity politics, because of the implications, because of your livelihood, because of all these other things.

But they're not really defensible by the data alone. And by data, I use that in a very broad, generic sense of any kind of information that can be used to draw conclusions about things. I don't use it in the sense of raw numbers or experimental results or things like that. It's the very wide, generic sense of data.

The idea is that when it comes to research questions about the Bible—what the Bible is saying, how the Bible is being used, how people engage with the Bible—I'm always going to try to put the information ahead of whatever dogmas might be out there that incentivize certain conclusions.

And certainly my livelihood can become a dogma, because maybe if I make certain types of content, I get a lot more attention, I get a lot more money, and suddenly I need to start making videos that arrive at these conclusions in order for me to continue to have the same standard of living. That's an example of something that I think is a dogma.

On the other end, a lot of the folks that I'm responding to are asserting ideologies that they have inherited from their tradition, that are critical to their own worldview, their own self-identity, to their position, and the success of the social identities that are important to them, whether they're related to their family, to their congregation, or to right-wing authoritarianism or to MAGA or whatever.

Yeah, those are the kinds of things that I'm directly challenging, trying to at least. And I think I'm more successful in some videos than in others. But it's always an aspirational motto of mine that I try to keep in mind that I don't want to fall into a trap of doing things for the wrong reasons. I want to always try to prioritize the data.

BLAIR HODGES: I also liked in the book how you underscored dogmas are not to be criticized, that you basically throw a fence up around any kind of pushback. You're not reevaluating something, you're not open to new data if it comes along. The conclusion almost precedes the work it takes to get to a conclusion, and it matters more than the work that it takes to get to a conclusion.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, and this is one of the reasons I get a little frustrated with some of the feedback that I get, because people will be like, oh, well, the scientific method is a dogma in and of itself. It's like, to a degree, but it is open to revision.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DAN MCCLELLAN: The same is true of naturalistic approaches to things. I get accused of being an atheistic, naturalistic, whatever scholar. It's like, okay, show me the data.

BLAIR HODGES: I call it identified whatever. No, just kidding.

DAN MCCLELLAN: But it's open to revision.

BLAIR HODGES: You want to see the data.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And if the data suggests that there's something wrong with these approaches, we will change them.

 

When Data Changed Dan’s Mind – 23:52

 

BLAIR HODGES: Is there something big you've changed on? That's an example where you've said, like, wow, I used to actually be pretty convinced about this thing, and because of the exploration of the data, I really had to reach this other conclusion.

DAN MCCLELLAN: The one that springs most readily to mind is my position on Psalm 82, which a lot of people will be like, well, that doesn't mean anything. But when I got into formal study of the Bible, and particularly when I got into graduate programs, I was really interested in early Israelite religion. I was really interested in concepts of deity, and I still am.

Deuteronomy 32:8-9 is a text that a lot of scholars think preserves this early distinction between Adonai, the God of Israel, and a higher deity named Elyon. There's a very common theory, one that I advocate for, that Adonai and El were originally two distinct deities. And a lot of people have long appealed to Psalm 82 as evidence of this because it talks about an Elohim standing before a council of gods and judging the gods.

And then it seems like there's another Elohim that is called on to rise up from their seated position on a throne. A lot of scholars take this to be an early witness to that distinction. For a long time, I understood it that way as well. This was a very early text. It was deeply mythological, and it seemed to distinguish Elyon from Adonai.

I was in my second graduate degree at Trinity Western University in lovely Langley, BC, in Canada, and I decided I was going to do my research paper for my Old Testament class on Psalm 82. I went through the whole semester doing this research paper, and by the end, I could not maintain that belief that this was a very early text. I was like, the more I look into it, the more I actually am convinced it's a very late text.

BLAIR HODGES: Is that because of language construction, vocabulary, that kind of stuff?

DAN MCCLELLAN: A lot of it had to do with context, but also with genre. As I looked at it, I noticed this has resonances with two different kinds of genres. One of them is what's called the God Complaint, which is a type of individual lament.

BLAIR HODGES: We see this in the Psalms charging God with something, right?

DAN MCCLELLAN: And the other is the divine council motif. I saw the two of these, and I realized that this text makes the most sense as an attempt to merge these two genres. So it's kind of a hybrid genre in response to the crisis of the Babylonian Exile. The psalms around it, I think, are one of the things that make the case, because you have this kind of repeated theme in the Psalms of Asaph, where they're complaining to God because God is allowing bad things to happen, specifically the invasion by Babylon, the destruction of the temple, the exile of the Judahites, and then Psalm 82.

I ultimately published a paper in a journal called the Journal of Biblical Literature on my position on Psalm 82. My new and improved, in my opinion, position on Psalm 82 is that they're taking the lament and actually putting it into the mouth of God, where God stands before the council and expresses God's laments to the other gods of the divine council, the patron deities. Then condemns them to mortality to depose them from the divine council.

This is the event of the universalization of Adonai, where the psalmist calls on God in the final verse, saying, "Rise up, for you will inherit all nations." The idea being that the patron deities of the nations have now all been deposed. Their seats sit empty. You take over rule of all the nations of the earth. In the pre-exilic period, God ruled over the heavens, but on earth, every deity had their own nation over which they were sovereign. Now, in the exile, they don't have access to Adonai because he's in the land of Israel.

This psalm, I argue, is an attempt to universalize Adonai's rule and thereby universalize access to Adonai, even for folks who do not live in the land of Israel. But for me, this was a catastrophic shift in my thinking that really was just the result of wrestling with this paper over the course of the semester.

BLAIR HODGES: What made it such a catastrophe?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Because it meant I lost a piece of evidence for my position on early Israelite religion. It's not that I… and I don't think that it's, you know, that case doesn't just crumble to the ground.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure.

DAN MCCLELLAN: But it was such a strong pillar in that argument.

BLAIR HODGES: You debunked a data point.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, it was a data point that then took one of the legs out from underneath a bigger position that I held. I was worried, oh no, is this going to cause this all to crumble? But I was also proud of being able to challenge my own dogma, being able to challenge my own position and say, no, my thinking was wrong. And I'm going to actually argue strongly for this other position now.

There are a handful of examples of positions like that, but that's the most prominent one. And it's also most prominent to me because it was such a big part of one of the main positions I hold about early Israelite religion.

 

Three Big Christian Dogmas About the Bible – 29:26

 

BLAIR HODGES: And for you, that's wrapped up in your professional career. For Bible-believing Christians who are not really interested in the scholarly side of things, a shift like that could be really unsettling because of three main dogmas that you identify at the beginning of the book.

The dogma of inspiration, the idea that every single word in the Bible was delivered by God. And if it's by God, then it's perfect. That's the second dogma, inerrancy—it can't be wrong. And then the third one is a fancy word, "univocality," which means that it speaks with one voice, that everything in the Bible, if God delivered it, agrees. It tells one story, it's one book, and it all can be tied together.

You're going through that psalm story and looking at earlier views of Israel's God, and that there's this pantheon of gods. Most, almost all, Bible-believing Christians would say, what are you talking about? There's only one God. They would point to verses in the Bible that say God is one. And you've done work to explore how those verses happen and what they mean. But those three dogmas, I think you have found in your conversations, in your work with most Christians, those are kind of the three big ones, right?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, I think those sit at the foundation of pretty much all of the approaches to the Bible that I find problematic and dogmatic. I very rarely run into someone who is taking a very problematic approach to the Bible who does not endorse usually all three. But at least one of those—even folks who are like, "yeah, I'm a soft inerrantist..."

BLAIR HODGES: Like there might be some errors here or there.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, they're unintentional though, and they don't affect anything like—

BLAIR HODGES: The main message.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, which is something I always find funny because usually the conversation goes like this: they say, well, none of these things you're talking about affect any central doctrine. It's like, well, my concern is that they can't possibly affect any central doctrine.

If I found a text tomorrow that said God has a body and walks around in the garden and makes noise as they're crunching over the leaves and stuff… that would not affect any central doctrine. And you know how I know? Because that text is already in the Bible, and it does not affect any central doctrine.

Doctrine does not flow downstream from the Bible. Doctrine is a result of a process of negotiation. If you don't like the text that says God lies, you just negotiate it away. If you don't like the text that commands child sacrifice, you just negotiate it away. You cannot have a single passage that compromises central doctrines because the doctrines are not based on the texts.

 

Challenging the Bible Versus Scrapping the Bible – 32:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's what makes your work most compelling, because you're not just doing this for an intellectual exercise about what the Bible's about, but you're looking at how communities interpret the Bible and how it affects everyday living. So your goal is twofold. Number one, you want to defang some proof text. You want to look at verses in the Bible that are used to harm marginalized communities, or to make problematic claims, or that fly in the face of contemporary ethics in some way. That's number one: defang those proof texts.

And then two, you also have to acknowledge that sometimes the Bible itself is not being misinterpreted and that it is making claims that we probably should find problematic. So you're also criticizing some things that are in the Bible that you can't interpret away as being unethical or problematic.

So that's really a twofold thing. You can see why people who hold the Bible as perfect and as the word of God would have a problem with what you're doing. Because the Bible itself is an instrument of power. It's telling us whether it's okay to be gay. It's telling us about, like, we try to make it say stuff about abortion. We try to understand what family relationships should be based on. And so defanging those proof texts and criticizing things—that's your twofold approach.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, which drives some people bonkers because they have a single approach and assume that I have a single approach, which is why they will always say, all you do is just reinterpret everything you don't like through a leftist lens. And it's like, no, I don't. I frequently say, this is bad, this is wrong. And so they want to reduce me to this single note, this monotone approach to the Bible, which is just not the case.

I am happy to acknowledge where the Bible gets things right, where the Bible gets things very wrong, whether or not my position is that that should be right or wrong. Which is not an easy thing for the people who are used to arguing about the Bible on the Internet to engage with competently, much less in good faith.

BLAIR HODGES: As you're looking at the text, to defang the proof text or to criticize the bad ethics, you still have that love for the Bible. The question to me becomes, why not scrap it? Then if there are these problematic things, if the Bible's being used in these harmful ways, and how influential is it? Is interest in the Bible declining? How do you address those questions of why still wrestle with it instead of saying, yeah, there's some good stuff in there, there's also some bad stuff, why don't we just find good stuff anywhere? Why the Bible?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, and I think you can find good stuff in many other places. And a lot of people, even those who assert the priority, the authority, the fundamental goodness of the Bible, a lot of times they'll talk about it in ways that reflect the mediation of those ideas through other cultural channels. For instance—and this may not blow anybody's hair back—but somebody…

BLAIR HODGES: I don't have hair. Well, my beard hair. [laughter]

DAN MCCLELLAN: But, you know, it's the beginning of June right now and the anti-Pride month rhetoric is all over social media, and somebody posted something saying, “Remember, pride goeth before the fall.” It's like, that's not in the Bible. The Bible says, “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

So you're not actually quoting the Bible, you're just quoting sociocultural discourse. And there are a lot of ways—I get a lot of people who say, “Well, in Exodus when the Pharaoh gave Moses his ring and did this…” and it's like, that's the Prince of Egypt. That's not the Bible.

BLAIR HODGES: There's a ton of those. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” We'll talk about that in a bit.

DAN MCCLELLAN: But the Bible's not going anywhere.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And as much as a lot of people wanted to, I get those comments all the time: “Don't care. We need to get rid of it. Why are you even talking about it?” And as nice as it would be for the Bible to no longer be a lever that is constantly being pulled in public discourse, and particularly in relationship to political power, that's not going to happen anytime soon. And so, as someone who has a degree of expertise in this topic, I feel it is incumbent upon me to leverage whatever resources, skills, knowledge I have to try to push back against that.

And I've told the story many times in many different places, but ten years ago, I might have been one who would have been like, cool, you guys do your thing. I'm staying out of it. I'm gonna go play golf. I'm gonna draw comics. I'm just gonna stay out of this. But in 2016, my world changed forever, and my relationship to the public discourse changed forever.

My oldest daughter—I think she was, oh, gosh, six or seven at the time, or eight, something like that—she came up to me and she said, “Daddy, what sports are girls allowed to play?” And that shook me, because this was not a thought that ever entered my mind growing up. It could not have possibly entered my mind, because I was never conscious of any limits on my agency or participation in society as a result of being a boy, because there weren't really any such limits.

Not only had my child recognized these limits, she seemed to have become accommodated to them and just wanted to know where the boundaries were. And I felt like such a failure, because I was allowing my daughters—I have three girls—to grow up in a world like that. And I can still remember I was sitting in a pew in this church building just down the street from me, and I said, this all has to change. I have to get involved. I cannot allow this world to be the world that my three daughters grow up in.

And that resulted in runs for public office. That resulted in me deciding I needed to step up my efforts to combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion online. And ever since then, I felt like I have to get off the sidelines. I have to be more engaged. And so while it would be easy to say, yeah, I'm gonna leave that argument for other folks, I feel it is incumbent upon me to be in the fray. And I will be for as long as I am able to.

 

Navigating Social Media Life – 38:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad to see it. And I have to say it's obvious that it matters, because you’ve accumulated over a million followers on social media. Tens of thousands of people tune into your online classes. You have the Data Over Dogma podcast. You're an award‑winning public scholar of the Bible. So maybe the most obvious response to why I care about it is, like, because so many people still do. This still matters. A lot of people care.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. Which was honestly a surprise to me, because I've been arguing about religion and the Bible on the Internet for about 20 years.

BLAIR HODGES: We were on message boards together.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, message boards, the blogs.

BLAIR HODGES: I remember seeing “Maklelan,” and I knew you. I knew him way back when. [laughter]

DAN MCCLELLAN: And it didn't get a lot of attention. There was not a lot of exposure. You know, when you're on one of those old silly message boards—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: You might only be seen by a dozen people or so.

BLAIR HODGES: And it's the same people.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And it's the same people, right. And so, you know, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, the reach of what I was doing was limited, even though I collaborated with other scholars and we worked on trying to combat misinformation when people came out with phony artifacts and things like that—the Jordan‑lead codices almost fifteen years ago, all that kind of stuff. And it just didn't get a lot of attention.

And then for whatever reason, during the, whatchamacallit, the pandemic—that’s what it's called—I got on TikTok because I was seeing people talking about the Bible and religion on TikTok, and I was like, who's in charge over there? And it turned out there was not really anyone in charge, in terms of credentialed experts. And I was like, well, time to get into the game on another platform.

But for whatever reason, yeah, there was a lot more exposure on TikTok. And I think that allowed the kinds of work that I and many other scholars do to reach an audience that is interested in it and for whom it is important. And so it's kind of exploded since then in a way that it never could have on Facebook or on Mormon Dialogue and Discussion.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, "Mormon Dialogue and Discussion." That was it. That was the message board. How hard is it to juggle all the comments and, like, on the back end of stuff when you have that big of a social media presence? How much time is spent reading comments or looking through that stuff?

DAN MCCLELLAN: I could spend 24 hours a day doing it and not cover everything. And so I made the decision: I'm gonna make my stuff. I will engage a little bit, but I have to cut it off. I have to clock out. Otherwise it takes over my entire personal life, and my wife will smother me in my sleep if I let that happen.

And so I have to be very strict about that. So while I probably read maybe 10% of the comments that get posted across the various platforms, I respond to even fewer of them. I will try to engage to some degree for a little bit of time, but when it comes to the very negative stuff and the combative stuff, occasionally I'll engage, but for the most part, meh. Because my world's not going to change one way or another if I engage or do not engage—apart from it's going to negatively affect my time and probably my mental health if I'm just constantly engaging with people who hate me.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: There can also be a weird egotism about it too. Like an obsessive, “oh, you're gonna say something about me, I'm not gonna let that slide.” So there could be many reasons why somebody couldn't walk away from it.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And every now and then I'll see comments about… and, you know, the lingo these days is bizarre. But, oh, they'll say to somebody else, “oh, Dan cooked you.” Or they love to see the dunks and dunking on people and all that kind of stuff.

And yeah, there's absolutely an ego thing involved there, where I'm like, yeah, and… and you might get the sense that you are actually some kind of powerhouse. And whenever I get my kit to feeling like that, I'm like, time to log off. Time to clock out.

BLAIR HODGES: Or like, your kids, how impressed your kids are.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, no, nothing. Nothing impresses my kids these days.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. So it's always humbling to go back there. One other question about the social media stuff: your videos are the first ones I remember seeing, like when you're doing Stitches. So you're taking someone else's video and commenting on it—yours were the first ones that I saw that included the message, “don't harass this creator.” Like, don't go bug this creator. Did you borrow that from Internet culture, or where did that come from?

DAN MCCLELLAN: I… I don't remember borrowing it from Internet culture. I first started doing that because I would occasionally get negative feedback. People would be like, oh, you have an audience that goes and harasses people.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And I was like, I don't want to have that kind of audience.

Or people would get reported. There were a couple of instances of accounts being taken down or deleted or stuff like that, either because of being reported a bunch by folks who were coming from my video or because of being harassed a bunch by folks coming from my video. And that made me feel awful.

And so I recall starting to just put a little warning or caveat on there, and it evolved over time, and it stayed pretty consistent for the last year or two. But it's not impossible that I saw it somewhere else and was like, “that's a good idea, I'm gonna do that.” I don't recall that happening though. I just recall being like, okay. And I think I may have initially just started saying it in my videos, but at some point I decided to just put it on the screen and let that count. And now I see other folks doing it. Some of them, I have no doubt, they've come up with it themselves. Others, I can tell they have taken it from my work.

BLAIR HODGES: You should have put a little trademark notification on there. We're talking to Dan McClellan, and we're going to talk more right now about his new book, bestselling book The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong about Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.

 

What the Bible Really Says About Abortion – 44:59

 

BLAIR HODGES: So the book has a lot of different chapters in it about what the Bible says about who God is, or things about Satan, or whether God has a body, or whether the Messiah would be born of a virgin. There's also chapters that pertain more directly to the kind of stuff we cover in this podcast. So I wanted to zoom in on those chapters in particular. And the first one I wanted to talk to you about is abortion. The religious right in America has made abortion central to their political goals. It's led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and they're working hard to further restrict people's reproductive freedoms.

And as you pointed out, because they were coming from the religious right, they needed to build a biblical case for that. And so liberals, especially ones that care about the Bible or maybe just want to use it to debunk Christians, have also dug through the Bible. For example, you saw a viral Instagram post that claimed abortion is only mentioned once in the Bible—in Numbers. Numbers, chapter five. And this is kind of where you start the analysis in this chapter, "What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?"

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, so Numbers, chapter five—I still get that an awful lot. This is the Sotah, the ordeal of bitter waters. This is a ritual prescribed should a husband become suspicious that his wife has been unfaithful, where he takes her to the temple. They have an offering. They go before a priest.

He writes out a curse, and then takes a jug of water, dumps some dirt from the temple floor in the jug. The woman reads the curse, scrapes the ink of the curse off into the water, and then the woman drinks the water. And the curse basically says, if I'm guilty… you have these two statements: her thigh will drop, and then her womb will do something.

And a lot of folks interpret this very rare verb that is associated with the second thing that will happen to her womb. It might mean to swell, or it might mean to sprout, which means… maybe it means ejection from the womb. It will… and maybe it means miscarriage. If it does mean that, then that would seem to be an intentional miscarriage, an abortion.

I'm not so convinced that that is the best reading of that passage, because the favorable outcome for the woman is that she will conceive, which suggests that she has not conceived yet.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DAN MCCLELLAN: It doesn't say her birth will be successful or anything like that. It just says she will conceive, which suggests to me that the idea here is that we just have a suspicion of infidelity. And when you look closely at the literary imagery that's being used, it most commonly has to do with curses of infertility in the ancient world or blessings of fertility.

And so, in my opinion, when this was initially written, the idea was: she will be cursed with infertility through the deformation of her reproductive system, or she will be blessed with fertility if she's innocent. The earliest Jewish texts on this have debates about whether or not it would be appropriate to subject a pregnant woman to the ordeal. And ultimately, they decided it would be—certainly if a woman is pregnant and if this ritual were actually efficacious.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's actually not going to do anything.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, it's not going to do anything. But if it were efficacious, then at most it indicates that the God of the Bible doesn't really have any concern for the personhood of a fetus, at least in this case. Perhaps a fetus conceived through infidelity. Although it's also possible that it could be a fetus conceived by the husband, and then the woman is going off and doing inappropriate things with someone else, and then is subjected to the ordeal, and then an appropriately conceived fetus would be disposed with.

So it kind of suggests that God doesn't seem to have a lot of concern for fetal personhood.

BLAIR HODGES: And this is where you zoom out to the broader biblical view to say the Bible doesn't talk about abortion in the ways that we would think of it today, because it doesn't think of personhood in the ways that we would think of it today.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Exactly. This is something that you see in a lot of the arguments against abortion today: “oh, human life begins at conception, boom, end of story."

BLAIR HODGES: "Thou shalt not kill." That's a pretty clear commandment.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Right. The problem is we don't really have murder. And… the ratzach is the Hebrew verb in Exodus 20 that is usually translated “you shall not kill.” It would be better translated “you shall not murder,” because that verb is used to refer to unsanctioned or illegal killing.

BLAIR HODGES: Because the Bible elsewhere prescribes killing.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, yes, quite emphatically, in fact. And you get in trouble when you don't kill people you've been instructed to kill.

BLAIR HODGES: God kills you.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes. And so in Exodus, you have in the Covenant Code a law about what happens if men who are fighting accidentally injure a pregnant woman. And there are two outcomes that are described. One outcome is that the injury causes her to miscarry. And the outcome—or the punishment—is the husband assesses a fine that must be adjudicated by judges so that it's not too exorbitant.

The other outcome is if the injury actually causes permanent injury or death to the mother, in which case it is talionic justice: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life. And so that is usually the punishment for murder: talionic justice. When something is done to a human, you do the same thing to the perpetrator.

And the fact that if the fetus is destroyed there's a fine, whereas if the woman is hurt or destroyed, talionic justice is activated, pretty clearly indicates that they did not think of the fetus as a full moral and legal person. And so what I argue is that the real question is not human life. The real question is personhood. And we actually can see this being debated in the ancient world. In the Hebrew Bible, personhood is not achieved until birth. And this is what the early teachers… breath of life. Right? Breath is the fundamental, essential element of life. And this is how most streams of tradition within Judaism approach this question.

Now, when you get into Greco-Roman period Judaism and into Christianity, you have the influence of Greek philosophy, where they are contemplating when the soul enters the body—the process of the event, actually, of ensoulment. And you have different positions on this. The Pythagoreans and the Epicureans said, oh, it happens at conception.

The Aristotelians said, oh, it happens when the fetus is fully formed, and then you have the quickening, when the mother can begin to feel the fetus moving on its own within her womb. And then the Stoics said, no, it happens at birth, when the baby comes in contact with the outside air. And within early Christianity, you have different positions on this. And until you get to Augustine around the end of the 4th, beginning of the 5th century CE, who says it's the Aristotelian view, it is the quickening. Abortion becomes murder only at the quickening. Prior to that, we don't like it; it's still wrong, not murder, because there's no soul, therefore there is no person.

BLAIR HODGES: And also, by the way, there were a ton of miscarriages happening in, like, their rudimentary understanding of what pregnancy and childbearing even was.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, yeah, they're rudimentary. So it was like the quickening made sense as a cutoff point, perhaps in part because so many pregnancies are lost before then anyway.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. And so it is, it is prophylactic—it is defensive in some ways, because if you don't think of the fetus in the early portions of the pregnancy as a person, it becomes less traumatic to lose it. This is even why in the Roman world and in other societies, personhood isn't actually achieved until a few months after birth.

And this is why you have things like exposure. In the Greco-Roman world, they would—

BLAIR HODGES: Leave infants out to die, basically.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Because they did not think of them as people, and because, you know, even if the child is born, the chances of surviving the first year of life are considerably low, much lower in that time period than today. So there are a bunch of reasons that the conceptualization of personhood is contextual, is socially and historically contingent.

But Christianity ultimately arrives at this conclusion that, okay, the quickening is when we're going to mark the beginning of the person. And that doesn't really change. You have different positions in different voices, but it remains the consensus view until the 1800s, when you begin to have the rise of better science related to human gestation and things like that.

And you also have people pushing back against women's suffrage and the equality movement. And here is where you have the idea of Mary, the Immaculate Conception.

BLAIR HODGES: Mary being sinless from birth.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Meaning she had to be a person; she had to have a soul at conception. And so there's this rationale that results in this conclusion. And so it's the mid-19th century that suddenly Christianity decides, nope, we're going to push it back to conception. And then this kind of starts point…

BLAIR HODGES: To John the Baptist just leaping in the womb when… yeah, which is Jesus in the womb.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Which is post-quickening.

BLAIR HODGES: Post-quickening. Ok, sorry, the data—[laughter]

DAN MCCLELLAN: But also an exception, not the rule. This is because the text pretty explicitly says the Spirit was responsible for this. And not everybody has… that is not, you know, the Spirit is not the puppet master of all fetuses. So in short, it's complex. When you look in the Bible you don't really get a single position. You get a few, you get a couple different positions, particularly if you look in the Septuagint or you look in early Christianity's debates about this.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, but you're not getting one view.

DAN MCCLELLAN: No, no, you're not getting that univocal perspective. And at best we can say, well, early Christianity said it becomes murder at the quickening. And so the most restrictive position you can really find is basically the Roe v. Wade position. That we see a transition towards legal and moral personhood. At some point the rights of that fetus have to overtake the rights of the mother.

And in Roe v. Wade they put it at, I think, 20 weeks or something like that. That's about as good a compromise as you can have, I think, on this position. And it happens to be what the majority of Christians agreed with for almost 2,000 years.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, the problem is it still skirts the issue of terminations that need to happen because, yeah, straight-up health issues or access to health care—you know, there's a ton. But I agree with what you're saying: the biblical—quote unquote—one of the main biblical views would be more liberal, more progressive than what Christians are adhering to today.

So I would read that chapter and say, haha, I can have this conversation with a Bible-believing Christian. "See, the Bible is not saying...it doesn't justify these terrible things."

 

What the Bible Really Says About Child Abuse – 56:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, this other chapter you write on beating your kids does something a little bit differently. Does the Bible say it's okay to help our kids by beating them?

DAN MCCLELLAN: You know, it enthusiastically endorses beating your kids, which is one of those things where—and I put this chapter in here because I see a lot of well-meaning attempts to argue for a different interpretation.

BLAIR HODGES: A lot of folks talk about the shepherd's crook—that’s one interpretation that was interesting.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. What you'll see frequently on social media, and sometimes in the pews, is people will say, it says, he who withholds the rod hates his child. And the idea there is, oh, so you should beat your kids. Right? And then a lot of people say, well, no, the word for rod there, shevet, is actually a reference to a shepherd's crook or staff, which was not used to hit sheep but to gently guide sheep.

BLAIR HODGES: What a beautiful image.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. And it's very well-meaning. It is a wonderful message. And it has absolutely nothing to do with what the author of Proverbs was trying to say, because you have eight occurrences of the word shevet in the entire book of Proverbs. And the word can just generically refer to any kind of stick contextually.

It can refer to a staff that indicates authority, like a scepter or something like that. It can refer to a shepherd's staff. It can refer to a rod of discipline—in the hands of parents, in the hands of God, or in the hands of a slave master. When you look at the occurrence of shevet across the book of Proverbs, every single time it is referring to a rod of discipline.

And, you know, it calls the shevet… it says the bridle for a horse's mouth or a donkey—I forget exactly what it says—and a shevet for the backs of fools.

BLAIR HODGES: Pretty specific.

DAN MCCLELLAN: It is very specific. And then we have a very enthusiastic: if you beat your child with a shevet, you will not kill them. You will save them from sheol. And, you know, it uses “hell.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, well, this is sheol or something, right?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Death, basically. 

BLAIR HODGES: Because they didn't really have an afterlife-type view.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Right, right. That's another chapter in the book. So I probably shouldn't have said “hell”—that's how it's translated in some places. But the idea is you will save them from death in the sense that they will not go off and do something stupid and be killed or die or shorten their life because of it.

And it's very explicitly about beating children. The verbal root there means to strike, to hit, to smite.

BLAIR HODGES: I like when you say you agree with the rhetorical goal of the person who offered that. And I've seen this in your videos quite often. It's like, hey, actually, I like what you're doing here. This is creative. And maybe even that can be a way to rescue a biblical text. I think if you're explicit about what you're doing and saying, like, “we can re-envision… why don't we re-envision this?” But you're going to run into people who are like, no, the Bible actually says beat your kids and that it's actually a good thing. And the problem with that obviously is cognitive science completely disagrees and says abusing a child in that way—not only is it harmful to them personally and it's traumatic and terrible—but it also doesn't work. It doesn't necessarily improve someone's behavior. It might, and it might not. It really depends on the kids.

So this is where you're saying the Bible does say this, but the Bible's wrong for it.

DAN MCCLELLAN: But yeah, straight-up wrong. Don't take your advice about how to discipline your kids from the Bible. And yeah, I found John Piper posted the passage from Proverbs on Twitter and said, “spanking is not abuse, it is love.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And that's a Calvinist—big Calvinist guy. Right?

DAN MCCLELLAN: And that's just flatly wrong. It's abuse. It results in far more trauma than it has ever resulted in better behavior. So yeah, don't beat your kids.

 

What the Bible Really Says About Sexual Assault – 01:00:28

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about another chapter here about rape victims. And one way that people try to invalidate the Bible, or point out the real moral and ethical issues with the Bible, is to point out where it really flies in the face of contemporary values. I think a lot of people today agree that you shouldn't beat your kids, but there's still a lot of people that do spank like that. That's not terribly uncommon.

Now with this one, it seems a lot more clear-cut. The idea is that people say the Bible claims that if a woman is raped, then her rapist is required to marry her. And that's horrible. It obviously disregards the rights and dignity of the woman. And I don't think you're going to find a lot of people that are going to defend that.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, so this is looking at some legislation that we have in Deuteronomy 22. And there are some laws about marriage. You get the classic: if a guy, you know, goes in and consummates his marriage and for whatever reason is convinced she's not a virgin, then, you know, he accuses her.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you can always tell, Dan.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, well, and that's what the law is. The woman's parents then have to present evidence of her virginity, which has been interpreted to mean the bloody sheets, because if she bleeds, then obviously she was a virgin. These were not physicians. They didn't have a really good working understanding of the female body—or the male body for that matter.

And one of the laws talks about if there's adultery with a married woman, then that's the death penalty—straight to death. And then you have two different discussions: if a man should find a woman who is betrothed but not yet married, and then lies with her in the city, then that means she should have called out. But she didn't. And so "obviously" she let it happen.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And so "she was asking for it."

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. And then if it happens in the open field, then she did call out, but nobody was around to save her. And so only the man gets the death penalty.

And then we get this passage that says if a man finds a woman who is neither married nor betrothed, seizes her and lies with her, then he must pay her father an elevated bride price, marry her, and he cannot divorce her. And so this is the passage that sounds like the victim of rape is required to marry her rapist.

And it's a little more complex than a simple black-and-white answer, as with some of the other things, because the authors of this law think they're doing something good. Because what they're doing is suggesting that this woman, who is… she's now “tainted goods.” Because back then, marriage was the purchasing of a woman's sexual availability and procreative capacities from another man, usually her father.

And she had to have that new-car smell. Nobody else. You did not want her to have had any other men in your workspace.

BLAIR HODGES: So if she saw it as a workspace too, by the way—it really was sort of dehumanizing this way.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, it was. She was his property in that sense, which is why these are property crimes. Because while she is the victim, the first piece of restitution goes to her father, because now she is no longer eligible for proper Israelite marriage, which means he is out one bride price. He has lost that expected income from basically selling his daughter to a husband.

And so he is made whole first. And then the law thinks it's doing something good by saying, but wait, there's more: he has to marry her, and he can never divorce her. And the idea here is that her social identity is still kept integral because she gets to be somebody's wife—

BLAIR HODGES: Someone else wouldn't marry her. Because it's like… it's horrible, I hate saying this, but it's like a “you break it, you bought it” policy.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. So she would otherwise be left adrift in society without a household and a male head of household to whose social identity she can be subordinate and glom onto. And so the authors imagine that they're actually helping her out by giving her a way to still be able to participate in good Israelite society.

And I raise the point in this chapter that, hey, most scholars don't think these laws were ever enforced. Certainly there's overlap with the jurisprudence on the ground in ancient Israel. But Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, whatever—we find in Numbers, these are mainly elite propaganda or scribal exercises. And so a good analogy would be the Ten Commandments outside of courtrooms in the U.S. today. No courtroom in the country actually adjudicates based on the laws on display out front.

BLAIR HODGES: I heard that in the ruling.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And similarly, when we look in Mesopotamian court cases, we never once find them citing a law code that we also have from ancient Mesopotamia. In fact, many of their rulings disagree with the law codes, indicating those are very similar. This is a monumental inscription that is basically your show cards. This is… this is what we want to just put on display for everybody. It's not what's actually governing the jurisprudence on the ground.

So it probably never happened that way. But whoever wrote Deuteronomy 22 probably imagined that they were doing the girls a favor—and they definitely weren't. And also, we have a parallel in Exodus 22, where it does not use the word for seize.

And some people think that in Deuteronomy 22 it doesn't say “seize” in the sense of against her will, it says “caress” or something like that—which is pure and utter nonsense. The verb there, whenever it has a human as the direct object, is always about seizing against the will of the human. So this is rape.

But in Exodus 22, we have a very similar passage, where it says if a man seduces a virgin, then he's required to pay an elevated bride price to the father—but the father can take the money and still keep his daughter. So if this ever came up in a courtroom, I think the father would be like, “I'll take the money and I won't turn over my daughter to this person.”

So while that text does kind of indicate that that's what they expected, that text was probably never enforced.

BLAIR HODGES: Also, wasn't he supposed to die if he did that? I guess this was only when they thought the woman was somewhat culpable too.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Or no, no, he wasn't supposed to die because she's unbetrothed, meaning she has not become the exclusive property of a man yet. So the crime is not as severe.

BLAIR HODGES: Got it.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Death if she's married. You have to marry her if she's not.

BLAIR HODGES: So dads have a little bit less prestige in this situation.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. Because it's something that's still off in the future. The possession, the selling has not yet occurred. And here's a point that I also try to make: rape is a more serious crime if the woman is married—it gets the death penalty. Rape just means you get another wife if she's not married, meaning it's not really that serious a crime. So, yeah, it's an issue.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. I don't think we should base any of our contemporary laws on that.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And you know, we don't, because we know better today. For the most part, we have some pretty stupid laws.

BLAIR HODGES: And this is one where, like you haven't seen anybody trying to defend this one, right? This is one maybe, I would imagine, people just kind of try to stay away from.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, I would hope. But, you know, there are some Christian nationalists these days who are trying to argue that women shouldn't get to vote and women should, you know, they should have no identity apart from their… their husbands.

BLAIR HODGES: The property view. At least they would kind of, you know?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, yeah. I think they would love to revisit that for sure.

 

What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality – 01:08:49

 

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking to Dan McClellan about The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong about Scripture's Most Controversial Issues. And we'll wrap it up with a discussion about homosexuality in the Bible. What are the main passages that people use in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament that condemn homosexuality? What are they pointing to, to say God says this is wrong?

DAN MCCLELLAN: The main ones are probably Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20, verse 13. Here, these are two passages that list a bunch of sexual crimes. And they say, a male shall not lie with a man as with a woman. This is an abomination. That's Leviticus 18:22. And then Leviticus 20, verse 13 says, they'll both be put to death. So it adds a punishment.

And these are rather late in the history of the development of the books of Moses. This is what is known as the literary layer H, or the Holiness Code. This is a post-exilic composition. We don't really have anything prior to that in the legislation that even addresses that kind of issue.

And it really seems to be prohibiting a man taking the insertive role—and only the man taking the insertive role in an act of male same-sex intercourse.

BLAIR HODGES: So being penetrated?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Doing the penetrating.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. 

DAN MCCLELLAN: Taking the insertive role.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, the insertive role.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, the insertive role.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm trying to break this down to my little brain.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And people will point to Leviticus 20, verse 13, which is probably actually a later version of the law where somebody has slapped a punishment onto it. They'll say, well, that says both of them are put to death, so obviously they're both culpable. And that's not a good take, because in Leviticus 20:13 we have several different sexual indiscretions that are punished with a variety of things, mostly death, but other things, including a prohibition on a man or a woman having intercourse with an animal, where the animal is also put to death.

And the reason for this is that in both of these passages, the problem with these sexual crimes is that the land cannot tolerate this. The idea is that there's some kind of metaphysical contamination generated by these acts because they are transgressive of the social boundaries and the hierarchies that have been established.

BLAIR HODGES: And there's some sort of, like, fertile parallel? Maybe they're thinking, like, if the land can't be fruitful, if there's unfruitful things happening on it or something?

DAN MCCLELLAN: That's an interpretation that has been suggested. I don't know that it's particularly, I don't think it's particularly robust, because you never have a prohibition on male masturbation.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, it's not robust! I'm not robust, you guys. Dammit. [laughter]

DAN MCCLELLAN: Even though that would kind of be the same thing as male same-sex intercourse.

BLAIR HODGES: But the reason I thought of it is because there's that passage where they're like putting different colors in front of the animals and then they would give birth to that color of an animal, right? So I was thinking it was kind of that sort of transactional view maybe.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, there isn't an idea that it's wasteful of the semen. But I don't think that makes sense of the text as a whole.

BLAIR HODGES: But this is straight up metaphysical belief of, like, this does something bad for the land?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. This contamination gets out on the land, it pollutes it. And the land can only tolerate so much of that pollutant before it must vomit them out. And so both chapters are saying, if you do these things, the land will vomit you out like it did the, the inhabitants that preceded you.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So they came in and took Israel and they would become the people that they displaced.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And so it's not about the agency or the consent of the receptive partner in any of these. It is about the notion that the contamination has to be purged, which requires the deaths of both parties involved, even if one of those parties is an animal.

BLAIR HODGES: See, but this doesn't speak to something like pegging or like masturbation or something. Right? I'm like, am I wrong?

DAN MCCLELLAN: No, it says nothing about that. And certainly those were things that were going on.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. People have always had fun with each other from time immemorial. So…

DAN MCCLELLAN: And I think, I think a lot of this is developing because with the Exile, you have this increased concern for maintaining ethnic boundaries and insularity and protecting the ethnic identity. And this is why you have, you know, the folks who married foreign women in Ezra, Nehemiah—they've got to divorce them, they've got to send their kids away. We've got to protect the ethnic purity of this people because they're under attack, they are under threat of destruction.

And so this is a defensive way of doing this. And sex and marriage become one of the ways that they maintain the kind of purity that allows them to survive. And so I think this is something that is a post-exilic rationale.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

DAN MCCLELLAN: You don't find this in the pre-exilic period, but it's still saying don't do it. So how, how do you take the teeth out of that for someone who's like, hey, yeah, we might not believe the whole metaphysical, like, hurting the land thing, or we might like, but it's there, so we got to obey it.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Well, we got to obey what it says in Leviticus is not something that you hear from a lot of thoughtful Christians. Now, when you—you can look in some of the best commentaries on Leviticus, the Anchor Yale Bible commentary series, for instance, and they'll point out, hey, this is about the land of Israel and the house of Israel.

Even if you do think the law of Moses remains in effect, you are exempt if you are not either living in the land of Israel or a member of the house of Israel. And so, like, even if this is supposed to be in effect, it doesn't apply to most of the people who are appealing to this piece of legislation.

BLAIR HODGES: I wondered why you didn't make the point that, like, the law code says all sorts of other stuff too. Like, it says, like, not to mix, don't put, like, milk with meat, or don't wear these certain fabrics together or else it's an abomination. And you didn't make that point of like, hey, why are we just zooming in on this abomination when there's all sorts of abominations according to the Bible that we all do?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, t

DAN MCCLELLAN: Not if you're paying close attention to the story. It is deeply problematic in a lot of ways. Particularly the way Lot is like, take my virgin daughters instead, which is a way to literarily show that Lot was meeting the expectations regarding how you treat guests, particularly foreigners. You're supposed to extend your house to them and treat them as if they are part of your family. And so this is a hyperbolic demonstration of Lot's commitment to the expectations of hospitality.

BLAIR HODGES: Especially for strangers.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, especially for strangers. But it is meaning foreigners. You could say aliens, immigrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. There are lots of different ways you could refer to the folks you are supposed to treat even better than your own family.

BLAIR HODGES: We forgot about that part. Go on.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Maybe from now on, when people say, well, you will treat your family better than the immigrant, maybe they need Genesis 19 thrown at them.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Actually, if you are righteous. But that hospitality is supposed to be contrasted against the inhospitality of the men of Sodom. Their main crime is using the threat of sexually assaulting other men in an effort to demean, to emasculate, to assert dominance over them, which is something that still goes on in many different parts of the world.

BLAIR HODGES: Right, in war—

DAN MCCLELLAN: In warfare, in prisons, in some kind of village justice. Criminals will engage in male rape to put them in their place. It's not about sexual attraction. It's about violence and power. That is their crime. It is the most rank manifestation of inhospitality the author can think of.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: There's a parallel story in Judges 19 where the exact same thing happens with a Levite and his concubine. People will say, well, Lot said, take my daughters, please. And they said, no. So they're obviously gay.

BLAIR HODGES: Gay, dude.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Right. They're not attracted.

BLAIR HODGES: That wasn't the point. The point wasn't to have sex with anybody. The point was to assault the strangers as a show of force. What's interesting you point out is the Bible itself gives us this interpretation. Is it in Ezekiel where it points out that—

DAN MCCLELLAN: It's in Ezekiel 16:49, where Ezekiel says the sin of Sodom was this.

BLAIR HODGES: And it wasn't being gay.

DAN MCCLELLAN: She was prideful, had an overabundance of bread, prosperous ease, yet she did not strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy. She was haughty and did abominations.

BLAIR HODGES: She wasn't a hottie. She was haughty.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Right, right. She was haughty, not shoddy, not hotty. That was awful.

The people will respond, "ah, he said abominations," and they're gonna smuggle in homosexuality.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Even though sexually assaulting men was an even greater abomination in their eyes. You could interpret Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 as prohibiting precisely sexually assaulting other men. This may be why the prohibition is on the one taking the insertive role.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Even though the victim is put to death as well. But we've already seen the laws of the Hebrew Bible are not overly concerned with the well-being of victims of sexual assault. So it's an awful argument that Genesis 19 is a lesson on the evils of a homosexual orientation. They didn't even have a concept of sexual orientation that in any way approximates how we understand the concept today.

 

Homosexuality in the New Testament – 01:20:25

 

BLAIR HODGES: But as you point out, Christians don't need that book. They've got the New Testament. So where are they going in the New Testament? How do you handle verses that seem to condemn what we today call homosexuality?

DAN MCCLELLAN: The main one is Romans 1:26-27, but also 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:9. Romans 1 is making the case that the Gentiles, the Greeks, are depraved and because they violate God's law, they are worthy of death. But rhetorically, that's setting up Paul's listeners to say, "aha, we're better."

Then he turns the tables: no, you're also violators, worthy of the same. To paint the Greeks as worthy of death, he's doing a vice list of what they are doing wrong. He describes how they worship the created rather than the Creator. He presupposes a kind of natural theology where you can understand God and how God expects worship by observing the natural world. The Greeks are keen observers, so they should know better.

BLAIR HODGES: And Paul says there's a divine person who constructed all this. I thought he was saying literally like idols that they created with their hands.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Well, he is that. That's what he's saying. They worshiped, but they're doing that because they have failed to acknowledge the true God and how God wants to be worshiped. Which is why he says they are without excuse. They should know better.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Because they should have arrived at the correct conclusion by observing nature.

BLAIR HODGES: Witnesses of nature would say, like, of course there’s a God. Look at like the stars and sun and la la, la. Yeah, yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Consider the lilies of the—of the G-D field, to quote the great poet. But. And then he goes on to say that as a result of this, God has turned them over to these unclean desires. And the idea here seems to be that human sexuality has kind of a natural governor or ceiling to it. But because they're not properly worshiping God, God is like, fine, I'm taking off the governor. I'm removing the limits on human sexuality. And it's just gonna go everywhere.

BLAIR HODGES: Dogs and cats living together.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. Mass hysteria. And this then results in women having sex with other women, men having sex with other men. Which means that for Paul, same sex intercourse is the outcome of God's punishment. That only happens if a people is not adequately worshiping God, which would mean it should not happen among the faithful. We know that's not true. We know that a homosexual orientation is a random thing that has a degree of randomness to it, which means it is not isolated only to the people who are not appropriately worshiping God. And so while I think Paul was not a fan of same sex intercourse and explicitly condemns both male and female same sex intercourse—by the way, female same sex intercourse is totally ignored in the Hebrew Bible.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Nowhere is it brought up. And if we go to 1 Corinthians 6:9, we have a word, malakoi, which means soft ones, which probably refers to people who seek out the receptive role in an active male same sex intercourse. And then arsenokoitai, which would be the men who seek out the insertive role in an act of male same sex intercourse. And the thing I would say about this, I think we can acknowledge that Paul was not a fan of homosexuality or at least same sex intercourse.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Without saying that ought to have anything at all to do with how we live our lives today. Because Paul also is not a fan of sex in general and says we should all be celibate like he was. He says, yeah, like he was. And then it goes on to say, in order to prevent sexual immorality, if you can't hack celibacy, it's better to marry than to burn. And the idea there is burn with sexual desire.

BLAIR HODGES: Being super horny.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah. And so Paul makes accommodations for sexual desire—

BLAIR HODGES: You have to say super horny.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, for the super horny, Paul makes accommodations. [laughter]

The idea is just, yeah, have occasional prophylactic passionless sex. 

BLAIR HODGES: Paul also thought the world was ending too, right? Wasn't this a big part of his thing, like, Jesus is coming back ASAP.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yes, he does not say a word about procreation. For Paul, sex is not about procreation because we ain't got time for that because Jesus is coming back. And so it's just for that passionless sex. He even says in First Thessalonians, you know, when you possess your vessel in honor and virtue—and this is a reference to having sex, where the vessel is probably the wife, virtue and honor, not with the passion of desire like the dirty, dirty Gentiles who don't know God. And so even when you are having sex, it should not be because of passionate desire.

And you know, you have other Greco-Roman period Jewish literature that has a bunch of different takes on how disciplined you should be about sex. For some it is only for the express purpose of procreation, and even when you're doing it for that reason, you're not allowed to like it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

DAN MCCLELLAN: And then others will say, well, you can enjoy it, but still only for the express purpose of procreation. Some people say once you hit menopause, it's game over. Others are a little more reproductive. And others are a little more tolerant of that. So you have a bunch of different perspectives. But Paul seems to be taking a pretty strict stance on this.

BLAIR HODGES: And it's clear Christians today aren't following Paul's overall sexual ethic. They're cherry picking these particular things about homosexuality and rejecting the rest of his sexual ethic because they don't like it anymore.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Precisely. And so that's a problem.

 

Do People Really Change Their Minds? – 01:26:45

 

BLAIR HODGES: And it takes me right to what I see as a big crux of the book and your project. And it's this: Have you experienced actually changing people's minds? Have you seen instances where sitting down and reasoning through this stuff has altered someone's views?

DAN MCCLELLAN: It is phenomenally rare and usually it's for folks who are not quite as dogmatically committed. I have received, I think within the last few months, maybe two messages where people have either messaged me or commented on something, apologizing for having criticized me, you know, a year, two years, three years ago, and saying I'm now under, you know, in the process of deconstructing or something like that. That’s quite rare.

But I think while I would love for that to happen with my work, I don't think that's the main rhetorical goal of my work. I think that's a side effect. I think the main rhetorical goal of my work is to speak to those people who are already seeking, who are already wondering what's going on with these things.

And maybe they're looking for permission to take this seriously, to ask these questions. Maybe they're looking for resources so that they can explore these questions. Maybe they're looking for guidance or they want to know why. And I get responses from people every day who say that I have helped them heal from past trauma or heal relationships with family members or with friends. Either folks who they have rejected because they are taking the Bible too seriously or other folks that they reject for themselves taking the Bible too seriously. I never could have anticipated the kinds of responses that I have gotten from folks who have found a lot of different applications for my work.

And those are the folks that I'm doing this for primarily. There is a degree to which I am trying to convince some other people, which is why I'm trying to come up with increasingly accessible arguments. But at the end of the day, if I have to pick between somebody who's not going to be convinced and someone who is already looking, I'm hoping that my work reaches the person who's already looking so that they can find the resources, so that they can find the guidance, so that they can find the permission, the authorization to ask these questions and to explore these approaches to the Bible.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Dan McClellan talking about the book, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:29:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: Dan, I always like to close with “Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises.” This is a moment for you to reflect on your project, this project in particular. Anytime a book goes out, there's probably something you wish you could change. So are there any regrets at this point? I know it's recent, so maybe you haven't had a lot of time to stew on that. And maybe you're not a person who does stew on that.

Or, what was the hardest part about writing it? Or was there something new you learned? I think in this one, it seemed like a lot of these you'd already covered on social media, maybe all of them. So I don't know if there are a lot of surprises, but you can choose what to speak to.

DAN MCCLELLAN: I think the book is kind of a Greatest Hits thing. So while I refined some things along the way, I think my biggest regret was that I did not have the word count to be able to include a chapter on whether or not the Bible says women cannot have authority in the church. That will definitely be chapter number one of a volume two.

I came up with a list of a number of things that I wanted to include in a volume two, but number one on the list is that chapter about whether or not women are allowed to have authority.

BLAIR HODGES: So that's a regret, one you can rectify. You have done some videos on that too, right? You've done some social media stuff on the topic?

DAN MCCLELLAN: Couple of times. Couple of times, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Any hardest part about the project? Was it that basically trying to decide what to fit in with the word count limitations?

DAN MCCLELLAN: The other hardest part was trying to learn to write in a different language because I have for years been writing in a scholarly language and it is a different language from how I speak into a camera. And my agent and my publisher were both trying to coach me because they were like, you still are writing as if you're trying to convince your colleagues and that's not what a trade book is.

And so it took a long time and I'm not perfect yet. I still have a long way to go to be able to write in a way that is closer to the way people are used to hearing me speak. So I would say that's the biggest challenge that I face.

BLAIR HODGES: I thought you did a good job.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Well thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: I enjoyed the pop culture references. You'll often have some references to—again, we kind of grew up at the same time. There's some Pearl Jam stuff and some other quotes from 90s bands sprinkled throughout.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Yeah, yeah, gotta do that.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, Dan, thanks for talking to me about the book. The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues, I highly recommend it.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Oh, thank you.

BLAIR HODGES: I enjoy following you on social media. Keep up the good work.

DAN MCCLELLAN: Thanks, Blair. I appreciate it.

 

Outro – 01:32:10

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another episode of Relationscapes. And if you enjoyed this one, I'll recommend a fellow traveler episode. Check out Sara Glass's interview. The episode is called “When High Demand Religions Control Sexuality.”

And I also recommend rating and reviewing Relationscapes in Apple Podcasts. It's really easy to do. It's free, it doesn't cost you a thing, and it helps me let guests and new listeners know what the show is all about. So go to Apple Podcast, open up the app, search “Relationscapes,” scroll down, you'll see ratings and reviews. Tap that, you're ready to go. You can also more easily rate the show in Spotify, if that's where you listen.

Mates of State provides our theme song. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, a journalist here in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you next time.