Pride Month vs. the Bible!

I think most basically all Christians in a modern context would be very happy to say that they disavow the idea of marriage as one man purchasing a woman from another man. We’re all on board with that, hopefully.

Yeah, I think there are some people in Davis County who probably are not quite there yet.

Okay, fair enough.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And, boy, do we have some combating to do tonight.

It’s all combat today, baby.

We’re gonna slip right into those combat footies, and we’re gonna get going warriors today.

Happy Pride Month, Dan.

Happy Pride Month, Dan. Right back at you.

And that is what, that is what this week’s episode is all about.

We’re going thematic this week.

And this is how we know that, that it’s springtime, because pride comes before the fall. No, wait. Anyway, what we’re going to be talking about in the first segment is actually the word pride. We’re going to be taking issue with the sin of pride. And then in the second segment for our chapter and verse, we’re going to be looking at some passages that have maybe been used in some not very nice ways against some, some very nice people.

And yes, perhaps they’ve been used in particularly prideful ways, if one, if one may be so bold.

Very, very. We’ve, we’re getting, we’re, we’re going to get them. Hoist them on their own petard, if you will.

Whatever that means.

Yes, whatever, whatever that ends up meaning. Yes.

Petard, I think, was a bomb, wasn’t it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so to be hoisted by one’s own is to accidentally blow oneself up.

So, yeah.

So we’re, we’re going to blow them up on their own bombs. So first, though, let’s take issue, and we’re gonna start with, the issue we’re gonna take is about pride. But our launching point is a lovely tweet. I’m not gonna call it a tweet. I don’t, I, well, maybe I will. Here’s, here’s what I’ve decided, and I’m just gonna put this out into the world. I want all of you to take this on. Dan, you and I were just talking about X and how when Elon first got Twitter and changed the name to X, I was like, I’m never going to call it that. I’m always going to call it Twitter, because that’ll show him or something. And then I realized that, oh, he’s changed it so much that it really is a very different place. So now I, I refer to the old thing as Twitter and this new abomination that welcomes Nazis and, and, you know, has a hate bot running around, and I call that X. I think that that is a perfectly fine appellation for what

for the dumpster fire that it has become. So, but I, but my theory is that the word tweet can now be used on any social media platform. If you did a short post, I call it a tweet. If you’re on Threads, you did a tweet.

You didn’t do a thread. You did a tweet. So anyway, we, we’re launching with a, a tweet. Sorry about the rant. Got a little off topic. We’re launching with a tweet from a real peach of a guy, Pastor Mark Driscoll.

Yeah. Little Pastor Mark from Mars Hill.

Yeah. He’s a, he’s a grump of a fella.

And, and I’m not a fan, but he did it. He did a tweet. And I, I, I do, I read.

Yeah, go ahead. And you can go ahead and read the tweet if you like.

I’ll read the tweet. But then we need to also describe the image that accompanies this. The tweet says, pride is what got Satan kicked out of heaven. Pride is what caused man to fall. Pride is the demonic counterfeit of repentance. Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. And okay, like, if that were what he posted and it were, I don’t know, let’s say February, I would be mostly okay with that. But there’s this enormous dog whistle in that, and, and he, the accompanying image. Do you want to just describe the image?

So it’s, it’s, it’s mainly colors ranging from dark brown to orange to yellow, and it is a bunch of people writhing in agony, bathed in flames.

Yeah. It is gruesome and horrifying.

And the caption is how God celebrates.

Pride, which, honestly, like, the, the thought that you would be okay with your God, with the person, with the entity that is, is the object of your worship, to, to have as it, as his celebration. The, the burning and torture of human beings is, is astounding to me.

Yeah, yeah. The, the, the post needs to go. His God is a pathetic God.

An evil God to, to tolerate or even to quote, unquote, celebrate. Burning people alive is. Is kind of the thing that they criticize in another prominent religion. That’s. I guess they once, once June rolls around, all bets are off and, and they get to use whatever kind of rhetoric they like. But obviously this is a reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 , which we will talk about in the next segment.

Right. It could also be hell. I mean, that’s the other thing that this could, that the, the people burning in the lake of fire. It could be either. It could be any of those things. It’s, it’s a very unpleasant image.

Yeah. But I guess, you know, sending, sending folks to hell would be the other way to understand what, what he’s talking about.

But the thing, the very clear inference here is that he’s not talking about. He’s. He’s making all these comments about pride and then it’s a reference to June being Gay Pride month or LGBTQ Pride month.

And I don’t know, Dan, do you have any problem with that at all?

I have all the problems with it as, as much. And, and I am, you know, of all the people of. Who loathe dictionaries.

I know.

And retreating to a dictionary for, for any kind of adjudication of meaning. I’m not trying to say that pride has to mean these things, but I’m just pointing out that the people who do look at how people use words have divided up the word pride into multiple different senses.

And there are senses that could be associated with what Mark is talking about in the body of his tweet. And there are other senses that are associated with Pride Month. And I’m actually going to appeal to the Oxford English Dictionary, my alma mater. I don’t know if you can use alma mater for a place where you did a graduate degree.

You went, you went to school in a book.

But the dictionary, yeah, it was crowded, it was warm. But when you look at the entry for Pride 1, it’s a noun. Hopefully we all know that already. But the Main sense number one is the quality of being proud. Now sense 1, 1A, which lets you know there are going to be a lot of senses. But one, one A is a, A high, especially an excessively high opinion of one’s own worth or importance, which gives rise to a feeling or attitude of superiority over others. Inordinate self esteem. So that is one one A. But I want to bring up another one as well, which is sense one Two. So this is down a few arrogant, haughty, or overbearing behavior, demeanor or treatment of others, especially as exhibiting an inordinate high opinion of oneself.

So this is the stuff that you could say is what’s addressed in the Bible, what is condemned in the Bible, particularly that word haughty. Even in the King James Version, we see haughtiness is. Is called out explicitly on a number of different occasions. So that’s, that’s what we might call problematic pride. If we want to stick with alliteration. We’re not into the whole brevity thing, but we are into alliteration, so why not? Yeah.

So alliteration is so alluring and aggravating. I ran out of a words.

So that a. I think that’s a decent look at pride in the sense that. That Mark is using in the body of the tweet.

Now this has nothing at all to do with the sense that is intended when people talk about Pride Month.

And Gay Pride, because you have to go down all the way to sense 1 6B. Oh, excuse me. 1 6A. 1 6B is about events associated with 1 6A is a sense of confidence, self respect and solidarity as felt or publicly expressed by members of a group, typically one that has been socially marginalized on the basis of their shared identity, history and experience. Frequently attributive. Compare Gay pride and then down further. It talks a bit about that. So you have.

Right.

And those are—there’s not really overlap there.

Or even like, you know, when I think of the pride of Gay Pride Month or, you know, the Pride Parade or whatever, I don’t even think it’s pride as a, you know, me compared to you moment. I think it’s pride as in we are proud of ourselves for having made it through this. We’re proud of ourselves for being able to be out and proud in a society that doesn’t want us to be. Like, it doesn’t seem to me to be a declaration of “I’m as good as you.” It’s just we are… we, you know, we’re holding to each other in this moment. And we’re… we’re raising ourselves up because everyone else is trying to push us down now. And that… that’s a very different meaning. And this… this is one of the problems. Right? Like, this is something that happens a lot where people like Driscoll like to take this jujitsu approach to language, where they get to use the word in their way and in the other way and conflate the ways, and it happens so much.

And, you know, I see so many of… I was just telling you about a post that I saw where the Utah Mammoth—that’s the new Utah—

New hockey team. Yeah. NHL.

They… they posted, and the whole post was just a simple one. It was just their logo done in rainbow. They didn’t even… I don’t even… did they even say happy pride? Yeah, they said, just say Happy Pride, hashtag Tusks Up, because that’s their new thing. And 2.7 thousand comments later, the comments section just went haywire in all the ways that I suppose are predictable. But another… another thing that, like, it’s so… that’s so funny to me is how many people, I think belligerently and willfully want to misunderstand what pride is, what it’s about, what it’s for, what’s being celebrated. So many people saying, “Why are we making this about sex?”

And it’s like, “You’re making it about sex,” right?

What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with a group of people, you know what I mean, and their struggles and their triumphs.

Yeah, but—

Yeah, you’re the one making it about sex. I just think… I think that’s what’s funny is just willful refusal to… to any attempt at understanding.

Yeah, I think because understanding means engaging the concerns on the terms of the people making them, thinking about systemic power asymmetries, thinking about how members of the LGBTQIA plus community have been mistreated by society at large for generations. And, you know, if you do that, you give away so much ground in the culture wars that so many people are trying to keep alive. Right? Like somebody… I saw another tweet or an Xing, I don’t know what they call them, but it was, you know, “Back in the 50s, you could be jailed in every state in the nation,” or something like that, for this. And somebody’s like, “We need to bring back that old-timey law.”

Right.

You know, that’s… that’s an awful thing to cheer for. And if you actually have to address the reality head-on, you kind of have to acknowledge that is an awful thing to cheer for.

Right.

And, you know, anytime you are advancing a worldview that literally results in children taking their own lives because of bullying, because of depression, because of being made to feel like they don’t belong in society in their own bodies—

Yeah. Full presence rejection. Yeah.

Yeah. Anytime you’re gleefully advancing a worldview like that, it’s time to sit a few plays out. It’s time to have a Coke and a smile. And if you know the rest of that line, it’s time for that as well. That’s abominable. And yeah, to have to go about it fallaciously because you don’t have a real case just kind of exposes the intellectual corruption of going out and just making it clear why it is necessary.

Right.

The more you push back against it, the more you demonstrate precisely why it is necessary.

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. A friend of mine actually posted on that Mammoth post, a friend of mine commented that he was thankful to the bigots for pointing out why pride is necessary.

As if you can be in public and say, hey, look at me, I belong. And you get people telling you you deserve to die and that God’s gonna punish you in hell just for imagining that you belong.

Right.

You’re, you’re just making it more and more necessary. What’s, what’s hilarious is all the, all the influencers and even people with like, responsibilities associated with the military who are like, “Why doesn’t…” as long as—what I forget—they, they use some kind of slur to refer to members of, of that community. But they were like, as long as those people get an entire month and the military doesn’t get a month for appreciation, you know, we’re going to, we’re going to continue to, to, you know, basically just be bigots and hateful.

Right.

And other people… like, there is Military Appreciation Month.

Right? And there’s, and there’s Veterans Appreciation. Yeah. It’s like there’s two months or something and, and, and then specific days as well. And also—

Which betrays how little they actually care.

Right? They don’t.

About the military, people serving in the military, veterans. It’s like people getting upset about trans women competing in sports when those people are also braying about how women need to stay in the kitchen and women shouldn’t even be able to vote.

Right.

They don’t actually care. It’s, it’s because it’s, it’s a, it’s a battleground in the culture wars.

Have you ever watched a fencing match? No. Then why are you not shutting up right now? But one of the things I did want to get to is that, like I said, without the picture and its caption, Driscoll has made an interesting… like… and again, without the reference to June, Driscoll’s made an interesting tweet about an actual thing, which is the so-called sin of pride.

And I wanted to talk about that because—

The sin of pride.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about what that is, what it means and what it doesn’t mean, because he’s not wrong that pride is widely… you know, it’s one of the seven deadly sins. It’s—it’s the worst of them by most accounts, by most reckonings. I remember C. S. Lewis talking about pride being the worst sin of them all. And I tend to think that probably murder’s worse than haughtiness, but, you know, whatever. But I think his contention was something along the lines of all the other sins stem from a pride, from a point of pride or something like that. So let’s talk about the kind of pride that the Bible does condemn.

What are we talking about here?

So even, even in ancient Hebrew, we’re not free of words that have multiple meanings that are actually very much in conflict with each other or at least at odds with each other.

Well, at least the, the, the connotations can be positive or negative depending on the context. So the word in and of itself doesn’t necessarily constitute a value judgment. The context must indicate if this is a positive or a negative value judgment.

Which is confusing for the “worst sin of all.” You know what I mean? Like, that’s, that seems a little weird.

Yeah. And when it talks about pride in a negative way, it is almost always about people who are wealthy, people who lord their power and their wealth over others, and people who insist they’re better than others. You know, like somebody who goes out and tweets about how God hates other people.

Doesn’t like. And somebody who has a position of power and preeminence within a specific community and who relishes that and exploits it and all of that kind of stuff.

Yeah. It does seem like, you know, having. I have had many encounters on the Internet, not encounters with, but encounters with the work of Pastor Driscoll, and it does seem like it might. Yo, man, you’re playing with danger, dangerous. You’re, you’re, you’re in the danger zone when you start talking about pride. Because that man is about as, as prideful and haughty and self. Not, not self assured. And that’s the other thing is that like, we’re not talking about self assurance or confidence. We’re talking about arrogance and, and, and, and that sense that’s that you’re better than other people.

Well, and, and he was actually, I think he resigned from his leadership of Mars Hill Church in 2014, so 11 years, precisely for being verbally abusive, being arrogant, and fostering a culture of fear.

Right.

And the elders, the elder board of Mars Hill, found him guilty of being quick tempered and domineering. And, and he resigned before the investigation concluded, claiming God had released him from his role. And then a 2016 civil lawsuit filed by former members alleged he misused church funds and engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity. And then also I find this hilarious just because I have been learning an awful lot about the things people do to get on the bestseller list. And he published a book in 2013 called A Call to Resurgence. And he evidently not only plagiarized portions of the book, but also his church paid over $200,000 to a marketing firm to artificially boost another book, Real Marriage, onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Something that he acknowledged doing and acknowledged was wrong. So, so he has a history of, of doing precisely what his te. The text of his tweet sans image would be condemning. And to my knowledge, there’s not been, I don’t know about any public repentance for, for what’s. For those kind of gross displays of, of pride and arrogance and haughtiness.

When I look at other, you know, I, I found a, a sort of a bunch of Bible verses about pride. A little art, you know, a little list of Bible verses about pride. And it’s always the version of pride that is basically the antonym of humility. Yeah, right. It is, it is. It is the. It is the. And he even, even in his tweet, he talks about humble yourself before the Lord. But like, he doesn’t seem to talk about being a humble person. He says, humble yourself before the Lord. But it does seem like in all. In a lot of these, you know, and I’m looking at James 4:6 , but he gives more grace. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Romans 12:16 . Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight.

Like all of those. So clearly say to me a very specific thing. And, and I don’t see people like Driscoll promoting that.

Yeah, yeah, he ain’t. He ain’t that. And, and we talked about Jordan Peterson’s attempt to try to spin. Blessed are the meek.

Right?

That’s true. Blessed are. Are the, the absolute unit monsters who just sheathe their swords and practice discipline with. With these, these hands that are registered deadly weapons. But that’s what it means.

But I won’t. And that means Jesus loves me.

Because I’m better than you.

Because I’m better than you. Right.

Which, which sounds an awful lot like. Like what Driscoll does.

In 2024, at the Stronger Men’s Conference in Springfield, Missouri, he was removed from the stage after publicly criticizing a sword swallowing performance by Alex Magala, a former stripper. He criticized it as demonic and akin to a strip show with a Jezebel spirit. And they yanked him off the stage.

I remember that one.

And then he later posted on. On Twitter about live streaming to discuss the Jezebel spirit to which he was exposed at the Stronger Men’s Conference. It sounds like he’s also currently being accused of structuring a church he started in Scottsdale, Arizona, to avoid oversight, where everything ran through him. And he started doing 24/7 surveillance of members of the church, particularly one family who was shunned after their son kissed Driscoll’s daughter.

Oh, wow. Okay. That. Yeah, I mean, he’s a peach. I mean, we, I think, I think the, we can all agree that he’s just a, just a sweet kid, but.

Definitely a model of humility and definitely the anti. The. Okay, that word didn’t come out right. The antithesis or as I used to say when I was younger, “anti-thesis” of a prideful person.

Yeah, it, it’s so interesting to, to see how, how they want to twist that. And I mean, this is part of the problem of all biblical interpretation. It’s part of the problem of just language use in general is that, you know, we. The using of a specific word that has multiple meanings is always. Is always a bit of a landmine minefield.

But when you’re purposefully obfuscating, when you’re purposefully pulling a switch-o change-o, I don’t think it says anything good about you.

No, it kind of reminds me of, of, of claiming. Just arbitrarily claiming, “Oh, I don’t own all of the houses that I own. God owns them. I’m. I’m just the humble steward.”

Yeah, yeah, we’re doing. We’re running the greatest hits here of guys we dislike. Dave Ramsey. All right.

It’s exploiting the ambiguities of language. Right. And, and just the making claims that, you know, are. Are laughably false just for the, the rhetorical value. And it’s, it’s pretty shameful. It’s unbecoming of someone who claims to be a follower of the Prince of Peace and the one who said, “Blessed are the meek.” This is.

And a. And, And a representative thereof as well.

Yeah, yeah. And it’s really just a representative of toxic masculinity, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and basically just a naked thirst for power and influence and money, which is, which is exactly what pride is.

Yeah, there you go. And I’m just going to flag that. If your church leader delights in the idea of literally anybody writhing in pain, engulfed in flames, maybe see that as a bit of a red flag.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, well, let us, let us then move on. We’re gonna, we’re gonna get. We’re gonna stick with the, the jerks as we move on to our chapter and verse. And for our chapter and verse, it’s actually just verses and verses, various verses, verses, verses, verses, verses. I tried to make the middle one “versus”.

We’re gonna pit verses against versus. Versus. Verses.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, so let’s talk a bit. We did a show a couple years ago about sort of, does the. Does the Bible actually condemn homosexuality? And just a quick recap. You can go back and listen to it or watch it if you want to, but the quick recap is, no, they don’t. They didn’t even know what homosexuality was.

If we’re talking about homosexuality as a reference to sexual orientation, which is what the overwhelming majority of the usage is directly pointing at. And you know, again, as much as I hate dictionaries, you can look in the OED and you can look in pretty much any dictionary, that will be the first entry in there.

Right?

So yeah, it doesn’t even. It doesn’t have anything to say about homosexuality in that sense. It does have plenty to say about men having sex with men. Says nothing about women having sex with women.

Not in the Hebrew Bible, it doesn’t. Because they didn’t care.

They didn’t care because. And one of the things that we learn and over and over again is that like, women don’t count. You know what I mean? Like, they’re, they’re not, they’re not even people in, in this, in, in this arrangement.

And, and if we go back to the. The logic of marriage, it’s a man purchasing the procreative capacities and the sexual availability of another woman from another man, usually her father.

Right.

And she was supposed to have that new car smell. The goods were supposed to be in pristine condition, meaning she had not been sexually penetrated by a penis.

Right.

Which is why in many streams of Jewish tradition, even pretty traditional ones, a woman who has had sex with another woman is actually not the tainted goods that a woman who has already had sex with a man would be considered.

To be still a virgin, basically.

Still a virgin. So, yeah, it’s. As far as they understood the concept of virginity, which was precisely. And we have, we have used these terms on this show before. A vagina that has been penetrated by a penis.

Right.

And, and somebody made a point. I apologize. So I forget which mutual of mine on social media made this wonderful point, but they, they pointed out that men are so prideful and so arrogant to talk about virginity as if their penis changes who a woman is.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Like it’s, it’s not just a relationship that, you know, may or may not have any effect on her well being or her body or anything like that, but the notion that that penis somehow changes her state of being.

Just because it was the first is, Is the height of arrogance and pride and stupidity.

I just think, you know, and I think that one of the interesting things is that I think most basically all Christians in a modern context would very. Would be very happy to say that they, that they disavow the idea of marriage is one man purchasing a woman from another man. Like, I think we’re all on board with that.

So, yeah, I think there are some people in Davis County who probably are not quite there yet.

Okay, fair enough. But for the most part, if you present it as that, most Christians would reject that. So congratulations, you’re already on board with rejecting a biblical sense of marriage. Yes. So why it is such a stretch for them to realize that like maybe they can take, take a few steps further along that path and realize that all of the ways that ancient marriage worked aren’t what we want and aren’t. Aren’t relevant in a modern context.

You know, most, I think also most Christians would not be okay with, you know, polygamy and concubines. I think most Christians would be very much against that.

And yeah, probably not big on eunuchs either.

Or what Paul’s take was you should all be celibate anyway. And if you can’t hack celibacy, then go ahead and get married, have your occasional prophylactic passionless sex. Right. But otherwise you should be living as if you were not married.

Very John, John Harvey Kellogg view of the world.

Yeah. And which, and, and this fits with kind of the Greco-Roman Jewish notion, particularly among the, the intelligentsia, the people who are more informed about Greek philosophy where sexual desire was one of the baser urges of the flesh. Where there, there are some texts where it’s like, not only can you not have sex with your wife during menstruation, but once she’s past menopause, it’s over. And even with, and it, it can only be done with the expressed intent of procreation. And even then according to some authors, you’re not supposed to enjoy it. So there are some who are like, eh, postmenopausal. You know, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna get hung up on that. Right. And you know, you can enjoy it, but only if it is for the, with the express intent of procreation. And you know, that’s the, that’s the world into which Paul shows up and goes, boy, have I got a new approach for you guys.

The world’s about to end, so nobody change their life circumstances unless you can’t hack celibacy because the last thing we want is for you to engage in any sexual immoral activity because your, your urges got too pent up, too urgy. Yeah, they got too urgent. So. But what. When we’re, when we’re talking about the, the passages that, that people retreat to when they need to demonize folks who just have a different sexual orientation. When I first saw Mark’s post, my initial idea was Sodom and Gomorrah. The more I look at it, the more I think it’s probably intended to be hell.

Right.

Which is a related but a separate use of, of that imagery. But, but Sodom and Gomorrah is brought up an awful lot. And I have seen multiple appeals to Sodom and Gomorrah since yesterday, which is in our timeline, June 1st.

Well, we’re pushing it so that this week, so that, so that this show comes out at the early in the summer. So.

Yeah, but. So, and, and we’ve addressed this before on the podcast. It is the official position of the Data Over Dogma podcast that the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 is not a story or a lesson about the evils of homosexuality. It is not even about gay people.

And you have, you have in, in chapter 18, reference to. Or is it chapter 18 or is it. Is it early in chapter 19, you have a reference to cries coming up to God’s ears. I’ve got to look for it. But there are, there are cries that are coming up to God’s ears. And this is before the angels show up. And, and so the idea is. Well, obviously it wasn’t just about the, the men of Sodom threatening the angels with sexual assault. However, it raises another question. If Sodom is so evil and their main sin is a homosexual orientation, being attracted to other men and wanting to have sex with other men, where are the cries coming from?

Right, right.

It’s not the women, because absolutely nothing in this story says a word about the women of Sodom and Gomorrah being spared. And they are not even real. And, and here’s the bizarre part. They’re not even really considered people.

No, because when God says. Go ahead.

Well, I was going to say this. The story of Lot and his, you know, and how he allays the mob is by just chucking his daughters out to them. Like that’s.

Or offering to. Yeah. He.

He. Like, you can’t dehumanize a person more than to be like, no, you can’t. You can’t mob and rape my new guests. My house guests have these two daughters that I don’t really care about.

Yeah, they’re virgins.

Yeah. So that. Yeah, that. It. It. It seems very much like that. Yeah, the opposite. That’s the opposite of honoring their personhood.

Yes. And the same thing happens in the parallel story in Judges 19 , right. Where we have the. The owner of the house says, no, take I got a daughter. And the. And the Levite says, and I got my concubine. And the concubine is the one who ends up getting shoved out into the crowd and then is sexually abused ultimately to her death. Ostensibly, the story doesn’t make clear precisely when or how she died, but she was at death’s doorstep, lying at the other person’s doorstep. And there’s a different. The reason there’s a difference between these two stories is because in Genesis, those two daughters are needed for later in the story because they are going to become the ancestors of the Moabites and I believe the Ammonites, they have to be there. They have to survive in order to sire these two ethnic lines incestuously with Lot.

And so some people will point to the fact that, oh, the men refused the women, which shows they weren’t attracted to women, which is entirely misguided. Yeah. Because it. And. And they. Even the. The men of Sodom even say we are going to treat. Because they’re. They’re offended by this, and they say, we’re going to treat you worse than we’re going to treat the other two, which is suggestive of a lack of consent.

Right.

So this is primarily about sexual assault. And the only reason that the women do not end up getting sexually assaulted is because the author needs them for later in the story. In Judges 19 , she is not spared. They. They do sexually assault her, which shows. It is about power. It is about shaming. It is about asserting dominance.

It’s about violence.

It’s about violence. It’s not about sexual attraction.

Well, and the other thing. And I just. I only realized this today as I was thinking about this for the. The show, but I. One of the funny things to me about, you know, sort of hearkening to Sodom as. As your point of reference for why. Why homosexuality is bad. No homosexuality happens in that story.

It doesn’t occur like the. There’s a threat of it, but, like, it doesn’t actually happen.

And. And just and just threatening something is not really grounds for punishment. Like the, the logic of, of their legislative system, the logic of their jurisprudence would not have considered that a crime.

Right. And yet the, the cities are destroyed. And you’re right, like the cities were set to be destroyed before all of that happened.

So, yes, we have Genesis 18:20 and 21. Then Adonai said, “How great is the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah and how very grave their sin! I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.” And when we look at Ezekiel, we have a description of Sodom’s sin as pride and abundance of bread, prosperous ease. And she did not strengthen the hand of the needy. She was haughty and did abominable things. And, and the folks who want to center homosexuality in their understanding of that story are always like, “Oh, abominable things. That means homosexuality.”

Right.

It could also mean eating shrimp.

Right.

It’s the last thing that’s listed, and it’s not very specific. But threatening men with sexual assault would also fall under the category of abomination. So there’s just, there are just no grounds for understanding the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as being sexually attracted—men being sexually attracted to other men. That’s—

Yeah, I don’t, I don’t.

—reading.

If sort of the celebration of Pride Month culminated in roving gangs of gay men, like, beating down doors to, to, you know, sexually assault people’s house guests, then I would think you could make a better argument for—there’s, there’s, you know, there’s some sort of analogous situation here. But what people seem to be protesting against is like, couple people just trying to live their lives in literally exactly the same way you live your life.

Why. Why are you so mad about that? Literally what they want to do is be boring people just like you in the suburbs, raising kids, you know, whatever, like just going to work and going back home again. What are you mad about?

Yeah, and I love the Sesame Street. The inventor, the creators of Bert and Ernie were like, “Yeah, they’re a gay couple.” And somebody posted a photo, a still from Sesame Street where Bert and Ernie are sitting in a living room in their lazy boys on opposite ends of the room from each other, quietly reading in the evening. And it was like, “This is all they want. Why would you be mad at this?” And then Sesame Street yesterday, I believe, posted an image showing a bunch of furry Muppet arms and grasping each other and the colors make the, the rainbow and—oh my gosh—the people who are like, “Keep all the sexualization out of this.” It’s like they’re what, they’re not bringing up anything related to sexualization.

Show me on the doll where you see sexualization happening. Yeah, I do want to mention that like there’s a lot of other, there are a lot of, of passages that people, that people cite as being sort of against homosexuality. And then they use and, and there are certain translations of the Bible that inflate this further. The New Living Translation, for example, has Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 , say do not practice homosexuality, comma, having sex with another man as with a woman. It is a detestable sin. I don’t think that’s how—I don’t, I feel like that—I’ve seen other versions of that particular thing and I don’t remember it saying “do not practice homosexuality.”

And, and yeah, the, that word’s not in there. That’s not a word in, in biblical Hebrew. And here’s, and here’s another consideration of this. Leviticus 18 and 20—many scholars, many, many Pentateuchal scholars will suggest that Leviticus is actually in, in coming up with all of these, with its legislation, it’s actually following the narrative of Genesis. And so it would be coming up to Genesis 19 when it lists these sexual sins.

And so if Genesis 19 is really about threatening other men with sexual assault, then Leviticus’s take on this would be a take on threatening men with sexual assault. It would be a kind of non-consensual relationship that is being reflected here.

And, and this is—Leviticus 18 and 20 is H, the Holiness Code, which is post-exilic. It’s relatively late. This is a time period when sexual ethics are undergoing a transition as they’re being used to more clearly delineate the Judahite ethnic identity from the nations that are around them and now are much closer to them. And so you, this is where we have concerns for intermarriage with others.

And, and so, yeah, practicing… practicing homosexuality is not in view.

Right.

Just, just, that’s a mistranslation, pure and simple. And even if you just look at the language of the text it talks about, it probably is prohibiting a man from taking the insertive role in an act of male same-sex intercourse. In other words, it’s only prohibiting one of the actors in that act because it probably understands the other actor to not be consenting. Or it probably does not account for the notion that anyone would seek out the, the receptive role. And people will say, well, if you go to Leviticus 20 , both of them are condemned to death. And that is because in all of these inappropriate sexual acts, both parties are condemned to death, whether consent is, is presupposed or not. Even in the case of bestiality, where the prohibition is on having sex with an animal, the animal is also put to death.

Yeah, they were pretty, they were pretty happy with the, the death penalty. They were pretty, yeah, capital punishment was like their favorite. Whoever wrote Leviticus.

Yeah. And, and these were not people who had authority over anyone’s life and death. And these laws were probably never actually enforced. But the fact that the animal is put to death is a clear indication that the idea is that this contamination is only purged through the death of both parties.

Right.

Without respect to consent or agency. And so, yeah, it’s a lot more complex than, than people want to understand. It’s, it’s simply not, it does not have an understanding of a homosexual orientation.

And, and I, I want to push a little bit on something because you know, when you, I only learned just now when you said it, that this idea that Leviticus might be following Genesis in its, in its narrative and that this was a reference to that. And if Leviticus 18 and 20 are a reference to the Sodom thing, you assumed that the author of Leviticus understood the—Genesis understood the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the way that we are understanding it now.

Yes, yes.

But I wonder if they could have had an alternate. If they could have. If whoever wrote this may have understood it differently and may have understood it as the crime was the sex with a man as with a woman. I don’t actually care. I mean, I know that it’s being used to clobber people and I think that the, I think that the more salient point is look at what the thing is. You know, the sexual ethics of two and a half thousand years ago aren’t necessarily going to be applicable to now. And again, I, you know, I retreat to the idea that like you’ve already, if you’ve already rejected a lot of these concepts of sexual ethics that are biblical because the Bible has some horrific sexual ethics, and I think we can all agree on that. And if you’re okay with saying the Bible’s sexual ethics are not always great, then why are you holding so tightly?

Even if, even if what Leviticus is saying is very specifically just having sex, a man having sex with another man is a capital offense. That doesn’t have to apply now.

And I don’t see why everybody thinks that, like they can reject one thing, but it would be absurd to reject another.

And, and even if you do, even if you do understand Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 to be, to be doing that, and even if you do think it should be authoritative, it’s only about the land of Israel and the house of Israel. So even if you take it all seriously and say this is still the law of the land, it is quite explicitly about the land of Israel and the people of Israel. So if you’re not either living in the land of Israel as it was constituted anciently, or a member of the house of Israel, then it doesn’t apply to you, even by its own standards. Terms. I almost said sturms because I couldn’t decide on a word. I just got too quickly to that decision.

I like that.

So, yeah, sturms. And, and so you have no choice but to retreat to the New Testament, at which point you’re again trying to appeal awkwardly, blithely, ignorantly to an outdated sexual ethic that is based on factually incorrect information. According to Paul, in Romans 1 , same sex intercourse is something that happens only among the Gentiles and only because they have failed so miserably to adequately worship God that God is removing the, the governor, the natural limits that God places on sexual desire so that they run amok, resulting in same sex intercourse. And so according to Paul, if you are appropriately worshiping God, then that doesn’t happen. That’s not true. Paul appeals to nature to talk about why this is all wrong. That’s not true. Yeah, Paul’s sexual ethic is just as outdated, outmoded, irrelevant to today.

And so, and even if you do decide it’s authoritative, what about the celibacy thing? Right, we’ve, we’ve scratched that off the list because we don’t like it anymore. What about the slavery thing? We scratch that off the list because we don’t like it anymore. Like, there’s, you have to be so inconsistent with your hermeneutic and your standards to want to leverage the Bible as a rhetorical bludgeon to clobber LGBTQIA plus folks. And, and it’s very clearly because it continues to function as an identity marker and as a way for people to put their credibility and their piety on display. It’s praying on the street corner only in a way that results in other people dying.

It’s pride.

Yes, it’s pride.

And so I think that’s amazing. I, I, I feel like what we’ve come to is that Pride Month is a month for the members of the LGBTQIA community to, to have pride, to, to, to raise themselves up in, in a land, you know, in, in a society that, that tries to push them down. And so their kind of pride, OED style, is a good positive. Is a positive good raising up pride.

And Pride Month for people like Mark Driscoll are the times when they exhibit the most sinful kind of pride and, and, and just really hit it as hard as they possibly can.

So it’s Pride Month on both sides. It’s just, it’s just Mark Driscoll, you’re the one doing the bad kind of pride.

Not, not the rainbow coalition.

Yes. Mark Driscoll, you need to grow the hell up.

Boom. All right, well, friends, thank you so much for listening to the show today. If you would like to become a part of helping to make the show go, and in so doing, get early access to an ad free version of every episode, as well as potentially get the the After Party, which is weekly bonus content that Dan and I do every single week. You can head over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. We really appreciate it when you do that. It’s amazing. Thank you so much to all of our patrons. If you want to contact us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Thanks so much to Roger Gowdy for editing the show, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Pride Month vs. the Bible!

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology