Yeah, so, some third-tier bearded TV personality proclaimed white supremacy, compared gay people to terrorists who practice bestiality, and reduced all women to “a vagina.”
And that got me angry. Not because this sad old man said such things — that wasn’t a surprise, so his bile itself wasn’t that upsetting. What got me angry was that Christians raced to defend this man and to identify with him and with his message. Any criticism of his comments, these Christians said, was tantamount to criticism of all Christians — an attack on Christianity and on Jesus Christ himself.
Because apparently Jesus was a racist, homophobic, men’s rights activist.
Part of why these Christians decided it was their Christian duty to defend racism, homophobia and misogyny was that the old coot preaching this gospel of hate — Phil Robertson of the basic-cable reality show Duck Dynasty — also quoted from the Bible. He quoted a clobber text from 1 Corinthians.
Religion News Service did an article examining Robertson’s exegesis and application of the clobber text in question. It’s a good summary of the same old tired question-begging discussion: Let’s examine the isolated words of this isolated text to see whether or not we should allow isolated words from an isolated text to trump everything else we’ve ever read in the Bible!
Brilliant approach, folks. How many laps of that circular argument do we need to make before we get tired of it?
Here’s all you need to know about Robertson’s misuse of the Bible: He quoted Paul to defend excluding people from the blessed community.
Yes, the Apostle Paul. Not some other Paul. Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus. The star of the second half of the book of Acts. The guy who wrote a bunch of letters that we’ve included in the New Testament.
Have you ever read Acts? Have you ever read those letters?
If you have, then you’re one up on Phil Robertson, because there’s no way you could read Acts and read Paul’s letters and then still somehow decide that Paul has got your back when you’re trying to exclude people.
Quoting Paul to defend exclusion is like quoting Tony Soprano to defend pacifism. Maybe you can find something Tony said that you can pluck out of context to make it sound like it might support that. And then you can ignore everything else Tony ever said or did and just elevate that one isolated phrase, repeating it over and over until you’ve convinced yourself that it means the opposite of everything Tony Soprano represents.
But that’s just stupid. Yeah, that’s my scholarly, seminary-trained assessment of clobbering with clobber-texts. It’s stupid. It’s illiterate hackwork that comes from treating the Bible as raw material to be mined for ammunition to fight whatever battle it was you had already decided you wanted to fight.
Clobber-text clobberers are the biblical equivalent of the Head-crusher from that old Kids in the Hall sketch. They imagine they’re doing something powerful and meaningful, but none of it actually matters — it’s a meaningless act that has no effect on the reality it pretends to be reshaping. It’s a delusion based on distorted perspective. Hold your thumb and finger right next to your eye and then squint and they’ll appear huge and powerful. You can do the same thing with your clobber-text, but that’s just as silly, and just as meaningless.
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