Chapter 18: Selective Literalism

This chapter is going to be careful and specific, because the subject at its center has been used as a weapon inside American Christianity for so long that a careless sentence in either direction will do more harm than good. I am not writing here to argue for or against any particular sexual ethic. I am writing about a pattern of reading that Conservative American Christianity has practiced for decades, in which certain verses are taken with unrelenting literal seriousness while other verses, on the same page, in the same book, from the same author, are treated as figurative, culturally bounded, or safely ignored. That pattern has a name. It is called selective literalism. And once you see it, you cannot un-see it.

The clearest place to watch selective literalism operate is on the subject of sexuality. That is where the pattern is loudest, where the enforcement is most public, and where the cost to real human beings, real families, and real churches has been most visible. So I will use that subject as the case study. But the pattern is not really about sexuality. The pattern is about a movement that has decided, in advance, which parts of the Bible it wants to enforce and which parts of the Bible it wants to explain away, and has then dressed the whole procedure up in the language of biblical faithfulness. Once we can see how the pattern works on this subject, we can see it working on every other subject in the book you are holding.

What Selective Literalism Looks Like

Selective literalism is the practice of applying a strict, plain-sense, no-exceptions reading to some passages of Scripture while applying a loose, culturally contextualized, exception-friendly reading to other passages. Everyone who reads the Bible does some form of interpretation. That is not selective literalism. Selective literalism is what happens when the interpretive choices are not driven by any coherent principle of hermeneutics, but by the desire to reach a predetermined destination.

Watch how it operates in an ordinary American conservative church.

Leviticus 18:22 says, you shall not lie with a male as with a woman. That verse is quoted regularly, treated as timeless, and enforced as a bright moral line. Any argument that it might be culturally bounded, or that its context might complicate its modern application, is treated as evidence that the person making the argument does not really believe the Bible.

Leviticus 19:9-10 says, when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and the sojourner. That verse is treated as an ancient agricultural custom that no longer applies. Nobody in the congregation is expected to reserve a percentage of their income for gleaners. If anyone suggests that this passage might have contemporary force, that suggestion is treated as socialism dressed up in Bible costume.

Both verses are in the same book. Both use the same commanding voice. Both are addressed to the same audience. There is nothing in the text of either verse that flags one as timeless and the other as time-bound. The distinction is being imposed on the text by the reader, who has already decided which verse is going to be enforced and which is going to be softened.

Try another pair.

First Corinthians 6:9-10 lists a set of behaviors that Paul warns will keep people out of the kingdom of God. Sexual sin appears prominently on that list. American conservative preachers have preached on that passage for a hundred years, and they preach it plainly, without softening.

The same list contains greed. Idolatry. Reviling. Drunkenness. Cheating. When was the last time you heard a Conservative American Christian preacher name greed by name from the pulpit, with the same seriousness he gives to sexual sin, and tell his congregation that greedy people, without repentance, will not inherit the kingdom of God? The verse is right there, in the same sentence, from the same apostle. But it does not get preached with the same edge. It does not get enforced. It does not get made into a bright line. It gets absorbed into a general vagueness about the human condition, which is very convenient for a church whose largest donors are, statistically, the wealthiest members.

One more pair.

Divorce is treated in the New Testament with more direct, in-person, on-the-record severity than same-sex sexual behavior. Jesus talks about divorce repeatedly (Matt 5:31-32, Matt 19:3-9, Mark 10:2-12, Luke 16:18). He tightens the Old Testament allowance. He calls remarriage after divorce, in most cases, adultery. Paul discusses it at length (1 Cor 7). Malachi records God saying, I hate divorce (Mal 2:16, older translations). By contrast, Jesus never once mentions homosexuality. The topic that Conservative American Christianity has made the defining moral test of our era is a topic on which the founder of the religion, in every recorded word we have from him, is silent. The topic on which he is loudest, divorce, is a topic on which the modern conservative church has, quietly and without much argument, made its peace with the surrounding culture.

Divorced Christians remarry in evangelical churches. They serve as elders and deacons. They pastor congregations. They run political action committees. Nobody is picketing their weddings. Nobody is writing state laws to restrict their capacity to marry. Nobody is passing them over for church membership. That silence, from a movement that claims biblical literalism as its identity, is deafening. If Conservative American Christianity were actually a literalist tradition, divorce would be the front line of the culture war and same-sex sexuality would be a secondary matter. Instead the priorities are reversed. And they are reversed for a reason. Divorce is a sin the majority of the congregation is either guilty of or wants to preserve the option of committing. Same-sex sexuality is a sin the majority of the congregation is not tempted to commit. Selective literalism follows the path of least personal cost. It condemns the sins of other people and negotiates with the sins of its own people.

Where the Pattern Started

The Bible is a large book, written across many centuries, in many genres, by many authors, with many audiences. No serious Christian, in any tradition, has ever treated every verse as flat, timeless, and directly applicable in the same way. The New Testament itself sets a precedent for selective application when the council in Acts 15 decides that Gentile Christians do not need to be circumcised or keep the whole law of Moses, but only to abstain from a short list of specific things. That decision is not made by a lottery. It is made by prayerful, communal, Spirit-led discernment, and it is defensible.

The question is not whether the Bible requires interpretation. Of course it does. The question is whether a specific tradition's pattern of interpretation is honest, coherent, and applied evenhandedly, or whether it is a mask for a set of cultural preferences the tradition has already chosen and is now attaching to God.

Conservative American Christianity's pattern, especially on sexuality, was not the pattern of the church for most of its history. The idea that the sexual verses in Scripture are the essential test of orthodoxy, and that all the economic, communal, and political verses are secondary or optional, is a specifically modern and specifically American development. It grew up, in the twentieth century, at exactly the moment when the church was losing its cultural monopoly on other issues, and it grew up as a way of maintaining a sense of moral clarity in a culture the church could no longer command.

That is worth naming. Selective literalism on sexuality flourished because it gave a shrinking, anxious religious majority a way to feel that it was still standing for something, even as it quietly accommodated itself to divorce, wealth, nationalism, and violence. It let the movement point to the world and say, at least we still care about this. That is not exegesis. That is coping.

What Would an Honest Reading Look Like

I am not going to solve, in one chapter, the enormous and painful set of questions surrounding sexuality and the church. Christians who read the same Bible, in good faith, come to different conclusions on what a faithful sexual ethic looks like in the twenty-first century. Those disagreements are old, they are serious, and I do not think a book about American religious politics is the place to try to resolve them.

But I do want to describe what an honest reading, of the whole Bible, on this whole subject, would at minimum have to include.

An honest reading would notice that the verses often cited to condemn same-sex behavior appear alongside other verses that the modern conservative church has quietly reinterpreted or ignored, and it would have to explain why the interpretive method being used on one verse is different from the method being used on the verse in the next sentence.

An honest reading would take seriously that Jesus's own recorded teaching says nothing about the topic and a great deal about topics the movement has stopped preaching, and it would have to explain why the movement's priorities are the inverse of its master's.

An honest reading would notice that the sexual ethic of the New Testament, whatever else it says, is embedded in a larger ethic of self-sacrificing love, of costly hospitality, of care for the vulnerable, and that any application that produces cruelty toward specific human beings, isolation of specific families, or the driving of specific children out of their churches into despair, has failed the larger ethic, whatever it thinks it is defending in the specific rule.

An honest reading would notice that the same Paul who wrote the verses used most often on this subject also wrote that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Gal 3:28), and that the historical trajectory of the church, on questions like slavery and the leadership of women, has been to read the specific first-century instructions in light of the deeper theological principle. Whether the same trajectory applies here is a real argument, held by real Christians in real congregations, and it deserves a real hearing, not a shouted dismissal.

An honest reading would refuse to build political coalitions, statutes, and campaign platforms around a small handful of contested verses while ignoring the vast, unambiguous, blood-and-bone verses about wealth, nationalism, and the treatment of the stranger. It would notice that a movement willing to change the laws of the land on the sexuality of others but unwilling to change the habits of its own wallet on the poverty of others is not, whatever it says of itself, a movement animated by fidelity to Scripture. It is a movement animated by something else, using Scripture as a rifle scope.

None of this settles what a Christian sexual ethic ought to be. That question is not settled by this chapter. But every Christian, on every side of that question, has a stake in dismantling the pattern of selective literalism, because the pattern is corrupting the reading of Scripture on every other subject too. If the movement can find a way to be literal about verses that cost other people and figurative about verses that would cost itself, then the movement's Bible is not really the Bible. It is a mirror shaped like a Bible, reflecting back its own preferred face.

The Same Pattern in Other Places

Once you see how selective literalism operates on sexuality, you can watch it operate everywhere.

The movement is literal about the verses that support capital punishment and figurative about the verses that command loving one's enemies. It is literal about the verses that describe hell and figurative about the verses that describe Jubilee. It is literal about the verses that seem to bless national Israel and figurative about the verses that command hospitality to the stranger. It is literal about verses that seem to establish a hierarchy of men over women in the home and figurative about verses that command masters not to threaten their slaves and to remember that they too have a Master in heaven. It is literal about the verses that command respect for governing authorities when the authorities are the movement's own and figurative about those verses when the authorities are the movement's opponents. It is literal about the verses that describe personal salvation and figurative about the verses that describe communal wealth-sharing.

Notice the pattern. In every single case, the literal reading is the one that costs the outsider something. The figurative reading is the one that would have cost the movement itself something. That is not a coincidence. That is not a scholarly disagreement. That is a corruption of interpretation by self-interest, and no serious reader of the Book should let it stand.

Romans 13 and Acts 5:29

The clearest single demonstration of the pattern lives in how the movement handles two verses that sit inside the same New Testament, written by men who knew each other, addressed to the same young churches, on the same subject: the Christian's relationship to the governing authorities.

Romans 13 says that the authorities that exist have been instituted by God, and that whoever resists the authority resists what God has appointed. Acts 5:29 says, on the lips of Peter standing before those same authorities, that we must obey God rather than men. Both verses are in the canon. Both are red-letter serious. Neither is a footnote. Any honest reading of Scripture has to hold them together, because the same Spirit inspired both, and the same church has quoted both across two thousand years of martyrs and reformers and abolitionists and dissidents.

Watch what the movement does with them.

When the governing authority is aligned with the movement's own political program, Romans 13 is read as flatly as any verse in the Bible. The authority is God's servant. Resistance is sin. Protest is rebellion against divine order. Christians are told to submit, to obey, to pray for the leader, to thank God for the leader, to interpret opposition to the leader as opposition to God. The verse is quoted at pulpits, printed on social media, invoked against demonstrators, invoked against journalists, invoked against neighbors who march for causes the movement dislikes. Romans 13, in that season, is not a difficult passage. It is a hammer.

When the governing authority is aligned against the movement's political program, Romans 13 disappears from the sermon rotation, and Acts 5:29 arrives with trumpets. Now the Christian's duty is not submission but resistance. Now the state is Babylon. Now every school board, every health department, every regulatory agency, every judge, every election official is a Nebuchadnezzar demanding that faithful Christians bow to a golden statue, and the faithful Christian must, like Peter, obey God rather than men. Acts 5:29 becomes the whole New Testament on the subject of civic obligation, and Romans 13 might as well not exist.

Nothing about the text changed. The authority changed. And the movement's interpretation flipped with the authority, not with the text.

That is not exegesis. That is not theology. That is not even bad theology. That is a political instinct laundered through Scripture, using whichever verse happens to serve the coalition this month. The same person who preached Romans 13 as a submission text in one administration will preach Acts 5:29 as a resistance text in the next, and never once acknowledge that his reading of the Bible has just performed a full ideological reversal without a single new argument from the text itself.

An honest reader would notice that Peter says obey God rather than men only after being commanded to stop preaching the gospel of a risen Christ, and that Paul writes Romans 13 in a Roman prison under an emperor who will eventually execute him. Both writers submitted to the state in almost everything. Both defied the state on the one point where the state demanded that they betray the Lord. Neither of them treated the state as sacred, and neither of them treated the state as satanic. They treated the state as the state, and they treated the Lord as the Lord, and they did not confuse the two.

The movement confuses the two, in one direction when it holds power and in the other direction when it doesn't. That is not a way of reading the Bible. That is a way of using the Bible to justify whatever the movement was going to do anyway.

What This Chapter Is Not

This chapter is not an argument that the Bible has nothing specific to say about human sexuality. It does. It is not an argument that every sexual practice is equally good in the sight of God. That is not what I have written and it is not what I believe. It is not an argument that traditional Christians who hold a traditional sexual ethic are dishonest or hateful. Many of them are neither. They are simply, on this subject, more consistent with the historic church than the movement I am critiquing is on almost every other subject.

What this chapter is arguing is narrower. It is arguing that Conservative American Christianity has, for at least two generations, applied a wildly inconsistent standard of biblical interpretation across the different moral topics on which the Bible speaks, that it has done so in a way that consistently spares the wealthy, the powerful, the native-born, the divorced, and the armed, while consistently condemning the queer, the poor, the immigrant, and the outsider, and that this pattern is not defensible on any theory of Scripture that a serious Christian would want to hold in the light of day.

And it is arguing that until this pattern is confessed and repented of, no argument the movement makes on any of these subjects, including sexuality, can be taken at face value. The tradition has forfeited its credibility as an interpreter. Not by disagreeing with the culture. By disagreeing with itself, systematically, in one direction, for a long time, on the record.

The way back is not to abandon the Bible. The way back is to read the Bible honestly, and to let the reading go wherever it goes, even when it goes to places the movement has spent a lifetime insisting it must not go.

Where do your ethics actually live?

If they live in the Book, they will live in the whole Book. They will not live in one page and skip the next. They will not raise the volume for the sins other people are tempted by and lower it for the sins in the mirror. They will read what is on the page. And they will let the same standard fall on the reader as on the read.

That is the beginning of an honest faith. Anything else is a movement using a book as a costume.