This 93% Stat About Dads is Totally Made-Up

A pie chart with sections labelled "Lies", "Wrong", "Guesses", and "Who knows?" Image source.

I'm late to the party on this, but I want to talk about this great post from Sheila Wray Gregoire: PODCAST: The 93% Myth That Fathers Matter More than Mothers. 

There's a statistic that I've heard in conservative Christian spaces. It goes like this:

When dad comes to Christ first, 93% of families will follow.

When mom comes to Christ first, 17% of families will follow.

When kids come to Christ first, 3.5% of families will follow.

("come to Christ" is Christian jargon meaning "converting to [the correct type of] Christianity")

This statistic is used by conservative Christians to make the point that it's SO IMPORTANT for churches to try to reach men. Some churches even use this statistic to justify prioritizing men's ministry higher than women's ministry, or getting rid of women's ministry altogether.

In the podcast I linked, Gregoire talks with Miranda Zapor Cruz (who wrote a post in 2022 showing that no actual research can be found to support this stat) and Beth Allison Barr. Basically, it's about how this statistic is totally made up- and also, it doesn't really "ring true" with most people's experiences- if you ask people who had the biggest influence on their religious beliefs, they often say their mother had a bigger influence than their father.

I liked this quote from Beth Allison Barr:

Beth: I actually had known about the statistic before.  Back when my husband and I were still at the church before he got fired a long time ago and we were really starting to question what the church was teaching about male and female roles, and my husband came to me.  And he said, “Hey, the pastor gave me this statistic this morning.  He said that there’s been this study that shows this.  Do you know anything about this?”  And as an academic, I looked at it, and I was like, “How would they even know that from this?  I mean it’s such a weird thing.”  And to say that 93% of families will go to church if the father is the first one to attend. And, of course, all the questions in my head were like, “Well, what church are they talking about?  How did they get the numbers on this?  Did they follow people across 10 or 20 years or something to try to figure out when,”—I mean it was just all of those questions.  And so I was just like that sounds made up.  I was like, “Where did you get it from?”  And he didn’t know where it came from.  And I just kind of wrote it off.  

Yes! How would they even know this? How would you design a study that could show this? You can't just ask all your church members "who was the first person in your family to become a Christian?"- that's not the data this stat is getting at. You would have to find a bunch of families (how do you define family, exactly? Do the parents have to be married? Are we only looking at families with minor children?) where all members are non-Christians, and then track them (for how long? Barr says 10 or 20 years, that seems about right). You would then check if any of the individuals in these families converted to Christianity (what does that mean, exactly- who defines what "convert to Christianity" means? Do they have to be active in a church for it to count?). And then you check what happened after that- in the families where the dad was the first person to convert, did the mom and kids convert? What about when the mom was first? What about when a kid was first? Do you only track 2 outcomes- "entire family converts" vs "there still exist some immediate family members who are non-Christians"? Wouldn't it be more useful to track how many individual family members converted, rather than only "counting" it if it's the whole family?

And even if you did that, and the result was that "when the dad converts first, 93% of the time the wife and kids convert too", that still doesn't mean churches should prioritize men. Because we don't know anything about how common it is for a man to convert first, compared to a woman converting first. What if it's 100 times more common for a woman to convert first (or, 100 times easier in terms of the amount of resources a church needs to spend, however that's measured)- then, even though there's a lower chance the rest of the family will convert, overall you will get better results if you allocate the resources toward reaching women. If you spend those resources on reaching men, but you don't end up reaching any men (and the statistic says nothing about how easy or hard that would be), then that doesn't help.

The other thing I want to say about this is... about the evangelical attitude toward statistics. People hear this statistic, and it fits with what they believe about how men are naturally the leaders of their families, so they believe the statistic, even though it's hard to imagine an actual study existing that would show this. 

I mean, people are like this in general, though. Let's not act like this is just an evangelical problem. Plenty of people who are "on our side" (whatever that means) are quick to believe and spread statistics that aren't right. 

Let's be on the lookout for this kind of bias in our own thinking. Wanting to use science and logic to win arguments, rather than to actually find out which things you're wrong about, so you can change your own beliefs. Repeating a statistic just because it is consistent with things you already believe, not because it actually makes sense as a thing that can be measured.

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Related:

Wow This Headline Gets the Statistics COMPLETELY WRONG 

The Great Sex Rescue: The 72-Hour Rule

WTF, CNN? 

Here's an article about evangelical women and sex

Blogaround

Links not related to the orange antichrist:

1. This Pixar-Inspired Robot Lamp Is the First Apple Intelligence Device I Really Want (February 7) Ah yes, I remember seeing this lamp in "Toy Story."

2. The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Perez (February 1) 2-hour-19-minute video from Jessie Gender.

3. He’d Die for You. But Will He Do the Dishes? (February 10) "One of the most bizarre arguments defending men being in authority over women is the idea that one day, he may have to take a bullet for you."

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Links related to the orange antichrist:

1. This Is How Evangelicals Defended Hitler in 1935 (2016 ~ This link was posted in a comment by Matthew James Longstaff.) Many Christians back then supported Hitler- and Christians now need to know this and learn from this history.

When I learned about the Holocaust in middle school, I don't remember learning anything about how Christians in general responded to the Nazis. (I remember hearing about individual Christians who heroically helped Jews hide or escape.) There was one time, one of my classmates asked the teacher what Hitler's religion was, and she said "he was a Christian," and I thought to myself "he wasn't a real Christian," because obviously, look at all the terrible things he did, murdering 6 million people, it's so obvious that's not what a "real" Christian would do. And I didn't think any more of it.

But, no, it wasn't like German Christians supported Nazism because they just didn't care about their Christian identity at all and therefore didn't put any thought into the question "what does Christianity have to say about this?" It's so much worse than that- they really made arguments, based in their Christian beliefs, about why supporting Hitler was the right thing to do. We need to learn from this. We need to know what their arguments were, to make sure we're not making those same arguments now. We need to learn from the way they used Christianity to justify horrific atrocities, so that we don't do the same thing.

2. Trump And 'Don't Say Gay' Come For The National Center For Missing And Exploited Children (February 8) "But like everything else spending-related right now, the executive branch is saying it may not disburse whatever money NCMEC is by law supposed to receive, unless the organization throws gay and transgender children under the bus."

3. “People Will Die”: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True. (January 31)

4. "Comparison is the way we know the world" (2023, via) "We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible."

5. Kanye West is selling $20 T-shirts with swastikas (February 10) WTF!

6. Trump's ban on gender-affirming care for young people puts hospitals in a bind (February 10) "After months waiting for an appointment at the gender-affirming care clinic at VCU Health in Richmond, Willow had one on the calendar on Jan. 29. President Trump's executive order limiting transgender health care for youth came out in the afternoon of Jan. 28."

Here's something I don't quite understand- if you have an insight or a link that explains it, leave a comment. I've heard trans people and allies make the argument that the same medical care that is provided to trans kids for gender-affirming reasons is also sometimes provided to cis kids. To ban this care for trans children but not cis children is discrimination on the basis of gender or gender identity- which is not legal.

This strikes me as not a very good argument, but maybe there's something I'm missing? I feel like, if you're talking to someone who doesn't believe being trans is even a real thing, they could just say, "When puberty blockers, for example, are given to cis kids, that's because there's an actual good reason- this happens when a cis kid starts puberty way way too early. Obviously in that case, it makes sense to use puberty blockers to delay puberty to a more normal timeline. That's a good reason to use puberty blockers. But for trans kids, we're talking about completely normal and healthy kids, going through puberty on a normal schedule, and then you want to use puberty blockers to change that? There's no good reason for this- being trans isn't a real thing. All medical procedures and drugs come with risks- so, you should use them if you have a good reason, but if you don't have a good reason, then you shouldn't, because of the risks."

Like, I feel like the situation is not "under this ban, this medical care can be given to cis kids but not trans kids- this is clearly discrimination." It's not *about* being trans or cis- when a trans kid gets treatment, vs a cis kid getting the same treatment, it's a completely different situation. It would happen for completely different reasons. It's not about denying them care simply for being trans, it's about whether there's a good enough reason for them to get this care, and in the eyes of the Republicans making these laws, one's feelings about one's gender is not a good enough reason.

I mean, maybe the pro-trans argument here is that the government shouldn't be in the business of judging what is or isn't a "good enough reason" for receiving medical care? Maybe that's the key? (Oh hey, I also feel that way about abortion.)

It's just that I've seen this argument mentioned ("this is discrimination based on gender because they're not banning this health care for cis kids") but I don't think I've ever seen it clearly explained. Feel free to leave a comment if you know something I don't~

7. Three migrants win temporary block from potential transfer to Guantanamo (February 10) "'Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,' Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrants' Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement."

Modifying My Faith Because of Doubt

A house of cards falling down. Image source.

Back when I was a "good Christian", on fire for God, I was really into apologetics. Apologetics means arguing about why Christianity is true. I read lots of apologetics books which presented questions like "are there contradictions in the bible?" and "how can a loving God send people to hell?" and "what if Jesus didn't actually die on the cross, he was just pretending to be dead?" These apologetics books presented arguments for why the Christian answer to these questions was the right answer.

Initially I just read the Christian side of it, but eventually I started reading the atheist side too. (The apologetics resources don't really pay attention to any other religions- it's just Christianity vs atheism.) Instead of just reading a Christian book that said "here's what atheists say, and here's why they're wrong" I would also go to the atheist resources directly and see what I thought about their arguments. (Christians are warned against doing this, because you may be "led astray" if you directly hear what the atheists are saying, without a Christian authority figure there to immediately tell you why it's wrong. ... Yeah honestly very shady that they don't want you to listen to anyone else except approved authorities...)

And sometimes the atheist side raised some good points! The problem of evil, for example. Why doesn't God intervene in the world to stop evil and suffering? Is it because They can't? Then God is not all-powerful. Is it because They don't want to? Then God is not all-loving. Either way, this God doesn't sound that good. 

Of course, Christians have all sorts of answers to it, like God valuing free will and wanting people to have a choice to do right or wrong- but I feel like most of these arguments aren't that great.

So I recognized that there were some points where the Christian apologetics side didn't really have a good answer- but I viewed it as very all-or-nothing. I thought, I have all these other reasons to believe in Jesus, so I will continue to believe even though there are a few weak points.

Yes, very all-or-nothing. I felt my options were:

1. Christianity- specifically evangelical Christianity- and the whole package of beliefs that came with it: you have to have a personal relationship with God; you have to spend time reading the bible and praying every day- if you don't, it means you don't love God enough and you should feel bad about that; the bible is inerrant; the bible doesn't have contradictions; God created the world; all the miracles in the bible really happened; literal virgin birth; literal resurrection; evolution is not true; Jesus was fully God and fully man; every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God; everyone deserves to go to hell because we are all sinners; Jesus died as part of God's plan to pay for our sin and get us into heaven; God sees you as totally worthless and ugly because of your sin, but when you get covered by Jesus, God is able to accept you; only people who believe in Jesus get into heaven; if you are a good person but you're not a Christian then you go to hell; if you do terrible things like murder people and then repent on your deathbed, you go to heaven; also everyone secretly knows that God exists and the gospel is true but they deny it because they love to sin; everyone has a "God-shaped hole" in their heart; everyone worships something; God wants women to dress modesty; the husband has to be the "spiritual leader" in marriage; premarital sex is a sin; everyone who has sex before marriage regrets it; God is extremely interested in what everyone is doing with their genitals; masturbation is a sin; and the ideal is you shouldn't even have any physical contact at all with your spouse before marriage- that's the ideal because it's the most pure, though realistically it's not likely to actually happen; God answers prayer; if we have more faith and pray for things that are in "God's will" then God will answer those prayers; you have to sit quietly and listen to God because God really does plant thoughts in people's heads about what they're supposed to do, or you could even open the bible and point to a random verse and perhaps that will be a message from God for you; also, be ready for the possibility that God will "call" you, meaning you have to give up your whole lifestyle and your plans and change to what God tells you to do, like moving to a foreign country as a missionary; the bible is God's love letter to you; we need to always "put God first"- if you like something, that could be bad because what if you love it more than God; we need to put others' needs before our own, always sacrificing in order to help other people; it's good to "submit" instead of standing up for our own rights; suffering can be a good thing because it helps you get closer to God; God has a plan for your life; if something bad happens to you, it's fine because it's part of God's plan; God will never give you more than you can handle; God has picked 1 specific opposite-sex partner that you are supposed to marry; we need to do evangelism to get people saved; all the other religions are about people trying to earn their way to heaven, but Christianity is different because Jesus already did the work and we just have to believe; it's really not possible to have morality if you don't believe in God; the most loving thing we can do is warn people about hell; and also we need to warn gay people about their sin; being trans isn't a real thing; hate the sin, love the sinner; the reason for most of society's problems is the breakdown of the family- casual sex, divorce, acceptance of queer people, abortion, etc; everyone who gets an abortion regrets it; life begins at conception, and abortion is murder; and so Christians all need to vote Republican; if you're obeying God and other people don't like it (perhaps because you are telling them about their sin), that's a sign that you're doing the right thing, because Jesus said the world will hate us, hey it could even be "spiritual warfare" which means the devil is attacking you; Christians are persecuted in the US; the US was founded as a Christian nation and it's terrible that it's becoming more and more secular; there are lots of people who claim to be Christians but they're not real Christians, probably most Catholics are fake Christians; you have to go to church every week; people have all sorts of excuses for not going to church, but they are wrong, they should be going to church
2. Atheism

When I say "all-or-nothing", I mean that because overall, I believed the Christian side of the apologetics arguments, that meant I had to believe this whole package of quirky beliefs. That's what Christianity is, right? Perhaps I had heard of some Christians who didn't believe a few of these things, but surely they were fake Christians and we didn't need to listen to them. We know that the bible is true [citation needed], and the bible says all of these things [citation needed] and so they were all true.

It was because of Rachel Held Evans, that I learned it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.

The things she wrote on her blog were unlike anything I had ever read. She knew how to speak evangelical, and yet, she frequently said things that good evangelicals weren't allowed to say. I was so confused; I couldn't figure out if she was a Christian or not. (Yes, she was.) She knew all the apologetics answers, but said those answers weren't good enough. She knew all the logical reasons why, for example, God needs to send all non-Christians to hell, but she also knew that her God-given conscience said that's terrible, no matter what kind of logic you can find to prop it up.

She had all the evangelical cred- she loved God, loved the bible, knew the bible so well, she was doing her best to follow Jesus. And she did NOT believe in some of those things that I thought all Christians had to believe- God sending people to hell, women not being allowed to be leaders, things like that. And yet she was still a real Christian.

That's how I learned it didn't have to be all-or-nothing.

For my whole life, I had been on the Christian side, in opposition to the atheist side. It was binary- I'm either a Christian or an atheist- and since I'm a Christian, I need to listen to the Christian leaders and find out the correct Christian view on all of these topics, and I need to believe that.

So, for example, why should I pray and ask God to do something, if God has already decided what They're going to do? Well, I couldn't answer that, but I believed in Jesus for a bunch of other reasons, so I could ignore this bit of confusion and keep believing it anyway. And keep praying to ask God for things anyway. The alternative would be to give up on Christianity entirely, right?

The other thing that happened was, in 2012 I had some health problems that totally derailed my life, for about 1 year. Before that, I had a very strong belief in the concept of "trusting God"- no matter what happens, it must be good, because it's God's plan! Even if it seems bad, you can trust that somehow it's actually good! But... my gall bladder just decided to try and ruin my life one day, for no reason- if that can happen, then what does it even mean to "trust God"? I can't trust God to not let some random health problem totally screw up my life. If I can't trust Them for that, then the whole concept of "trusting God" is pretty meaningless. (At the time, I blogged about it here and here.)

So I started to view my Christianity like this: If there's some belief I have that doesn't logically make sense, then I modify my beliefs to no longer include that bit of nonsense. Here's an example: Because of the problem of evil, I don't believe God intervenes in our lives, and I don't pray to ask God to do things. Because no, it doesn't make sense that there's a God who is always working in the little personal details of my life, and also allows suffering to happen on a large scale in this world. It doesn't make sense to attribute my success to God, when part of it was because of white privilege, and people with black-sounding names get called for job interviews less- maybe God should be working on that problem, instead of helping me. It doesn't make sense to believe I can pray and God will respond by helping me, when there are many people in this world in worse situations than me, and God hasn't stopped them from getting into those situations. It doesn't even make sense to postulate that the reason bad things happen to other people is that they don't pray- what a horrific God that would be, choosing to let bad things happen to people who don't have the correct beliefs and/or don't pray correctly.

So whereas before, my perspective was "I don't have a good answer for the problem of evil, but I do have other reasons for believing in Christianity, so just plow ahead and try to ignore the problem of evil," now I see it as "I don't have a good answer for the problem of evil, so I let that inform my Christianity, and I discard common Christian beliefs which are inconsistent with an honest awareness of the problem of evil."

I don't really believe in "I believe, help my unbelief"- the idea that faith and doubt kinda coexist in a person, and the overall belief system is totally true, so you *should* have 100% faith and 0% doubt, but we are flawed human beings and have doubts anyway, and that's okay, we don't have to be perfect, we just do our best to keep pushing ahead in the "faith" part and try to ignore the "doubt" part. No, I don't see it that way. Maybe you have some beliefs that are not actually true, and doubt is a useful indicator that you should examine them and maybe change them.

Doubt is not something to fight against. If you have "doubt", ie, you realize you believe something that doesn't really make sense, then you can consider what would happen to your overall belief system if you changed that one specific belief to something more logical. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. (Or, maybe you have some beliefs that you don't really have a good reason for, but you're okay with that. I do... That's fine, but you have to know you're not going to win any arguments with those.)

And some Christians will disagree with me, saying that this path basically leads to atheism. Someone starts out evangelical, and then they change it, one little belief at a time, and then eventually they become an atheist. Uh, okay, this argument is kinda lost on me, because I don't think there's anything wrong with being an atheist. But if that's your concern, then let me tell you, the house-of-cards religion where one weird little belief is overturned, and then the ENTIRE THING falls- that kind of ideology makes more atheists than what I'm advocating here.

Believe in something that you can actually believe. Not something that people say you need to believe, as part of a whole ideology. Doubt is not an attack; doubt is an indication that you should think about the reasons for your beliefs, and maybe change to something that makes more sense.

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The Slacktivist has a very good post on this: Hold on to the good 

Siggy has a post which makes some similar points: Christian Doubt

Related:

She was the first (Thank you, Rachel) 

On believing that "prayer works" 

Gotta Love That Full-Blown Atheism 

Taking My Kid To Church: "The Belief That Baffled the Best of the Buddhists"

What if the 10 spies were right, and God was wrong?

Artwork showing 2 people carrying a huge cluster of grapes on a stick. Image source.

I was so fascinated by this post from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: Spy vs. Spy. It's about the bible story in Numbers 13-14 where Moses sends 12 spies to go look at the Promised Land, in preparation for the Israelites invading it and driving out the people who live there. (Ruttenberg's post repeatedly emphasizes that this conquest did not really happen, and that this story has been used to justify all kinds of terrible atrocities throughout history- but it's in the bible so Jews and Christians shouldn't just ignore it.) The spies come back and 10 of them say the people of the land are too strong, and the Israelites won't be able to defeat them. The other 2 spies (Joshua and Caleb) say God will help us, so let's go do it.

Most of the Israelites are convinced by the 10 spies, and they don't want to try to enter the Promised Land. God is mad about this and declares that the Israelites should wander in the desert for 40 years, until the whole generation has died, and the next generation will be the one to enter the Promised Land.

I'm very familiar with this story. Heard it many times, starting when I was a little kid in Sunday school. The point of the story, I always heard Christians say, is that the Israelites should have trusted God, instead of being too scared to enter the Promised Land. Yes, it was a horrible sin for them to not trust God, so God was right to punish them, to make them all wander in the desert until they died.

That's what I always heard about this story. I never heard any other interpretation. Which is why I'm so fascinated by Ruttenberg's post, and I'm sharing it here. 

She lists several different interpretations. The first one is the one I had always heard:

As can all tales in Torah, this can be a message about obedience. It, for better or worse, can deliver an authoritarian model of Judaism (or Christianity, I reckon)– one in which failure to follow God (and, presumably, your religious leader, God's emissary here on Earth), engenders fatal consequences:

"People didn't trust God enough to go along with God's plan even when they were scared so they were punished."

Implied: You must follow my instructions if you would like to be Good, Safe.

There's also this "trauma-informed" reading of the story:

There is the reading that tries for a trauma-informed lens, that seeks a more compassionate rationale for such a harsh divine decree. Something like:

"After their whole lives enslaved, the generation that participated in the Exodus– which was traumatic enough, jeez– wasn't emotionally ready to do the next step of setting up a new, just society. They regarded themselves as inferior to others– it was their low self-esteem that caused them to regard themselves as 'like grasshoppers' rather than as empowered as full people. They couldn't have handled the responsibility of creating something new in the Promised Land. God finally recognized that and realized that only people who had grown up knowing freedom could best set up the future." (2)

Ruttenberg is not sold on this interpretation; she points out that it implies "Only healed people can be leaders." She says there are plenty of important leaders from history who experienced trauma before becoming leaders and doing great things.

I am also not a fan of this "trauma-informed" reading because, how do I put this, I think it's just silly. The way the story is written, God is telling them to enter the Promised Land, the Israelites refuse, and then God punishes them by making them wait 40 years. (Moses manages to talk God down from just smiting all the people right then and there.) To turn it into a cutesy little "oh God was just concerned about if they were emotionally ready or not... God was really doing what was best for them by giving them time to heal from the trauma of slavery rather than making them enter into a fight for the Promised Land"... come on.

God is not compassionately taking a realistic view of what the people are emotionally ready for. God is mad as hell in this story. In Numbers 14:36-38, the 10 spies who didn't trust God were "struck down and died of a plague before the Lord." Does that sound like God was just really concerned about being careful and understanding of trauma?

(I guess you could argue that the way the biblical writer wrote the story completely misrepresented what actually happened, and actually God told them to wander in the desert for 40 years for trauma-informed reasons, but then the biblical writer put a MASSIVE SPIN on it. I guess you could say that. But, why tho.)

Ruttenberg mentions another interpretation, which says the issue was how Moses asked binary questions- "Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not?" Maybe more open-ended questions would have helped the spies think about the situation differently.

I'm also unimpressed with this interpretation- I mean, sure, there's a point you could make about how leaders have a responsibility for how they frame the tasks they give to their followers, and how binary questions can limit how people understand a situation, okay, sure. I just don't really think that interpretation is central to The Point Of The Story.

Here's another interpretation Ruttenberg mentions in her post, and this one is blowing my mind:

And what if the ten scouts were offering an accurate account of their experience? And what if they were being told by authority figures to ignore their take on the situation, because it didn't conform to the agenda of those in power?

And again, we over here at Life is a Sacred Text Inc. are open to looking at God, in these stories, as a literary figure with whom we can engage with curiosity-- and assume that doing so doesn't necessarily validate or disprove or anything about anyone's experiences of the living divine, or even about how Torah can engage with those experiences. Theology, and God, can be big enough to hold all of it.

What if we were willing to question all of our assumptions about who's right and who's wrong, just to see what might happen if we opened the story from the other side?

What if God and Moses were ready to launch Project Promised Land but their folks on the ground told them that it was, in fact, unsafe?

And if there were a couple of people willing to say what those with power wanted to hear, but the majority of voices– those warning against taking action were speaking not from warped perception, but actual concern?

How many times have experts warned that an outcome is not right, and been steamrolled or ignored, because a little truth happens to be inconvenient at the moment?

How often have those most impacted warned that an organization is not safe, to no avail? How often have people with some power– but lesser power– tried to speak out, and been punished for doing so?

And then derided as the narrative is fixed to paint them as the cowards or the troublemakers, not the brave heroes willing to comply with power's agenda?

It happens all the time.

What if we assume that the spies aren't working in bad faith? We could even posit that Promised Land 1.0 didn't, in fact, release at that time, so we will never know how it would have gone– and it's possible that it would have been a disaster, just as those ten spies warned us that it would have been?

What if God– or whoever was writing this story after the fact– even recognized this and used this 40 years "punishment" as a cover, so that time could be bought without making authority look bad?

Implied: History is written by the victors, and we must ask why the stories we have are written the way they are– including who is blamed, and why.

!!!!

Oh my goodness, this is huge.

What if the spies were actually right? What if "trust God" wasn't the right thing to do in this story?

I LOVE THIS. I love this because it's something that never in a million years would occur to anyone when you're inside an evangelical "biblical inerrancy" ideology. This is something I'm super-interested in- taking the bible stories about "bad" people who disobeyed God, and reframing them to show why those people were actually heroes. (See, for example, my bible fanfic Strange Fire.)

In Sunday school, it was always so obvious: Trusting God is the right thing to do. These spies- who didn't believe God would really be able to win battles- were wrong and sinful and bad and deserved to be punished. We never ever questioned that. (We asked ourselves, would we be able to trust God, if we were in this situation? Would we be able to ignore our own instincts, and have faith and rush in when God said to, even though it might feel like a terrible idea? We hoped we would be good enough Christians to do so.)

This is blowing my mind- what if the Israelites actually wouldn't have won, if they had invaded at this time? (I mean, this whole story didn't really happen, but I'm just thinking about this hypothetical within the universe of the story.) And, as Ruttenberg says, this biblical writer "used this 40 years 'punishment' as a cover"? This is incredible.

Here, take a look at this, from Numbers 14:39-45,

When Moses reported this to all the Israelites, they mourned bitterly. Early the next morning they set out for the highest point in the hill country, saying, “Now we are ready to go up to the land the Lord promised. Surely we have sinned!”

But Moses said, “Why are you disobeying the Lord’s command? This will not succeed! Do not go up, because the Lord is not with you. You will be defeated by your enemies, for the Amalekites and the Canaanites will face you there. Because you have turned away from the Lord, he will not be with you and you will fall by the sword.”

Nevertheless, in their presumption they went up toward the highest point in the hill country, though neither Moses nor the ark of the Lord’s covenant moved from the camp. Then the Amalekites and the Canaanites who lived in that hill country came down and attacked them and beat them down all the way to Hormah.

Omg, how was I so naive? I always read this as "no, they missed their chance, God told them not to go into the Promised Land, and now they're sinfully going in anyway instead of listening to God- see, it didn't work, because God wasn't with them."

I'm just marveling at how well Christians have spun this passage (and/or the entire bible), such that it never even occurred to me to think of this: Oh, this shows the 10 spies (who all suddenly died under mysterious circumstances?!!!) were actually right, and the Israelites actually weren't able to defeat the inhabitants of the land at this time.

Seriously. Every time I read this when I was evangelical, my thoughts were "ugh there they go again, not listening to God, of course it's not going to work, come on you guys, why can't you just obey God?"

I always imagined that, during the time of the bible, everything was so simple- you just follow God's rules, and then everything is perfect. Not at all like our world now, where it doesn't really seem like God is close, where you do your best to obey God but it's not really clear if it's working or not. But what if the reason they wrote these things was to get people to believe- because their reality did not feel like everything was this simple and straightforward. What if it was hard to believe back then, just like it was for us, and that's why the biblical writers wrote all these things?

Imagine what it would feel like for you, if you were a spy checking out the Promised Land, and it just feels so unbelievable that your people will really be able to defeat the people living there. What you can see with your own eyes, vs a promise from a God who may or may not actually have this kind of power.

Why were we always so sure it was right to trust in that God? Sure, he brought them out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea, but invading the Promised Land is a totally different situation. Why *should* they believe he had that kind of power?

Why were we so sure they deserved to die for not believing that?

And there's one more interpretation that Ruttenberg mentions in her post, about how this story was a way to explain the geography of the land at a later date when the story was actually written. Also very interesting!

Wow, I'm fascinated by this. Evangelicals have this idea that bible stories are all meant to teach us something about how to obey God, and I'm seeing now how that's so incredibly limiting. The stories mean so much more than that. They can be read in so many ways that go beyond that. And I'm most fascinated by an interpretation where God is wrong.

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Related:

No One Can Take The Bible From Me 

Womanist Midrash 

What Would Abraham Do? (a bible fanfic)

"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "Maybe God Is Like That Too" by Jennifer Grant.

In my quest to find good books to teach my kids about Christianity, I came across this one: Maybe God Is Like That Too, by Jennifer Grant. I love this book and I totally recommend it! Here's my review.

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Basic summary

The book is about a boy who asked his grandma where God is:

"Grandma, does God live in the city?" I ask one morning at breakfast.

"Yes, God is here," she says, "You just need to know where to look."

"Whenever you see love, joy, and peace, God is there," she says, stirring her tea.

"Wherever there's patience, kindness, and goodness, God is there too. When you see faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, that's God's Spirit at work."

Then, as the boy goes about his day, he sees examples of each of these things. And each time, he says, "Maybe God is like that too."

For example, here's the one about love:

At school Grandma hands me my lunch and hugs me close before she says goodbye.

That's what love looks like to me. Maybe God is like that too.

You may have noticed that this list of virtues- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control- are the fruit of the Spirit, from Galatians 5:22-23.

The book concludes by saying that we can't see God, but we can see God's Spirit working when we see these good qualities in people.

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Most- but not all- of them are about people helping each other

For most of these fruits of the Spirit, the examples in the book are about people doing good things for each other. I love that; I really do believe that is God. (Evangelicals will cringe at this though, because it's just people helping each other, it's not people helping each other because they are motivated by their belief in Jesus. Yes, it's just people whose religious beliefs [or lack thereof] we know nothing about. That's where we see the fruit of the Spirit, in this book.)

But, they're not *all* about the way people treat each other. Look at this one, about joy:

On the swings, I pump so hard I see over the wall into the alley. My friends shout, "Higher! Higher!" as my feet fly way up into the sky.

That's what joy looks like to me. Maybe God is like that too.

This is great! I love this so much! This joy, this happiness, pleasure, this simple uncomplicated enjoyment of life- this is God too. When I was an evangelical, I didn't believe in that- I didn't think happiness or pleasure were good things in and of themselves. I believed that when the bible said joy was a fruit of the Spirit, it meant that when we believe in Jesus, we will naturally feel joy because of it. That Jesus is the only source of "true" joy, and all other happiness should be viewed with suspicion.

But now I believe in something so much bigger than that- I believe that it's just a good and beautiful thing when people thrive and laugh and enjoy their lives. Regardless of whether they believe in God or whatever. (See this post from 2015, I Deserve God's Love.)

And I love how this book has this character just simply enjoying swinging on the swings, and "maybe God is like that too"- not as a means to an end, not as a "we have joy because we believe in God" or "helping others brings joy to all of us"- but that his pleasure is just a good thing, just by itself. I think that's great.

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God's pronouns

This book doesn't use any pronouns for God. As for the examples of people doing good things for each other, some are men and some are women. And the example for "peace" is a quiet classroom (which presumably has no gender). Maybe God is like all of these people and things.

I love this, I love this so much. I believe God contains the full spectrum of gender. No gender is any more "God" than any other gender. So to not use any pronouns for God, and then give examples of both men and women who are like God- yeah, this is exactly what I want to see in a kids' book. (It would be even better if it had nonbinary people too.)

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"Maybe"

Why does this book keep saying "Maybe God is like that too"? There's this constant uncertainty, this questioning, this feeling that the boy is kind of making his own observations and speculation about what God is like, rather than having some authority figure saying "here is the right answer." 

I think this is great; I always tell my son that different people have different opinions about God, and some people don't believe in God. I want him to think about it on his own and come up with beliefs that make sense to him.

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This book really is the Christianity I believe in

I was SO EXCITED when I read this book. This is the Christianity I believe in, and I am SO INTO IT. Usually when I read children's Christian books/ bible story books, it's an exercise in uh, cringing and trying to decide if I can tolerate whatever cute little lesson the book tries to turn a bible story into, trying to decide if there's enough good in there that I can salvage something meaningful to talk with my son about.

But this book is different. This book didn't make me feel like "okay, it's not that bad." This book had me so excited, from beginning to end, like "YES! THIS is what I believe!" 

So if you're looking for a children's book that shows this kind of Christianity, I very much recommend this one.

---

Related: 

"Muppet Christmas Carol" Is My Religion 

"Who Is My Neighbor?" (Kids' Book Review)

Blogaround

Posts not related to that felon/ fascist nonsense:

1. China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesmen (January 29, via) "'DeepBean’s new beans only require a third of the water that American beans need to not grow into anything of value,' an analyst said."

2. Home and whole and ‘back to normal’ (February 2) Those of you who follow the Slacktivist's blog may know that his wife has spent 3 years trying to get a surgery she needs because of constant pain, and it keeps being delayed. Well, she finally had the surgery. This is great news! Very happy for her!

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And the posts about that felon/ fascist nonsense:

1. Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral (January 29, via) "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible."

2. As Part of 'Authoritarian Takeover,' Trump Signs Order to Deport Pro-Palestine Students (January 29, via)

3. A Line By Line Analysis Of Trump's Youth Care Ban Executive Order (January 30) 

Also from Erin Reed: School Systems Across US Declare They Will Not Comply With Trump's Anti-Trans Executive Order (February 1) "The claims in their statement are false. We do not have a policy that violates anyone’s rights or indoctrinates children. What we do have is a culture of respect—one that honors the dignity and diversity of all students, families, and educators."

4. How They Lie: Trump's Executive Orders (January 30) "The executive order relies on cis normativity to communicate body horror that simply does not exist when trans care is provided to the right people at their own request in a patient-centered, patient-empowered context."

5. Mass Deportations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (February 3)

6. US Postal Service flip-flops on Hong Kong-China packages, lifting a ban imposed a day earlier (February 6) This is all a bit ridiculous. I'm an American in China, and I saw a lot of confusion in the WeChat groups for Americans the other day, people trying to figure out what to do about the package they need to mail back to their mom. These sudden policy changes are really not cool.

7. Are abortion bans across America causing deaths? The states that passed them are doing little to find out. (December 23, via) "'I can’t imagine the states that passed restrictions saying, ‘Now we want to know if that caused any deaths,’' said Eugene Declercq, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who serves on Massachusetts’ maternal mortality review committee. 'The clinicians and the public health people might want to know, but the political leaders would be aghast.'"

8. Donald Trump’s Second Term Begins With a Crash (January 30, via) "Also on January 20, Trump imposed a hiring freeze across the entire federal government, and air traffic controllers (ATCs) are federal employees. The FAA has been struggling for years to make up for an ATC shortage caused by the pandemic; though it finally met its hiring goal in 2024, controllers are still reportedly stretched thin. As Reps. Rick Larsen (D-WA) and Steve Cohen (D-TN) pointed out in a joint press release, Trump’s move was both illegal, as the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 requires maximum staffing of ATCs, and dangerous. 'Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry,' they wrote."

9. Second judge blocks Trump's birthright citizenship order in back-to-back rulings (February 6) "'All I have wanted is to focus on my baby being born healthy and safe, but instead, even though my baby will be born in the U.S., I have been worried that they will be denied a right is that guaranteed under the constitution — the right to be a U.S. citizen,' Garcia said in a statement after the decision. 'This ruling will give mothers like me a bit of temporary relief as we navigate pregnancy and the uncertain future for our babies.'"

10. NSA museum covered plaques honoring women and people of color, provoking an uproar (February 5)

11. This meme:

12. Is Somebody Doing Something?! (February 4) "It’s helpful to think of the response as falling into four distinct yet sometimes overlapping categories, each with increasing urgency. These responses include the personal, the political, the legal and the popular."

Top 18 Posts of 2024

Photo of a computer. Image source.

Hi all, it's a new year, so it's time to do a roundup of my top blog posts from last year.

First we have the posts with the most pageviews:

1. "Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" (What is this book actually about?): "Slavery is a 'neutral example' which can prove to Christian patriarchists that hey, you guys don't literally follow everything in the bible either, so you can't just say 'well the bible says' and automatically dismiss our arguments for women's equality. And, if any of those patriarchists want to bring the criticism 'well if we allow women and men to be equal, it's a slippery slope to accepting homosexuality, and oh wouldn't that be terrible if Christians accepted homosexuality'- that's why the book also addresses 'the homosexual issue', and if to say 'don't worry, good evangelicals, equal rights for women DOESN'T mean we have to accept homosexuality.' It gives the egalitarian arguments in the book a lot more credibility, from an evangelical perspective, if the author also shows why those same arguments do NOT support gay rights."

2. The Great Sex Rescue: Marital Rape: "This section was hard to read, because a lot of the anecdotes in it are horrifying. It's about husbands who rape their wives, and claim that it's right for them to do so, because of the bible or whatever. It's about Christian marriage books that teach that all men are like that, and don't mention that marital rape is A REAL THING- so the women in these situations don't even know that what's happening to them is rape and it's wrong."

3. What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people?: "You need to throw queer people under the bus, in order to be seen as a good evangelical. That's just a fact. That's just an undeniable fact. This is how it works."

4. The "Redemptive-Movement Hermeneutic" Argument for Queer Acceptance: "Basically, the idea that Jesus' message was about inclusion, especially among groups which were marginalized and rejected by society, and therefore in our culture that means acceptance of queer people."

5. The Great Sex Rescue: Be Normal!: "I very much disagree with this. Why does it matter what 'the vast majority of people' think? You're in a monogamous marriage- 'the vast majority of people' are not involved in your sex life at all; it's just the two of you."

6. The Slavery We Ignore in the Book of Exodus: "God and Moses freed the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, and then turned around and said 'so anyway, if you want to sell your daughter as a slave, here's how.' Doesn't the story of the Exodus hit different, once you realize that?"

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And then these other posts which are my favorites too:

7. Womanist Midrash: I love this book so much. I've written a whole series of posts on it, actually. Links can be found at the end of this linked post.

8. Michal wasn't here for David's worship, and now neither am I: "You can understand how, if someone treats you like that, and then they're like 'I LOVE GOD SO MUCH, I SIMPLY MUST DANCE,' you might hate them."

9. A Comprehensive Pro-Choice Ethic: "I always hear politicians saying 'women can make their own choices about their bodies.' This is nothing more than a euphemism for 'abortion is legal' (or, possibly, 'abortion is legal and accessible'). I don't like that. I want to live in a world where 'women can make their own choices about their bodies' means exactly that. Certainly that includes abortion access, but it includes so much more than that."

10. What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?: "Does God handle it differently depending on which way you anonymize the study? What if there are multiple patients with the same initials- would it be like, the researchers assign Prayer Volunteer 1 to pray for patient C. D., and there is another patient C. D. in the control group not getting prayed for (different person but same initials) and God uses Their omniscient knowledge of the researchers' methods to figure out which is which and make sure the prayers get allocated correctly? Or would the researchers need to add an additional indicator to pass along to the prayer volunteer, to pass along to God, to make sure God knew who they were talking about?"

11. Raising Mixed Race (a book for parents of mixed-race Asian kids): "I guess my son does have thoughts about race. But doesn't have the language to communicate them with me."

12. Christian Nationalism / Faith Without Works Is Dead: "Making a big deal about how it's so important to be a Christian, without talking about what it actually means to be a Christian, what Christians are supposed to do, what it means to follow Jesus. You ever notice how Christian Nationalists talk a lot about Christianity and not about Jesus?"

13. I Had Pre-Eclampsia: The story of how my little daughter was born.

14. "Expecting Better": Asking the Right Questions About Pregnancy: "These are the questions that we absolutely should be asking! But instead, these 'rules' are presented to pregnant people like they are ironclad rules, like if you eat precut fruit, it's BAD for your baby, OH NO!!! I've seen the amount of stress and anxiety this puts on pregnant people- because, it's seen as, yeah it's tough to give these things up during pregnancy, but it's for YOUR BABY, and you'd DO ANYTHING for YOUR BABY, right?"

15. Here's How We Do Our Budget: "I found that the most important thing I need from a budgeting system is it needs to be cumulative- ie, we allocate money to a certain category this month, and then if we don't use it, that money continues to exist in that category and simply rolls over to the next month. This way, there's no need to wonder about 'well sometimes we spend more and sometimes we spend less, so... I guess that's fine overall?'"

16. "The Red Tent" (this bible fanfic is great): "The main thing that this book does is to portray a whole realistic world which contains ideas and practices that we know were common in bible times, but may be hard for us to imagine because they are so different from our modern world."

17. Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories: "Why would God do the work to ensure that 2 of every kind of dinosaur got on the ark, and then just let them die out anyway right after? If God is so invested in marsupials living in Australia, willing to do all these tiny little miracles to guide them on their journey and make sure they survive, then it must also be true that dinosaurs went extinct because God just really really wanted them to go extinct. What? What was the point of bringing them on the ark then? Is God just really bad at planning?"

18. A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe: "Really? Someone goes to heaven and comes back, and all we get is more confidence that we were already right about everything? We don't, like, learn anything new? Really?"

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So what's coming up in 2025 on "Tell me why the world is weird"? Well *glances at drafts folder* there are gonna be a lot of posts about the bible. So if you are saying to yourself "I wonder what Perfect Number thinks about the bible," then this is the blog for you. (I also write about plenty of other things too, lol.)

Also I should mention I have a patreon~

Thanks for reading! As always, let me know what kind of topics you like to read about~

God, Soul Mates, and International Marriage

Clipart image of a person with a bunch of complicated paths to choose from. Image source.

So here's a question: If "God has a plan for your life", is it possible that this plan involves marrying someone from a different country?

When I was evangelical, of course I believed "God has a plan for your life" and this plan includes 1 specific (opposite-sex) person you're supposed to marry. God has destined a soul-mate for you, supposedly. (This whole "God has a plan for your life" idea causes evangelicals an incredible amount of anxiety because they have to constantly worry about if they've made the wrong decision and accidentally gotten off track for the plan.)

But then, in college I dated a guy who was an international student from China. (I am American and went to college in the US.) Let's call him Xin. I was starting to rebel against purity culture, and I did something extremely naughty: I made the decision to start dating him even though God hadn't told me that I was supposed to. Yes, super naughty and rebellious, and I had a lot of guilt about it. Purity culture teaches that you can't date someone just because you want to- you should only date 1 person, ever, in your entire life, and it needs to be the person that God "planned" for you. You can't date someone just based on your own choices and feelings; no, you need to ask God. Because really, how are you going to know if it's the person you could marry, if you haven't even dated them yet? No way of gathering enough information to know that, without compromising your "purity"- therefore, the only way is to get God to tell you the answer. (Or, in some subcultures of purity ideology, your parents would do most of the work of deciding which potential partner is good enough to marry, before you date them.) And if you end up not marrying them- if you *gasp* break up- well that would be THE WORST THING EVER. You lose so much of your purity. Your God-picked spouse might not even want you anymore, after that.

So I was dating Xin, a guy from China, and one thing that worried me SO MUCH was that I felt this couldn't possibly be "God's plan." Imagine the incredible number of steps God would need to plan out in order to bring me and him together. First, Xin would need to decide he wanted to go abroad for college. Then he would need to choose where to go. After he chooses the US, just think about how many universities there are in the US. And all the factors that would go into picking 1 of them. And then, from my side, there were all the factors that went into me picking which college to go to. And then, once we're both there, God would have to arrange for us to meet. We met because I had suddenly taken an interest in studying Chinese, and I was going to meetups for international students.

It's just... A LOT of steps. Each step could have gone in SO MANY different ways, which would have led to us ending up THOUSANDS OF MILES apart, and never meeting each other.

So how could something like that really be planned?

It made more sense to me to imagine that "God's plan" would be something like, I marry a white guy with a pretty similar cultural background to me. Each step in that "plan" would be something that's fairly high probability- an American chooses to go to an American university, a white student has a friend group/ dating pool which is mostly white students, nobody suddenly develops an all-consuming desire to learn a foreign language, and so on.

Or rather, it depends how far you have to plan ahead. Is it like, God's making this "plan" when I'm already a college student, and the plan is that I should marry someone from China, and so God looks at the students from China who already exist at the same college as me, and then makes a plan from there? Or is it like... planned from birth?

At the church where I grew up, every year when students graduated from high school, the church had a ceremony where they would read all the graduates' names, and each one would tell what their plans were. And I always thought it was funny, roughly half of them would announce they were going to one local Christian college, and roughly half would announce they were going to the other local Christian college. I remember joking with my sister about it- every year we would tally up which college got more. (And then there would be the occasional 1 or 2 students who weren't going to either of those colleges- like me.) Like... being predictable. See, that's the kind of situation where God can easily plan way in advance, about who is supposed to marry whom. Or, say, 2 people both born to families who attend the same church- yeah, God can easily get them together.

But how can it really be "God's plan" to be with someone who was born on the other side of the world? Who for a significant fraction of their life wouldn't have even been able to talk to you, because you didn't speak any of the same languages?

The logistics of it are just a NIGHTMARE. The incredible number of tiny little decisions that need to go a certain way, in order to get these 2 people to meet each other. I just couldn't believe that anyone- not even God- could make a 20-ish-year-long plan that involved so many low-probability events, and have it actually go successfully.

Yeah if the plan is that I marry *a* Chinese person, that's one thing. That's doable. There are lots of Chinese people. But a *specific* one, picked years and years beforehand? No way, not even God could get that to work.

I remember talking to another Christian about this, back then, and she saw it totally opposite from how I did. She said, because all these little things needed to go exactly right in order for me to meet my boyfriend, doesn't that seem even MORE like it was God who had done it?

I didn't buy that, when she said it. We constantly have random encounters with people, caused by a long series of tiny decisions, each of which may have been high or low probability at the time that it happened. It's impossible to predict, but the overall statistics tell us that in general this is how it works. Probably every day I happen to meet people who are in this specific city partly because of some weird unusual event that affected the course of their life long ago. Low-probability events happen all the time, of course they do, but of course you don't know which ones they're going to be. Just like how you don't know what the winning lottery number will be, but you know it will be SOMETHING, likely something that looks like an unremarkable string of digits.

(And also, race is an aspect of this. I felt like... I'm specifically attracted to Chinese guys, is that like... bad? Is it bad to have a preference based on race? And what did God think about it? I had always imagined God to be like my white pastors and Sunday school teachers, viewing China as some faraway backwards place where they talk weird and eat weird food. My God was vaguely racist- I found it impossible to believe that this kind of God would make a plan for me to marry a Chinese guy.)

Way back then, it really had me questioning the whole idea of "God has a plan for your life." Dating a Chinese guy was so new and unexpected for me, and I just couldn't bring myself to believe that it could be something planned by God from the beginning of my life. I just couldn't.

Anyway, fast-forward a few years, and I moved to China, and started dating a different Chinese guy, and now we are married. When we got engaged, it was a very big deal to me that it was an actual choice I was making. It wasn't "God's plan" and I just passively go along with it- no, marriage is a big deal, and it was my decision to marry him. Marriage shouldn't be something that just kinda happens to you as you float through life on "God's plan"- it should be a real choice.

I don't believe in "God's plan" anymore- and I'm glad I don't. It raises way too many questions about how God could possibly make such an intricate plan work successfully, it means you have to constantly be stressed about whether any little decision you make is totally throwing you off track for "God's plan", and it means you're not allowed to make your own choices, but need to be constrained by whatever biases you imagine God has.

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Related:

In Purity Land, a First Date is a Bigger Decision Than Marriage

Is There Choice in the Kingdom of God? 

This "Do Not Intermarry With Them" Stuff Hits Different Now

On Marriage as an Immigrant in China

We're a lot better off if God has no plan

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" (book review)

Book cover for "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," 1995 edition.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll, is a book that was published in 1995. (There's also a 2022 version which includes some updates about Trumpism.) I've seen this book mentioned by ex-evangelical blogs many times over the years, and I finally read it. Here is my review of it.

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The overall thesis of the book

I had heard that this book was about anti-intellectual pressures in evangelical Christian culture. I had heard the quote, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." 

And, growing up evangelical, I had experienced some of this anti-intellectualism. There are questions you're not allowed to ask in church. There is an attitude that "we know better than scientists and scholars because we have the bible." I was guessing that was the sort of thing this book would talk about.

But it mostly didn't. It was not about what it's like "on the ground" in evangelical culture. Noll is a historian, and the book traces the history of evangelical attitudes toward intellectual thought, over the past several hundred years, showing the movements that came and went, and how that led to where we are today. (Or rather, in 1995.) That's really useful to know about, but it wasn't what I was expecting, so at first I couldn't really understand what Noll's point was.

Here's his point: Evangelicals have not done the work of applying evangelical beliefs to high-level academic study. Catholics have universities which were founded out of the Catholic tradition and do good quality research in many many different fields, but evangelicals don't really have anything like that. Yes, there are evangelical seminaries and bible colleges, of course, but these aren't really known for their high-level research. We should be applying evangelical ideas to all fields of academic research- philosophy, art, politics, and so on, but evangelicals aren't doing that.

And, because of that, evangelicals are not obeying the command to "love God with your mind." They are not interested in learning about the world that God created. And because evangelical thinking is so shallow, they are not prepared to face new ideas or societal developments and respond to them in a way that's reasonable and consistent with evangelical Christian beliefs.

The first thing that came to mind for me was, well, what about creationism, that's an example of evangelicals applying their ideology to science and going really deep with it and inventing a whole field of """science""" that's completely different from "secular" science. But, then Noll mentioned creationism as an example of evangelical anti-intellectualism. So, no, that's not what he thinks evangelicals should be doing.

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I have to admit I don't really get it

I'm having a really hard time grasping what it would mean for evangelicals to deeply apply evangelical thinking to big academic questions or societal problems.

The book talks about how Catholics have historically valued tradition and study, and major universities were started because of a Catholic drive to learn about the world and do excellent academic work. It's very hard for me to imagine evangelicals doing something similar, because, to be honest, when I was evangelical, that was one of the reasons we viewed Catholics as "fake." Yes, we were highly suspicious that Catholics were "fake Christians" because being Christian is about having a "personal relationship with God" (this is how evangelicals define "Christian"), and Catholics were not so big on that. Catholics were more into tradition and church hierarchy. Evangelicalism is about reading the bible yourself, experiencing God yourself, having spiritual experiences that mean a lot to you personally but are hard to explain to other people. We felt that Catholics had kind of missed the point- they followed their traditions and their church leaders and the pope, rather than going directly to the bible or directly to God. They were all caught up in listening to what other people said about God, rather than having a "personal relationship" with God. So, they were highly likely to be "fake Christians."

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" talks a lot about this aspect of evangelicalism. Experiencing God and the bible in an "intuitive" and personal way, which is accessible to everyone- and how that causes evangelicals to not value advanced academic study.

Academia is all about building on the work that other people have done. Spending years learning about some very very niche problem and then advancing humanity's knowledge on it- and only people who have spent years studying in your same field can even understand what you're working on. To me, it feels very incompatible with the evangelical focus on how God is always right there with us and God knows everything, and we already have all the answers we need because we have the bible.

Yes, there are evangelicals in academia. Of course there are. I went to grad school, for engineering, and I was evangelical back then. What I'm saying is, I don't understand what it would even look like to meaningfully bring one's evangelical beliefs into one's academic work, unless you were studying theology or something very obviously religious like that. The evangelicals who study engineering, for example, keep their engineering work separate from their religious beliefs. Yes, sometimes there's an element of "I'm really stuck on this problem, I'm going to pray for God to help me figure it out" or "I can't take credit for figuring this out on my own- God gave me the ability to do it." But beyond that, I don't see how they can mix.

Okay, maybe because I'm thinking about my experience in STEM, that's why it doesn't make sense to bring religious beliefs into it. Maybe for fields about philosophy and morality, and art and meaning, and how we should live and how we should structure society, maybe in those areas it makes sense that evangelicals should bring their evangelical beliefs into their academic work. And Noll says there are evangelicals who do a good job of this, but mostly they work for secular or Catholic universities. There aren't evangelical institutions where people do this kind of work.

But I'm still having trouble understanding what Noll wants evangelicals to do, exactly. The examples in the book, of evangelicals doing this well, come across as not evangelical, to me.

I'm not sure how to explain how exactly this feels "not evangelical." It's something about... for evangelicals, being a Christian is about having an active, dynamic, emotional "personal relationship with God." It's a little wild, a little risky, full of big dramatic gestures about "laying down your life", and God suddenly "calling" you to go do some ridiculous thing. This is the polar opposite of good academic work, which is about spending years studying the minute details about what other researchers have done in your field, very careful, getting the citations right, making sure every claim you make is backed up by something that your readers could look up. Just years of normal and boring human work- no "you have to believe me because God randomly told me this."

And it feels really "not evangelical" to me, when considering the question "what does our Christian faith have to say about this or that issue?", to answer by citing sources built on years of human effort doing the necessary academic work. No, that's exactly what we're NOT supposed to do, right? We should address the question "what does our Christian faith have to say about this or that issue?" by praying about it and considering whether any thoughts which subsequently pop into your head may or may not be from God. And reading the bible and simplistically applying 1 bible verse to whatever the issue is.

The bible says "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding." And "leaning on your own understanding" sounds a lot like valuing a legacy of work done by academics over many years, right? "Trusting in the Lord with all your heart" would be believing whatever random thing "God told you" just now, right?

So, I mean, I understand that evangelicals can be in academia and do good work there, but the work itself does not read as "evangelical" to me. It's a separate thing from their religion. So I couldn't really understand what Noll would want this to look like, in an ideal world. 

Keep in mind, this book was written in 1995, so things may be much different between then and when I was "on fire for God" sometime around 2010-ish. Also, my experience is as an average church member, who also read a lot of bible-study books because I'm a nerd. Whereas, Noll is a historian who studies evangelical culture in the US. He is an evangelical with much more of an academic background than I have. I've heard (mostly from the Slacktivist) that there is a disconnect between what pastors learn in seminary and what the average churchgoer believes. For example, scholars who have actually studied the story of the Exodus know that it didn't really happen. But even if the pastor knows this, no way they can say it out loud in church- to the average evangelical, it's very much NOT acceptable to believe the Exodus didn't really happen- that's an attack on the bible! So there's a disconnect between the anti-intellectualism of the average churchgoer, and the higher-level leaders who have more awareness that these commonly-required evangelical beliefs just aren't true.

So my point is, it's very likely there's a difference between my opinion and Noll's on what "feels evangelical."

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Creationism and pre-millennial dispensationalism

The two main examples of anti-intellectualism that this book gives are young-earth creationism and pre-millennial dispensationalism [PMD]. Here, let me define them: Young-earth creationism is the belief that God created the whole universe in 6 days, like Genesis 1 says, and therefore the earth is only about 6000 years old. Pre-millennial dispensationalism is the belief that the world is going to end "soon", and Jesus will come and "rapture" all the Christians away, and then the anti-christ will come, etc, and therefore we should obsess over news stories about things happening in the Middle East, to look for clues that match up with the prophecies in the bible.

I used to believe in young-earth creationism. And as for pre-millennial dispensationalism, and the other popular Christian ideas about how the world will end "soon", I never got into that at all. I guess I believed it was true that the bible gave prophecies about when the world would end, and that Christians who paid attention would be able to pick up on the "signs" when it happened, as the PMDs claimed. But I felt there was a very low probability that any of it would happen in my lifetime, so I didn't see any point to doing that kind of obsessed analysis and "being ready" for when Jesus comes. I thought, we've had 2000 years of Christians believing Jesus would come back "soon", and all of them were wrong. Probably it won't happen in my lifetime either! So I very much refused to be part of any of the "Jesus is coming back SOON, we have to be READY" hype.

"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" points out that creationism is about refusing to learn about this amazing world that God made, if that knowledge might contradict your view of what "the bible says." And PMD ideology responds to news events in the Middle East (and/or the question of whether bar codes are "the mark of the beast") in an extremely shallow way- simply trying to match them up with bible verses, making claims about "here's what the bible says about this." Rather than actually learning about the history of the real-life groups involved, what they actually want, the reasons for conflict, etc.

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Inerrancy

The book talks about the evangelical belief in biblical inerrancy. Noll describes this modern approach as taking a "scientific" view of the bible; in other words, viewing the bible as a list of ironclad true statements, and building on top of that. Developing ideas about biology/geology, as in young-earth creationism, or piecing bible verses together like a challenging puzzle, to find connections to modern news events, as in pre-millennial dispensationalism. Simply taking each verse as a true statement which can be 100% believed, and making logical deductions accordingly. 

This is a very new view of the bible. (Noll says that Christians who argue for this reading of the bible aren't "defending the bible"; they're defending an interpretation that's less than 100 years old.) In contrast, one could read the bible with an awareness of ancient literary genres and the reasons that writers would have spun the stories in certain ways. The things they wrote to make sense of the world, not because they actually happened.

This is also a bit confusing to me- is Noll saying biblical inerrancy is an example of evangelical anti-intellectual sentiment, and therefore evangelicals should abandon it? This makes no sense to me. How can you BE evangelical and not believe in biblical inerrancy? Like, yes, I agree that evangelicals should abandon their belief in inerrancy, but by doing so, they would cease to be evangelical- yes, I believe they should abandon evangelicalism, actually. But obviously that's not what Noll is trying to say.

I don't recall if the book says inerrancy is a problem, or if it says this approach of "reading the bible scientifically" is a problem. From my point of view, those are the same thing. As I define it, inerrancy is this insistence that every single thing in the bible is true, actually true. Does Noll define inerrancy differently? Does Noll think you can believe "the bible is inerrant" and also believe that the creation story in Genesis 1 didn't actually happen at all, under any interpretation of the word "happen", but was just something they wrote back then to illustrate how they viewed the relationship between God, people, and the earth? That's not inerrancy- or at least, I would not call it inerrancy.

Again, this book was published in 1995. Surely things have changed since then. And Noll is coming from an academic background, whereas I just went to church A LOT. So... that's why I'm not quite understanding some of his points.

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Some examples of my experiences of anti-intellectualism in church

In my experience in church, yes there were comments about how we already know the answers because we have the bible, and scientists don't know what they're talking about. I remember hearing a story that went something like this:

My 6-year old son was at school, and his teacher was telling the students that the Exodus didn't really happen the way the bible said. Moses didn't really part the Red Sea. The Israelites just walked across on a sand bridge where the water wasn't as deep. Just a few inches of water. Then my son raised his hand and said, "Wow, it's so amazing that the whole Egyptian army drowned in just a few inches of water!"

The point of this story is: Oh those public schools, trying to tell our kids that the bible isn't true! It's horrible, it's an attack on Christianity! This teacher talking about the Israelites walking through a shallow section of the Red Sea- lololololol! So ridiculous! Taking the big dramatic story about Moses parting the Red Sea, and turning it into this silly thing about simply wading through the water- that's so funny! Lolololol! And it doesn't even make any sense, because then how would the Egyptian army drown in that water? Even a child can see right through it! LOLOLOLOL! [whole congregation laughs]

(And don't even get me started on the uninformed jokes people at church make about evolution!)

I remember one of my history teachers in high school, saying something like "Religious people believe [some bible story]. And historians believe [some modified version of the bible story which doesn't have miracles]." I really didn't like the way she said it, like saying "people who are more realistic know that the things in the bible didn't really happen." I wondered if there were any historical scholars who were "on our side", ie, who believed a very simplistic, naive, "the bible is inerrant" ideology.

Another thing: I sometimes read articles talking about "People say Christians don't value science, but that's not true! There are scientists who are Christians! For example, Francis Collins." I don't know why, but it seemed that Francis Collins was always the one they pointed to. I heard about him many times, but I don't actually know what his scientific contributions were. I think something about medical research? [Oh okay I just googled him- he worked on the Human Genome Project.] Wow, that's very interesting, isn't it- evangelicals mention Francis Collins just to score points in a debate against an atheist who says "Christians are anti-intellectual", but do we know or care about what scientific things Collins actually worked on? Lol, no. We mentioned him not because we actually cared about science, but because we wanted our debate opponents to stop saying we didn't care about science.

And another thing I remember from when I was evangelical was this: Sometimes I would read about scientists who were Christians, and it was presented like "hooray, our beliefs aren't illogical, see, here are some smart people who believe in this." But sometimes I would dig deeper, and find more information about these role models, and I would find out that they didn't actually believe all the things that "real Christians" should believe. Their faith was much more nuanced than that. For example, they weren't creationists. They didn't believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Etc. So... they didn't meet the evangelical criteria to be "real Christians" actually. And so they couldn't really be used as evidence for "see, smart people believe these things." I remember being kinda concerned about that, back then.

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Other writing which used "scandal" in the title

Because this is an important book related to the history of American evangelicalism, the title has inspired some other similar titles:

The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart, a 2013 post by Rachel Held Evans. It's about how she grew up always knowing all the apologetics answers- but the reason she began to question what she had been taught was because of her heart. This is very similar to my own reasons for leaving evangelicalism. 

The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, a 2005 book by Ron Sider. I have not read this, but I know that Ron Sider was an evangelical who advocated for evangelicals to seriously follow the bible's teachings regarding helping poor people and other social-justice causes.

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Conclusion

If you're always talking about evangelicalism, like I am, then you should read this book. Yes, definitely required reading if you are this specific type of person.

But, as I said, I feel like I didn't really *get* it. I don't even know what it would look like for evangelicals to seriously apply their beliefs in an academic sense. That would mean valuing tradition and history and the work that other people have done, long before us, and that comes across to me as not evangelical. Evangelicals are more about "I read this bible verse and here's how I felt about it" or "I was praying and a random thought popped into my head, maybe it's from God"- and treating these personal, emotional experiences as more real and truthful than whatever those stuffy arrogant scholars have to say. From that perspective, building on the academic work that people have been doing for hundreds of years is NOT a good thing- it means there have been hundreds of years during which that line of study could have gotten off-track, as sinful humans continue to develop it. Better to go directly to the source- directly to God, who is the Truth- ie, whatever random thoughts passed through your head while praying and/or reading the bible.

I honestly don't see any way you can be evangelical and believe that the way we advance our evangelical thinking is through work done by researchers rather than claims about "God told me this."

Well, I mean, I'm oversimplifying it a bit... In my experience, yes, evangelicals are interested in learning the meanings of ancient Greek and Hebrew words, to understand the bible better. Yes, evangelicals do believe that whatever the original Greek or Hebrew said is a better interpretation than whatever naive thought popped into your head when you read an English translation. Yes, we did believe we could get more insight into what the bible was saying if we learned about the culture it came from. And no, we didn't just believe that any thought that flittered across your mind while praying must be a message from God.

But... it wasn't like we were going to learn anything new from that kind of study. It was like, we already knew the answers, generally, and we looked up the meanings of ancient Greek words to kinda fill in some details.

And yes, we very much did believe that it was common for God to tell you something by just giving you some random thought out of the blue. A big source of evangelical anxiety is trying to figure out which random thoughts are from God and which aren't. (And some random thoughts might actually be from the devil! Watch out!)

I never realized how the "personal relationship with God" is so bound up with anti-intellectualism, so I'm glad I read this book. 

(When I think of anti-intellectualism in Christian spaces, I think of someone saying "I'm having doubts about the existence of God" and then people shaming them for even saying that out loud. People telling them the point is to "have faith" with no evidence. And yeah that kind of thinking definitely exists in evangelical spaces, but there are also a lot of evangelicals pushing back against it, saying, "God really is real, therefore our beliefs are strong enough to handle any questions you have. Ask any questions you want. It's normal to doubt." I was one of the evangelicals advocating for the right to question and doubt back then. But still, there was always a limit to it- you could ask any question you wanted, but at the end of the day you had to come back to what we already know are the "correct" beliefs.)

In the book, Noll doesn't really come right out and say "the concept of a 'personal relationship with God' is inherently anti-intellectual." He talks about historical movements which have placed emphasis on each person being able to easily understand the bible and having an "intuitive" experience of God, and how that came along with de-prioritizing advanced academic work based on evangelical beliefs. I'm having a hard time understanding what he would want evangelicals to do instead, because to me this is sounding like "the concept of a 'personal relationship with God' is inherently anti-intellectual" but I don't think it's possible to be evangelical and not believe that the most critical aspect of Christian faith is having a personal relationship with God.

So, in summary: This is an important book if you're interested in the history of American evangelicalism. Evangelicals have emphasized having an individual, "intuitive" experience of God, and have not applied their beliefs in more advanced, academic ways. The result is a shallow ideology which isn't able to meaningfully address new societal issues. But, I don't understand what the book wants evangelicals to do instead. Respect for history, tradition, and the work that scholars have done feels not evangelical to me.

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Related:

I used to be a young-earth creationist 

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe