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- [00:00]
Host
The following content may be disturbing for some viewers.
- [00:04]
Reporter
The pastors at Steadfast Baptist Church, now based in Watauga, have a history of anti gay rhetoric, and that continued on Sunday when Pastor Dylan Oz gave a statement calling for the execution of gay people. This is audio from part of that sermon.
- [00:19]
Brandon Robertson
They should be convicted in a lawful trial. They should be sentenced with death. They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head. That's what God teaches.
- [00:29]
Reporter
Protesters showed up outside the church, including a mom who told our part at the Fort Worth our telegram that the message is dangerous.
- [00:35]
Host
I am a mom of a kid.
- [00:37]
Reporter
From the LGBTQ community and I am not going to stand for you wishing death upon my kid just because of who he is. Oz quoted Scripture, but Pastor Rachel Bachman of Oak Lawn United Methodist Church says his message contradicts the teachings of Christianity.
- [00:54]
Host
The gospel message is love and not hate. The real atrocity in what is happening in this pastor's sermon and what is being now, you know, propagated to the rest of the community is that it's a message of hate. There is nothing that stands for hate in our Christian gospel.
- [01:13]
Reporter
Watauga police say they've received multiple complaints from citizens, but say they can't do much about it. They say the language used by the pastor of the church is likely to be offensive to many people. However, at this time, the reported language of the sermon appears to be constitutionally protected free speech. Attorney Eric Zedillo says while the pastor's words are disturbing, that type of speech is protected under the First Amendment because it's not an immediate specific threat.
- [01:40]
Brandon Robertson
It's not specific. It's not something that is immediate. So it's a situation where that may be protected, and I think their interpretation is a relatively reasonable one.
- [01:50]
Reporter
The church issued a statement saying they've been vandalized and received multiple death threats for their beliefs. The Southern Poverty Law center that monitors extremist groups has labeled the church an anti LGBTQ hate group and says their rhetoric could incite harm against the gay community.
- [02:06]
Host
Across platforms and churches, we hear rhetoric that the Bible condemns homosexuality. Christian nationalists have added this to their toolkit to get their way in society and oppress people that they don't agree with and that they don't like using the Moral Majority argument. Politically, the right wing has demonized trans people to an irrational level, despite the fact that they make up less than 1% of the population. In this year alone, Republican politicians have put forth over 800 anti trans laws, most of them targeting Trans women. They've used the Bible as an excuse to demonize and ostracize and even criminalize a group of people who just want to lead live their lives. It's also been used to lead to their deaths. The permissiveness of hateful rhetoric has always increased the comfortability of hateful action. Today we're going to talk about this use in the evangelical machine as part of their goal to to take over the United States government. And we should live in a society where the laws that we make and politics and religion should be separate. It should be, but right now it's not. And unfortunately, we have to have this conversation around religious rhetoric. This is not a religious podcast. It's more of an educational one. But because of this podcast is based in history and politics and our current environment, we have to have these conversations together. So today I'm gonna give you the history of how evangelicals, like with the issue of abortion, took this issue to give them the moral right because the racist policies they wanted to implement were unpopular. And I also have a very special guest coming to talk about how the Bible has been misused intentionally and in bad faith to demonize queer people. My guest that I'll be interviewing a little bit later in the episode is Brandon Robinson, who is a gay activist, writer, a theologian, and a pastor. And he has been working in the field of progressive Christianity to also address the glaring issues of mistranslations, the complete ignoring of cultural understanding when it comes to interacting with the text and providing some healing to members of the LGBT community who've been harmed by Christian nationalism, ideology, and also to give people permission if they want to explore Christianity in a way that is healing and whole for them. This is going to be a little bit of history, a little bit of context, a lot of biblical conversation around where these gotcha verses come from. On today's episode of Flipping Tables. Today is kind of an extension of my previous episode, how do I talk to my MAGA family? I covered abortion for the most part in my first episode. Now we're going to focus specifically on LGBTQ rights, sexuality, what does the Bible say? I can't even count how many times I've received a message from a member of the queer community who said, does God see me as an abomination? Or asked or has commented to me. Thank you so much for letting me know I'm not an abomination. And I've had a lot of messages from people who want to reach out to their non affirming parents and say, how do I Get them to change their mind. So a couple of disclaimers for this episode is that these conversations are necessary and we have to have them. But don't waste your time with people who are openly hateful, people that are trolling you online or wish you harm. And second, for people that you feel like you can talk with and you can approach, even if they don't agree with you, know that you may not be able to change their mind, especially in the first conversation. But planting the seed is so important. The smallest seeds of doubt can cause massive change in a person's life. I'm a testament to that. And even though sometimes it doesn't seem this way, I want to be very clear that most of the people within Christianity, and I'm not talking about the far right, hateful extremists, most of them are not hateful people. They've been indoctrinated from a very, very young age to believe that this is what their soul depends on, that if they don't get all of this right, they're going to suffer eternal damnation in hell. So many of them are just afraid. But we have to have these conversations anyway. And before I bring Brandon on, I'm going to give just a brief little conversation about the evangelical's position using homosexuality as one of their political talking points and why that's not valid historically and why it's clearly been used as a power tool, not an actual moral one. So first, let's address the Bible itself. The belief that the Bible clearly condemns homosexuality is a relatively modern phenomenon. It's one shaped more by politics than translation and ancient intent. The original biblical language, which were Hebrew and Greek, did not have a word equivalent to our modern concept of homosexuality, which encompasses sexual orientation, identity and consensual, loving relationships. The idea of sexuality being something you were born with didn't show up until the 1800s. The word homosexual was coined in Germany in the 1860s. In the Bible, the commonly cited verses which Brandon and I are going to break down together, have long been debated. The Hebrew text in Leviticus are more likely citing cultic practices, violations of purity codes, not blanket condemnations of same sex relationships. They didn't have romantic relationships in general. Women had no sexual agency. They didn't have the right to say yes or no. Sex was something that happened to them. And women were exchanges, property. They also didn't have consensual same sex relationships. They would not have known what you meant by that. And in the New Testament, especially Greek words like which literally means male bed was invented by Paul, it wasn't a word that existed in the language prior to him using it. Even though Greek, the language Paul wrote in, had a lot of words that he could have used that people would have understood, but he chose that word specifically. The critical turning point in this conversation came in 1946 when the Revised Standard Version or the RSV of the Bible became the first English translation to use the word homo. Homosexuals in First Corinthians 6, 9. I want to be very clear that homosexual did not exist in the Bible until 1946. Scholars later admitted that this was a mistranslation and it was not talking about consensual same sex relationships in that verse. By then the damage was done, though the term homosexual was picked up by subsequent versions including the niv and it gave modern evangelicals what appeared to be biblical justification for anti gay theology and anti gay political sphere rhetoric and laws. Until the 1970s, most evangelicals were relatively disengaged from political activism and homosexuality was not a central issue now. It was unfavorable in the 50s and 60s in a lot of ways, but evangelicals didn't consider it a talking point, nor were they really politically active. Their main concerns revolved around issues like biblical inerrancy, evolution, alcohol, and personal and individual morality. The strategic shift occurred during this time and it used issues like homosexuality and abortion to weaponize a new political coalition. The popular narrative is that evangelicals were mobilized by the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision in 1973. But that is revisionist history. That's not true because we know that the Southern Baptist Convention released three churchwide edicts supporting the passing of Roe. Supporting a woman's right to choose, knowing that bodily autonomy is a core right. The real spark to this came in the late 1970s when the IRS began revoking tax exempt status from segregated private schools, including evangelical run academies like Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell's Liberty Christian Academy. These schools were established to evade racial integration after Brown versus the Board of Education. And evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell, political activist Paul weyrich and Tim LaHaye. Yes, that Tim LaHaye among others, saw this as a federal overreach and they were furious. Now voting for racist policies wasn't popular anymore. So they needed causes that could unify white evangelicals without openly defending racism. So they chose abortion and homosexuality. In 1977, the singer and orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant launched her infamous Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida. The campaign sought to overturn a local ordinance that Prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. Bryant's messaging was stark and terrifying. She acquitted homeless, equated homosexuality with child predation, famously declaring homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. She is the blueprint of the LGBT community is after your kids. She made this up. It was. This was not real. It was a campaign because she didn't like a law that was being passed that said she couldn't discriminate against gay people. Then the religious right is born. The same year as Bryant's campaign, evangelical and fundamentalist leaders founded new political machines. The Moral Majority, 1979, spearheaded by again Jerry Falwell and then Christian Voice, Concerned women for America and Focus on the family, founded by James Dobson, who as a reminder, was mentored by an atheist white supremacist eugenicist named Paul Poo. These groups married b biblical language to political strategy. And they blended conservative Christianity with Republican politics. Homosexuality, along with abortion, became central axis of their man made fake culture war. And this marriage was solidified in the Reagan era. Homosexuality was ideal for this role. It could be cast as sinful and un American. Invoking this fear while positioning evangelicals as defender of morality and children, the same children they don't want to be fed in schools. Evangelical leaders use television, radio and megachurch pulpits to spread this narrative. And they did galvanize millions of voters. This same period saw the NIV Bible from 1978 popularized the mistranslated use of homosexual in multiple verses. So they took it from one verse, spread it to others. Then again, the 1980s Republican platform began echoing of evangelical talking points, warning of moral decline, framing the family as under threat. No, they're not. And then Ronald Reagan, initially silent on the AIDS crisis, catered to this new base by promoting traditional values and allowing religious rhetoric to flourish in government. Then enters the 80s and the AIDS epidemic. It intensified evangelical opposition to homosexuality. The media describing AIDS as a gay disease. Evangelical leaders weaponized the crisis as evidence of God's divine punishment. Jerry Falwell called AIDS the wrath of God upon homosexuals. And Pat Robertson blamed the gay community for spreading a plague through sin. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but my father, also a ultra right conservative and a Republican politician, wrote a book about how gay deserved to die. And AIDS was proof. I'm very ashamed of that. I don't remember what the book was called. I've tried to burn it from my memory, but I remember it being on the shelves of my dad's library. These narratives not only demonized gay men, but also diverted attention from systemic public health failures that the health care system was failing, but they didn't want health care for everyone. So they diverted the attention they distracted so that people wouldn't push for change. During this time, evangelicals pushed for anti gay laws, blocked funding for AIDS research and education, and promoted harmful conversion therapy. In the 1990s, evangelical groups shifted towards legislative action. So now they've moved from really not being politically active at all to now they're actively pushing for legislation. The Defense of Marriage act passed in 1996 with support from both parties. Evangelical legal firms like the Alliance Defending Freedom or adf, emerged, which I'm going to do an episode on them because they are the reason for the Dobbs decision. They focused on religious liberty lawsuits as a way to protect Christian institutions while legally discriminating against LGBTQ individuals. In the early 2000s, George W. Bush and Republican operatives used state ballot initiatives banning same sex marriage as a voter turnout strategy. Evangelicals organized grassroots campaigns in dozens of states claiming that same sex marriage would destroy the family. And this is how they get their numbers to turn out, by creating a lie around an issue that isn't an issue. And today in the Religious Freedom and The Culture War 2.0, although public opinion has shifted dramatically towards LGBTQ rights, there's still evangelical institutions that are a powerful form of resistance. Religious freedom is now the primary argument. It's used to justify denying LGBTQ people jobs, housing, wedding services, and even medical care under the guise of, well, my religion prohibits me from helping you, which it does not. Religious English. Religious liberty gives you the right to practice your own religion however you see fit, provided it does not cause harm. It does not give you the entitlement to persecute or discriminate against others. Groups like the Family Research Council, the Liberty Council, the ADF are actively shaping Republican legislation. ADF was also in charge for that Colorado baker who discriminated against a gay couple because he was just an artist that didn't want to make a cake that said that.
- [15:18]
Brandon Robertson
Sure.
- [15:19]
Host
Most recently, we've seen the groomer panic revived the Anita Bryant style tactics casting LGBTQ individuals and allies as threat to children to justify book bans, book burnings, anti trans legislation and school censorship. This has also led to an increase in hate crimes and the fact that with this rumor panic, gay people very rarely commit crimes against children. And we have the stacks. That's not a. That's not a feeling, that's not an opinion. That's a stat. But it doesn't matter because facts don't matter when all you're trying to do is manipulate large groups of people. So now that you know that homosexuality, like abortion, is just a political tool in Christian nationalism to get what they want and to make sure that Christian religious liberty is the only religious liberty that matters in America to shape America in their own image, I'm going to welcome our very special guest again. Brandon Robertson has worked deeply in this field. He is a gay activist, a writer, a preacher, and an openly gay theologian. And we're going to discuss these clobber verses, the way the Bible is manipulated to attack the queer community. And we're going to hopefully give some hope, healing and restoration. Let's welcome him onto the interview. Here we are. Brandon, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for the work you've done. I'm so excited to talk about your book. I'm just so deeply grateful.
- [16:37]
Brandon Robertson
Thank you so much for having me. I've been following for a while and I'm so grateful for your work and witness in the world as well.
- [16:43]
Host
And so you have the day that this episode comes out is the day after your book Queer and Christian comes out. And I want to spend a lot of time talking about what you cover here because I think this may be the most clear and deeply authentic conversation about this intersection of faith and existing in the queer community that I've ever read and where I really wanted to start. Without spoiling the story, but give people a little bit of your background, your journey with faith, how that intersected with sexuality before we get into like the meat and potatoes of everything.
- [17:23]
Brandon Robertson
Totally. Yeah. Well, thank you again for those kind words. And yeah, I mean, my journey, it's the journey of so many of us in the queer Christian space, but also in the deconstruction space. I ended up becoming a fundamentalist Baptist when I was 12 years old because I started going to church with my neighbors. And it's that time period, I see it all the time where you either have lots of teenagers becoming religious, getting saved, as we would have put it.
- [17:49]
Host
Yep.
- [17:50]
Brandon Robertson
You also have a lot of teenagers coming into puberty and so starting to realize things about their sexuality and gender identity. And for me, both of those things began happening at the same time. But faith and the church really saved my life. As a young 12 year old, I was kind of stereotypical closeted gay kid, quiet, shy, was not hanging out with all the boys, was getting bullied. And so by the time I started going to church, it really was the first place I ever felt like I truly was welcomed and I truly belonged. And yet it was only a few months into going to church that I also began hearing our preacher say things like, no homosexual will enter the kingdom of God. And at the time, I didn't identify as gay or didn't even use that language for myself. But for some reason, when I heard my pastor preaching so adamantly against the gay community, it felt like he was talking to me. And so I found myself in a place of fear and struggling as I was trying to navigate how I remained belonging to this new community that had introduced me to the faith and also dealt with this new identity that was beginning to emerge within me. And the long story short is I did that. Okay. Suppressing my sexuality until I got off to college, where I went to Moody Bible Institute to study, become a pastor. And it was in those four years that studying the Bible in an academic context and then also going out into the city of Chicago, which is where Moody was located, both of those things began to reveal to me that what my church was saying was not as black and white as it seemed. The Bible wasn't as clear on the topic of LGBT issues as the church was making it seem. And the people I was experiencing out in the city, some of them were gay, but even folks that were like Muslim or atheists that my faith had demonized, I began to interact with them and see that they weren't these scary, evil people. But actually, the way I put it is I would find God in all the places God wasn't supposed to be among these people. And the long story short, there is. I just started really wrestling until I was able to come to a place where I recognized the version of Christianity I was a part of didn't accurately represent the faith that had changed my life as a 12 year old that was found in the voice and works of Jesus. And that led me on a new journey that allowed me to eventually come to reconcile faith and sexuality and leave evangelical Christianity behind.
- [20:25]
Host
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, because you mentioned that you. You kind of. You were open about your questions and your exploration while you were in college. Can you talk a little bit about what the college and what leadership's response was to that and. And kind of what they expected of you in that space.
- [20:43]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, totally. So when I went off to Bible college, I made a pact with God that if I devote my life to go study to be a pastor, that God was gonna take away my same sex attraction, as I put it, and get me a wife, and I would just gonna graduate, go off into the sunset and be a Good evangelical preacher. But again, what happened in college was that overlapping of being thrown into a big city for the first time allowed me to begin asking questions that I didn't know I wanted to ask. We would walk off the campus of Moody, which was really right in the heart of downtown Chicago, and you're surrounded by cultures and experiences and people that started raising real questions for my faith. And at the time, I've always been a little bit of a contrarian. And so for some reason, I had a blog and a podcast back in college where I would share these kind of musings about, like, hey, maybe the Catholics aren't that bad, and maybe Muslims aren't going to hell, and maybe the gays aren't all abominations. And the response I got from school leadership, six times over four years, I was called into the dean's office and threatened with expulsion because I was asking questions about what they considered were orthodox doctrines or ethical perspectives. And that really did more for my faith journey, both negatively and positively, than anything else. Right? Because I recognized that the faith I was a part of was rooted in fear. If asking questions about whether hell exists, I wasn't even saying it didn't exist. I was asking if it existed. If that elicited such fear that I wasn't allowed to be a part of this community anymore and I couldn't study to be a pastor anymore, then what does that say about the God that they believed in and the Jesus that they followed? One verse really changed my life, and I opened this book with it first. John says, God is love, and perfect love casts out all fear. I recognized in college that if God is love and love casts out fear, whenever fear is present, God is not. And so I started to see that this tradition didn't have God at its center. It had something else. And that started making me. Freeing me, I would say, to begin to explore beyond the boundaries of conservative Christianity.
- [23:01]
Host
I love that. And one of the things I say a lot, because, you know, you and I operate in different spaces, but we're both questioning the traditional white American version of Christianity. And it does incite so much fear in people to even ask questions. And I always tell them that the truth is never afraid of scrutiny. The truth will hold up against research and data and questions and discussions. The truth isn't afraid of that. Because for me, in my deconstruction and I went through a period of completely walking from all forms of religious anything, but I was reminded that the truth will set you free. So if your truth is making you feel like a prisoner, it's forcing you either to be subjugated, whether that's inflicted on yourself or someone else is doing it to you, then that by definition, according to scripture is not truth. And I'm so glad that this is becoming a more common conversation, because one of the things for me deconstructing evangelicalism was that I could not get on board with this idea that if there is a loving God who makes humankind in his image, why would he hate a large group of them that he made like that? Those two things could not both be true at the same time. And I'm wondering how you kind of wrestled with that on your way out of evangelicalism.
- [24:29]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, I mean, those types of questions are, I think, at the heart of so many of our deconstruction journeys. Because here's the thing that I've now realized a decade later. So much of conservative evangelical Christianity just doesn't make logical sense. And. And yet because of this faith language, we're told that we just have to accept it as a divine mystery. And even if it's not a mysterious thing, evangelicals are really good at creating systems of theology that explain the absurdity of the faith that we believe in. The very idea that there is a God who in the Hebrew Bible forgives people all the time, but could not forgive the sins of humanity unless a blood sacrifice was given for us. And the only way to access that forgiveness is through believing right things. And like, the system falls apart. And I did start realizing that kind of tip towards the tail end of my college experience. And that question about, I mean, the truth of evangelical theology is that a majority of humans are going to burn in hell for eternity. And at that time I was a part of the Mark Driscoll conservative movement that actually delighted in that. And there was actually this kind of smugness to think about us being the chosen ones of God, we were the elect. And so too bad for the rest of humanity, too bad for the gays, too bad for the Muslims and the atheists, they're all going to burn in hell, but they're just chosen by God. But again, the cognitive dissonance, and it sounds so simple and trite, but it's not. Just read the words of Jesus, like, look at the example of Jesus. That is what compelled me as a 12 year old. That's why I walked down the aisle and prayed. The sinner's prayer was because of who Jesus was. And the theology of damnation, the theology of exclusion bears no resemblance and finds no grounding in the Actual words of Jesus. And that's when somebody has that realization. I think the deconstruction process is inevitable because you realize you're believing a system rather than in the living loving person of Christ that we're supposed to be seeking.
- [26:39]
Host
Yeah. And also I think that when we, when you're able to step out of the indoctrination and out of the bubble, you look at how blatantly dishonest their approach to the biblical text is. Like this is a, this is an ancient text written by a host of different authors who had their own biases, especially about patriarchal rule that some of it's myth. I was never taught that, you know, growing up, because it was. The Bible is 100% literal and everything is the literal word of God. And so you can't, you know, but then again you get into it and you look at verses about slavery or about women being property and I'm like, okay, but we don't believe this anymore. And what I'd love to do because. And I'm sure you get a lot of these on your platforms, you know, people in the queer community coming to you saying thank you for showing me that God doesn't hate me. And I've had. So I was kind of shocked that I had so many messages about that and one that was really just heartbreaking. I had a 14 year old trans student reach out to me who said, I've been contemplating taking my own life because I felt like that was my only option, that either I was gonna live in sin because God hates who I am, or I just had to end my own life, which is also a sin. And I thought I was gonna go to hell your way. It was so like I couldn't believe that a 14 year old is awake at night hearing this. And so what I'd love to do is especially with you, cover in here the most common in your book, queer and Christian. The most common arguments of this is why God hates gay people. And I would love to take some time and kind of lightly touch on those and debunk them a little bit. And I would like this episode to be something that people can send to each other that says, no, we're gonna heal from this, we're gonna heal from this rhetoric. God does not exclude you. And being someone who has studied this so thoroughly, I was waiting to have this conversation with you. So if you're down for that, I'd love to jump in and talk about these passages. If you listen to my content, you probably know that I talk a lot about history, a lot about current events, a lot about religion. Sometimes it feels like the big jarring headlines hit the news every single day. And that's why I use ground news. Ground news lets me look at all the headlines on an issue in one. It gives me all the sources. Do they lean left or right? Who owns those new sources? How factual are those sources? I can get balanced information from multiple sources by looking at a wide variety of things in one app. I don't waste time diving into a source that doesn't really have a lot of factuality. It saves me a lot of time and a lot of content overwhelm, which is easy to experience with today's headlines. You can subscribe today using the link groundnews.com monte for 40% off their vantage plan. And stay informed with the resource that you can trust. This brings it down to about $5 a month to make sure that you know you're getting good information from a quality source in one single app.
- [29:39]
Brandon Robertson
Totally.
- [29:40]
Host
So the first one is Genesis. Genesis 1 and 2. And I know I'm gonna. I'm gonna play Christian nationalists here. So they are gonna say it's. It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. God says it's male and female.
- [29:54]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, yeah. I mean, before I even answer that, the first thing I'll say is that exactly as you already said, the paradigm with which we view the Bible will determine how we interpret it. The Bible has not been understood for the majority of history by Jews and most Christians as the inerrant word of Word of God, meaning that every word of the Bible is spoken by God and is literally true. That's not how most Christians have ever believed it. It's actually a fairly modern doctrine in the last 500 years. And so I give that caveat to say the way we're going to engage the Bible here is the way that most people have, but it's as a library of texts that are written by humans that are, you can believe, inspired by God, but that does not mean that they don't have human fingerprints. So when we get to Genesis chapter one and two, this is the passage where it says, God makes man and woman. In God's own image, the two become one flesh. It's this idea that marriage is only between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Right. This. Most scholars agree that Genesis chapter one and two, if you actually look at it in most English Bibles, it's a poem. If you look how it's formatted in your Bible in English, it's not like the rest of the verses, it's literally a poem. It's a myth. It was not intended to be a literal accounting of what happened at the beginning of the world. It's a creation myth, which is found in most ancient Near Eastern cultures. And Genesis 1 and 2 isn't about the creation of the world. It's actually the creation of the Jewish people. It was their origin story. And in it, the word Adam in Hebrew, ha adama, simply means human one. It is not a gendered term, and it's not a name. So we're told that God creates the human one in God's own image and likeness, and the human one is given a partner, and. And those two people. Then we see gendered language pop into the text to become one flesh. There's a male and female, and it's this command to procreate. What this passage is actually getting at is not a prescription of how all marriage relationships should look like for the rest of time. This passage is trying to describe how the Jewish people emerged on the scene. And the way that happens is God creates a Jewish human person and that Jewish human person procreates. And thus you have. The Jewish people are formed. And the key thing that I believe we can take from the Genesis story isn't that it's a literal historical accounting of how marriage was formed, but that in the passage, God says to the Adama, it is not good for you to be alone. Genesis is actually communicating something about the deep needs of humans to be in relationships with one another. And it doesn't prescribe that relationship should be between a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and woman, just simply that all of us need relationships, romantic or otherwise. And so this passage, when looked at in its context, is a myth. It's meant to be a poetic accounting of the history of the Jewish people. And the emphasis is on the need for covenant relationship with other people, rather than a prescription of what all marriage relationships should look like for all time, which is how conservatives use the passage.
- [33:03]
Host
Yeah, and I mean, and it does establish, you know, this kind of patriarchal format that shows up in Genesis, but it was written by people that. That was their understanding of culture. You know, we don't. Again, we don't believe that women are property. We don't. You know, fathers don't typically shop their daughter out for 12 camels and a herd of sheep anymore. It's like. So we've been able to grow past understanding, you know, that humans have learned more. We know that we revolve around the sun. Now we know that schizophrenia is not demon possession. And I think for me, that's one of the areas where things get really dishonest is it's like we clearly do not adhere to the moral standards of the people person who wrote this book, but we're gonna pick and choose what we want because we want to manufacture this God being into someone who hates the same people we do.
- [33:56]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah. And what is. It is also scary, though, that there are the most conservative fringes of the MAGA movement, and the Mark Driscoll types are actively trying to reinstate this ancient patriarchy, which is something that we haven't seen in recent evangelical history, at least in the mainstream. But it is becoming the mainstream. And that, to me, is even more terrifying than even the dishonest evangelicalism that I think we probably came from. That did pick and choose a lot more. Now you've got people in Moscow, Idaho, saying that we want to set up Sharia law, essentially, but with the Bible and submit all women to the leadership of men. Like, yep, you're using the Bible in ways it's not intended to be used and trying to create a Bronze age culture in 2025. It's wild.
- [34:44]
Host
And also this idea, and I mean, this goes back to Rushdooney, you know, bringing capital punishment for things like adultery or being a rebellious teenager. And the fact that this is no longer such a fringe sect that even conservative Christians are like, whoa, dude, you need to chill out. That they're actually engaging this way. And especially I find a lot of people like, well, if you don't like America, why don't you go to Iraq and see how you like it there? And I'm like, you're proposing doing the same thing here, just using Christianity instead of Islam. Like, you're compare. You want me to go to a theocracy that has the style of government you want? Yes, and now. And you can look at that country and see it's not working. Yep, clearly it's working for a very few people.
- [35:31]
Brandon Robertson
And yet it's so wild that we see Donald Trump just this week over in the Middle east swooning at these cultures which do have these kind of very Biblical, in some senses, like ancient world policies. It's getting really. Getting really scary when the president of the United States is swooning over cultures that promote the subjugation of women and the murder of queer people.
- [35:53]
Host
And yeah, it's. It's definitely progressively become a nightmare. And then staying in Genesis, the next one, they're going to bring up is Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they were engaging in homosexuality.
- [36:08]
Brandon Robertson
This one is just so easy. People don't read their Bibles because even if you literally take this story as a historical fact, which it is not, but if you do take it as a historical fact, the story is about two angels that come to warn Lots that God is going to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their immorality.
- [36:28]
Host
And.
- [36:28]
Brandon Robertson
And the men of Sodom come to gang rape the angels. Now to something you already talked about. What you're going to see in the rest of the passages is how gender worked in the ancient world and how different it is in our world in almost all ancient cultures. And this will apply to every other Bible verse. We're going to talk about men of a certain country if, like American men, for instance, were permitted legally to sexually abuse and use anybody of a lower social status or of a different cultural background than them. So in these ancient cultures, sex was not about romantic attraction. It was about power and social status. And therefore, when the men of Sodom see these foreigners, these angels come in from the outside, they're xenophobic. These. These are ancient Bronze Age, Bronze Age cultures that were hell bent on dominating and conquering and taking more land. I mean, this is how the ancient world worked. And so when these foreigners came in unprotected to their land, they went, wanted to go sexually abuse them to show their superiority. And Lot, as a good person who follows the law of God in the Hebrew Bible, which says to protect strangers, says, no, you cannot abuse these men. However, the horrible thing in the story is, was common in ancient cultures, but we see it in the story from modern eyes. And it's ghastly that Lot offers his daughters because he takes this law of God to protect the foreigner and the immigrant more than he does to protect his own family. And again, this is just showing how complex and backwards ancient morals in many ways were. But the very fact that Lot offers his daughters suggests that the men of Sodom were not gay. They were simply trying to abuse men that they saw on from a different culture. And Lot seems to think that the men would have wanted to take his daughters.
- [38:30]
Host
Yeah. Otherwise he wouldn't have offered.
- [38:31]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah.
- [38:32]
Host
Which.
- [38:32]
Brandon Robertson
So.
- [38:32]
Host
And one of the things that bothers me, you know, being a woman growing up in this space, is that I don't remember a pastor ever addressing how utterly evil and heinous it was that he would offer his daughters to be getting raped Yep. Didn't say a word.
- [38:49]
Brandon Robertson
Because they can't. Right. Like it. It's a. It says something about how messed up our theological system is because you must believe all the Bible is eternally true. You can't critique it. Lot is the holy one in the story. I can acknowledge Lot was holy for wanting to protect the angels. And we should be able to say with full throated condemnation that no, you should not be offering up your family or anyone else to be abused by the men of Sodom. And yet again, this is a different culture. And it's not in every case that I would say modern people are more moral or more evolved than in ancient people. But there are a lot of these instances that we are. And Lot was wrong. The scripture is wrong. That was not a good or noble thing to do. And Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing to do with gay people. It had everything to do with this abusive, exploitative culture. And that's what God was condemning in this story.
- [39:41]
Host
Yeah. And Dan McClellan mentions in a video that really the standard of sexual morality for them, it was that a man could not take a sexually submissive position ever, even with a woman. And so as long as he was dominant, it did not matter the gender of anyone as long as he was in the dominant position. It would have been considered immoral to be submissive and it would have been considered immoral to spill his seed because that's where they believed life came from. And it was really about preserving the culture, preserving the tribe. And again, we skip over that of like, this is what they believe to be wrong because men had carte blanche to do whatever they want. And if you even read the Old Testament, sex is not something that women participate in. It happens to them. And even the verbiage references women as objects. When Nathan comes to King David, Bathsheba is a ewe lamb who was powerless in the situation where the rich man stole her from the poor man. So it's very, again, it's very just like we have to understand this in a culture that is so vastly, wildly different than ours is absolutely spot on. It's just I've been working on a lot of this for some. Like, it's so frustrating. I wish people would just, just let's just let's consider that this was written thousands of years ago. So another common conver verse in this conversation, Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20.
- [41:17]
Brandon Robertson
Totally this one. I totally understand why on the surface people think it is a condemnation of all gay sex. It says, a man shall not lie with A man, as with a woman, for this is an abomination. That sounds like a clear condemnation of gay sex, but we're taught to read the Bible in context. And so if you zoom out and you look at Leviticus 18, the entirety of the chapter, you'll quickly see that at the very beginning, God speaks to Israel and says, do not do what they do in the land of Egypt, where I am bringing you from, or what they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you to. Do not follow their customs. And what follows in the rest of this Chapter, including verse 22, are a list of things, customs and practices that were done in ancient Egypt and Canaan, these ancient pagan cultures. And God is telling Israel not to do these things because God is interested in the book of Leviticus in preserving the Hebrew culture and keeping them pure from the influence of other cultures around them. So the natural question you have to ask is, if 1822, do not lie with a man as with woman, simply refers to gay sex. Was gay sex widely permissible in ancient Egypt or ancient Canaan? We have very little evidence of law codes from ancient Canaan, but we have tons of evidence from ancient Egypt. And there is no place in Egypt in this time period where it was permissible for men to have sex with other men as a romantic relationship. There were not gay marriages happening all throughout ancient Egypt, and men didn't have boyfriends all over the place in ancient Egypt. What did happen was what we've already referred to and what we'll continue to refer to in the next few verses, these exploitative sexual relationships where Egyptians or Canaanites would conquer a nation, come sexually exploit and abuse their men, women and children. And that was permissible by law. It was moral. It was something that was a very regular practice. So the simple interpret, simplest interpretation of this passage is the author of Leviticus is going to be condemning the widespread practice of sexual exploitation and abuse. And this is even amplified, this interpretation, in that the Jewish people were colonized and captured by ancient Egypt. So it would have rested in their memory that they had faced this sexual exploitation and abuse. And as you pointed out in our last answer, there was nothing more shameful for a man to be emasculated, to be penetrated by another man. That would have degraded him in a way that was irreparable in the eyes of the culture. And so, of course, the author of Leviticus is condemning this practice of exploiting other men. And if that is the most likely interpretation, which I believe it is, I stand against that too. So, yes, I condemn the kind of same sex sex Leviticus is condemned, using.
- [44:06]
Host
It as, as dominance and abuse to harm someone. And I find it interesting, you know, because in Leviticus 18 addresses a lot of incestuous relationships, but at least in my mind, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, But with Leviticus 18:22, I would think that if it was the same sex interaction in and of itself, then the author would have addressed women as well. Because he does with adultery. He does with bestiality. He says, men do not do this. And then he goes to the next verse and he says, women do not do this. So for me, logically, if it was the same sex interaction that was the problem, he would have also addressed women, which he never does in the entire book of Leviticus in that way.
- [44:50]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah. And just to add how ghastly Leviticus is, even if it's not condemning gay sex. The reason he doesn't address women and the reason we see it in no other passage, except for one in the entirety of the Bible condemning women on women's sex, is because women were viewed as lower than men and women were sex objects that could be used by anyone, for anyone. And so it's a rare thing we do in Leviticus 18. You're right. See, some condemnations of women sex, but as you talked about earlier, like generally women, the problem of a man allowing himself to be penetrated by another man, the ancient Greek literally says the reason that isn't a good thing is because they become as a woman. The misogyny in all of this, these biblical passages related to sex and gender is at the core of everything. And it's, It's.
- [45:39]
Host
And is that argument, you know, essentially the same for Leviticus 20:13 as well? I mean, it's all within the holiness code.
- [45:47]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, it's literally the same verse. The only thing that happens in Leviticus 20 is they add the death penalty. And if you look at any scholarship, conservative or liberal, no one believes that any of the ancient Jewish people carried out the death penalty for this or any other of the things that death is called for because it calls for death for disobeying your parents. It was just a hyperbolic punishment that was not actually used in any real way by the ancient Hebrew people.
- [46:15]
Host
So much to learn and so much. Such a little time. Such little time. Okay, Deuteronomy 22, verse 5. A man shall not wear the clothes of a woman, or the woman the clothes of a man.
- [46:26]
Brandon Robertson
I'll start getting more succinct with these ones. So this one quite simply cannot apply in the way that it's used today as a condemnation of cross dressing or of drag queens or of trans people. Because in the ancient world, first of all, the clothing between men and women was almost identical. So this verse would have been hard to actually live out in the context from which it was written. And clothing changes gender in every age. Yeah. So it's in it. If you're taking it literally, it's an impossible command to ultimately understand. But really, again, what it comes down to is the Hebrew Bible is trying to keep the Jewish people's culture distinct. And in many ancient cultures there were certain dresses that men would wear and women would wear. There are certain pagan festivals where men would dress like women of that culture and women would dress like men. This verse is just trying to say to the Jewish people, maintain your cultural distinctiveness. Because as you mentioned, they were a often colonized people, their identity is always under threat. And so the entirety of the codes of the Hebrew Bible are just about preserving identity, preserving survival, not about making moral law codes about gender for all people and all types of.
- [47:41]
Host
Yeah. And then, you know, the foundation of the Christian faith is Christ. So we'll jump to Matthew 19, and this is often used that, you know, Jesus is saying that divorce is between a man and a woman, which means he's only saying men and women can get married.
- [47:57]
Brandon Robertson
This one again, pretty easy if you actually read it in context. Jesus is asked a question, a specific question about a specific couple who is facing a specific divorce. And Jesus says it is wrong for this couple to get divorced. He's asked about a man and a woman and he responds about a man and a woman. Jesus isn't thinking about gay people in this section. And also, Jesus as a first century Jew probably was not aware of any same sex couples in his culture around him. So he would have had no reason to even think about this. The problem with this verse for conservatives is that they. If you insist that Genesis 1 and 2 as we talked about are literal and prescriptive of how every relationship must be for the rest of time, then you can read Jesus as saying, well, that standard remains true for all people in all time. But that's not what Jesus is attempting to do here. That's not how Jesus or any other 1st century Jewish writer understood what Genesis was. This is just Jesus telling folks that divorce is wrong. And actually in this passage he's protecting women because men were allowed to divorce women for any reason at any time and women had no recourse or economic means. Of stability. Jesus raises the standard here and says, you can only divorce if there's adultery in a relationship rather than any reason. And that actually gave women more security in these cultures because men couldn't just toss them aside and leave them economically unstable. So this is a win for Jesus, but not for anti gay Bible interpreters.
- [49:24]
Host
Yeah. And it's very much. Again, you know, for me, the. The bad faith of so many of these arguments is noticeable to me in what they don't point out in the fact that, like, they totally gloss over this chapter about how men could throw their wives on the street for any reason. And it's the wrongness of that. And clearly that's not God's standard. Right. And the fact that Jesus is in his, again, he's asked a direct question that he answers, but he's also stepping in to intercede for women and try to protect them in a culture that didn't see them as people. I mean, even through the ancient Greeks, they saw women as deformed male bodies that were like a perversion of the male body, which is just so heartbreaking. And it's. But it's comical almost. It's just, what do you like? And especially women being the person that brings life into the world and still viewing them as less than or a deformation of what should be. Yeah, it's. It's very dishonest. I'm gonna cover two more verses, and then I want to talk just a little bit more about the book, but also just what gives you hope in your faith and. And kind of a new. How can we look at scripture in a fresh way? So Romans 1, this is where he's talking about. They gave themselves over to unnatural desires. Even the women exchanged their natural lust for unnatural ones.
- [50:50]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, this one we already know the answer to. Folks have already heard it on here. But it is also probably the most familiar passage. Right. That it seems like this is the nail in the coffin of the LGBT Christian movement. But you've got to understand the context. Rome was even more patriarchal and hypersexualized than the ancient Canaan or Egypt or Israelite culture in Rome. We have so much evidence. You can go to Rome today and see the reason. There are obelisks all over the city. They are phallic symbols that, like the obsession with penises and masculinity and dominance in Rome is everywhere. And in ancient Rome, it was very common for Roman men to have sex with anybody they wanted of a lower social status. It was also common in ancient Rome for there to be Priests and priestesses and temples to pagan deities that would offer themselves as sacrifices and people would come and have sex with them ritually to please, for instance, the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of sex. And so there was a sacred prostitution tradition that existed in the ancient Greco Roman world. This is what Paul is looking around at as a Jewish person who is trying to spread a Jewish movement in this pagan Roman world. And Romans chapter one and two is supposed to be his condemnation of the entirety of this culture. And in the middle of the condemnation he says once the Roman people exchanged the truth of God for the lie, once the Roman people started worshiping idols, then the Roman people, because of the idolatry, began to have sex with whomever they wanted. Men with men, women with women. Inflamed with lust is the key phrase here because Paul's a Stoic. He's influenced by Stoic philosophy which was dominant in the 1st century Roman world, which says that all desire in humans is actually weakness and sinful. And so we should repress and suppress all of our desire. And that's what makes one strong. Paul has that going on in his mind, plus the Jewishness of Leviticus in his mind of we've got to stay distinct from these other cultures and they're having sex in ways that don't lead to procreation and that emasculate people. So Paul condemns the sex that he's seeing in the Roman world which was not loving, consensual, same sex relationships, it was exploitative and abusive or idolatrous. And we'll just say this is the only passage where same sex sex between women is condemned. We have very little evidence that this happened in any widespread way in the ancient Greco Roman world. But that's primarily because women were never written about in the ancient Greco Roman world.
- [53:27]
Host
They didn't care.
- [53:29]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, but it seems likely that if men of Roman citizenship were allowed to have sexual relationships with their slaves, it was also likely that women who were Roman citizens were allowed to have sexual relationships with their women slaves. And that's what most scholars believe is being talked about here because there's no other evidence of widespread lesbian relationships that are documented anywhere in the ancient Greco Roman world.
- [53:53]
Host
Yeah, yeah. And it's again, it always points back to idolatry, abuse, pedestrie, incest of some form. And the last verse I'm going to talk about because this is the one when I was growing up and I was told that gay people were the devil and they're against God was First Corinthians 6, 9.
- [54:11]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah.
- [54:12]
Host
And this, you know the original verse that was Translated by the RSV to add homosexual into it in 1946. What's your, your explanation on that verse? Because I think when I've received messages online, this is the verse that the queer community most often references to me as far as it being used against them.
- [54:33]
Brandon Robertson
This one, I would say is probably actually the easiest one to debunk for two reasons. One, arsenokoitai is a word that Paul makes up. It does not exist in Greek before Paul uses it, and it's only used scarcely in Greek after Paul writes it in this, this verse. So never used in the Greek language. What, how does Paul make this word? Most scholars believe that what Paul did was look at the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And in Leviticus 18:22 it says, an arson shall not coitin with an arson, for this is an abomination. A man shall not lie with a man as with woman. So clearly what Paul is doing is condemning a practice in ancient Corinth that he believes it's the same practice being condemned in Leviticus. Now, the reason we know this isn't consensual same sex relationships is because there are over between 12 to 16 words in Koine Greek that referred to same sex sex. Same sex relationships. There are words in Koine Greek for women who prefer women, men who prefer men. Paul doesn't use any of the words that his audience would have readily understood. Instead, he feels the need to create a new word to refer to a practice that didn't have a word in Greek that condemned it. And so he creates this word arsenal koitei, which is referring to whatever Leviticus is referring to. And what was Leviticus referring to? Exploitative, idolatrous, abusive sex. We know that was happening in ancient Corinth. We know that was happening all across the ancient Greco Roman world. And if you look at the verse and the passages around this, you're exactly right. Paul. I think the verse right before this is literally condemning slave trading. The first after this, he's literally condemning prostitution. These are economic, exploitative, sexual sins, not loving, consensual, same sex relationships.
- [56:22]
Host
And when you know, because again, I'm hoping that this episode, and I already know your book, is gonna be groundbreaking for so many people. But when people are facing this argument and for many members of the queer community, I feel like they feel that they've been forced to sacrifice their faith. Right. Because I can't be who I truly am. And interact with this faith anymore. How would you encourage them to start to start exploring and investigating if they want to?
- [56:53]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah. The two things I say to everyone are, one, you have no obligation to be a Christian. I understand why people walk away. I spent, I was a pastor and then I walked away. Because even in the space of doing inclusive ministry and always having to advocate for myself as a gay person got tired. I get that it's actually spiritually healthy for some of us to step away and say, that's not for me. But the other thing that I think is true is that most people, especially queer people, don't recognize that progressive, inclusive Christianity exists, that there is an alternative. And I believe in my experience of the queer community, that lots of folks do have a spiritual hunger. Lots of folks would like to be a part of the tradition that they were raised in or broadly the Christian tradition they come from, but just don't think that there's anything out there that would ever be welcoming to them. And so I always point people to gaychurch.org, this wonderful website that has literally thousands of churches. And I guarantee there are churches in your community not for you to go in and need to sign up and become a member. But even if you just step into and experience one worship service in a truly inclusive and affirming place that can do more for healing your spiritual trauma and helping you move past some of the abuse we've all experienced in the church, because you recognize that there is a different way of being Christian and there are places that exist for you. So just know that the loudest Christians on TV and on the Internet don't actually represent this broad movement where today every major mainline denomination in the United States is fully affirming of LGBT people at the denominational level. Like, change is happening. It's a new day. And if you want to explore it, there are safe and life giving places for you. And if you're not the friends, go to drag brunch on Sunday morning and get spiritual nourishment there, because that can.
- [58:51]
Host
Be just as life giving. I love drag brunch on a Sunday. And I, I had another question that I get a lot of questions about biblical translations. And this is not an area that I'm a super expert on, especially in light of, for instance, I use on my videos my old Bible that I've, I've had that thing. I was nine. And the reason I keep it is because my dad gave it to me. It's got an inscription on the front of it from him. But I understand that the niv, it's because it's niv, was particularly guilty in propagating this homosexuality is evil lie, even after the RSV changed their translation back. So if people are wanting to read and they're wanting to understand, are there specific translations that you would recommend they look into for being as honest as possible?
- [59:37]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah. Here's the thing. There is not a Bible out there that's going to be the progressive, inclusive, beautiful book that we all want it to be, because the truth is the Bible says some pretty terrible things, and there we can't erase that. But I will say that most people in kind of the progressive and academic world uses the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which is in that lineage of the first Bible that ever used the word homosexual. And the newest version came out last year. It does not use the word homosexuality. What's beautiful about this translation is the committee is people from literally every denomination. There are Roman Catholic translators, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal, liberal, conservative. And it's a really robust, beautiful translation, but it's still got all the bad stuff in it. So the one thing that I actually recommend most people do if they want to do serious study around this stuff, the Society for Biblical Literature just released the SBL Study Bible in the New Revised Standard Version edition last year. And a study Bible has notes from the world's best scholars that help explain all of these sticky verses in Scripture. And because the Society for Biblical Literature is an academic society, they don't have a conservative or theological agenda. And what you'll find is actually all of the kind of liberating interpretation that we're talking about here, come straight from the scholarship, and you can have it all in your Bible. So SBL Study.
- [61:06]
Host
SBL Study Bible. But it's nrsv.
- [61:11]
Brandon Robertson
Yes.
- [61:11]
Host
Awesome. Okay. I was like, Brandon's gonna know the answer to this question. And the last thing I wanted to kind of COVID One of the things that really blew my mind about your book that I was kind of surprised by is you take some of these stories in the Bible that are very clearly about people that were on the gender margin, didn't show up quite like a patriarchal society would have required that they show up. And I would love for you to. And you can pick any of the stories that you want. I would love for you to just share about one of those stories and how, hey, maybe, just maybe, the Bible is actually giving us examples of queer people existing even in this time, that it would have been not the norm.
- [61:58]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, this is something that Brandon, 10 years ago, even as an openly gay Christian, would have rolled his eyes at. And I understand a lot of people are get tense when we talk about reading queer stories into or out of the Bible. But here's what I discovered is that the more you actually study the Bible in its culture and context, and I've spent way too much money in student loans getting Bible degrees for the past decade and really getting to have the privilege of reading the deep scholarship around this and you discover that there are so many examples in the Bible of characters that are transgressing gender and sexual exploitations of the ancient world, which is what we mean when we use the word queer in the modern world. So I don't think it's a stretch to say characters are queer. I'll give a quick rundown of a couple because just I want people to get at the scope of this. The one that everyone might be familiar with is King David and King Jonathan. If you actually read 1st Samuel, their story, there is no way anyone in good faith can read that text plainly and not see the homoerotic components of King David and King Jonathan saying that their love for one another is better than that of a woman. That King Saul, Jonathan's father, comes in and says, why have you fallen in love with David? And essentially accuses him of sexual indecency with King David. And then when Saul, when Jonathan dies, David weeps and says that's the place that he says, your love was better than love I've ever had from a woman. It's this deeply homoerotic story where we can never prove if they were actually in a relationship. But as a queer person, to be able to read a Bible story that gives opening for me to see myself in the story is powerful. You see this in Ruth and Naomi, this beautiful story where a woman from a different culture cleaves to and commits to follow and love and care for a woman of another culture, which was against the scriptures and against cultural practice. And she says, where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Lesbian have lesbians have used that in marriage ceremonies for the past 50 years. Those words because they see a powerful connection there. The other one that I use that will catch people guards is Jesus. The scholarly consensus is that Jesus was queer, not necessarily meaning that Jesus was gay or that Jesus was in same sex relationships, but that in the way Jesus embodied his gender as a 1st century Jewish male was different and subversive than all the expectations of his culture. Jesus was supposed to have been married and have kids by the age of 30. And yet Jesus chooses to spend his life life as a single man, as far as we can tell, hanging out on the margins with all the people his society and culture said were impure and unclean. And then there are these beautiful, mysterious instances in all four gospels that do suggest there's some queerness either between we've all will have heard. There are suggestions that there's something going on with Jesus and Mary Magdalene, which is interesting. Dan Brown has done his work on that. I, as a gay man, prefer this reading that Jesus has this beloved disciple. The only person Jesus ever says he loves directly in any of the four gospels is a man named Lazarus, the same man who Jesus weeps at his tomb when he dies and Jesus raises him from the dead. And in this other first century text called the Secret Gospel of Mark, Lazarus and Jesus spend a night together with Lazarus naked at Jesus's feet. I say all of this to say none of this is to say that any of these characters were verifiably historically gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. But straight people have been able to read the Bible and see themselves reflected in it because they assume that everyone in Scripture is like them for 2000 years. It is now time for queer people to reclaim our Bible and to be able to have creative reading and engaging with the text that opens up the possibilities of us seeing our lives and our love reflected in text. And that's what this rereading the Bible with queer eyes is supposed to be about. Not about proving historically whether someone was queer or not, but by saying that there is queering going on in the text and there is space for us to see ourselves and to belong in this biblical tradition as well.
- [66:19]
Host
And where would you recommend people start? Because I feel like women that I know and so many queer people I know, like, have been so harmed by the version of Christianity that they were sold that sometimes it's hard and it's prickly, but also people want to reclaim some of it back, you know, because I grew up believing Jesus love and he cares for people. Where would you recommend people start?
- [66:44]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, I mean, it's hard because if you come from an evangelical background like us, this stuff will seem shocking. Even if you don't believe anymore, even if you're progressive, like, this stuff takes time to begin digesting. Interesting. But I really do. Like, you've named some great people already, but there is some great work happening on the Internet, not about queerness, but about helping to rethink what the Bible is. And I say that at the beginning of my book that the problem isn't six verses of the Bible that we're mistranslating. It's the entire way we view the Bible and God and faith that leads us to these horrible translations. And so if you're on a journey to wanting to reconcile faith and sexuality or have a more progressive, inclusive version of faith, I recommend, and starting with people like Peter enns and Dan McClellan and the types of folks that are at a very high level helping to reform how we understand what the Bible is. And the more you're able to start clicking those things, the more all this other stuff will start falling into place. And if you want to do queer theology in specific, my friend Brian Murphy and Shann Kearns have been running a wonderful website called queertheology.org for, for over 15 years now. And it's one of the best resources for everything about how do queer Christians think about polyamory and non monogamy to how do you find queer saints in the stories of the Bible? So it's a great resource if folks want to dive right in.
- [68:09]
Host
I love that. I love that. And what is your hope for the future for everyone moving forward as well as like your personal mission in this space?
- [68:19]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, my mission used to be to reform Christianity. This book really marks a moment of transition for me. I'm not interested in reforming anymore. I end this book with a quote that says, why beg for a seat at the table when you can create your own? My hope for my work, for this book, for the future of this movement that we're all a part of, is that people who have been pushed aside from the Christian faith start wresting the Bible from the hands of those who are using it as a weapon and use it as a tool for our power, use it as a tool for our liberation. Because the Bible is going to continue to be the most influential book in the world for generations to come. And we have the opportunity to take it back and to use it as a tool for liberation, for progressive social renewal, for change, and for justice. And I'm seeing more and more people on the Internet these days with a deep hunger to know more about the Bible and theology and things like that. And I think that gives me hope that better education is out there, the interest is there, and we can turn the tide on Christian nationalism by taking the source of their authority and using it against them in the way that I think the Bible was actually intended to be used. Because by the way, the Bible was written by an oppressed people about their liberation. And that is who the Bible has always been meant for. It's for the people on the margins and it's time that we use it and find our inspiration and strength from it.
- [69:49]
Host
I agree. That is, that is the foundation of the work I do is I'm like, I'm going to take what you have used as a weapon and I'm going to use it against you and I'm going to use it to defend people. Because I do believe, regardless of where people fall on the spectrum of was Jesus a teacher, a prophet, savior is the reality is he stood up for the underdog and he advocated for that repeatedly. And before we go, I would love for you to tell everyone where they can find you, where they can find your work. This is coming out the day after your book Queer and Christian comes out. So go buy a copy but let people know where they can find you.
- [70:22]
Brandon Robertson
Yeah, you can really just head over to queerchristian.org and that will have all my social media. I'm on TikTok, Instagram, all the places and I'm also launching a 40 city book tour across the U.S. canada and the United Kingdom for this book. So I really hope to get to meet some folks out there. If you're interested in going deeper into these conversations, let's hang out.
- [70:40]
Host
That's amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time and you and I have been in conversation. You sent me an advance copy. Thank you for your work and for your honesty. The community really needs it and I just want you to know from where I'm standing that this was deeply healing for me as well.
- [70:55]
Brandon Robertson
Thank you. I really appreciate that and I appreciate all that you're doing.
- [70:58]
Host
So thank you.
- [70:59]
Brandon Robertson
Keep going.
- [71:00]
Host
I will, I will. And hopefully we'll get to talk to you soon on Flipping Tables. Thank you all so much for listening as always. If you would like to receive these episodes ad free, you can sign up for my Patreon Become an accomplice list for $1 a week. You get early episodes, bonus episode and voting power, as well as early releases and exclusive content from me. And I'll see you next week on Flipping Table.