Below is an exchange between Jill Hicks-Keeton and Matthew V. Novenson on Hicks-Keeton’s book Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2023).
Matthew V. Novenson: Dr. Hicks-Keeton, many thanks for writing this fascinating book and for agreeing to have a conversation about it. I’m wondering, first of all, what is the book’s origin story? Why did you set out to write this book (and not some other book) now (and not some other time)?
Jill Hicks-Keeton: Thanks for reading! It’s a pleasure to get to talk with you about this book. As I’m sure you know, books usually have multiple origin stories. What I would highlight first is that my own intellectual curiosities in the field of biblical studies have coalesced around the convictions that “the Bible” is produced over and over again in different contexts and that biblical scholars must analyze how scriptures are constructed and how people use them to define themselves and organize society. I want to attend to the power dynamics at play in this process. Good Book is focused in particular on the power dynamics related to gender and violence. I mention in the acknowledgements of the book that, having learned to be an expert in both historical-critical scholarship and in (a lifetime ago) white evangelical “womanhood,” I am dissatisfied with the limitations of both. But I remain interested in how each is entangled in a power apparatus that insists on the Bible’s fundamental goodness, particularly in a time when white evangelicals enjoy outsized political influence in the U.S. Speaking of which: my book also came from a place of ethical urgency. Roe v. Wade was overturned while I was writing it.
I think that many people in our field either accept white evangelical biblicism as normative and so do not articulate the rules by which they make the Bible into scripture, or they dismiss biblicist claims about the Bible’s fundamental benevolence or its divine origins, etc. They think such claims are obviously ridiculous or wrong or not worth attending to. I became interested in writing Good Book because I wanted to take seriously how this particular group of religionists produces a Bible that works for them and with them. Instead of saying (or stopping at) “they’re doing it wrong,” I wanted to ask, “how are they doing it?”; “why are they doing it?”; “how can we analyze it productively?”; and “what are the stakes?”
MN: Yes, that makes good sense. So, further to those questions you just raised: what is the inner logic of white evangelical theology such that, as you argue, white evangelical readers must save the Bible to save themselves? What are they saving themselves from?
JHK: To be completely honest, I do not think that theology or an inner logic thereof is a primary governing factor here. I think it’s instead about power, and particularly about maintaining a perceived position of power that might feel threatened. I argue in the book that when white evangelicals work to square the Bible—the “good” book—with contemporary notions of what is good, they are actually engaged in a respectability project for themselves as moral authorities. That is, close attention to their rhetoric suggests that when they offer defenses of how the Bible is still good even though it has terrible stories, or even though it has been used by Christians to do terrible things in the past, evangelical writers are defending their own moral authority as they navigate a diverse landscape in which they see themselves as unfairly marginalized. Ultimately, they are working to save themselves from public critique. It’s a reputation management project.
MN: Point well made; I ought not assume that there is necessarily anything theological going on. Theology aside, then, I am still curious why white evangelicals save the Bible to save themselves. Surely there are other avenues for reputation management they might have chosen. Why this one?
JHK: Interesting question. Evangelicals, whether or not they adhere to the extremely conservative tenet of biblicism known as “inerrancy,” rely on the Bible as an authoritative communication from a benevolent deity. Their trust in the Bible as a source of truth and exhaustive moral guide does not tolerate any criticism of the Bible’s trustworthiness or moral goodness. If the Bible is fallible, then their deity messed up along the way somewhere, and that is something that evangelical biblicism cannot tolerate either. Evangelicals do not have the same intellectual resources as some other kinds of Christians who, say, rely on more expansive forms and means of divine revelation, or those who deliberately and without compunction read the Bible as important but not infallible, or those whose framework allows for explicit incorporation of contemporary values derived from observation and experience. And because evangelicals usually define the boundaries of who counts as an evangelical and who doesn’t around what one believes–including what one believes about the Bible–if an evangelical Christian were to shift to a different view of the Bible, they would probably not be counted as evangelicals anymore!
MN: Indeed. But that then raises another question for me about what is specifically white and evangelical in all of this. How far does your account apply specifically to white evangelical Bible interpreters (your stated objects of criticism), and how far does it apply to any Christian readers of the Christian Bible (of whatever race, denomination, or theological persuasion), or, for that matter, any religious readers of religious holy books (e.g., Jews with the Torah, Muslims with the Quran, and so on)?
JHK: That’s a great question. In Good Book, I develop the analytic category of “bible benevolence” to name the work that interpreters do to make the Bible good. Such a project is necessary because “good,” of course, is always evolving. What was deemed “good” fifty years ago (let alone 2000 years ago) is not always the same as what we might view as good today. And the definition of “good” also varies quite a bit across any given society. So what Bible benevolence names is the work interpreters do with the Christian Bible to make it good for them in dialogue with prevailing notions of good within the interpreter’s time and place.
This is something Christian readers do all the time. In the book, I use the subset of U.S. Protestants known as white evangelicals as a case study (due in part to my own familiarity with writing on white evangelicalism). But I hope that the conceptual term Bible benevolence will prove useful in analyses of other groups that I do not treat in the book. Liberal Protestants, for example, often make the Bible good as they construct a Jesus that serves as a model for social justice advocacy or make Paul into an anti-imperial resister. The same applies to other kinds of Christians, though the Bible does not play the same role in, say, Catholic theology as it does (broadly) for Protestants. In other Christian traditions, the Bible plays a role alongside and in conversation with other forms of authority (tradition, ecclesial authority, etc); however, in each of those systems arguments need to be constructed for why this constellation of authorities is “good,” or, in other words, why we should see this particular arrangement as good for us and as good according to the values espoused by the wider culture.
Bible benevolence as an analytic category is thus a subset of what scholars in the tradition of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Vincent Wimbush have shown about the nature and function of “scriptures” more broadly. In his work, Smith notes how scriptures do not exist as such but are made scriptural by human activity. Humans make scriptures over and over again by how they treat them, by setting them apart in specific ways from other forms of writing, speech, or literature. One of the roles of the scholar of religion, for Smith, is to study how people make their scriptures. Building on Smith’s work, Wimbush has called the work of making scriptures “scripturalization.” Wimbush notes that it is not just groups that make scriptures, but a whole assortment of socio-political relations of power that make scriptures…and make the conditions within which they can be interpreted. What this means is that the meaning of any given scripture is not located in the text itself. Meaning is made within an assortment of interpretive constraints. What I’m doing in Good Book can be seen as one way of looking at how a sect of Christians makes meaning out of their scriptures within a set of interpretive constraints and social relations. As such, I think that this can be done with any set of scriptures, though it will take as many different forms as there are groups that venerate scriptures.
MN: That is a helpful point: wherever there are scriptures, there is scripturalization. But what about goodness, or benevolence, in particular? Is that part of what is meant in calling any given text a scripture? Or is it, rather, a peculiarly white evangelical way of thinking about scripture?
JHK: Bible benevolence is not peculiar to white evangelicals. (Biblical scholars of all stripes do it all the time!) White evangelical ways of making the Bible good may or may not overlap with those of other Bible-venerators. White evangelical strategies of benevolence work may or may not find analogies in those of other scripture-venerators and scripture-makers. There is no one, universal way in which groups make scriptures from a cross-cultural perspective. Every scripture is made locally out of various assumptions and procedures. But it is the case that often (not always) the goodness of a given scripture is axiomatic in the production of that scripture as scripture. Now, of course, what it means for anything to be “good” is a moving target within a particular culture, as I show in the book with regard to white evangelicals. Thus, when scriptures are made and remade in the dialectical process that W.C. Smith names, they are often required to conform to standards of goodness that are particular to a specific time and place. These standards need not always be dominant forms of goodness shared by a whole society. They can be rooted in the particular dynamics of a social subgroup or subculture, as when some white evangelicals claim, for example, that the Bible is counterculturally good in relation to dominant, “perverse” moralities of modern secular society. But, more often than not, the pitch for any given scripture is that it resonates with the prevailing norms and values of the social order. Scripture is good somehow. And it’s the “somehow” that I think demands investigation.
MN: Indeed it does, and you have shown us all how to undertake that kind of investigation. Dr Hicks-Keeton, thanks again for writing the book and for discussing it with me (and with AJR readers) in this forum.
Jill Hicks-Keeton is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California.
Matthew V. Novenson is the Helen H. P. Manson Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.