One of the largest religious schisms in American history has occurred in the last few years. Around one quarter of the 30,000 congregations in the United Methodist Church (UMC), the second-largest Protestant denomination in the United States, have left to launch the Global Methodist Church (GMC). They have left because they refuse to be part of a denomination where same-sex marriages can be celebrated and LGBTQ people can be ordained.

When asked about their departure, members of the new anti-LGBTQ denomination tend to sound the same note: they have done what the Bible tells them to do. According to one GMC elder, the UMC’s recognition of same-sex marriages, following the recent repeal of its 52-year-old antigay statement in its Book of Discipline, “separate[d] the denomination from the ancient, orthodox, ecumenical, biblical Christian faith.” Consequently, those joining the GMC, in the words of one member, have merely “chosen to follow the Biblical tradition of Methodism.” Officially, the GMC’s Transitional Book of Doctrines and Discipline maintains that the new denomination adheres to “a scriptural view of sexuality and gender.” Such rhetoric is ubiquitous among Christians who, like the GMC contingent, are called “evangelicals.” In the GMC and elsewhere, evangelicals simply point to the Bible to explain their views on sexuality and gender. 

What’s more, such rhetoric—such simple pointing—is replicated in scholarly accounts of those views. From scholars who identify as “evangelical” themselves to scholars who fancy themselves “secular,” the same note keeps sounding: evangelicals are antigay because they believe the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin. 

As for why evangelicals have come to believe this, many scholars, journalists, and other commentators treat the biblical interpretations of evangelicals as a natural product of their ostensibly stable approach to the Bible. That approach is usually described with language like “literalism,” “inerrancy,” and “a high view of biblical authority.” Often echoed without any interrogation, these terms are made to function as straightforward explanations for why evangelicals do what they do. So, scholars tell us—like evangelicals themselves tell us—that evangelicals are antigay or antifeminist because they have a high view of biblical authority and thus base their positions on biblical texts. Similarly, scholars tell us—like evangelicals themselves tell us—that evangelicals are antigay or antifeminist because they are biblical literalists, and some biblical texts, read literally, teach that homosexuality is sinful and that women are to be subordinate to men. 

I call this “hermeneutical determinism”: attributing the actions of religious subjects to the interpretive principles and approaches that those subjects purport to apply when reading their scriptures. 

In the case study of evangelical stances on sexuality and gender, hermeneutical determinism obscures hermeneutical diversity and hermeneutical change within evangelical communities. As my forthcoming book on the history of evangelical gay activism shows, drawing from a host of evangelical publications and archives of evangelical institutions, a minority of evangelicals in the United States have advocated for churches to recognize same-sex unions and ordain gay and lesbian people since the 1970s. They have frequently done so by using the same evangelical discourses about the Bible—language of literalism, inerrancy, and a high view of biblical authority—that their antigay counterparts have used. The same is true for the evangelical feminist movement that coalesced in the 1970s, which many of the movement’s leaders preferred to call “biblical feminism.”

Moreover, even within antigay and antifeminist evangelical circles, discourses of literalism, inerrancy, and biblical authority have resulted in shifting and conflicting exegetical conclusions. Take, for example, the history of evangelical interpretations of Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction in Genesis 19. In the late 1960s, when evangelicalism’s flagship magazine Christianity Today began deliberately addressing “what the Bible says about homosexuality” for the first time, Genesis 19 was authoritatively cited as clear proof that homosexuality was sinful. Over the course of the next decade, however, authors in the magazine wrestled with alternative interpretations of Sodom’s sins (Was this not a story about a gang rape? Were the perpetrators really homosexuals? Was there such a thing as a real homosexual?). 

By the late 1970s, variable readings of Genesis 19 were raising more questions than a perspicuous scripture was supposed to raise, and authors in the magazine began conceding the inapplicability of this text to an evangelical antigay stance­. Meanwhile, other evangelical publications employed literalist devices in their insistence that the sinners of Sodom really were homosexuals. When we attend to exegetical shifts and conflicts such as these, as well as attend to the broader diversity of evangelical hermeneutics, we realize that the antigay and antifeminist positions of evangelicals are not an automatic consequence of their theology or hermeneutic of the Bible. 

Hermeneutical determinism is problematic even apart from its tendency to under-historicize and to flatten intra-religious diversity. Scholars who rely on hermeneutical determinism in their analyses of evangelical stances tend to parrot evangelicals’ discourse under the guise of analysis while fundamentally misunderstanding the discourse they are parroting. Terms like “scriptural authority,” “inerrancy,” and “literalism” simply do not refer to stable beliefs about scriptural texts or to coherent methods of reading them. They refer to versatile rhetorical tools that evangelicals have wielded in a plethora of ways.

For the sake of ascertaining the extent of that versatility, scholars would do well to discard the widespread view that a scripture is a source of authority, for texts in themselves have no authority to exercise. Instead, we should treat a scripture as “a complicated site of contestation with respect to religious authority.” When they converge on the site of a scripture, religious actors construct various interpretations of scriptural texts, generating “a high-stakes competition of unstable claims” in which religious actors struggle to exercise their own authority through those texts. Conceiving of a scripture as a source of authority is also problematic insofar as we are imagining a singular entity that is isolable from other things regarded as sources of authority, like “science” or “experience.” One cannot engage a scriptural text or lay claim to “scriptural authority” without bringing one’s brain and background to bear on that text (though one can certainly pretend). Evangelicals do a lot of pretending here—that is, accusing their opponents of relying on extra-biblical sources of authority while declaring that they themselves have relied instead on “biblical authority.” Scholars ought not to pretend with them. 

In their efforts to maintain their interpretive authority, religious actors often project coherence and confidence where there is conflict and contingency. For example, in the 1986 Chicago Statement on Biblical Application, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI) projected a unified evangelical front on the subject of divorce: “God hates divorce, however motivated,” although “in a sinful world separation is sometimes advisable and divorce is sometimes inevitable.” All it takes is a few minutes of browsing the ICBI’s archive to reveal not a unified front but a behind-the-scenes battle. Some evangelical leaders, terrified of the rapidly rising divorce rate since the 1960s, maintained that divorce was never justified and cited Jesus’s words to that effect in Mark 10. Other evangelical leaders, mindful that the divorce rate was rising among evangelicals as well, maintained that divorce was sometimes justified and cited Jesus’s words to that effect in Matthew 19. The latter group won the battle, even as both groups agreed to insist that, notwithstanding their competing biblical citations, “we deny that any contradiction exists within Scripture on the subject of divorce and remarriage.” 

For American evangelicals, the labor behind projections of hermeneutical coherence and confidence has become only more complicated since the mid twentieth century, as translations of the scriptures they deem authoritative, inerrant, and perspicuous have proliferated. At times, the proliferation can work to their advantage. In his 1965 book World Aflame, for instance, evangelist Billy Graham included a lengthy discussion of “sexual sins,” in which he consistently cited the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible—until, that is, he discussed Romans 1:27. According to this verse in the KJV, men who had left “the natural use of the woman” and “burned in their lust one toward another” had received “recompence of their error.” Graham was not content with the connotations of “error,” however, and so instead of citing the KJV, he switched to the New English Bible (NEB). Where the KJV used “error,” the NEB used “perversion”—a coded reference to homosexuality at the time of Graham’s writing. Regardless of whether or not any of Graham’s readers pondered or even noticed the switch, Graham himself knew what he was doing and knew what it indicated: the more biblical translations in circulation, the less clear the Bible would seem, and thus the less compelling appeals to a “literal” reading would be.

But the notion of a literalist hermeneutic needs to be interrogated further. In my analysis of antigay evangelical exegesis from the 1950s through the 1980s, I found that the rhetoric of biblical literalism in evangelical discourse on homosexuality increased just as gay-affirming exegesis was on the rise, pressuring antigay evangelicals to assemble more and more elaborate defenses of their own exegesis. Antigay evangelical leaders ramped up their talk of the Bible’s “plain meaning” regarding homosexuality precisely as their own discourse revealed that the issue was becoming less plain. Evangelical communities did not become rabidly antigay because their members read certain biblical texts literally; members of those communities were taught to talk about reading those biblical texts literally as a means of advancing the antigay positions of their community. 

When GMC members and other evangelicals, then, say that they are defending biblical authority, or say that they believe in biblical inerrancy, or say that they are reading the Bible literally, these phrases do not necessarily indicate underlying motives. Rather, they indicate rhetorical strategies. Whatever evangelicals think they are doing when they say that they are defending biblical authority, they are rhetorically defending their own and their communities’ authority to dictate interpretations of certain biblical texts. Whatever evangelicals think they are doing when they say that they believe in biblical inerrancy, they are making use of a term that empowers them to proclaim that their interpretations are inerrant. Whatever evangelicals think they are doing when they say that they are reading a biblical text literally or relaying the plain meaning of a text, they are deploying yet another rhetorical tactic in support of their own interpretations. 

None of this means that scholars should not take what evangelicals or other religious subjects say seriously. It means that we should not go along with our subjects when they appear to not understand what it means to read a text. Nor does this mean that we should treat all scriptural interpretations as epiphenomenal. It means that an approach amounting to “because the Bible tells them so” will not provide a sufficient historical explanation. 

My own research has benefited immensely from critical engagement with what my subjects say about how they read their sacred texts and what their readings of those texts compelled them to do. To my eyes, such engagement is especially needed when examining religious views on sexuality and gender. Some scholars seem inclined to stop their inquiry once apparently sincere individuals start pointing to their scriptures. Our job is not to point alongside them, but to look—not so much at the texts, and certainly not for the sake of ascertaining what the texts “really say” about any given matter, but at wider histories of reading and the myriad phenomena that have shaped them.