Jeremy Jernigan [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Cabernet and Pray, the podcast where we explore Christianity through the beauty of wine. This is episode 27, calling this ministers of propaganda. Today we're going to unpack this book. This is truth, power, and the ideology of the religious rite. We're joined today by the author, Scott Coley. He is a lecturer of philosophy at Mount St. Mary's University. He has written this book.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:00:29]:
And really what you're going to see throughout this episode is the spiritual side of propaganda. Maybe you hear the term propaganda and you immediately think politics. And certainly there's a lot of overlap, as you'll see in this episode. But Scott does a great job of exploring how the ideas behind a lot of these propagandas are often used in a spiritual sense as to what we believe and how we get there. A few things. We're going to dive into this episode that you may go, oh, this is going to be helpful. We're going to address the idea of when people say, I don't see color, to offer a rebuttal of, well, I'm not a racist, I don't see color. And if you've ever heard that idea and it didn't feel right to you and you thought, no, it doesn't mean what you think it means, we're going to explore that.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:01:16]:
If you've heard people talk about, we just need law and order, and whenever there's an uprising or people are not okay with what's happening, you often hear even christians talk about, we just need to get back to law and order and, and we're going to explore how that may not mean what people think it means. And, and we're going to even talk about authoritarianism in the church and how maybe a lot of our theology and our practices of following Jesus reveal far more about the authoritarian type of leader we're looking for rather than what it means to follow Jesus. And all of that is going to be in this episode. If you are a deep thinker, Scott is going to be an episode you're going to absolutely love because Scott goes there, and this is going to be a book you're going to want to explore. If these ideas are intriguing to you, we're just going to scratch the surface today, but enjoy episode 27. I've never shared this with anybody publicly. There's so many things happening in this conversation right now.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:03:56]:
Scott, welcome to Cabernet and pray.
Scott M Coley [00:03:59]:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:04:02]:
This is going to be fun. We're going to get into your book. We're going to talk about what we're drinking. Scott's got a new drink for us. It's the first time this particular drink has been on the podcast. So before he gets to that, I'm going to talk about the wine I'm drinking today. I've got a 2021. This is a semillone from Australia called Broken Wooden, and it's super hot, continues to be super hot where I live in Arizona.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:04:28]:
So for those of you who are listening watching this podcast in a hot place, you're resonating. Semione is a great varietal for you to try. This thing has got super refreshing notes. I'm getting lime, lemon peel, green apple, and honeycomb on this one. So a very light, summery drink. If you are looking for a great summer varietal. Scott is not drinking wine with me today. He's gonna throw a curveball at us.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:04:53]:
Scott, what do you. What do you got in your glass?
Scott M Coley [00:04:56]:
I have coffee with oat milk. But this is the first time learning that you're in Arizona, and I have to say, I do not enjoy heat or hot weather. And if I were in Arizona, I would probably be drinking, too.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:05:13]:
We'll take that endorsement. Yeah, no, I don't like the heat either. I just happen to be from here, and we deal with it in the summer. Where are you located?
Scott M Coley [00:05:24]:
I'm on the east coast in Pennsylvania, but I think, perhaps more saliently, my forebears are from Ireland.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:05:33]:
Oh.
Scott M Coley [00:05:34]:
And I think that's the weather to which my DNA is best suited.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:05:40]:
Gotcha. So, we got an Irishman with us today, so that's awesome. Okay, so before we get into some questions on the book, here's an opening question I love to ask people that gives us a little bit of context for who you are. If you look at the last ten years of your life and your faith journey, how would you say your faith has changed over the last ten years?
Scott M Coley [00:06:03]:
I would say that I have become more attuned to the ways in which our practices and social preferences influence our theological commitments. Whereas ten years ago, I would have thought, if you have some belief that's morally problematic or some political commitment that is regressive or tends to oppress someone, historically marginalized group or something like that, what we might call regressive kinds of social preferences, then I would have thought ten years ago, oh, you're just not thinking clearly about, you know, your moral theology, or you're not thinking clearly about the moral salience of institutions. Now, I still think that's true. I think that corrupt beliefs engender corrupt practices. But what I've come to recognize more recently, over the course of the last ten years or so, is that corrupt practices engender corrupt beliefs. And. And, in fact, this. There's a kind of feedback loop there, and this is what I call ideology.
Scott M Coley [00:07:08]:
I realized we weren't getting directly into the book with that question, but as it happens, that is directly related to my research.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:07:17]:
Okay, well, you're teeing us off here, so let's dive in. You say, I contend that much of what's described as evangelical deconstruction is essentially an effort to decode propaganda that's embedded in the ideology of the religious right. Now, many christians, and this is a subject we talk about often on this podcast, they frame deconstruction in a very negative light. Right? We have this great thing that we need to protect, and you guys are just trying to screw it up. You can't, you know, you can't hang with the rest of us. And so they put it in that light. You were reframing this in a very unique, and I think, helpful way as maybe this isn't as much deconstruction as it is decoding propaganda. How do you see the difference between those two?
Scott M Coley [00:08:09]:
Well, I wanted to kind of put that notion of deconstruction to one side just because I think that that term, I mean, it's been interesting to watch. Right. So when this term first, as far as I know, came to be used to describe this process that people are going through with their, I sort of conservative religious background, there were folks on the other side of things. I think, as you, the folks you mentioned who tend to paint these things in a negative light, they sort of made a joke out of it. They're like, oh, yeah, like whether these kids sitting around reading Derrida or something, the implication being, of course, they're not reading Jacques Derrida and they've somehow misappropriated this term or something like that. Well, then you fast forward, you know, three, four years, if that long, and then you see these articles coming out from the very same people, or at least the very people at the very same institutions who are like, well, obviously deconstruction is bad because you read Jacques Derrida and he's post modernist and et cetera, et cetera. It's like, it's bad because Derrida. And it strikes me as completely disingenuous.
Scott M Coley [00:09:13]:
But in any case, rather than sort through all of that, what's in the name? I just decided to sort of rein reframe the conversation, at least in terms of the terminology that I'm using. But I see it as a process of, to elaborate on the quote that you read there, I see it as a process of disentangling one's faith, say, in the teachings of Jesus from a certain set of political commitments that came to define, let's say, the previous two or three generations of white evangelicals, or at least a high percentage of them, to disentangle one's spiritual and moral commitments to do with the teachings of Jesus from a certain kind of political project that has historically been, and I think is increasingly being seen as based in a lot of misogyny and racism and a kind of economic paradigm that's deeply problematic. In other words. In other words, I can be a follower of Christ. Right. Without a certain kind of blind commitment to free markets or capitalism or a certain kind of gender hierarchy and so on and so forth. Now, some people who embark on this process end up walking away from their faith. I don't in any way see that as a necessary outcome of the process.
Scott M Coley [00:10:43]:
But, you know, some people walk away, they might come back. Yeah, I don't see it at all as inherently problematic. Sort of like when I quickly, briefly when I went to college, I went to a, you know, secular institution and studied philosophy. And some of the conservative people I knew growing up were like, oh, my gosh, like, what do you do doing? And it's like, well, I mean, if I can't go talk to a few atheists or whatever and preserve my faith, then what's my faith really worth? I mean, you've got to be able to question it or what are you doing?
Jeremy Jernigan [00:11:15]:
Yeah. So it seems like with that shift, you know, deconstruction is often seen as, like, some people need to do it. But what you're describing is almost like you would all want to do this. Like, every Christian would want to decode the propaganda that has, that they've inherited right to get to what is the essence of this Jesus thing without all the cultural stuff we've kind of added to it. Right?
Scott M Coley [00:11:43]:
In my view, yes. I think there are a lot of people who have remitted the care of their conscience to evangelical leaders, whether it's their pastors or denominational leaders or people they see on television or sadly, I mean, a particular news organization that's probably doing far more discipling in a lot of cases than any church is. And I think that a very important part of the christian faith is, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard, to work out your faith with fear and trembling. It's not supposed to be easy. It's not supposed to be the kind of thing where you have all of the answers laid out for you in advance. It should be difficult intellectually. I think some people think that the hardest, you know, the hardest part about the christian faith is sort of like, you know, trying not to sin and having, like, awkward conversations when you're on an airplane or something with a captive audience. And it's just, I just don't think that's it.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:12:46]:
It's more than that. Huh?
Scott M Coley [00:12:49]:
A bit.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:12:51]:
I like that. One of the phrases you use throughout the book, and it's probably a new phrase for many people listening or watching. This is the idea of Christo authoritarianism. And you just say this, as its name suggests, is a species of authoritarian ideology that incorporates elements of the christian tradition. Christo authoritarian ideology is Christiane only in the sense that it uses the resources of christian theology to underwrite its authoritarianism. This is such a brilliant idea. And one of those that, like, quickly got the highlighter out, and I was like, oh, man, that is so well said. My question is, how prevalent do you see this today, and where do you see it?
Scott M Coley [00:13:41]:
Oh, man. I don't think I could put an exact percentage on it. Right. Because as folks like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, sociologists of religion, I think as much as anyone are responsible for renewing interest in this thing that we're calling christian nationalism. And they, incidentally, both read my book and were kind enough to say nice things about it. As they point out, these things are a spectrum. Right? So you've got the folks who they call in the context of christian nationalism, and there's a lot of overlap here. I didn't want to use the term christian nationalism because I'm not a sociologist of religion, and I didn't want to get into, like, this pedantic, technical discussion about exactly where the.
Scott M Coley [00:14:24]:
Where the overlap is. There's a lot of it.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:14:26]:
That's.
Scott M Coley [00:14:27]:
That's all I'll say about that. But as they point out there, there are folks who they call ambassadors. You know, they got kind of a five point scale, right? One end being all in and the other end being totally reject. Well, there are quite a. Quite a few people that are all in, right? But then there are quite a few more who are not necessarily promoting it, but they're sort of okay with it for a variety of reasons. And I would say that the same is true of this kind of dynamic around what we might call, like, an authoritarian cast of mind or a prevailing white evangelical enthusiasm for anti democratic political rhetoric and tactics. You know, there's, whether you are cheering at the front of the parade and waving flags or you're just willing to vote for political figures who engage in certain tactics and certain rhetoric, you are in some way or another complicit in what I would argue is quite evidently an authoritarian movement. In fact, I don't need to argue it.
Scott M Coley [00:15:35]:
They say it. They say it in so many words, and they express a lot of enthusiasm for folks like Viktor or Bond, who is an authoritarian. No one denies it. I don't know if that answers your question.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:15:44]:
No, I think it's. It's what a lot of people who, you know, want to go to church today, who are trying to find some community. And then in a lot of these expressions of church, it does feel very authoritarian. And it's very much, let's put a leader or a face or a voice on a pedestal, and thus saith this person and fall in line and do things the way, you know. And it's like. And that, that way of thinking trickles down into a theology of how you believe and the way you exist in that community. And so I think when you're naming this, it's going to be a term that, again, a lot of people are going to go, okay, christian nationalism. Probably more familiar with that term.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:16:27]:
This term Christianism, not as familiar with the term, but again, when I, when I read that, I was like, you are. You're naming it, right? Like you're naming the thing that people are going to go, oh, that's what this is. And it looks christian, but that's what I love. You're like, it's using the resources of christian theology for the aim of authoritarianism, you know? And so even if it looks christian, I think that's where it'd be helpful for people. Something can look christian and. And be authoritarian and not at all be of Jesus. And it takes a little bit of work, going back to your earlier answer, to discern, like, okay, just because you're using this verbiage or quoting this verse or trying to hijack this part of our history doesn't mean the pursuit in which you're applying it is for a Jesus looking cause.
Scott M Coley [00:17:18]:
Right. A major, a major thread in the book is, revolves around what I call the hermeneutics of legitimization. So the book is not, you can attest to this, but the book is not heavy on technical terminology. But there were a couple places where I felt it was important to isolate a concept so that it would be portable into other contexts. Because what I'm trying to do here is provide a framework that can be used to analyze all sorts of things. I analyze in depth a few of them in the book, gender hierarchy, racial hierarchy, creation science and anti intellectualism, unreality, and the role that that plays in exercising social control, to name a few of the things that I discuss. But I had a conversation on a podcast a few weeks ago with some folks who see this framework as relevant to, say, analyzing christian parenting literature, you know, which isn't something I talk about at all in the book. So, in any case, not heavy on technical terminology, but there are a few concepts that I really wanted to highlight and isolate to make them transferable to these other other contexts with this framework.
Scott M Coley [00:18:34]:
So one of those is the hermeneutics of legitimization. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, particularly the interpretation of sacred texts like the Bible and the idea of legitimization. This evokes something else I talk about in the book. This isn't my term, but something called a legitimizing narrative. So is it all right if I lay this out just a little bit?
Jeremy Jernigan [00:18:54]:
Go for it.
Scott M Coley [00:18:55]:
Okay. So ideology, as I said, is this kind of feedback loop between belief and practice. A classic example of this feedback loop would be the relationship between, say, in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, the relationship between white supremacy and racial segregation. Yeah. So white supremacy provides this kind of justification, the belief that people can be divided into different races based on the color of their skin and that people with white skin are inherently superior. That's meant to justify racial segregation, keeping people separate, and then the consequences of racial segregation, because, of course, people of color are being barred from accessing the trappings of material success in this scheme. So the consequences of racial segregation seem to confirm the belief in white supremacy. So white supremacy engenders racial segregation and racial segregation.
Scott M Coley [00:20:04]:
The consequences of racial segregation appear to legitimize the belief in white supremacy. So that's that feedback loop that I call ideology. Now, at the core of any ideology is some kind of social hierarchy could be built around race, like the example I just used. It could be built around gender, could be built around economics. As it happens, I analyze all of these things in the book, but there's some kind of hierarchy at the core of ideology. Now, when you have a social hierarchy, right? And some people have wealth, power, and social control, right? And privilege and opportunity, other people are impoverished and disenfranchised and subjugated. And it's quite natural to ask, well, why? Why do some people have things and other people don't? And so we invent what we call a legitimizing narrative, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a story that we tell ourselves about why the social hierarchies that we prefer are legitimate.
Scott M Coley [00:21:00]:
A legitimizing narrative. Without a legitimizing narrative, hierarchy is just hierarchy. With a legitimizing narrative, these hierarchies become sort of the natural order of things, or so it's argued, right, when we have a legitimizing error. So a major strain in the book is the way in which white evangelicals tend to use the Bible as an inexhaustible well of legitimizing narratives that prop up and perpetuate social arrangements that benefit white evangelicals themselves. Or at least it's believed that they benefit. I mean, as I argue later on in the book, this is actually to their own detriment, but just, you know, this sort of on a more explicit level, it's to the detriment of historically marginalized groups. Right. So did that.
Scott M Coley [00:21:55]:
Did all that make sense?
Jeremy Jernigan [00:21:57]:
Yeah.
Scott M Coley [00:21:58]:
Okay.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:21:59]:
That's a. It's. It's brilliant. And it's also like a haunting explanation of so much of what we've seen happened.
Scott M Coley [00:22:07]:
So the hermeneutics of legitimization. This is the method by which white evangelicals turn the Bible into an inexhaustible well of legitimizing narratives. Right. And without going into details about this sort of specific mechanics of the hermeneutics of legitimization, I'll put it this way. It's an approach to biblical interpretation whereby one consistently comes away from scripture with narratives that confirm the rightness of one's social preferences. Right. And it involves things like proof texting. Yeah.
Scott M Coley [00:22:47]:
You know, and importantly, what I call the paradigm of authority and submission, the idea that one of the main questions the Bible sets out to answer is who should be in charge and who should submit. So if you're willing to take. I don't need to tell you what proof texting is. I think we're all familiar with this. If you're willing to take isolated passages of scripture out of context and sort of read them through the lens of who should be in charge and who should submit, it's quite natural to end up using scripture in the way that white evangelicals often do, which is to prop up social arrangements that they prefer. Oh, and you shouldn't do that. Just to put a finer point on it. That's part of the argument of the book.
Scott M Coley [00:23:29]:
This is bad.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:23:30]:
This. This is. It's bad. But it's, as I'm just listening, I'm like, it's just so prevalent, what I think you're doing, what I'm hoping this. This episode is like, I want to help people, like, equip them to recognize it, to navigate it, to go, oh, that. That's what that is. You know, and I think that's where these conversations can be so valuable. Okay.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:23:50]:
There's a couple quotes I want to get into that I think will be very practical for people because you address some common speaking points that people are going to go, oh, yeah, I hear this said right all the time. And there's a couple places where you address that. And I'm like, man, this is so helpful for people because oftentimes we hear these things said, we know they don't make sense. But someone may not know, how do I respond to that? Or how do I begin to offer a rebuttal to that? And so one of the things that you do such a great job is you talk about the idea of being colorblind, which, again, people are going to go, yes, we hear this. This terminology gets used. You know, I don't see color. All this. I want to, I want to read a couple quotes that, that really, I think you, you set this up well and then see your take on this, how we can apply this.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:24:41]:
You say color blindness is propaganda. Let's name it. It appeals to the ideal of racial equality in order to perpetuate racial inequality. This propaganda reinforces and is reinforced by appeals to meritocracy. And then you say this, if I don't see color, then I don't see racial disparities in wealth, income and opportunity, which prevents me from observing that white superiority is implied by the proposition that wealth in our society is allocated on the basis of merit. Now, again, some people may need to read the book to highlight that quote from themselves. That's so meaty. How do we handle a conversation? Again, you're addressing one of the big ones when someone uses this argument.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:25:36]:
How do we begin in real time in a conversation to try to break down why that is actually propaganda?
Scott M Coley [00:25:44]:
So I give a really simple analogy in chapter two of the book that I think is meant to demonstrate the absurdity of certain kinds of arguments for the appropriateness of complete neutrality. Now, there are certain basic facts of american history that have really been obscured for reasons that I talk about in a number of chapters. For example, the Federal Housing Administration and the fact that racial segregation in housing was not just legally permitted, but legally enforced at a federal level for about four decades, from 1934 to 1968. That's 34 years. And then fairness and lending didn't come along until ten years later, nine years later in 1967. And of course, who's paying cash for a house? So if we don't have equality in lending practices, then, you know. But in any case, we're talking about roughly, roughly four decades, depending on how you count, arguably bit more. Where we have total or almost total discrimination in housing.
Scott M Coley [00:26:57]:
The way that Americans accumulate and transfer wealth from one generation to the next is through home equity. I would argue that this, I don't have to argue this, but I think there's a good in order to make my point. But I think there's a good argument to be made that this history of housing discrimination basically entirely accounts for the racial wealth gap that we see today, which is that the average, the median white family has about $160,000 more wealth than the median black family. This is according to the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis, circa 20, 2161 thousand dollars more wealth to be exact. Now you might say, if you believe that our society allocates wealth on the basis of individual merit, you might say, well, look, we have fair rules now, everybody, you just got to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and we'll achieve, we all have equal opportunity. So one thing I point out in this analogy is imagine you've got a basketball game, and basically the game is extremely unfair in the first half. I won't go into all the details.
Scott M Coley [00:28:00]:
I mean, this is literally one of.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:28:01]:
My other questions because I love this analogy so much.
Scott M Coley [00:28:04]:
Yeah. Okay. So I say imagine a future in which basketball games are officiated by artificial intelligence. Roboraph. Roboraph, that's right. It's that surveillance every inch of the court at all times and feeds the data into, you know, supercomputers that are trained to make the right call immediately. Foul, double dribble, out of bounds, whatever, right? Well, imagine that this robo ref is malfunctioning in the first half of a game. And every time, let's say, the green team and the blue team, the green team is playing the blue team.
Scott M Coley [00:28:38]:
Every time the blue team rebounds a missed shot, Roboref calls a foul on the blue team. Even if there are no green players around. If you know anything at all about basketball, you know that this is a huge problem. Rebounding is very important part of the game. And if you get called for a foul every time you get a rebound pretty quickly, your starters are going to be fouled out, you're going to be facing a major deficit. Right. And of course, artificial intelligence. Right? So it doesn't suffer.
Scott M Coley [00:29:04]:
Artificial AI can be biased in various ways. Right. But we can set aside that complication, okay, for the sake of this illustration, it's not going to suffer from the kinds of biases that afflict human referees partiality toward a particular player team. Not going to be swayed by the home crowd or the petitions of a coach who's whining, nothing like that. Right? But it's got this malfunction in the first half. And let's say that as a result of this, the green team accumulates a 40 point lead, right? Well, the officiating in the second half of the game can be as flawless as you like, and it's not a fair contest. Because the blue team entered the second half with a 40 point deficit, they're going to have to adopt high risk strategies with little hope of success. It doesn't matter if it's still possible for the blue team to come from behind and win.
Scott M Coley [00:29:48]:
It doesn't matter if they do come from behind and win. Right. Which in a very rare case, they might. Yeah, but that's very rare indeed. To come back from a 40. 40 points is the cutoff for, like, basically the game's over. You might come back, don't quit, whatever. But, like, probably you could just hit the showers.
Scott M Coley [00:30:07]:
Right?
Jeremy Jernigan [00:30:07]:
In addition, a bunch of their players have fouled out.
Scott M Coley [00:30:10]:
There are some dis. Analogies here. Right. For example, in the thought experiment that we imagine that the whole second half is officiated fairly, there's no plausible construal of american history according to which we've had fair rules for anything like half the game. I'll leave it there. I mean, I go into more detail in the book, but I literally debated.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:30:29]:
Just reading that whole section because I've used that analogy with a few friends of mine and just said, like, literally, just pick this book up. If nothing else. Here's the page where this analogy begins. Because you hear this analogy and you go, well, yeah, how do you fix that? Like, that's a major problem. You know, and then you begin to look at the world and you go, oh, how do we fix that? That's a major problem. And I think it gives you a sober look at, you know, some of these things that we think are just so easy and that people can just get over.
Scott M Coley [00:31:07]:
And there are good books about that, either entirely about or that mention, you know, proposals about how to rectify this injustice. I don't get into any of that because I don't want that to be a distraction. That's a separate conversation. It's an important conversation. It's one that we need to have. But in my experience, it's got to start. The conversation has to start with an admission that restitution is in order. Making restitution.
Scott M Coley [00:31:34]:
Oh, well, that's super complicated. Okay, okay. I'm not talking about that. Well, what about. What if we do that and then. Okay, all right. We can talk about that later. We just need to talk about whether this has been rectified.
Scott M Coley [00:31:48]:
We do complicated things all the time. We put a person on the moon. Right. Is it complicated? Yes. Does that mean that we're warranted and not even trying. Of course not. So let's first establish this baseline. Yeah.
Scott M Coley [00:32:02]:
And if you think that this has nothing, that this history of racial discrimination, whether it's this particular policy or any number of other policies, if you think that this history of systematic racialized oppression has nothing to do with the racial wealth gap, in other words, if you think that our society allocates wealth entirely on the basis of merit, which, by the way, I think there are other good arguments against that claim, even if we're setting aside the history of racialized oppression just as a separate conversation. But if you think that this history of racialized discrimination, systemic racism, has nothing to do with the racial wealth gap, as I pointed out, that entails white supremacy. I'm not saying that. If you believe that you harbor racial hatred in your heart toward people of color. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that you believe something that logically implies white superiority, and you have to deal with that. You have to deal with that. The information is out there that's on you to figure out how to reconcile that.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:33:13]:
That's good. Another quote that you have is, again, another phrase I hear often. And I think people go, oh, yeah, this is a constant thing we hear you say. It's worth observing that in the us context, appeals to law and order are generally a form of propaganda gesturing toward the ideal of justice in order to deprive people of justice. Specifically, the phrase law and order signals the intent to deploy the coercive power of law enforcement for the sole purpose of safeguarding the established order over and against the protests of those who claim that the established order is unjust. In other words, law and order isn't about justice at all. Rather, it's about power, specifically legitimizing the use of power to perpetuate an unjust social order. Again, this is another banger from the book that I think you.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:34:11]:
You absolutely nail it. Unpack a little bit of this. How is this. This idea of law and order that is, again, used as a legitimizing narrative for something totally opposite to the thing it's actually used for?
Scott M Coley [00:34:26]:
So you've pointed to a couple examples here of specific bits of propaganda that I analyzed in the book. And so I think it might be worth mentioning a little bit about sort of how I approach propaganda. And then I can speak to this example in particular. So there are a lot of different kinds of propaganda. You see propaganda in speeches, in film, in various kinds of art, literature. There's many, many forms of propaganda that might be put to any number of purposes. I focus on a very particular kind of propaganda in the book, which is rhetoric that appeals to some ideal in service to an agenda that undermines that very ideal. Right? So colorblindness appeals to the ideal of equality in order to perpetuate an agenda that actually props up inequality.
Scott M Coley [00:35:20]:
Law and order, as I say, propaganda appeals to the ideal of justice and the rule of law in order to perpetuate an unjust system of law. Yeah. So, I mean, you see law and order rhetoric invoked in contexts where there's some kind of social unrest. Often it's perfectly legitimate political protests that are framed by certain cross section of people who object to those protests. They're framed as riots and lawlessness. Right? So the notion of law and order is this idea that in order to get these people to be quiet about, you know, the way that they're being treated, we're going to send in officials of law enforcement. I mean, there's also, as I discuss in, well, chapters five and six, there's also an element of lawlessness here, too, as well. Right? So it's probably, the propaganda operates on a couple of levels.
Scott M Coley [00:36:19]:
It appeals to justice in order to perpetuate injustice, and it appeals to the rule of law in order to bring officials of law enforcement in to enforce not laws, but parochial notions about which kind of social preferences should carry the day, which is an abrogation of our First Amendment rights.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:36:38]:
But it sounds good to say.
Scott M Coley [00:36:41]:
Sure. And interestingly. Right? So it's, you see the same thing with color blindness. So initially, and by the way, this is detailed in the colorblindness bit, is in a book by Jesse Curtis called the myth of Colorblind Christians. I think I'm getting that title right, where I got sort of the kernel of the idea for some of the arguments I make there. And I do quote him a bit there. And then I think there's. I think I got this from a different book by Aaron Griffiths.
Scott M Coley [00:37:08]:
Appeals to colorblindness actually started in the civil rights movement, right, when laws were oppressing people. And the argument was, hey, we should at least have neutral laws. Right? And then this rhetoric was appropriated by figures on the right, particularly the religious right, to say, like, oh, well, we have neutral laws now, so we don't. There are no more grievances to be redressed, nothing else to be rectified. Right. We've got neutral laws. Similarly appeals to law and order. But go back to the Jim Crow south, right, where you've got lawless mobs getting together and lynching people.
Scott M Coley [00:37:39]:
And there were calls for law and order. Right? Like, we need to have proper procedural justice here, you know, and then those appeals were then appropriated, you know, following the civil rights movement by people on the right who invoke law and order. Just, I mean, it's really just an appeal to. It's political realism. It's an appeal to might makes right. You know, the police are going to suppress this protest that we don't like, and we're going to maintain the social order that we have set aside. Setting aside the question of whether or not it's just.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:38:12]:
Okay, there's another just great idea in here, and this is a little bit different than what we've been talking about. But for Christians, this is worth. This is worth spending a moment on having you address. You say white christian nationalists tend to perceive an analogy between God's relationship to the United States and God's relationship to ancient Israel. They read the exodus narrative and they see themselves reflected in the plight of Israel rather than the privilege of Egypt. This is nothing short of biblical illiteracy engendered by an evangelical intellectual class that is so preoccupied with the bidding of their political masters, so fixated on alerting christian voters to the infirmities of secular american culture, that they seem to have forgotten that judgment begins in the house of God. Why are we not biblical Israel?
Scott M Coley [00:39:09]:
Well, so many reasons.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:39:13]:
It needs to be said, I think.
Scott M Coley [00:39:14]:
Yeah, if you're, let's say, white middle class, a white evangelical in the United States, and you read the exodus narrative and you see sort of the. Your role as a, let's say, patriotic white Christian American, if you see your role mirrored in that story, in anything other than the Egyptians, you know, we need to have a. I don't know. Maybe we need to talk about literature or self awareness. I don't know. I mean, there's any number of things going on there, but we're not the Israelites. Speaking as a, you know, white protestant male in the United States. Yes, the Israelites are.
Scott M Coley [00:40:05]:
The protagonists in that story were meant to identify with the. As the reader, right. You're meant to identify with the cause of God's people in that story. The cause, which is to say the cause of the oppressed, you know, but there's a really interesting way that white evangelicals in the United States approach their role, because in some contexts they do present themselves as the oppressed. Right. In other contexts, they present themselves as sort of like the real Americans, you know, whose country this is. And I suppose they're the ones who are oppressed in context where people are trying to take the country from them, you know, in their telling of american history. And this gets into the founding mythology, which I talk about in the book as well.
Scott M Coley [00:40:51]:
By the way, the book I referenced a bit ago, that's Aaron Griffith, God's law and order. Since I. Aaron. Aaron Griffith. That's a good book. I just want to make sure I got that title right. Yeah, no, but we're not. We're not.
Scott M Coley [00:41:04]:
We're not the Israelites in the exodus narrative. No, no. And I mean, I think, you know, enslavers in the antebellum south understood this, which is why they excerpted certain passages from the Bibles that they permitted enslaved persons to read. They understood, didn't translate into their practice.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:41:23]:
But I think, though, the typical Christian probably hears many of these stories preached, and it is just a direct application rather than, hey, let's. Let's view the oppressed as the protagonist, as you said, let's see ourselves as the good guy in every one of these stories. And we, we just naturally assume, yeah, we are. We are the modern, you know, and then it's, it's all myopically focused on us, and it leads to some really funky theology, as you. As you so dutifully point out in the book. All right, one more quote from the book, and this, this kind of gets into a. So what now we've. We've gotten to, got these ideas.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:42:06]:
You say the antidote to Christo authoritarianism is the pursuit of justice over and against the pursuit of social arrangements that reinforce my own power and privilege. Said so succinctly and so. Well, how. How do we do this? How do we take that, that idea and begin to implement more of it in our world today?
Scott M Coley [00:42:30]:
Good. So to put just a slightly broader gloss on it, I think there are two things that I argue for in the book that I hope would be acceptable to just about anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus. I don't make doctrinal proposals in the book. The reader can probably infer that. I don't have a lot of sympathy for, you know, these arguments for, like, biblical gender hierarchy or complementarianism or patriarchy or whatever you want to call it. The reader can probably infer that. The reader can definitely infer that I. Okay, the reader can definitely infer that I have no sympathy for young earth creationism.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:43:10]:
Yep, got it.
Scott M Coley [00:43:11]:
That definitely comes through. Having said that, I hope that the complementarian or the young earth creationist can read the book and agree with me that the arguments I analyze for complementarianism or for young earth creationism or whatever it is, are not good arguments for those positions. That's as far as our agreement needs to go. Same. Same with respect to politics. I don't actually make any policy proposals. You know, there are some passages that are probably suggestive, but I don't make any claims about what public assistance should look like, you know, or how much funding we should give to education or healthcare. All that to say, I would hope that someone can read the book, and conservative friends of mine who've read it have, you know, told me that, and friends and people I've talked with in interviews I don't particularly know have suggested me that this is the case.
Scott M Coley [00:44:09]:
But I would hope that someone could read the book. And even if they don't agree with my theological positions generally, or don't agree with my political views particularly, can come away from the book with two things that we should all be able to agree about. One of them has to do with theology, and one of them has to do with politics. Rather modest claims, I think. On the theological side, I think we should all be able to agree. Whatever else may be the case, should all be able to agree that it's not an appropriate use of scripture to consistently go around plucking out proof texts that legitimize social arrangements that benefit myself to the detriment of marginalized people. That's not a good. That's not what the Bible is for.
Scott M Coley [00:44:55]:
And so, to this point about judgment beginning in the house of God, for example, I'm consistently amazed and have been really, ever since I was in probably middle school, never made much sense to me. Now, I think I have a better understanding of why it happens, but that you have preachers just shouting until they're red in the face on Sunday morning about all the wicked people out there in the world, it's like, what good does that do anyone? And everyone's sitting there just nodding, and what are we doing here? What is the point of this? You know, why would you expect people outside the church to act like, isn't part of the point of this that, like, the people in the church have something that is necessary to not act that way? Right. I mean, what. Like, what's your point? Okay, so people who aren't in church don't act like people who are in church. Great. Let's. Let's move on. Yeah, you know, let's.
Scott M Coley [00:45:50]:
Let's talk about something that's actually going to be fruitful for the people sitting here, transformative for the people sitting here. I think that's maybe what scripture is about. It's not about, you know, proving to myself why I'm right and why everyone who disagrees with me is wrong. Okay, so that's point number one. Point number two to do with politics is this. I think that a follower of Jesus should agree with me that it's not the purpose of political engagement to pursue my own interests, maybe enlightened self interest in a philosophical sense. Right? In the sense that, like, if we achieve a just society, that's actually better for all of us, right. But I mean, you know, in the sense that, like, people go to vote and they say, like, oh, who's going to do the most for christians? Like, whatever that means.
Scott M Coley [00:46:29]:
I don't even know what that means. But the people voting for that know what they think it means. And it means, you know, that they pay less taxes or something. As I argue in the book, it actually doesn't. It's actually to the detriment of a lot of people who are voting for it. And there are complicated, somewhat complicated psychological reasons for this. But you look at it this way. When you go into vote, you could ask yourself which politician or party or platform is going to do things that I like that benefit me and then vote for that person.
Scott M Coley [00:46:59]:
I think that's kind of the default assumption, not just in the church but in the United States generally, that, like, that's what people are doing. They're voting for their own interests. And I think we're finding out that that's a really bad way to try to keep hold together a political community. It's not good, right? On the other hand, and I would argue that this is just what an informed citizen should do, but certainly a follower of Christ, you could go into the voting booth and say which politician or policy or platform is going to bring our laws and public policies into greater conformity with the objective truth about what people deserve and what we owe to each other. In other words, justice and vote for justice. That's what followers of Jesus should be doing. So to sum up, two things I think we should be able to agree about, the christian faith is not about pursuing my own interests and reading the Bible in ways that confirm my own interests. And similarly, when I enter the political arena, it's not about pursuing my own interests.
Scott M Coley [00:47:56]:
It's about seeking justice. And we can argue about what that means. We can argue about the specifics of what that means. Then at least we're engaging in a substantive debate rather than just talking around each other about, you know, what I think is best for me. I mean, what is even the point of that?
Jeremy Jernigan [00:48:12]:
Yeah, that's so good. And that. That would certainly change quite a bit if come. Come voting time. That was the approach we all voted with. Okay. That was fantastic. We're going to go to a speed round of a few questions that will.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:48:29]:
Will be much easier to answer. These are just things that we can learn from you as a human thought leader, and I love asking these questions to different guests. What is something you used to believe that it turned out later you were wrong about so many things, man. Pick one.
Scott M Coley [00:48:50]:
Okay. I used to be a libertarian.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:48:55]:
That's what you're going with?
Scott M Coley [00:48:57]:
Longer than I care to admit.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:48:59]:
Okay. It's good. You have to pick one. We talked about a bunch. What do you see as one of the major issues facing Christianity in America today?
Scott M Coley [00:49:10]:
Fondness for authoritarianism. That's it. That's bad.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:49:17]:
All right.
Scott M Coley [00:49:18]:
Period.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:49:18]:
I like it. Okay. What is something that's blowing your mind right now? Something you're learning?
Scott M Coley [00:49:24]:
Parenthood. I have two children under five. I had no idea. The laundry, the dishes, the complete absence of agency. I'm becoming a much better person, but in ways that I just wouldn't have chosen to become a better person without kids.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:49:43]:
I have five, so I definitely understand what you're saying. What is a problem you're trying to solve?
Scott M Coley [00:49:51]:
Mostly just try to understand problems, but I guess as best I can. Problem of how to get people with certain. How to get people to see through their ideological commitments, to look dispassionately at, you know, an argument for something.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:50:10]:
Yeah. What's something you're excited about right now?
Scott M Coley [00:50:13]:
In September, school starts.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:50:19]:
Yep, we've already started here. So I got you beat a little bit, but it's. It's a good time when school starts back up. Okay. Is there anything else you want to add to this conversation that I may not have asked you about?
Scott M Coley [00:50:32]:
No, this is great. Thank you so much for having me. And it's been. It's been delightful. I'd be happy to do it again sometime if you. If you like.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:50:39]:
Awesome.
Scott M Coley [00:50:39]:
And I'll try to. Try to remember to bring some wine.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:50:42]:
There we go. Okay, so this is the book ministers of propaganda. You can find this, I'm assuming, wherever books are sold, right? It's kind of the standard deal these days. Yeah.
Scott M Coley [00:50:54]:
Yeah. I saw it in Barnes and noble. Here you go the other day.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:50:58]:
So you're on Twitter as well. How do you. How do people connect with you if they're going like, this guy's on to something. I want to dive deeper into this.
Scott M Coley [00:51:07]:
Uh, at Scott, underscore m underscore Coley. That's on Twitter and also on Instagram. I'm more active on Twitter.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:51:17]:
I can put that in the show notes as well. So in case you didn't catch that. Uh, Scott, this has been awesome. You are a deep thinker, and there's numerous points in the book. I had to, like, read something and then reread it, uh, to make sure I was understanding what you were saying, because there's a lot of meat there. And yet it's very thought provoking. It certainly challenged me to approach this. And hopefully, as we are sharing, just scratching the surface of some of these ideas today, hopefully people are going, oh, wow, that's a better way to do this.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:51:51]:
Or we can, you know, we can navigate this differently. But thank you for taking the time to spend with us today to unpack this, and I hope more people are exposed to these ideas and the way that you are processing ideas and getting us all to look a little bit deeper than maybe the initial conclusions we might come to. So thank you for that, and thank you for your time today.
Scott M Coley [00:52:16]:
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
Jeremy Jernigan [00:52:18]:
Awesome. Well, everybody, thanks for joining us. We'll catch you in the next episode of Cabernet. And pray.
