Given the U.S.A.’s frightening recent slide toward religious nationalism, it would be helpful to know what the “good book” they are trying to impose on us actually says.
From Project 2025 being implemented, to abortion rights being revoked in violation of the freedom of religion, to the fact that states including Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas are passing laws to require the Ten Commandments and teaching from Bible stories in public schools, religious nationalism is having a moment.
Enter this timely new book, The Bible Says So: What we Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. Dan McClellan, a scholar of the Bible and religion, brings his vast knowledge and good sense to the task of correcting common misconceptions about and distortions of the Bible. He does so in a serious but accessible way. And if you like your highly informed linguistic and historical explorations of ancient religious texts leavened with dad jokes and pop culture references, The Bible Says So will be especially pleasing.
Debuting at number seven on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list and hitting number ten on the Publisher’s Weekly nonfiction list, Dan McClellan’s book about what the Bible does and doesn’t say has a built-in audience: His 0.92 million followers on TikTok, plus hundreds of thousands on other social media platforms. There’s a good reason @maklelan is so popular. His short and engaging videos typically begin with a claim from another online religious commentator (“All right, let’s see it.”), which McClellan then dismantles or explains more clearly through the use of careful textual analysis, linguistic expertise, anthropological and historical facts, and good reasoning guided by a strong moral compass. He often signs off by showing the audience which comic book design adorns his t-shirt of the day. On his “Data over Dogma” podcast, McClellan and co-host Daniel Beecher provide deeper dives into Biblical criticism. I can’t think of anyone who does religious content for the general public better than McClellan. This book will only make him more fans.
McClellan is not just another Internet religious apologist. If anything, he is an anti-“theo bro.” He embraces geek culture, compassion, and intellectual rigor. He has no patience for twisting a reading to get a doctrinally convenient result, uninformed or superficial takes, or rhetorical deceptions. He is uncompromising in his critiques of people using the Bible to harm others.
Some of The Bible Says So “rhymes” with things McClellan has said on social media, but there is no direct duplication that I saw. In the book he has space to give details and to “show receipts.” This includes close readings of the texts, discussions of the history and culture of ancient Jewish societies, anthropological and historical accounts of neighboring areas of the Middle East, philosophical debates, linguistic studies, translation controversies, Church history, and more (supported with twenty-six pages of endnotes). Always, this is tempered by an unflinching insistence on seeing what is really there, rather than what we expect or want to see. The text and other evidence drive the interpretation, rather than doctrine determining the interpretation of the text.
Mostly, McClellan uses the scholarly consensus to show that what people say about what the Bible says is often unsupported or unreasonable. The Bible Says So is a powerful antidote to the increasingly common attempts to impose “what the Bible says” in law, politics, public education, public health, and other parts of American life.
Part of what McClellan shows is that Biblical literalism is not merely unwise, it is literally impossible. The authors and editors of the Bible wrote, changed, and assembled it to fulfill their own (often mutually conflicting) political, social, and religious purposes, and all of those differ from ours. Importantly, because of its history of composition, the Bible is not univocal: It says different things in different places.
Taking a page from literary criticism, McClellan holds that Scriptures do not speak for themselves. Meaning has to be constructed in negotiation with the text. This means biases, purposes, culture, and more, all have an effect on what anyone says the Bible means. Many common interpretations are demonstrably false or very unlikely once you acquire the relevant background knowledge.
The Bible’s lack of univocality makes the idea that it is inerrant highly implausible. The only way to maintain inerrancy – the dogma of inerrancy, McClellan would insist – is to shift to metaphorical interpretations of the passages that are false on their surface or which contradict other parts of the Bible. This leads to what I call “pick-and-choose-ism,” where different readers of the Bible use their own biases and purposes to shape their assertions about “what the Bible says.”
If the Bible is neither univocal nor inerrant, the idea that the Bible is inspired – that the authors and editors of the Bible had the benefit of God’s direct revelation – becomes far less probable, too. This should be a relief: It releases believers from having to struggle to accept everything in the Bible, even when it is factually false or morally wrong.
In a strong sense (though blame me rather than McClellan for this point), in its many and varied forms, Christianity is not Biblical. Anyone who declares that theirs is a (or especially, the) Biblical Christianity is either uninformed or trying to leverage the cultural authority of the Bible to bamboozle you into believing what they want you to believe. This only sounds controversial because every Christian denomination cites the Bible as justification for its doctrine, when it is usually the doctrine that is driving the interpretation of the Bible.
Many Christian doctrines are relatively recent inventions. For example, the fire and brimstone concept of hell as eternal conscious torment is post-Biblical, innovated centuries after the last words of the Bible were written, mostly by medieval Europeans.
Even more fundamentally, as McClellan persuasively demonstrates, the Bible is not monolithic in its monotheism. For example, some passages describe Yahweh as a member of a generation of 70 regional gods; others say he had a divine wife, Asherah. The Bible does not propose that God created the universe ex nihilo or out of pure nothingness. Rather, it seems to say there was a preexisting something God shaped and worked within. And the Bible nowhere straightforwardly contains the doctrine of the Trinity. Only a few passages could be interpreted that way, and it isn’t simple to justify that reading (which is why that doctrine has caused schisms).
Of less metaphysical importance, and therefore of more practical significance, is the fact that the Biblical passages commonly invoked to justify homophobia do not support that view. Sodom was not destroyed for what we call “sodomy” but for being inhospitable to strangers – a tragically ironic inversion of the positions on homosexuality and immigration many conservative American Christians are currently attached to. Similarly, despite what people claim, the Bible does not condemn abortion as always immoral; abortion is not even mentioned in the New Testament.
McClellan is also quite willing to say that sometimes the Bible is wrong: For example, in its acceptance of slavery, its advocacy for corporal punishment of children, and its oppressive patriarchy. The authors and editors of the Bible were not more intelligent than us, and they knew a lot less about the world, so it is no surprise they got some things wrong. We can do better.
Each of the nineteen chapters is self-contained and titled with a common assertion about the Bible. They could be read in any order. Someone interested in the details could follow up the specific Biblical texts and critical scholarship cited. A chapter per week in a Bible study would also be an excellent way to read this book. But you can profitably read it without chasing down those references, and non-believers will be as interested as believers: The overarching story is easy to grasp, and persuasive unless you are in the grip of a dogma.