Natalie Burris

"That's a lot of code": conservative rhetoric on welfare

 

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In response to Republican presidential hopefuls' rhetoric, I'm posting portions of a paper I wrote last semester.  Here are parts one and two.

Like slavery, welfare's history informs "family values" rhetoric.  While conservatives promote family values, their policies ultimately help few low-income families of color and employ racialized rhetoric.  One initial goal of federal housing programs, for instance, was to encourage morality in families.  

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF”) favors heterosexual married couples.  Marriage promotion as welfare policy is a modern reincarnation of the “civilization” of “unruly” slaves.¹  Just as slave marriage was promoted at masters’ convenience, marriage was used post-bellum to privatize freed blacks’ economic mobility, minimizing government responsibility. 

Post-emancipation, states used marriage as a so-called “civilization” tool, which forced African-Americans to conform to white family constructs and which regulated black behaviors.  Some slaveowners had disregarded slave families, but now whites suddenly wanted black couples to marry—only within their race.  With black husbands working, there would ostensibly be no need for black women and children to seek government assistance.  This assumption persists today: if black women and children were part of a traditional family, welfare demand would decrease.  

Modern aid for women with children began in the 1920’s, but only for women deemed "deserving."  Participants were 96% white and 3% black.²  Under the 1935 New Deal “Aid to Dependent Children,” the first formal welfare program, white widows were considered most entitled to support, while immigrants, unmarried women, and women of color were reluctantly included.  In 1937, 85% of recipients were white women, while 13% were black women.³  

Women of color now comprise the majority of those on welfare.  Thus, a stereotype of the typical welfare recipient emerged: “a lazy, promiscuous black woman who lives in luxury at taxpayers’ expense.”⁴

Melissa Harris Perry, on the Colbert Report, recently discussed stereotypes of black women, one of which is a "Jezebel."  This stereotype, around since the antebellum area, is similar to the welfare queen and pigeonholes black women as sexually promiscuous, having children with several different fathers.  Meanwhile, a thrice-married white man runs for president nearly with impunity.

With the majority of welfare recipients no longer white, whites' sympathy level has dropped.  States with larger minority populations on welfare impose harsher restrictions.⁵  And using law to promote an ideal of family, similar to post-bellum attempts, has produced a racialized discourse hostile to unmarried black parents.  Debates especially portray women of color as bad mothers, just as in the antebellum period. 

Although 33.3% of TANF recipients are black, 31% white, and 28.8% Hispanic, the image of a “welfare queen” is a black single mother.  No longer focused on “worthy" white widows, TANF discourse casts judgment onto unmarried black women who allegedly won't work and “won’t use birth control.⁶

Candidates rail against those supposedly unwilling to work with a wink, knowing whites are in on the shared understanding of whom is really being referenced.  (see Gingrich's "really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have nobody around them who works" in the above video).

Rather than prophetically critique it, many U.S. white evangelicals buy into this code-speak hook, line, and sinker.  Evangelicals view lack of personal responsibility as the reason black single mothers use TANF.  Grace, in an excellent series on race and gender, discussed some telling data from Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's Divided by Faith.  White evangelicals blame racial disparity on poor choices, such as "having too many children."  Emerson writes:

In their use of these cultural reasons [for racial inequality], white conservative Protestants do not mean patterns of behavior rooted in values (e.g., blacks have many children because they highly value large families), but rather that blacks are making poor choices (e.g., black individuals do not exercise responsibility in child-bearing, faith, or speech).

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¹ Angela Onwuachi-Willig, The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the Revival of Post-Bellum Control, 93 Cal. L. Rev. 1647, 1653 (2005).

² Id.

³ Id.

⁴ Madeline Howard, Subsidized Housing Policy: Defining the Family, 22 Berkeley J. Gender L. & Just. 97, 124-5 (2007).

⁵ Elena Christine Acevedo, The Latina Paradox: Cultural Barriers to the Equitable Receipt of Welfare Services under Modern Welfare Reform, 20 Berkeley J. Gender L. & Just. 199, 208 (2005).

⁶ Martha L. Fineman, Images of Mothers in Poverty Discourses, 1991 Duke L.J. 274, 282 (1991).

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Health care v. defense spending

The health care bill (the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act) will cost $1 trillion over 10 years.  However, as the below video illustrates, the proposed defense budget for 2011 is $1.6 trillion - for one year.  The video also shows how 53% of the U.S.'s budget finances the military.  Let's remember this during the presidential debates this year.

 

 

 

And James McGrath shared this great cartoon last week:

What does U.S. slavery have to do with white evangelicals and political rhetoric?

This post is part of a paper I'm sharing as a result of disturbing, racially-coded rhetoric used by Republican presidential hopefuls.

Although many politicians uphold family values as a cure to social problems and see the decline of family as a moral failure, such discourse privileges the European-American hegemonic definition of family.  I've previously defined hegemony, which is a dominant group enforcing its norms against others.

The traditional ideal of family, which many politicians want to impose, is a sole heterosexual married couple and their biological children.  Ideally, the husband is the main wage-earner, who earns enough to allow his wife to at least dedicate more time to childrearing, even if she also works. 

Welfare policy and its surrounding rhetoric rely on the above definition of family.  Traditional "family values" discourse is racialized, even without explicitly using racist language.

The white hegemonic notion of family has been simultaneously held from, used, and imposed onto black families both throughout history and today.  This type of family is held out as a cure-all for social problems, and many African-Americans’ failure to conform is viewed by white religious and political conservatives as a moral shortcoming.

Slavery and the historical development of welfare have served up racially-charged, damaging rhetoric.  Slavery began the systematic degradation of black families and the distortion of many whites' perceptions of blacks.

The disruptions and distortions began as soon as European-Americans brought African slaves to U.S. soil.  Early historians already blamed failure to form families on slaves' alleged character deficiencies.¹ 

(Note there is no singular definition of the antebellum slave family.  Whites’ systematic denigration of slave families should not detract from complex family structures in Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and other West African countries, commonly exploited by slave traders.  West African family models were communal and child-centered, and many did not look like "traditional" white U.S. families.)

Slaves were thrown into a system with no concern for family relationships, a system rife with double standards.  Family formation was allowed when convenient for slaveowners, but prohibited when considered a threat. 

The biological tie of a slave mother and slave father to their child was critical in conferring slave status, yet when white male slaveowners had children with slaves, this familial tie was downplayed.  No matter who fathered the child, she would be a slave if born to a slave mother.  To preserve white supremacy, slaveowners reinforced the socially-constructed racial caste system by emphasizing a clear demarcation between black and white.

In the antebellum South, some slaveowners encouraged marriage to ensure loyalty, while also portraying themselves as moral, benevolent masters.  But, a marriage could be dissolved at the master’s whim, or by a sale of one or both spouses.  In fact, a slaveowner’s desire to have his women slaves provide slave offspring would result in forcing women to live with various men at different times.  Monogamy—much less marriage—was not many slaveowners’ concern.  

Another systematic denigration is that black women were left out of the definition of a “good mother.”  Slave mothers were continually forced to perform backbreaking labor, so the era's dominant mindset, which emphasized women as nurturing, stay-at-home mothers, rendered slave mothers aberrant.²  

Slaveowners maintained racially-based slavery, but at a cost: relatives were ripped apart, and slaves were often prohibited from establishing families.  “Family” was an empty concept, allowed and simultaneously prohibited in paradoxical ways when convenient for whites. 

What do the rhetoric and hypocrisy surrounding slave marriage and family have to do with white evangelicals today?  This history informs the current "family values" rhetoric.  In my next post, I'll share the political rhetoric that reared its ugly head once welfare recipients moved largely from "deserving" white widows, veterans, and Depression-era families with temporary setbacks, to predominantly single mothers of color.  

A discussion of this rhetoric can't be done unless we acknowledge the hypocrisy (of many "devout Christian" slaveowners) and systematic degradation of black families as a result of slavery.  

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¹ Damian Alan Pargas, Boundaries and Opportunities: Comparing Slave Family Formation in the Antebellum South, 33 Journal of Family History 316-345, 316 (2008). 

² Adrien Katherine Wing, Laura Weselmann, Transcending Traditional Notions of Mothering: The Need for Critical Race Feminist Praxis, 3 J. Gender Race & Just. 257, 273 (1999).

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White evangelicals, welfare, and racially-coded rhetoric

With Newt Gingrich's recent win in the South Carolina Republican primary, many are discussing the role family-focused evangelicals played in the victory of a candidate who has been married three times and has reportedly committed adultery.  Evangelicals comprised two-thirds of primary voters, and Gingrich won 44% of their votes.  At least 98% of these voters were white.  

Gingrich ran an ad in South Carolina, the first Southern state to hold a primary this season, featuring his exchange with debate moderator Juan Williams.  Williams had asked about Gingrich's repeated references to President Obama as the "food stamp president."  Gingrich has also made disparaging statements about poor children, remarking they have no work ethic.

Critics call this type of rhetoric racially coded:

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the new racism entails individuals saying and doing things that perpetuate racial stereotypes and inequalities, but they do so in such a way that the offender is able to deny being explicitly racist.  One of the many types of new racist strategies Bonilla-Silva highlights is the use of racially charged code speak, or using indirect racial rhetoric and semantic moves to express an ideology that serves to reinforce white dominance over minorities.

I wrote a paper last semester that explored racially-coded language in "family values" and welfare-reform discourse, much of which is perpetuated by another Republican presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum.  

Santorum built his political career on promoting "family values" as the answer to social ills.  To move people off welfare, government must encourage the formation of families headed by heterosexual married couples.  Santorum authored the 1996 welfare reform act, which created Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ("TANF"), limited how long participants could rely on TANF, and capped funding.  The act also restricted food stamp eligibility.

Many conservative politicians and talking heads use coded "family values" rhetoric to rail against black low-income families (especially mothers, i.e. Reagan's infamous "welfare queens") and rally the white voting troops.  

Gingrich may owe his newfound success to dubbing Obama the food stamp president, as many white conservatives see the rise in welfare recipients as a moral failure and a threat to society.  If we would "get back" to the work ethic and family values on which our country was founded, we would see less poor, inner-city (read: black) families rely on government aid.

In light of GOP presidential candidates' disturbing racist rhetoric, and especially given many evangelicals' response to this rhetoric, I will share parts of my paper over the next few weeks.  

Much ink has been spilled recently over the African-American family (see Ralph Richard Banks' controversial book Is Marriage for White People?).  But I do not dare speak to or at black U.S. Americans who earn lower incomes or who are not in a "traditional" two-parent family.  

Rather, I'm interested in how the political discourse on family values and welfare has ugly undertones, often supported by white evangelicals.  Fred Clark at Slacktivist pointed out that Richard Land, "ethics czar" of the Southern Baptist Convention, defended Gingrich, accusing the NAACP of being too sensitive. Land even uttered the phrase “off the liberal plantation and out of the liberal barrio.” 

But aside from racially-coded language, the statistics, among all races, are intriguing.  Over the last 50 years, the number of married adults in the U.S. decreased by 20%.¹  Thirty-two percent of black adults are married, compared to 56% of whites.  Birth statistics tell the same story: the number of births to unmarried women in the U.S. rose from 5% in 1960 to 41% in 2008.  Among white mothers, 29% were unmarried in 2008, while 72% of black mothers and 53% of Hispanic-American mothers were single.  

Conservatives are not exaggerating numbers to incite panic about crumbling "family values."  But, using racially-coded language and blaming only people of color are too often hallmarks of some political and religious leaders' discourse.  This is why I'm interested in pulling back the curtain on such rhetoric.

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¹All statistics are from the Pew Research Center, Pew Social & Demographic Trends, The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families, November 18, 2010.  

Graphic source

Inerrancy is weak

The next section in Chapter 7 of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible encourages an understanding of various meanings the written word can take on, which biblicists often fail to appreciate.  As a result, biblicists find themselves in some tough spots.   

A written phrase can simply make a descriptive statement, or it can evoke commands, promises, warnings, criticism, surprise, inspiration, insults, etc.  

Smith points out "the use of speech to communicate is not a simple matter of speakers intending to make clear propositional statements that, when properly interpreted, reproduce the original propositional meaning in the minds of those receiving the statements." When translating written utterances into different contexts, "significant problems of meaning arise."

Smith continues: "the meanings of terms such as 'error,' 'mistaken,' 'inaccurate,' and 'fallible' become not entirely straightforward when speech acts are understood in this way."  In imposing these categories (which I argue are very modern Western notions), what does it mean for warnings, expressions of surprise, insults, appeals, promises, expressions of honor, etc., to be in error?  Smith writes:

Given the richness of the variety of kinds of speech acts that appear to be at work in the Bible, therefore, it seems quite inadequate to try to describe or defend scripture’s truthfulness, reliability, authority, and whatever else we might say on its behalf with single, technical terms like “inerrancy.” That particular term—a favorite of many evangelicals—tends to zero in on matters of accuracy in reporting on facts and events as a matter of correspondence between propositions and the real states to which those propositions refer. But that term tends not to capture the multitude of other ways in which the locutions of texts and their illocutionary and perlocutionary acts may or may not be reliable, authoritative, compelling, powerful, inviting, and so on.

We don't parse the accuracy of a comforting word given during a time of grief - and inerrancy as applied to the Bible works the same way:

Evangelical defenders of biblical inerrancy are used to the typical charge by more liberal critics that “inerrancy” is too strong, extreme, or demanding of a concept to accurately describe what the Bible is. What I am suggesting here is quite the opposite. “Inerrancy” is far too limited, narrow, restricted, flat, and weak a term to represent the many virtues of the Bible that are necessary to recognize, affirm, and commend the variety of speech acts performed in scripture.

Genesis 1-2 is an excellent example.  What was the intended effect of the written words of these chapters?  Was it to convey to the reader that the Yahweh God created a good world with his power?  Or was it to communicate a literal scientific account about the precise method and time period of the creation of the world?  Was it to banish rival pagan narratives of the earth's origins?  Or, anachronistically, was it to motivate followers of the Yahweh God to mobilize against teaching evolution in schools?  

To impose our categories of literalism and factual accuracy onto a rich, ancient text disrespects the intended effect of Scripture's written words.  Inerrancy forces the Bible to look like a collection of "error-free propositions with which to construct indubitably true systematic theologies[.]"  But the living God of the Bible "actively promises, confronts, beckons, comforts, invites, commands, explains, encourages," and more.  

I don't want the flat and weak version of Scripture that inerrancy hands us.  I want the complicated, perplexing, diverse, active, and living Scripture that isn't forced into categories such as "factually-correct," "error-free," or "literal."

The next section in Chapter 7 that I plan to post about is a discussion of biblical authority, which inerrantists usually bring up in response to the idea that the Bible was never intended to be viewed as factually error-free.

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"What is most important for democracy is...that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands"

I started classes this week, one of which is Wills and Trusts.  My textbook has some interesting statistics and quotes about the passage of wealth from generation to generation.  Note this edition was published in 2009, well before any catchphrases about the 1% were coined.  

The baby boom generation inherited, between 1987 and 2011, $6.8 trillion:

Much of this wealth was built by their parents between the late 1940's and the late 1960's when real wages and savings rates were higher and housing costs were considerably lower.  [...]  Of course not all will benefit equally, or at all.  The richest one percent will divide one-third of the worth of estates, each inheritance per estate receiving an average of $6 million; the next richest nine percent will divide another third for an average inheritance of about $396,000.  Much of this wealth will be property.¹

Four of the top 10 spots in Forbes' list of 400 richest U.S. Americans belong to relatives of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, while 3 of the top 20 slots are held by Forrest Mars' family.  Mars invented M&M's candy.  

The concentration of wealth in the U.S. decreased sharply from 1929 to the 1940's, leveling off until the 1970's. However, the 1980's saw a sharp rise in the share of wealth held by the richest U.S. Americans.  By 2004, the richest 1% owned 34.3% of family wealth, and the top 10% owned an astonishing 71.2% of family wealth.  Many wealthy people are wealthy simply by virtue of being born.

The textbook offers a quote by philosopher Robert Nozick, who said this "sticks out as a special kind of unearned benefit that produces unequal opportunities."  And Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands.  In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.

We now enjoy less economic mobility in the U.S., and a recent study has suggested that conflict between rich and poor has surpassed even racism and nativism as a source of tension.  While many become rich simply by being born, 45 million others rely on food stamps to keep their family fed.

This is why I will be so intrigued with the 2012 presidential election.  Mitt Romney has warned against "a bitter politics of envy" in discussions about wealth inequality.  Romney even prefers to discuss questions about the distribution of wealth "in quiet rooms." 

My textbook authors imply that our system, with its entrenchment of wealth passed from generation to generation within privileged families, is a danger to democracy and equal opportunity.  An alternative to the U.S. system of passing wealth strictly within families is to require part or all of one's wealth upon death to be returned to society.  I use the word "returned" because no one becomes wealthy without help from society - take Wal-Mart for example.  It drives down wages by billions of dollars, so its employees have to rely on public aid.  Perhaps 4 of those top 10 richest U.S. Americans should thank the U.S. taxpayer for subsidizing the wages of their company's employees, thus helping the Walton's accumulate massive wealth.  Or am I simply being envious of their wealth?

I wonder if we've reached the breaking point, and discussions about wealth and inequality will bust out of those quiet rooms... 

________

¹Dukeminier, Sitkoff, and Lindren, Wills, Trusts, and Estates, 18 (2009, 8th Edition).

The "bad" part of town

I have a friend who's very concerned about sending her children to one of the school districts in our suburb.  While her children are not yet school-aged, my friend and her husband may sell their home and rent in a neighboring affluent suburb so they can send their children to a different school.  

While the raw numbers may show one school district has better test scores than another, occasionally I get the vibe from some white friends, who are otherwise kind, thoughtful people, that they do not want their children attending a lower-income school located in a higher-crime neighborhood with a majority of-color population.

My husband's kids attend schools in the very same school district from which my friend and her husband are attempting desperately to flee.  And shortly after my husband and I were married, we looked for a new apartment as the rent increase at our current place was too high.  We lived in the neighboring affluent suburb, and could really only afford to move to our current suburb, which in some parts has an "urban" feel and shares many of the same issues as "urban" areas.  

While looking for a new place, I would ask my husband, "Is this a 'bad' part of town?"  He would get offended, and (always keeping my privilege in check) would remind me that our closest friends--and his kids--live in this area.  I maintained my innocence.  I just didn't want to live in an area with high crime! 

It wasn't until I learned some nice (white) church ladies were afraid to volunteer at my stepdaughter's elementary school that I realized how offensive it is to label an entire geographic or demographic swath as "bad."  

I hang out with friends here, our kids play here - and you say it's too dangerous for you to come here and minister to elementary schoolkids and their families?  Combined with the implications of some white friends taking great measures to move out of our school district, I've realized that using these labels ignores the humanity of residents of lower-income, higher-crime areas.  More than the humanity - I've realized I disparage the image of God with which we're all endowed.

What does it really mean to use the word "bad" in reference to a neighborhood?  What does it mean to assume you would never send your children to school with the children in these neighborhoods, forking over money for private school or simply leaving altogether?  We have decided to keep the kids in public school, hoping to maintain a redemptive presence, somehow.  This is not to say our decision won't change or to cast judgment on those who make different decisions.  Yes, even my friend who is pulling out all the stops to get out of our district.  I simply take issue with the underlying implication that it's acceptable to write off a group of people as bad.

Having actually lived in a "bad" neighborhood for four years now, I suppose I dropped the word "bad" from my vocabulary in terms of entire parts of town or school districts.  What was once what I would ignorantly label a "scary" neighborhood is, I've realized, where children and families and churchgoers and image-bearers live.  So, this privileged white person has learned to think twice before I wrinkle my nose and make a remark about a bad part of town...

Did Neandertals have the image of God?

A few months ago I shared why I can't believe that Adam and Eve literally existed.  One of the pre-modern-human species I mentioned were Neandertals, who are thought to be an evolutionary dead end.  Pinpointing a literal Adam and Eve after the Neandertals, or leaving their species out of those who would have the image of God, is problematic to me because Neandertals left flowers at burial sites.  They had some understanding of the meaning of death, so to consider them soulless is troublesome.

I recently discovered a great blog by Jim, a self-described "Christian, librarian, palaeoanthropologist, and evolutionary biologist with an all-consuming interest in apologetics and controversies in science and religion."  At Science and Religion: A View from an Evolutionary Creationist, Jim linked to an intriguing new finding on the Neandertals.  Researchers found that this species lived in house-like structures.  The report says: 

Researchers from the Museum National d'Histories Naturelle in Paris said it suggests the early human ancestors settled in areas where they built structures to live for extended periods of time.

The circular house was made up of 116 large bones, including mammoth skulls, jaws, 14 tusks and leg bones.

And inside at least 25 hearths filled with ash were also found, suggesting it had been used for some time, the Mail said.

Jim adds that the Neandertals "were every bit as intelligent as we are, just very environmentally-challenged."  This discovery complicates the notion that two individuals were suddenly infused with God's image.  That a group of not-quite-human beings had the capacity to build homes, albeit crude, makes a bright-line rule with regard to who has a soul seem arbitrary.  

 

Problems with the theory of inspiration

The next section in Chapter 7 of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible criticizes the deductive theory of inspiration.  Deductive reasoning starts with a theory, and then moves on to the observed object, which is the Bible in this case.  

Smith argues that evangelicals get into trouble when starting with the theory of inspiration, and describes the common logic:

(1) all scripture is in the biblical canon because it is inspired by God (per 2 Tim. 3:16–17);

(2) “inspiration” definitely means “plenary verbal” inspiration (every word and grammatical form is divinely inspired);

(3) since God does not err, tell falsehoods, or say useless things, everything in the Bible is not only inerrant but also meant to communicate divine truth, which readers must learn; and, therefore,

(4) in every statement the Bible, most often read in its “plainest” sense, communicates binding theological and moral truth.

Nowhere in Scripture is this model used to describe Scripture itself; inspiration is an external theory biblicists impose on the text.  And the point of 2 Timothy 3:16-17 was to describe Scripture's pastoral usefulness, not its factual correctness.

Similar to Timothy Beal's argument in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, which I discussed here, simply looking at the early church's concept of "the Bible" causes the doctrine of inspiration to collapse.  Early Christians had no concept of a closed canon, and passed around different versions of the authoritative version of Scripture until the final canon was determined in the late fourth century.

While most of what ended up in the New Testament canon had been written by the end of the first century, few communities had copies of all of these texts.  And, some texts many Christians considered scriptural weren't even included in the later official canon, while some texts considered non-scriptural ended up in the final canon.  Smith points out:

This means that the early Christian church lived without “the Bible” as we know it canonically for nearly four hundred years, even if many churches possessed copies of many of the documents that eventually went into the New Testament. That has big implications for the role of the church, the Holy Spirit, and the “rule of faith” in the function of scriptural authority for Christians.

Noting how the church has interpreted the Bible for the past 2,000 years is another aspect that pokes holes in the theory of inspiration.  Evangelicals have a tendency to be anti-traditionalist and to not lend as much credence to those who are not American (or, I would add, Western European).  Smith calls this tendency "foolish and arrogant."  We miss out on the benefit and insight of our predecessors.  

We have no reason to pretend to be "biblically or ecclesially self-sufficient" or feel superior to our predecessors and to non-Western believers.  Smith writes:

American evangelicals should pay much greater attention to how Christian believers read and interpret scripture in other parts of the world, across space, particularly perhaps in the Global South. “The church today must be open to listening to how other Christians from other cultures read Scripture and live it out in their daily lives” [quoting Peter Enns]. American evangelicals have already learned and can still learn a great deal from Christian believers outside their subculture and normal social networks.

Non-present-day and non-American interpretations won't always necessarily be better, but at least bucking this anti-traditionalist and ethnocentric trend will "reveal blind spots, challenge parochial views, offer insightful perspectives...and suggest helpful ways to resolve differences of understanding within the American evangelical world."

Not surprisingly, this is one of my favorite points of the book, because I believe the theory of inspiration aggrandizes the perspective of those who have the loudest voices when interpreting Scripture within North American evangelicalism.  When the Bible is read in its “plainest” sense, and thus communicates binding theological and moral truth, this truth often ends up reflecting the viewpoint of the most influential and loud interpreters, who are usually middle- to upper-class, white, straight males.  And a purportedly "plain" reading of Scripture disregards the cultures in which both the text and the reader are rooted.  

My intent is not to marginalize middle- to upper-class, white, straight males, but rather to recognize that the logic that undergirds the theory of inspiration may keep helpful alternative views from informing how we look at Scripture.  

When defending the Bible is a defense of collapsed modernism

The final chapter in Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible offers quite a lot to digest, so I plan on discussing it in more than one installment.  Titled "Rethinking Human Knowledge, Authority, and Understanding," this chapter provides more suggestions for moving toward a postbiblicist, yet still evangelical, reading of Scripture.

Smith first argues evangelicals must break from modernism's epistemology (how we know what we know).  That today's evangelicals equate the most correct reading of Scripture with modernist knowledge is ironic given that evangelicalism grew out of opposition to modernism, especially naturalism, liberalism, and relativism.  Evangelicals "have drunk deeply from some of the wells of modernity and the Enlightenment, yet in ways they often seem to fail to notice."

One such "well" is epistemological foundationalism, the belief that rational people can identify a common foundation from which we build a body of reliable knowledge.  The foundation on which this knowledge rests must withstand all challenges and be universally accessible to all rational beings, producing reliable knowledge without fail.  All those who think rationally, then, can access truth that is certain and universally binding.  

This epistemology has collapsed, but evangelicals still hold to it by making the Bible the foundation for certain knowledge.  "Without realizing it, evangelicals embraced a view of scripture that was more driven by [...] generally modern preoccupations with epistemic certainty than by scripture itself."  So, rather than using the Word to critique modernism, evangelicals fully ingested some aspects of modernist thinking and equated its epistemology with the Word itself.

But Smith points out that, as a corrective, evangelicals shouldn't fully embrace postmodernism.  Just because modernism's attempt to frame truth as certain, rational, and completely accesible has failed doesn't automatically mean that all truth claims are simply exercises of power.  

Smith claims there are alternatives, and one such alternative is called critical realism.  This view abandons foundationalist illusions,

acknowledges the conceptually mediated and fallible nature of all human knowledge, accounts for the influence of historical and cultural context, and [unlike much of biblicism] recognizes the inescapably hermeneutical, cultural-historical, and interpretive character of all knowledge[.]

Smith argues that critical realism "breaks the stalemate and enables both sides [modernists and postmodernists] to move forward," especially because the modernist-postmodernist debate often reinforces the binary between objective-subjective truth.  

Smith doesn't actually go into much more detail about critical realism, but conveniently enough, he recommends another of his books as a starting point: What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up.  Although I found the next part of this chapter helpful (a discussion of inspiration, authority, and the dynamic, always-developing nature of the Gospel), I'm sort of disappointed Smith didn't flesh out critical realism a little more.  That said, he emphasized earlier that the book's purpose wasn't necessarily to provide a comprehensive solution to biblicism's problems.

Has anyone read up on critical realism or have any other books that would be a good starting point?