Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves by Dr. Jill Hicks-Keeton

A synopsis

Our Bibles are collections of ancient documents that at one point in their history simply spoke for themselves. They were accessible to the many and didn’t require as much labor in translation, interpretation, sociological and historical study. Over the millennia though, the Bible and its meanings have been constructed and reconstructed to support the power structures that held the hermeneutical reigns at the time. Using the Bible to maintain power is far from a new phenomenon so there is really nothing new in Jill Hicks-Keeton’s volume entitled Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.

What Hicks-Keeton does do is point out what negotiation with biblical texts looks like in our modern context. She remind us that a large swath of the American church has bought the idea that the Bible is a one-dimensional "perfect" book. As such it becomes THE unquestioned source of truth that rises above critique. We end up ignoring the inconsistency between what we want it to say versus what it actually says.

As in times past, the church finds itself in a controlled system that provides an overly simplified way to update the Bible’s meanings for us common folk, a project that allows us to gloss over the uncomfortable parts by holding double standards or redefining what’s good about the Good Book. Going all-in on the idea that Bible speaks eternal truths, white evangelicals in particular, whether aware of their participation or not, have signed on to what Hicks-Keeton calls the “Bible Benevolence Project.” 

Enter the business of Bible benevolence—the intellectual, rhetorical, and moral work of rendering the Bible the Good Book. Such labor is often accomplished through clever use of building materials and production techniques spanning the gamut from strategic translation and definition to historical contextualization and creative invention. 

Hicks-Keeton, Jill. Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves (p. 8). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition. 

Bible benevolence tells us that every sentence in the Bible has something good to say- a positive prescription, a truth to learn, a revelation about God that will always lead to goodness and light. Institutions shorthand these ideas in these catchwords: infallibility, inspiration and inerrancy. 

However, there is a slight problem.

Readers who understand the Bible to be benevolent have a puzzle to solve, a problem to tackle: how to deal with what feels bad when it comes to scriptural texts deemed fundamentally good.

Hicks-Keeton, (p. 3)

Shoring up the castle walls are books like Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions, The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, 101 Alleged Bible Contradictions Explained, Hard Sayings of the Bible and so on- an Amazon search will return hundreds of books on apologetics that all attempt to tame the natural wildness of the Bible texts on their own.

Turning to one of the more uncomfortable themes running through the Bible, Hicks-Keeton spotlights sexism, patriarchy and misogyny. Like the “Bible Difficulties” books, there have been more than a few white evangelical authors who have attempted to turn that misogynistic frown upside down: "The Bible is good for women! Jesus was an early feminist," they declare, "Paul didn’t really mean to assign second class status to women!" And for the most part we want to believe that’s true. Why? Because modern culture has had a glimpse of what happens when patriarchy has eased its grip and we like it. Public opinion has shifted, resulting in a need for the Bible to mirror our changed attitude toward a woman's place in society. But, as Hicks-Keeton demonstrates, the Bible remains steadfastly patriarchal, forcing Christians to either embrace it or explain it away.

Hicks-Keeton’s book pulls back the curtain on these attempts to de-patriarchialize the Bible by unmasking the interpretive blind spots to which we have willingly become accustomed. She addresses both an egalitarian and complementarian approach commonly found in American evangelicalism. 

Their debate turns on whether the Bible authorizes or resists patriarchy as a good way to organize society. So-called complementarians read the Bible and conclude that men and women are existentially equal but designed for separate, complementary roles within a patriarchal hierarchy. So-called egalitarians push back with biblical warrants for their conviction that women should be accorded the same degree of authority, decision-making, and access to leadership opportunities that men have. For complementarians, the Bible mandates patriarchal social order, which in turn must be good for women because it is biblical. For egalitarians, who reject patriarchal social order as normative, the Bible resists or outright upends patriarchy.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 24)

She goes on to define her terms relying on Australian philosopher Kate Manne’s work in the fields of feminist, moral and social philosophy. 

In Manne’s schema, patriarchy is a social system. Sexism is an ideology, a belief system justifying patriarchal social order. Misogyny is the environment women encounter that regulates their behavior within patriarchal norms.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 28)

Manne describes misogyny as “the law enforcement branch” of patriarchy. The environment women and girls face within a patriarchal social system rewards them for playing by the rules of patriarchy, for complying with gendered expectations of their behavior. Misogyny punishes women and girls who do not comply with patriarchal norms, disincentivizing them from stepping outside the bounds. Misogyny is like a shock collar, teaching women the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 29)

Evaluating the questions we ask of the text, Hicks-Keeton demonstrates the ways white evangelicals betray their biases and blind spots:

…Not “Does Jesus hate women and girls?” but rather “Does Jesus participate in a social environment in which the behavior of women and girls is regulated by patriarchal norms?” Not “Does Jesus believe in the full humanity of women?” but rather “Do Jesus’s words and actions direct women’s humanity within patriarchally-conditioned expectations?” Not “Does Jesus treat women as able to think and reason?” but rather “To what ends are women’s thinking and reasoning ultimately put?” Not “Does Jesus value women?” but rather “What are they valued for?” When women interact with Jesus, does their encounter with him empower them or police them? When women interact with Jesus, are they constrained by or forced to resist male entitlement to power, to knowledge, to control of their bodies? What do the women in this man’s world face? What is expected of them? Of their behavior, their labor, their lives?

Hicks-Keeton (pp. 30-31)

If we expect the Bible to tell us how Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God, how he demonstrated a God-approved set of attitudes and actions, and acted out his own teachings on loving one’s neighbor and enemy, then it seems proper to expect some kind of pushback in the gospels against the prevailing patriarchy of the day. In our own context, perpetuation of a man-ruled society has met with legal, moral and practical challenges such that it’s no longer a given. Pro-patriarchialists have been largely relegated to the institutional margins (although misogyny and sexism still hangs around). In some fraction of our culture, patriarchy is held up as ideal but these promoters are aware that they are resisting the tide of American culture, and see themselves as battling “corruption.” And where are many of them found? in conservative, fundamentalist Christian churches.

After this framework of questions, Hicks-Keeton takes us on a tour through the gospel of Mark without our usual Bible-is-good goggles. With unconverted eyesight, we find that the narratives describing Jesus in the gospels are consistent with other first-century hero-making encomiums: by, for, and about males at the top of a hierarchy. For a complementarian reader, it's neither a surprise or a problem that patriarchy as modeled in the New Testament is plainly the way God wants things to be. 

For egalitarian readers, there’s a bit more difficulty. If the Bible is the inerrant, transcultural and eternal truth from God in which the story is told of a Messiah who reaches out to the marginalized and oppressed, a feminine-friendly Bible should display some subversion of the social system into which the Way the Truth and the Life is thrown. We have the answer to the question: “What would Jesus do… in a patriarchal culture that denigrates and devalues the worth of women?” Subversion is not what we find, however. 

Reading without “good goggles” shows that women in Mark’s gospel in no way have equal access to markers of Jesus’s power, including healing and teaching. Women’s lives and labor are directed toward supporting the interests of men, and women who comply are rewarded. Those who do not are punished. Women in Jesus’s orbit work harder, get less, and suffer more. The earliest Jesus available in the Bible does not combat or transform patriarchy. He masters it.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 32)

Hicks-Keeton outlines a legitimate way of reading Mark through the cognitive categories of a “good ol’ boy” supporter who roots for “winners.” This can become a bit cynical, but it’s still one way to read Mark… 

• First, Jesus assembles a group of followers with himself as leader.

• He then garners positive public opinion by demonstrating acts of power and authority for the needy.

• He develops favor with socially marginal and deferential characters

• Jesus, as a “broker” between God and a crowd of admirers provides enough food for them to stay around and listen to more of his speeches

• He provides secret insight to the inner circle of followers after mystifying the mob with parables

• And, finally, track the number of times women are allowed into full agency with his mission- it’s essentially zero

“...women were not among those given “authority over the unclean spirits” (6:7). Women were not there to see Jesus walk on water (6:45). Since Jesus and his disciples were in the middle of a body of water, away from others, no one except the disciples on the boat had even a chance to participate.”

Hicks-Keeton (p. 35)

Women were not present or mentioned in most of Mark’s episodes, until we encounter this afterthought in chapter 15: “Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem” Is it possible that this mention was simply a literary device meant to explain the presence of women at the resurrection in chapter 16? Was their apparent terror a product of being kept out of the inner circle of insider knowledge?

The longer ending of Mark has the boardroom dismissing Mary’s news of the resurrection as would be typical of patriarchal thinking, and though Jesus admonishes them later for their unbelief (not for their treatment of the women!), he commissions them for God’s work. 

“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation,” he says (16:15). Mary is not included in the commission. This is not equal opportunity evangelism. Jesus gives the men who just failed, the men who are less qualified, a job that Mary had proven she could do. The men are rewarded despite incompetence. The woman is ignored. With his men sent out, Jesus ascends to heaven without talking to Mary again.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 37)

Simon’s Mother-in-law, the first woman that Jesus heals, remains unnamed and unsung. In contrast to the males that Jesus heals, she simply reassumes her usual servile position for the benefit of the men in her house. 

The healing of Simon’s mother-in-law results in her reinsertion into a hierarchical system in which women’s labor supports the interests of men. Freedom from fever is not here freedom from service to men. Her healing is rather what makes it possible for her to get out of bed and resume domestic labor for the benefit of Jesus and his disciples, all men.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 39)

Turning to another unnamed woman, healed unexpectedly from a hemorrhage, the double standard of Bible-whitewashers is exposed again. Jesus seems annoyed, or at best surprised by the unnegotiated release of healing power by a sneaky female. Applying the time-honored evaluation “what would have happened if it was a man?” we notice some odd goings-on. 

In order to make this story work as an example of how Jesus treated women remarkably well, Bible apologists must express surprise that Jesus was not mean to this woman.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 42)

Many apologists go to great lengths to make the woman appear undeserving and outcast in order to make Jesus’ annoyed response acceptable. Taking ritual purity to its unsubstantiated extreme justifies Jesus’s response as normal. The fact that the woman dodged a rebuke or worse underlines our framing: the woman did not deserve or have any right to ask for healing. 

To make the logic work, Jesus apologists must venture reasons that it is surprising that Jesus was not mean to the woman with the flow of blood. …For Jesus’s behavior to be remarkable, the woman has to somehow deserve it less.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 43)

The authors of Mark and Luke anticipate a response in their audience that assumes their low attitude toward a needy woman; her character is a setup. The reader or hearer expects Jesus to berate her, but how about that? He’s actually nice to her!

On its face, the response of Jesus in this pericope is unsatisfying and weird to modern sensibilities. Complementarians have made their bed here and must lie in this story that reduces women to undeserving, pathetic creatures that must slink around the edges of the men’s game. 

Don’t think that Jesus was kind of rude to the hemorrhaging woman? How about the unnamed Syrophoenician person two chapters later? 

There are plenty of examples of Jesus healing men upon request, no questions asked or eyebrows raised. So why does Mark insert this tale of healing that depended on witty riposte and deflected insult? 

It’s an obvious device that reveals something about the author’s need to address the early church’s growing concerns over the admission of gentiles to the Christian club. Can gentiles be part of this without undergoing a conversion to Judaism? Mark’s answer is yes, but rather like a dog can be a kind of family member. And female gentiles? Let’s have Jesus make this OK while keeping them in their place. 

So Jesus, trying to hide out in Tyre, calls a gentile woman a dog after initially refusing her request for an exorcism for her daughter. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he says. It takes some creative interpretation to make Jesus’s response line up with the kindness we expect from him. 

Think about it from an evangelical perspective: Jesus is about to voluntarily undergo torture and death for the sake of forgiveness of the entire planet, gentiles and Jews. He teaches and demonstrates to us that loving one’s enemies is the way of God, the right path. He tells us in Matthew that calling someone a fool is as bad as murder, that turning the other cheek is the right thing to do, and so on. He even sends his men out to the entire world of gentiles to make disciples of them. 

And yet, Mark depicts Jesus assigning dog status to the woman and resisting her request. She takes the crumbs and in doing so acknowledges her place in the prevalent social hierarchy. Shouldn’t we expect something different, something better? Something like, "There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in me?” 

White evangelicals must soften Jesus’s rebuke to keep the Bible as good as possible. Matthew calls the woman a Canaanite, to recall ancient grudges against an enemy people. He also changes the reason for the healing to center on the woman’s “faith,” not the witty rejoinder. We try to accentuate the positive by calling on more sanguine references to dogs, and that maybe Jesus is not so offensive (this ignores the gendered valences of our use of the word as we use it differently for men as opposed to women). 

Other attempts have been made of Jesus’s use of the diminutive form for dog: like puppy or doggie. Not so bad as calling her a bitch.

Can we make the woman appear to be strong and resilient by winning the argument with Jesus? The fact remains that she is made to be so in spite of how Jesus treated her. Would Jesus force any of us use our strength and resilience in the face of his unwillingness to help? Is it fair to require something extra from a woman in need when men get it by simply asking? 

What are Biblical women good for?

Absent our ingrained pro-Bible bias, a reader of Mark 14 might notice that Jesus applauds an act of service done for him while ignoring the person doing it. She is not even named, and it’s not her intrinsic value as a human being that will be remembered, Jesus says, but the deed she did in preparing me for burial. Jesus appears to stick up for her in the face of scorn from the other dinner guests, but a careful read tells us that no, in fact Mark’s author draws all the attention to Jesus; it’s all about what she did for HIM. 

The negotiation required to make this passage, and the Bible generally, into an advocate for women requires a strategic definition of what is good for women. To accomplish this, white evangelical Bible-redeemers claim the term “feminism” to constrain it. They define it simply as a belief that women are human.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 49)

When white evangelical Christians celebrate the Bible as good because Jesus on its pages thinks women are people, they limit “feminism” and “feminist” strategically to make a definition of “pro-women” cohere with what the data about Jesus on the pages can tolerate. This move baptizes feminism into patriarchy. The claim that Jesus is pro-women because he sees women as people exists perfectly well alongside patriarchally-conditioned constraints on women’s behavior and opportunities.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 51)

The idea that women are people challenges neither patriarchal social order itself nor the regulation of women as women within such an order. Women who serve men are people too. Women subjected to double standards are people too. Women whose bodies are not theirs to control are people too.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 51)

There’s much more in Hicks-Keeton’s book like an analysis of Dan Kimball’s insistence that Jesus conversing with a “scandalous” Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 is somehow not slut-shaming that draws a line between “good” women and “bad” ones. We intentionally ignore the power differential going on between a lowly profligate woman and a “Prophet of Israel.” Why does he demand that she fetch her husband? Is it a nod to the fact that in many Mediterranean cultures, a woman needed a male figure to affirm her identity? If Jesus wanted to break that destructive violation of basic human rights, why didn’t he just keep revealing himself to her without making some point about her marriages? 

Is ancient misogyny all that different from modern? Most evangelical interpreters layer on the metadata that it was forbidden for a man to talk to an unaccompanied female, and even more transgressive to speak to a hated Samaritan. “Jesus is willing to talk to a woman” sounds odd in our contemporary context, but not so much if you embed it in an unenlightened ancient culture. But so what? Wasn't the Bible written to us here and now?

In verse 27, the author of John makes it clear that the disciples had a baseline expectation of Jesus, formed from their everyday interaction with him and the crowds that followed them. “They were astonished that he was speaking to a woman.” Strange considering the expectations we typically assign to Jesus as a social reformer dismantling the unjust social norms that will not be welcome in the coming kingdom. Any other heroic kingdom-bringer might well be breaking gender taboos all the time, rendering the disciples’ astonishment moot. 

He was operating the best he could within the culture he chose to inhabit, a Good-Book apologist might protest. Agreeing with that claim opens the door to all manner of confusion about what can be ignored as a peculiarity of the time and what stands as eternal truth. Slavery, divorce and homosexuality- can we chalk up biblical statements about these and other social issues as unique to the occasion and inapplicable to the modern day? Can we not expect better from the Son of God whose words and deeds would eventually shape the culture of twenty-first century America? 

And there are many, many more instances in the gospels where we gloss over legitimate perspectives from the characters in the stories that function as foils for Jesus and his disciples. Reading these stories as a feminist uncovers a surprising streak of patriarchal bias common to the time, which Jesus does nothing to resist or change. That’s a problem for those who want to make the Bible a book for all times and places with universal truths to tell. 

And this is not to mention anything about Paul, about whom Hicks-Keeton devotes two chapters “Making Paul Less Bad” and “Making Paul Less Bad, Again.” 

To wrap it up, two longer quotes from the last chapter of the book, The Cost of Bible Benevolence: 

White evangelical Bible benevolence depends on seeing Jesus as simultaneously metatextual and accessible sola scriptura. Paul is both typical and unique, special and not. Early Christians were fitting in and revolutionary at the same time, called to be respectable and simultaneously deviant. Women are both deserving and not, there and not, equal and not. They are simultaneously victims and vixens. Women are dogs, and women are people too.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 166-167)

The white evangelical Bible benevolence script scripturalizes misogyny—not because white evangelicals get the Bible wrong but because they get misogyny wrong. For many Bible apologists, a return to the patriarchy of the 1950s is what is good for women. Only through feminine submission will both women and men find the good life that eludes so many in the inhospitable terrain of modern capitalism. For those who attempt to save the Bible from patriarchy, rescuing the Bible means leaving behind the women who, presumably, should also be rescued by an anti-patriarchal Bible. The business of white evangelical Bible benevolence as currently practiced—despite any stated good intentions on the part of its practitioners—cannot empower, free, or rescue women because what it most wants to sell is the power of the Bible. What it most wants to protect is the safety of the Bible. Solutions cannot fix problems the problem-solvers do not see. Good intentions will never be sufficient to make the Book good.

Hicks-Keeton (p. 167-168)

Amazon Link for Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.

Or buy a used copy from AbeBooks here Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves.

The print length is only 239 pages, so it’s a short read. 

From Amazon’s Author Page on Jill Hicks-Keeton: 

Jill Hicks-Keeton (Phd, Duke University) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel's Living God in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018), was awarded the 2020 Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, an international first book award. She is the author, with Cavan Concannon, of Does Scripture Speak for Itself? The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and co-editor of The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019) and The Ways that Often Parted (SBL Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Religion Dispatches, Religion & Politics, Ancient Jew Review, The Revealer, and The Bible and Interpretation. Hicks-Keeton has been awarded the Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar Award and has served as a Humanities Forum Fellow, a Risser Innovative Teaching Fellow, and Honors College Presidential Teaching Fellow at the University of Oklahoma.