Discerning Snakes and Bad Theology
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Discerning Snakes and Bad Theology
Why Perspective Matters, and the next Poisoned Bible Project
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“Snake! Snake!” Some child was calling from the side of the house. Normally, I’d be sure who the voice belonged to, but as this was my son’s birthday party, we had a surplus of overlapping children’s voices. I ran around to the driveway to see what they’d discovered.
A gorgeous gray rat snake had frozen in place across the driveway, waiting to see what we would do. Several more children came running, and it showed signs of disappearing into the woods, so I moved to pick it up to show the rest of the kids.
At my motion, it coiled up and began shaking its tail at me. I laughed and said, “Oh, cut it out, I know you’re not a rattlesnake.”
Taken aback at its failed deception, the snake uncoiled and disappeared into the forest before the rest of the kids could come running.
That was last September, but not the last time I’ve been asked to ID a snake. Just two weeks ago in North Carolina, my two boys were playing in the river along with a bunch of other kids, and this little boy with a net caught a snake. All the kids started yelling, “snake!” The boy who had what was obviously a small snake clasped firmly in his net started to make his way back across the river to where his anxious mother stood.
“Do you want me to ID it?” I asked.
She nodded and we got her son to carefully set the net down, and I moved it with the handle so the markings were visible.
“It’s a common water snake, non-venomous,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. The poor baby was again frozen at the sight of all these potential predators looming over it. We released it back into the river, where I hope it recovered from its traumatic few moments.
“How’d you know it was a watersnake?” The other mom asked me.
I always want to respond, “Because it looks like a _____” fill in the blank with whichever snake it is. But I refrained and explained how to identify a common water snake, Nerodia Sipedon for those that want the scientific name, and then showed her how to tell the difference between copperheads and water moccasins.
But when they ask me how I know, that instinct to respond because it just is and when you know what you’re looking for, it is very obvious. However, it’s just as obvious sometimes that we humans don’t at all know what we’re looking at, all too often because we’ve been taught to only look at one very specific angle.
“Is this a copperhead?” She wanted to know, her question accompanying the picture she’d posted in the facebook group.
The markings on this snake could not have been more classically copperhead if it had tried and yet, she couldn’t tell. Why? She was looking for the so-called “hershey kiss” pattern that most copperheads display. This pattern is named because when viewed from the side, the darkest part of the pattern resembles a hershey kiss shape repeated over and over. This snake had a beautiful high-contrast pattern, but she couldn’t recognize it. Again, why? This snake was photographed from the top.
…if you only learn one very specific marker to try to identify something, it’s actually worse than not knowing anything because being armed with one tiny, often out of context fact is far more dangerous than none at all.
When I started hiking, I was determined to get past my anxiety about certain things through education. So I began to research. I learned about tick-borne illnesses and how to recognize symptoms. This helped both with my anxiety as its harder to get most tick-borne illnesses than you think as the tick has to be connected for at least 24 hours to transmit the illness, except in the case of the alpha-gal allergy which I did end up getting, and fortunately because of my research, I recognized what was happening before it got too bad.
Along with my research on ticks and learning how to read topographic maps, I also joined a snake group on Facebook to learn how to identify the venomous snakes in our area and learn more about them. This helped a lot with my anxiety as I learned that there’s really not much to fear from snakes.
It also taught me something very important about people. The group admins have done a great job of attempting to teach people that you have to learn multiple characteristics in order to properly identify a snake. Any given species can present with a range of colors, pattern variations, mutations that cause it to have no pattern at all, and so forth. Non-venomous snakes practice mimicry of venomous snakes as a defense mechanism. Several species will flatten their heads to mimic the “triangle” head shape of a pit viper. A rat snake among others will coil and rattle their tail, preferably into dry leaves, to mimic a rattlesnake when threatened.
But over and over again, multiple times a day even, people will post a highly identifiable snake and go, it can’t be _____ species because I don’t see _____ characteristic.
The hershey kiss thing with the copperheads being one of the most prevalent examples of this. People learn one thing, from one angle, like say, “The sin of Sodom was homosexual intercourse,” and then they can’t see the real sin was economic oppression that led to the treatment of people like objects including objects for rape, something that gets downplayed or outright ignored in some churches’ sermons on this story. This leads to an overemphasis on one supposed sin, and the complete omission of discussing wide-spread economic oppression and the violence–including sexual violence–that accompanies it. The sin in the Sodom story is rape and the degradation of a child of God to an object for gratification. But after all, using homophobia as a clobber issue benefits those using a veneer of Christianity to stay in power and continue their economic oppression to hold on to their own money.
Or like Florida is trying to do right now in the case of using extremely selective facts to hide the truth about the history of enslaving people in the United States. If you make it look like this was just an unfortunate chapter back in a time where everyone was doing it, you miss the ongoing ways that race-based oppression evolves and the need to do anything about it. Again, who does it benefit to only look at one characteristic this way?
Or again like too many people of European descent saying that racism is only individual, and has to do with personal prejudice against someone of another race. And while that can be part of racism, this limited identification prevents people from identifying systemic racism which is by far the much larger problem affecting us as a nation.
But what I’ve learned from my snake group is that if you only learn one very specific marker to try to identify something, it’s actually worse than not knowing anything because being armed with one tiny, often out of context fact is far more dangerous than none at all.
In the case of snakes, people regularly kill snakes because of fear and prejudice and are often convinced they did something good because the snake was, in their identification, venomous. Not only is that ID almost always wrong, but venomous snakes contribute to the ecosystem and should be left alone as they want nothing to do with humans.
In the case of history and theology, one supposed fact out of context has led to incalculable harm for oppressed communities. If you can’t recognize a copperhead from the top, what else are you missing?
Keep reading below the fold for more on Sodom in my upcoming Poisoned Bible Project episode.
Poisoned Bible Project Episode 5
Who You Demonize Determines What You’ll Justify: Sodom, the Unnamed Woman, and Terror
One is hard-pressed to find two texts more disconcerting than the near-parallel stories of terror in Genesis 19 and Judges 19. In each story, visitors to a city are in danger, mobs gather on the doorstep and demand to be allowed to gang-rape the men who have been taken in as guests by residents of the city. In each case, women are offered as a substitute.
Two different people submitted these texts to my Poisoned Bible Project Survey, both conveying the depths at which these stories shook them, sickened them, and even made them question their faith.
The problem with these stories lies not in the existence of the story themselves, but rather how they’ve been taught. It took me a long time to gather my own internal fortitude to tackle them because I too have heard sermons that are clumsy at best on these–at worst brush off the rape as “oh, that was bad, but homosexuality is far worse.”
Again and again, especially in what I’ve called American Christianity in Inward Apocalypse (a specific definition referring to a broad swath of Christianity that tends to vote conservative, is against marriage equality, and loves to use “clobber verses” on any variety of issues), any text that can be seen as being anti-LGBTQIA+ people is immediately not only given precedence, but is reduced to only that meaning despite existing in very complex narratives that are trying to tell a different story all together.
What if I told you the sin of sodom wasn’t “sodomy” but rather economic injustice? What if the story of the Levite’s concubine in Judges was also not about men wanting to rape men, but was really wartime propaganda told to justify a genocide? Yes, they wiped out an entire city down to the animals, and needed a reason why when they recorded their history.
These stories shed light on injustice, oppression, and terror in the times they were told: how they have been interpreted in our time sheds light on the injustice, oppression, and terror in ours.
These stories shed light on injustice, oppression, and terror in the times they were told: how they have been interpreted in our time sheds light on the injustice, oppression, and terror in ours.
Come journey with me through these texts of terror. We will see what God values, learn something about how to read Scripture, and put theses stories back into their context where the harm that was preached to us no longer has any root in the Scriptures themselves.
Episode five will be released September 12th to paid subscribers only. Each of these episodes requires weeks of research, digging, and frequently, purchasing of books in order to properly unpack them.
Want to submit a text for the Poisoned Bible Project? Click here and fill out my Google form.
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“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.
But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day.
I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
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