Anthony B. Bradley has published a very insightful thread on Twitter, regarding the response from certain sectors of evangelicalism to work such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne. A particularly interesting post therein reads as follows:
This really hits home. I am quite familiar with white evangelicalism. I was raised among such folk, with several generations of my family being card-carrying members of the tribe. And post really gets at the heart of why I made certain decisions the better part of twenty years ago. Having done my undergraduate in anthropology, with a very healthy dose of biblical studies courses as electives, I found myself with three interests as I contemplated graduate school: indigenous studies; ethnographic work on evangelicalism; and New Testament (especially gospel) studies. I was fascinated by especially the archaeology of indigenous persons here in Canada, and had a very keen interest in how methodologically we might say things about their religious life before c. 1500 when we lack documentary evidence from that period (trying to reconstruct ritual practices, cosmological beliefs, etc., is crazy difficult without texts). But I also came to realize that I didn't want to be just another white guy telling indigenous people about their own history. That just didn't sit right with me. So, I thought, "Hey, I come from evangelicalism. It's a totally different thing to study my own people." But I soon realized that I had little interest in poking the bear, and it really does seem like suggesting that white evangelicalism is anything less than perfect is enough to trigger a certain sector of the broflake population. And I just didn't really want to be bothered with that. So, I decided to focus upon the historical study of the New Testament, figuring that this was a generally apolitical area of study.
Of course, it turns out that undergraduate me wasn't always that bright, as biblical studies is hardly immune to political squabbles. They tend to happen covertly, in the form of proxy wars over reliability, etc. It's usually not hard to see where politics are particularly operative, because their presence is typically revealed through polemic. Because let's be honest: there's nothing urgent enough in the historical study of ancient texts to be particularly polemical about, so when you see polemics it's usually because "the question behind the question"—what's actually motivating the scholarship—has to do with squabbles over what sort of world we want to have in the here and now. But that's another matter, and one that I will leave for now.
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