Foucault and The Bible

 As is their wont, conservatives are throwing philosophers' names around as criticisms without checking what they actually thought. For instance, Dr. Kristin Du Mez recently got accused of being Foucauldian. This got at least me wondering what an actual Foucauldian might say about gender and sexuality in the Bible and White Evangelical society.

First of all, though: I don't really have any credentials to bring to this. I've read Discipline and Punish, and I've picked some stuff up through osmosis, mostly skimming stuff by Dr. Cressida Heyes and reading the SEP entry for Foucault. So: grain of salt required, but let's see where this goes, shall we?

The first thing a Foucauldian might note is that our ways of being gendered and practicing our sexuality are structured by discourses which establish what counts as "normal" gender/sexuality. So, in each culture there are these discourses.

One might go one of two ways here: on the one hand, one might see the Biblical record as constrained by these discourses in such a way that the Biblical writers could not conceive of an alternative sexuality; on the other hand, one might appeal to divine inspiration to claim that the Biblical writers were completely free from these constraints as they wrote, so that wherever the Bible appeals to such structures as a premise it thereby endorses them. I lean more toward the latter, but nuanced a bit: while the Biblical writers make use of these structures, their uptake in the context of God's revelation transforms these discourses.

A ramification of this perspective is that we cannot simply assume that there is a single correct discourse for gender or sexuality. Different discourses might be suitable for different circumstances. So, just as the OT transforms the sexual/gender narratives of its time, and Paul transforms those of his time, we might need to transform those of our time--and these three will have similarities, but not be simply identical.

A full Foucauldian account of White Evangelical sexuality/gender discourses would examine the particular practices through which they enforce their norms and teach people to internalize certain standards for "correct" sexual/gendered behavior. The criticism would not be simply that they enforce such norms, but that the fallout of the necessary practices and discourses is harmful: unnecessarily high rates of anxiety, depression, shame, etc. We're stuck with some kind of discourse around sexuality and gender, the question is what discourse is the most conducive to human flourishing in our present time.