# Biblical Values A claim of divine authorization wearing the costume of a moral category. The phrase "biblical values" gestures at a fixed canon of ethical commitments derived directly from Scripture — but the canon it actually points to is a small, politically motivated subset (sexual restriction, gender hierarchy, restrictions on bodily autonomy) selected and organized by a specific theological-political program rather than by the Bible itself. The rhetorical work of the term is to make that selection vanish, leaving only "the Bible says so." ## The Selection Problem The Bible contains roughly 31,000 verses. Any speaker who claims to advocate "biblical values" must choose which ones to foreground, which to soften, and which to ignore. The canon assembled under the term *biblical values* in contemporary American politics is unusually consistent across speakers and consistently narrow: **Foregrounded.** Sexual ethics (especially homosexuality, transgender identity, premarital sex, abortion). Gender hierarchy (male headship, women's roles). Family structure (heterosexual marriage, parental authority). Religious liberty for Christians. Sabbath/Sunday observance. **Softened or ignored.** Wealth redistribution (Jubilee, prohibitions on usury, the rich man and the eye of a needle). Welcoming the stranger and the refugee (Leviticus 19:34, Matthew 25:35). Care for the poor as the central ethical concern of the prophets and the Sermon on the Mount. Sabbath economics. Prohibition on swearing oaths. The sermon-on-the-mount injunctions on enemy-love and non-retaliation. The term *biblical values* doesn't describe a survey of Scripture; it labels a movement-curated selection and presents that selection as a survey. The selection is the politics; the label hides the selection. ## Cultural-War Framing In American political usage from roughly Reagan onward, "biblical values" functions less as a description of moral commitments than as a side-marking term in the culture-war frame. To advocate "biblical values" is to be on a side; to oppose them is to be on the other side. The claim's content is mostly definitional rather than substantive — the term identifies the speaker as a member of the religious-conservative coalition and casts opposition as anti-religious. Polling makes the asymmetry visible: when American evangelicals are asked whether they support "biblical values," support is near-universal; when asked about specific items their religious tradition might support (e.g., Jubilee-style debt forgiveness, generous refugee policy, redistributive welfare), the same sample's support drops sharply. The term is doing identity work, not policy work. ## Rhetorical Function **Authorization-by-divinity.** The phrase translates "what I want politically" into "what God wants morally." Disagreement is recoded as defiance of God rather than as ordinary political disagreement. **Moral high ground by default.** Anyone who disagrees is positioned as opposing values — not opposing this particular value-construction, but opposing values as such. Opponents become the immoral camp by linguistic structure rather than by argument. **Permission for legislative aggressiveness.** Once policies are framed as biblical values, opposing them in pluralistic-democratic terms feels like religious persecution to the in-group. This is the load-bearing rhetoric for state-level bans on gender-affirming care, abortion, drag, library books, and the like — each presented as a defense of biblical values rather than as a contested moral choice. **In-group passport.** The term is fluent currency among Reformed, evangelical, and charismatic audiences. Speakers who use it without quote-marks signal membership; speakers who use scare-quotes ("so-called 'biblical values'") signal opposition. The term thus does the same identity-marking work as [[Loaded Language]] in cultic studies. ## Christian Nationalism Context [[Christian Nationalism]] depends heavily on the *biblical values* construction because the ideology requires a way to assert that public morality must be Christian morality without sounding overtly theocratic. *Biblical values* lets [[Mike Johnson]], [[Russell Vought]], and [[Stephen Wolfe]] claim that what they want is not establishment of religion but defense of moral commitments that "America has always shared" — eliding the fact that the commitments in question are a specific theological selection. [[Project 2025]] uses this construction repeatedly. [[Schedule F]]'s ideological screen for replacement civil servants is articulated in terms of biblical values rather than partisan loyalty; abortion restrictions are argued as biblical-values defenses rather than as contested moral choices; education policy is framed as protecting children from worldviews "hostile to biblical values" — a construction that lets exclusion of LGBTQ-affirming material feel like defense rather than offense. ## The "Judeo-Christian" Variant The phrase "Judeo-Christian values" is the more pluralistically respectable cousin — it gestures at a shared monotheistic tradition while doing the same definitional work. The "Judeo-" prefix is largely cosmetic: the policy commitments labeled Judeo-Christian are the same evangelical-Christian-conservative selection, with Jewish moral commitments (which often diverge sharply on, e.g., abortion) papered over. The term proliferated after World War II as a counter to the "Judeo-Bolshevik" antisemitic frame and has since been adopted by the religious right to broaden the appeal of an essentially Christian-conservative program. ## See Also - [[Biblical Worldview]] — The cosmological-epistemological cousin; same family of terms doing similar work - [[Loaded Language]] — The Lifton framework for in-group jargon as political technology - [[Thought-Terminating Cliche]] — The shorter, faster version of the same move - [[Christian Nationalism]] — The ideology that this vocabulary serves - [[Dominionism]] — The doctrinal underpinning - [[Project 2025]] — Where the rhetoric becomes operational