For all those who’ve used The Word as a weapon against the LGBTQ+ community, it’s time to holster your Bibles and go on social media. There, you’re likely to encounter the reel-explanations of Dr. Dan McClellan, aka @maklelan, where over a million followers on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter tune in to find out what the Bible actually says, from an actual Bible scholar. Dan explains there is a difference between a theologian, whose work is to teach how a religious group should incorporate or interpret Biblical teachings, versus a critical Biblical scholar, whose job is to evaluate and explain the historical and social context of the actual written work at the time it was written. Dan says studying it this way removes the common proclivity to consider the Bible as univocal—meaning the text speaks as one universal voice and thus can’t disagree with itself, as all parts should harmonize with the others. This deeper study brings to light the need to consider data over dogma, which is exactly what Dan now does with his online break-it-downs and popular podcast, Data over Dogma.
The problem with dogma, according to Dan, is that it can be painful for certain populations like the LGBTQ+ community when exclusive ideologies are favored by the power structures that find them beneficial. This social identity politicking underlies so many of the philosophies and interpretations Dan started to see floating across the social media landscape around 2020, when he decided to put his degrees to work online to join the conversation. When it comes to the scholastic frames hanging on his wall, there are four of them—including a bachelor’s from BYU in ancient Near Eastern studies, a masters in Jewish studies from the University of Oxford, a master of arts in biblical studies from Trinity Western University, and a doctorate from the University of Exeter, where Dan defended his thesis on the cognitive science of religion and the conceptualization of deity and divine agency in the Hebrew Bible in 2020. Along the way, he’s become well-versed in 12 languages. When people like to challenge whether he is really a “scholar,” he laughs, and insists that dealing with so much negativity is actually job security.
Biblical scholarship was not a job Dan envisioned until he began his Biblical Hebrew studies at BYU and thought, “If I could make a living out of studying the scriptures, that would be the coolest thing in the world.” He was not the typical BYU student. Raised in West Virginia, Maryland, Colorado, and Texas, he was not brought up particularly religious, and in his late teens, made several friends in the LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities while waiting tables. Dan joined the LDS church at age 20, and quickly realized he brought along a different world view than many of those raised with “the primary answers.” For instance, he understood evolution to be true, that the earth is not a mere 6,000 years old. He was always fortunate enough to find himself around other likeminded members of the church, even if they were in the minority.
He served a mission a year after joining the church and there says he found himself “compelled to be a representative of a more conservative perspective. At the time, I was willing to toe the line, but it never sat well with me.” Afterwards, he observed that conservative-mindset population multiply at BYU, where most of his peers had a very black-and-white, binary view of the world. He hoped to find more nuance, more compassion and charity for those who got the proverbial short end of the stick. And then he met the Soulforce Equality Riders, who in the vein of the Civil Rights’ Movement Freedom Riders of the 60s, were a group of young people who went on a seven-week bus tour to protest discrimination against LGBTQ+ students on college campuses. This was something Dan could get behind. Knowing people who had family members and friends who’d taken their lives because of oppression from church and the broader conservative community due to their orientation and gender identity, Dan got in touch with Soulforce and asked them to come speak at a gathering at his apartment complex which included several student wards. He felt this was work that mattered.
Dan met his wife at BYU and as they began to raise their three daughters, he further contemplated what kind of world he was bringing his children into. When his oldest daughter approached him at age seven and asked, “What sports are girls allowed to play?” Dan acknowledged that was a question he’d never had to ask as a boy. “But the fact that had occurred to her already, and she had accepted it, brought me to tears. I knew I needed to do more to try to change the world for the generation we’re raising. I couldn’t be on the sidelines.”
This was 2016, around the time where Dan was deeply troubled at the seemingly mass acceptance from his Utah-based community of a political candidate who proudly boasted about sexual assault. The fact that this wasn’t a deal breaker for voters, and the peripheral surge of homophobia in the political space, ignited something in Dan, who then says he “chose to put my privilege on the line and speak up for those who didn’t have accessible privilege.” He became the Democratic party’s precinct chair for Herriman, UT from 2016-2020, was the Salt Lake County Chair of the LDS Democrat Caucus from 2018-2020, and ran for the Utah House of Representatives in 2018 and the Utah Senate in 2020. He didn’t win either race but impressively minimized the blue-red margins. Along the way, he clearly let people around him know he would be speaking out against the hostile actions he was witnessing to let people in minority communities know he was safe, saying, “If my work makes some feel uncomfortable, then good.”
As the pandemic of 2020 continued to incite and divide the country, Dan decided to peek into the Tik Tok space to see what people were sharing. He was surprised at the amount of religious chatter; this was a conversation he had a right to and interest in joining. “I saw a robust community talking Bible and religion from all sides—from very conservative Christian and Jewish creators to those styled as deconstructionists and those overcoming religious trauma. But I didn’t see a lot of credentialed experts. I thought I might be able to position myself not to join anyone’s team, but to call balls and strikes when I see them. To my great surprise, there was a lot of interest.”
When it comes to data vs. dogma, Dan says, “If there’s a dogma I stick with consistently, it’s that all other things being equal, we should give the benefit to the less powerful group. It’s interesting, the fact that doing this infuriates so many people who explain why it’s ok for them to hate… When people challenge my bias recognizing how power structures govern so much of the world around us, and why so many experience the world so differently from someone like me, that’s why I work at the intersections, trying to amplify women, immigrants, LGBTQ, and root out Islamophobia and Antisemitism.”
Dan has worn a Pride-themed watchband for years that his wife bought for him because “he likes colorful stuff.” (A talented sketch artist, he’s also an avid comic book character fan.) He tells those who ask that he wears his watchband as a signal that he’s hopefully a safe space and is going to stand up for people who are often disenfranchised. Interestingly, over the ten years he recently worked for the LDS church as a scripture translation supervisor, he’s worn it in meetings with members of the Quorum of the Twelve when he was often brought in as a Bible expert. “I never got one word about my watch… It's interesting the people who run the church haven’t rejected my expertise, when people on Twitter have so much objection.”
The evangelist community gives Dan the most heat online, and he feels is the largest foe right now to the LGBTQ+ community as many are “inserting their dogmas into the political sphere.” He's always been impressed (though not surprised) by the amount of atheists, agnostics, “none’s” and deconstructionists who follow and laud his work, but occasionally an atypical fan presents themselves, as was the case when someone recently recognized Dan in a grocery store and confessed not only was he in the extremist group DezNat, but he’s also a Dan fan. “I didn’t see that one coming,” laughs Dan.
Having traveled all over the world for his career and seeing the church operate everywhere, Dan is often asked his views on a variety of Bible topics. He has a project in the works via St. Martin’s Press entitled, The Bible Says So—a book that includes the greatest hits of Dan’s social media, with each chapter taking on a different claim of what the Bible says about abortion, Jesus as God, homosexuality, the mark of the beast, etc. As Dan’s online presence has grown, it has become his number one focus and income source, though he still occasionally teaches online courses, and currently has an honorary fellowship with the University of Birmingham Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion.
As to what the Bible says about homosexuality, Dan says, “It’s a reflection of where their societies stood at the time and what they understood about sexuality. And it’s different between the Old Testament and the New Testament, based on the ideas of social hierarchies or domination.” He explains that the ancient concepts of gender and sex don’t line up with our concepts today if you allow them to operate on their own terms. “Early Judaism talks about six or seven gender identities, some that could line up with trans and nonbinary. Early Christianity was more conservative and still doesn’t line up perfectly. Everything in the Bible represents a certain framework and set of conventions that are much different from today. Pretending what people said 2,000 years ago ought to be authoritative today gets tricky when it comes to their unflinching endorsement of buying, selling and owning other human beings—it puts the lie to anyone who claims to fully subordinate all their interests to the biblical texts.”
Dan continues, saying, “You have to ask, what are your priorities and agendas with the interpretive lenses you bring to the text?” In regard to structuring power, he says you’ll come up with a certain set of conclusions if you prioritize that over loving God and loving your neighbor. “The Bible is a story about the transition from an insular small group to the whole world. For Christians who read it to understand everyone to be if not a child of God at least their neighbor, they should see it’s about maximizing the success of the whole group, not our domination over a certain group. If people read the Bible and find a God who loves all, that should be the priority. But human nature often retreats to prioritizing the protection of one’s standing and access to power.” But Dan argues that the Bible teaches us to fight against human nature to put what God wants above what we want. “If your Bible is telling you to do the opposite, you should reevaluate your faith.”
Concluding that many Biblical teachings are “outdated, harmful, and have long been irrelevant,” Dan says, “But people have turned their opposition to homosexuality into an identity marker for the social identities important to them. They leverage what the Bible says to authorize and legitimize that identity marker to structure their power and values in favor of their identity politics.” A point Dan reiterates “so often that people are probably sick of it” is that “everyone negotiates with the Bible, so much so that what it actually says is no longer relevant in terms of social monitoring. Polygamy, slavery from the start of the book until its end, the objectification of women—we’ve jettisoned it all as it no longer serves our social identities. I think the Bible-induced homophobia will ultimately go away just like slavery. It’s just a question of how long it will take for people to prioritize children’s safety.”
Dan pointed out that evangelical scholar Richard Hayes (who wrote a book in the 90s that took a hardline stance against homosexuality) will soon come out with a new book in which he claims he was wrong and now argues from a theological point of view for full inclusion of LGBTQ+. Dan recognizes that his first book did a lot of harm for which Hays has not yet had to face accountability, but anticipates more and more people will come around in the future. Dan closes out his own book with the fact that again, “Everything is negotiable. As more people realize they know people who are LGBTQ+ and choose to respect and love them, there will be no choice but to negotiate those prejudices out of our lives.”
Here are some of Dan McClellan’s videos that we especially recommend:
https://www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7375917733050977582
https://www.tiktok.com/@maklelan/video/7369580573762850094
