Escaping the Echo Chamber: A Response to Alex O’Connor and Dan McClellan on Scripture, Slavery, and Abortion
I recently watched a 75-minute conversation between Alex O’Connor (CosmicSkeptic) and Dan McClellan (Data Over Dogma) covering biblical inspiration, slavery, abortion, and child sacrifice. You can watch it here.
It’s a frustrating watch. Not because the arguments are strong, but because they go entirely unchallenged. Two skeptics nod along with each other for over an hour while the strongest counterarguments never make an appearance. McClellan presents contested scholarly positions as settled consensus. O’Connor plays the sympathetic interviewer, occasionally gesturing toward pushback but never from anywhere near an informed theological position.
The result is an echo chamber masquerading as inquiry. Viewers walk away thinking these issues are settled when they’re anything but.
So let me offer what neither participant bothered to provide: actual engagement with the Christian position they claim to be dismantling.
The “Data Over Dogma” Shell Game
McClellan has built a brand on “data over dogma.” He’s the neutral scholar following evidence wherever it leads. Religious people have presuppositions; he has facts.
Pull back the curtain and this framing collapses.
McClellan has presuppositions stacked to the ceiling:
The Pastoral Epistles are pseudonymous - therefore 2 Timothy 3:16 can be dismissed as unreliable
Different legal codes in the Pentateuch represent contradictions rather than addressing different circumstances
Naturalistic explanations are methodologically preferable by default
Harmonization is special pleading; fragmentation is neutral scholarship
None of this is “data.” These are interpretive choices embedded in a research program called historical criticism. That program has produced genuine insights. It also carries philosophical baggage McClellan never acknowledges and apparently hopes you won’t notice.
When McClellan says “the data suggests,” what he means is “my interpretive framework suggests.” Everyone interprets through frameworks. The difference is that some of us admit it.
The Univocality Strawman
McClellan’s central thesis is that presupposing “univocality” - Scripture speaking with one voice - distorts interpretation. Assume the Bible can’t contradict itself and you’ll force harmonizations and read your preferences into the text.
There’s a sliver of truth here. Flat readings that bulldoze genre, development, and context do produce bad interpretation. But McClellan conflates two very different positions:
The position he attacks: Every verse harmonizes perfectly with every other verse on every topic. No development, no genre variation, no progressive revelation. Wooden literalism from Genesis to Revelation.
The position Christians actually hold: Scripture has a unified divine author working through diverse human instruments toward coherent theological purposes. Unity exists at the level of canonical trajectory and theological center, not verse-by-verse wooden concordance.
No serious Reformed theologian holds the first position. The Westminster Confession explicitly states that “all things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all” (WCF 1.7). We’ve recognized progressive revelation, genre diversity, and careful hermeneutics for centuries.
McClellan spends his time demolishing a fundamentalist caricature while the sophisticated position stands untouched. That’s not scholarship. That’s choosing your opponent based on who’s easiest to beat.
Slavery: The Hermeneutical Key McClellan Won’t Touch
McClellan claims slavery is “the one topic where the Bible speaks univocally in favor.” This is his strongest claim, so let’s take it seriously.
What he gets right: The Bible regulates slavery. Leviticus 25:44-46 permits purchasing slaves from surrounding nations. Exodus 21 establishes rules for treatment of servants. The New Testament includes instructions for slaves to obey masters. These texts exist. Pretending otherwise helps no one.
What he ignores - and this is remarkable given his credentials - is that Jesus provides an explicit hermeneutical key for reading the Law. McClellan never touches it.
When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus responds:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.“ (Matt 22:37-40, ESV)
That final sentence isn’t decorative piety. It’s an interpretive directive. Jesus is telling you how to read the Law. Every command - including servitude regulations - hangs on and must be read through the controlling principle of neighbor-love.
When asked “Who is my neighbor?”, Jesus answers with the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Your neighbor is anyone in need whom you have power to help - enemies, outsiders, people you’d naturally avoid. This moral horizon rules out exploitation by definition.
You cannot coherently read “love your neighbor as yourself” alongside “take your neighbor into involuntary bondage.” The hermeneutical key Jesus provides makes that combination impossible.
McClellan, the biblical scholar, somehow missed this. Or chose not to mention it. I’m not sure which is worse.
Concession Is Not Endorsement
McClellan operates on an assumption he never defends: if God regulates something, God endorses it as morally ideal.
Jesus explicitly denies this.
When asked about divorce, Jesus distinguishes God’s ideal from Mosaic accommodation:
“Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matt 19:8, ESV)
There it is. An interpretive category McClellan never acknowledges: regulation does not equal endorsement.
God regulates slavery the way He regulates divorce - because immediate abolition in a fallen world would require perpetual judgment. After the Flood, God covenanted not to destroy humanity every time society collapsed into sin (Gen 8:21-22; 9:8-17). That covenant frames the entire Old Testament: patient limitation of destructive practices rather than instant abolition followed by annihilation.
Servitude regulations are guardrails for a fallen people, not revelation of God’s moral ideal. McClellan either doesn’t know this distinction exists or hopes you don’t.
The Trajectory McClellan Pretends Doesn’t Exist
McClellan reads biblical texts atomistically - frozen snapshots ripped from canonical context. But Scripture has a trajectory, and on slavery that trajectory is impossible to miss unless you’re trying:
Imago Dei (Gen 1:26-27): All humans bear God’s image. Not just Israelites. Not just free persons. Everyone. This anthropological foundation undermines slavery’s legitimacy at the root. Image-bearers cannot be reduced to property.
The Exodus Narrative: God’s paradigmatic act of salvation is liberating slaves. Israel’s entire identity forms around “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). Liberation is the pattern. Enslavement is what God rescues people from.
Prophetic Critique: Amos, Isaiah, and Micah thunder against oppression. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?” (Isa 58:6). These aren’t obscure texts. They’re major prophetic themes.
Jubilee Provisions: Every fifty years, return to ancestral land. Structural limits on permanent servitude built into the calendar.
New Testament Trajectory: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Paul tells Philemon to receive Onesimus “no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother” (Philemon 16).
Historical Outcome: Abolition movements arose from Christian moral frameworks. Wilberforce, the Quakers, Clarkson - they argued from biblical anthropology, not against it. Where were the secular abolition movements grounded in naturalistic philosophy?
McClellan isolates Leviticus 25 as if none of this exists. That’s not “data over dogma.” That’s selective quotation pretending to be comprehensive analysis.
The Falsification Challenge
Let me make this concrete and falsifiable:
Show me one command where God explicitly instructs Israel to take a human being as an involuntary slave, rather than regulate an already existing Near Eastern institution.
The texts McClellan cites are permissive regulation (”you may purchase”), not divine mandate (”go enslave these people”). God permits what He does not command. He regulates what He does not endorse.
Produce a text where God initiates slavery - commands Israel to take free people into bondage - and I’ll acknowledge the argument has force.
That text doesn’t exist. What exists is regulation of existing institutions with limits pointing toward eventual abolition. McClellan knows this. He’s counting on you not to.
The Grounding Problem McClellan Can’t Answer
Here’s where it gets interesting. On what basis does McClellan condemn slavery?
Throughout the conversation, he deploys moral language freely. Certain readings are “harmful.” Slavery is bad. Oppression matters. Human dignity is valuable.
Where does any of this come from?
McClellan’s method is functionally naturalistic. Historical criticism brackets theological claims to analyze texts as human documents. Fine - that’s a methodological choice. But if your operative worldview is naturalistic, you have no resources to condemn slavery as objectively wrong.
On naturalism:
Humans are temporarily organized matter with no intrinsic dignity
Morality is evolutionary adaptation - useful fiction, not objective truth
“Slavery is wrong” reduces to “I dislike slavery” or “my culture disapproves”
There’s no standpoint from which slavery is genuinely evil rather than locally disfavored
McClellan can’t have it both ways. Either he’s borrowing Christian moral resources - human dignity, objective harm - while attacking Christianity, or he needs to produce his own foundation for the moral claims he keeps making.
He won’t. He can’t. So he just keeps borrowing and hoping no one notices the loan.
When McClellan condemns “harmful” interpretations, I want to ask: harmful according to what standard? On what basis is harm objectively bad? His method can’t answer. Christianity can.
On Abortion: Contested Readings Sold as Consensus
McClellan argues Exodus 21:22-25 proves fetuses weren’t considered full persons - miscarriage gets a fine while harming the mother triggers lex talionis.
This reading is contested. McClellan presents it as settled.
The Hebrew describes men fighting who strike a pregnant woman, causing her children to “come out” (yatsa). If no “harm” (ason), a fine. If harm, life for life.
McClellan reads: miscarriage = fine, harm to mother = talion.
The text can equally be read: premature birth with no harm to child = fine, harm to child or mother = talion.
The Septuagint reads it differently still: “not fully formed” = fine, “fully formed” = life for life. This implies graduated fetal personhood - closer to the pro-life position than pro-choice.
McClellan presents one contested reading as “data” while alternatives become dogmatic special pleading. But the textual situation is genuinely disputed among scholars who don’t have TikTok followings to maintain.
More fundamentally: even granting McClellan’s reading, what follows? That ancient Israelite legal codes didn’t grant fetuses full legal personhood doesn’t establish what’s morally true. Legal codes accommodate social contexts. The question is what trajectory Scripture sets.
Christianity provides:
Imago Dei extending to human life at all stages
Psalm 139’s language of God knowing us in the womb
The incarnation beginning at conception (Luke 1:31-35)
Consistent early church witness against abortion (Didache, Epistle of Barnabas, Tertullian)
McClellan’s historical narrative about the pro-life movement is equally selective. Yes, some evangelical leaders initially accepted Roe. Yes, political motivations existed. This genetic fallacy doesn’t address whether the position is true. The early Church condemned abortion centuries before Jerry Falwell was born.
On Child Sacrifice: Minority Position Parading as Mainstream
McClellan claims Exodus 22:28-30 was “originally a command for child sacrifice” later renegotiated into redemption requirements.
This is a minority scholarly position by essentially non-Christian skeptics delivered with consensus-level confidence. Classic McClellan.
The text commands Israel to “give” (natan) the firstborn to God. McClellan reads sacrifice because the same verb applies to animals in the next verse. But natan has broad semantic range. Consecration to Temple service - Hannah dedicating Samuel (1 Samuel 1) - fits the verb without requiring sacrifice.
Other Exodus texts (13:13, 34:20) explicitly require redemption of firstborn sons, suggesting this was always the intent. Not a later renegotiation. The original meaning.
Even granting early Israelite religion may have included child sacrifice practices - a contested claim - the canonical trajectory moves decisively against it. Near-sacrifice of Isaac. Redemption requirements. Prophetic condemnation of Molech worship. These establish the direction. Reading one ambiguous text against that entire trajectory isn’t “data over dogma.” It’s cherry-picking dressed in academic robes.
The Question Neither Will Ask
Throughout this conversation, McClellan and O’Connor assume naturalism is the default. Christianity must defend itself against the neutral position.
But naturalism isn’t neutral. It’s a metaphysical commitment with consequences. And there’s a question neither participant will touch.
Christianity’s epistemic circle is anchored to an investigable historical claim: the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If Christ rose:
God exists and acts in history
Jesus’ interpretive authority over Scripture is validated
McClellan’s methodological naturalism fails at the foundation
The trajectory I’ve described carries divine authorization
Paul stakes everything on this: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). Christianity offers a falsification condition. We point to a historical event that can be investigated.
The resurrection question precedes the hermeneutical question. Instead of quibbling about whether ancient servitude regulations satisfy modern sensibilities, address the foundational claim: Did Jesus rise from the dead?
If He did, everything else follows - including His authority to tell us how to read the texts McClellan dissects for content.
If He didn’t, I’d be forced to abandon my faith.
What would falsify yours, Dan?
Which Worldview Actually Delivers?
McClellan presents himself as the scholar following evidence while religious people follow dogma. Examine the actual exchange and a different picture emerges.
His method has presuppositions he won’t name. He attacks a univocality strawman while sophisticated hermeneutics goes unaddressed. He isolates texts while ignoring Jesus’ interpretive key and canonical trajectory. He borrows moral realism to condemn “harmful” readings while his framework can’t ground moral realism.
The real question isn’t whether the Bible contains difficult texts. It does. The question is which worldview provides resources for human dignity, moral grounding, and the trajectory toward justice.
Christianity provides:
Intrinsic human dignity grounded in imago Dei
A hermeneutical key that rules out exploitation
A trajectory from accommodation toward creation ideal
Historical resources that actually funded abolition
An anchored epistemic circle that invites investigation
Naturalism provides:
No intrinsic human dignity
No basis for objective moral claims
No trajectory - just survival strategies
Borrowed moral capital with no account
A floating epistemic circle anchored to nothing
McClellan keeps borrowing Christian moral resources to attack Christianity. That’s not refutation. That’s unwitting confirmation.
The data doesn’t favor skepticism. It favors asking harder questions than skeptics are willing to face.
Soli Deo Gloria
JD Longmire
oddXian.com | Challenge the Consensus: Working out the harmony of God’s Word and God’s World