01/22/2025 – Interview with Dan McClellan
Today we're going to talk with this guy, Dan McClellan. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.
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Dan McClellan is a popular biblical scholar who is on multiple social media sites. This was a great conversation that I think you're going to like so let's get into it.
Dr. B: Hello we are here with Professor Dan McClellan a biblical studies professor and we've got a number of things we want to talk about today but how are you doing today Dan?
Dan: I'm doing well thank you. How are you doing Mark?
Dr. B.: All right. Doing great, doing great. Soa lot of people are already familiar with you but for those that aren't give us a quick, a brief overview of your background, education, and how your interest in biblical studies developed.
Dan: Yeah happy to. I actually started my career in biblical studies at Brigham Young University doing an undergrad in Ancient Near Eastern studies where I emphasized Biblical Hebrew and did a minor and classical Greek cuz I wasn't sure if I wanted to go Hebrew Bible or New Testament. They both fascinated me then I went away to the University of Oxford for a master's degree in Jewish studies where I wrote my thesis on textual criticism of the Septuagint. So I kind of split the difference a little bit there. But then I came back, went up to Canada for another master’s degree in biblical studies at Trinity Western University where I worked with Peter Flynn and Marty Abegg doing some Dead Sea Scrolls things doing cognitive linguistics. I wrote my thesis there on the conceptualization of deity in the Hebrew Bible through the methodological lens of cognitive linguistics and ultimately did my PhD through the University of Exeter where I was supervised by the inimitable Francesca Stavrakopoulou and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the conceptualization of deity and divine agency through the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics but also the cognitive science of religion which became kind of a specialization of mine so I focus on the conceptualization of deity, of scripture, and of religious identity but you know this is not a very robust field right now so I've been working full-time as a scripture translation supervisor for the LDS church for the last 10 years. Was having trouble finding full-time you know tenure track work...
Dr. B.: Sure, sure.
Dan: …which is the dream and in you mentioned that you started in 2020 it was March of 2021 when I was getting a little antsy being inside all the time I thought I might as well check out what's going on TikTok cuz I started to see videos related to things that I had researched bubble to the surface on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and I thought Tik Tok was just for dancing…
Dr. B.: Right, right.
Dan: …and for you know interrupting presidential campaigns from Korea and all that kind of stuff and I was glad to let him have it but I thought well if they're talking about religion over there I want to see what exactly they're saying so I went and lurked for a little while and realized that nobody was in charge. So I didn't see any credentialed experts over there who could speak in in an academic and informed way about the Bible and religion and I thought well shoot I might as well go give it a shot and so I kind of position myself as a bit of a referee trying to or umpire trying to call balls and strikes not necessarily playing for any team but just trying to share what the data suggests about the academic study of the Bible and religion and I had engaged in this kind of thing before fact-checking and responding to misinformation on blogs and on Facebook and stuff like that and it never garnered much attention but for whatever reason and it's not this it's not it's not the image that I present for whatever ever reason it got more attention when I was making videos and so I have since pivoted to doing content creation and public scholarship full-time and have channels on a variety of different platforms some of them perhaps circling the drain others a little not so much and also have the podcast called the Data Over Dogma podcast that releases episodes every Monday morning and I have a trade book coming out in at the end of April called The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. So we'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah so I've been doing everything I can to try to get food on the table through the medium of social media.
Dr. B.: Yeah I mean you're already sort of answered my next question. I mean you you're involved you have multiple media outlets you know the most well-known being the Data Over Dogma podcast slash YouTube channel you know TikTok Channel active there daily. What are some of the key moments that sort of led you to pivot to such a wide online presence? I mean why do this? You already partially answered this but…
Dan: I just... one of the most fascinating things to me as I progressed within graduate studies in the study of the Bible and religion is the disconnect between the academic world and the understanding that the academic world has of the Bible and what you see in public discourse.
Dr. B: Yeah it's a pretty wide gap.
Dan: It is, and this was something when I was at Trinity Western University I can recall specifically having long conversations with some of my cohorts in that group where some of these folks were intending to go on to ministry and it was they were trying to figure out how can I package this for the pews.
Dr. B.: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: How can we make this something that we can share with your everyday Bible believers without immediately getting fired or run out of town.
Dr. B.: The practical question, I mean I had a pastor tell me once you can't tell people John wasn't written by John you know and I'm just like well…I…it…um…
Dan: You should be able to though. And I participated in those discussions from kind of an outside point of view because I was not an Evangelical. I'm an active member of the LDS church which is a very different brand of Christianity than what a lot of the people engaged in that public discourse are and so but I recognize the same dynamic and the same problem. How am I going to be able to digest and transmit some of this to the folks in the congregations that I'm a part of and so it was something that I always struggled with but when I when I see the misinformation and one of the things that probably the biggest catalyst the reason I said all right I've got to do this now is back in 2011 there was this thing called the Jordan Lead Codices I don't know if you recall hearing about this. Somebody put out a press release claiming that they found 70 lead codices that were from the first century CE and covered in Christian inscriptions and iconography and all this kind of stuff and I had a group of friends on Facebook who were scholars who are philologists and archaeologists and things like that and we put our heads together and said we need to present a united front against this misinformation because it was gaining an awful lot of traction in social media and so we did what we could to try to provide responses to all the claims that were being made. It wasn't incredibly effective, but as I was lurking on Tik Tok I saw a video where somebody talked about the Jordan Lead Codices and made a bunch of outlandish claims about them and I was like well now you've fallen into my wheelhouse.
Dr. B.: I’ve got to do something, right.
Dan: Because I was like I just I cannot let this disinformation stand unchallenged and so that was when I turned my phone around and I hit play and I recorded a video and I have never been comfortable since but that was probably the main catalyst to this and initially I was I tried to present myself as combating the spread of misinformation and also trying to democratize access to the academic study…
Dr. B: Right.
Dan: …of the Bible and religion as this channel began to spread, I realized this was a wonderful opportunity to try to do what we had been always lamenting couldn't effectively be done outside of like Bart Ehrman that was the one example of someone who was popularizing critical New Testament scholarship at least. And so I started responding to other stuff and to my surprise things started I started getting a lot more responses. I started getting tagged in other videos. I started getting engagement by with or on the part of other creators larger creators who were supporting what I was doing and even some who were not and I just felt like it was it was work that I thought was more fulfilling and work that I thought was important and needed and so I guess I was doing the old see a see a need fill a need kind of thing and so I decided I was going to I was going to stick with it. I was I was in it for the long haul and I had a couple of videos that I that you know got over 4 million views and suddenly you know I would have there was a week where I had 15 to 20,000 new followers in just that week and that was a little it was a little unsettling because every time I would get a big wave of new followers the audience that might either disagree with me or even potentially know better than me about an issue suddenly got a lot bigger and so that was a little intimidating but I found nothing but support on the part of colleagues. The first time I went to SBL after starting to gain some popularity on social media was still we were all wearing masks but the first night I was in the hotel lobby and somebody came up to me. I had my mask on and they said “Are you Dan McClellan. Are you the Data Over Dogma guy? And I said “Yeah.” And he said, “I want to thank you for what you're doing it's so important. We need more folks like you out there and you're doing a great job.” And I was and that was incredibly meaningful and touching to me and overwhelmingly that has been the response ever since and so and so that those few things are what keep me going. Those few things are what got me going in the first place and have pointed me in the direction that that I'm going now and also the fact that it's a I'm making a much better living than I was before doesn't hurt um so I would be I would be lying if I didn't include that as one of the motivations.
Dr. B.: Yeah, it's… I… it's tough when you start becoming public facing. I mean just the other day I had somebody in the comments one of my videos point out a mistake I had made. Both in something that I said and then with a corresponding graphic that I put on the screen and so I had to reply and say, you know yes you're right, you know I, and so on and so forth, and you know thanks for pointing it out. And so I mean it makes me think of what are some of the challenges that you encountered while starting up this, you know very public-facing presentations in biblical studies and religion?
Dan: There were an awful lot of challenges because initially I was just kind of doing whatever I thought was interesting and I had to go out and seek out videos to respond to and Tik Tok search function is abysmal so it was not easy for me to find things to respond to. So initially I was doing an awful lot of videos where I'm just saying, hey have you ever thought of this or here's something that scholars are talking about. And so content was a challenge. But at the same time I'm also trying to make my channel as broadly accessible as possible. Which means I need to generalize as much as possible.
Dr. B.: Yeah.
Dan: And you don't really have generalists in this kind of field and so I was that was an additional challenge once I did have content rolling in and people tagging me and dozens and even hundreds of videos every day and people sending me questions suddenly I was like oh no I need to get a lot better informed about the broader world of biblical scholarship than I currently am. And at the time I still had a you know a 40-hour a week full-time job so the time constraints were significant and then in January of 2023 that's when I shifted to doing this full-time which allowed me to spend more time doing more research and things like that but I also have made errors a variety of different kinds of errors along the way and have had them pointed out to me by people who are sympathetic to my to my movement and my rhetorical goals and also people who are not. And I have tried to respond in the same general way as all of them to take seriously any of these criticisms and do like what you did where I have to post corrections and things like that. I just did one a couple of days ago and you know there are a lot of people who are like, “Well I can't trust you anymore.” And I've always thought…
Dr. B.: But that's just silly. I mean, it’s a mistake.
Dan: Yeah, it's just silly. No if you're if you're following somebody because they've never made a mistake, you're being misled. So that's certainly you know that is a blow to one's ego but if you're doing this for ego then then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. But yeah I've had a lot of obstacles such as my ego that have I've had to recognize those things have to take a backseat if I'm going to be able to if this is going to be a sustainable career for the foreseeable future but I've been again the support that I've that I've gotten has been has been an incredible motivator. Last year not just a few months ago but a year and a couple months ago I won SBL’s award for public scholarship, the Richards award, which was which was incredibly validating and then I hope he doesn't mind if I point it out, but I recently received a message from the executive director of the SBL saying, hey, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate what you're doing so…
Dr. B.: Nice, nice.
Dan: So that's been incredibly validating as well so the challenges are definitely worth it and I'm sure the challenges are only going to grow from here particularly once my book comes out and I think there will be a bigger stage and again that audience of people who might disagree with me and might even know better than me about something I'm talking about is going to grow but it's all been worth it so far and I think as long as I continue to take the same approach of I'm going to put Data Over Dogma to the best of my ability but I'm not perfect please call me out on things that I that I do or say incorrectly and I will be happy to correct myself where I need to. As long as I stick with that, I think that's a winning formula.
Dr. B: So I, which topics have you liked covering the most or covering the least for that matter, and is there anything you haven't done or would like to do as far as content is concerned?
Dan: There I get an awful lot of questions about the history of Christianity and Judaism ever since the Bible which is not really my area of expertise so I would like to be able to respond to those questions more because there are some folks who know parts of that very well out there in social media but there's not somebody I can say any questions about Christianity from Nicea on you can go to this person. If somebody who is that person wants to do a social media channel by all means do it and I will send people your way but certainly that more reception history later on in Jewish and Christian history is something that I would like to be able to do. I think the things that I have addressed most frequently are more controversial topics not only because they're kind of more prominent more conspicuous in the public discourse but also because they tend to perform better and while I don't want to make performance of my videos my priority because then I get stuck in a in a trap but you know I want to put food on the table as well so it has to be a factor at least some of the time.
Dr. B.: Yeah.
Dan: So some of the controversial things when it comes to sexuality in the Bible. When it comes to things like slavery in the Bible. I have done a lot of work with textual criticism and the development of the canon and conceptualizations of deity. I have very strong feelings about monotheism and about Christology. In fact I've got a today I have to submit the final draft of an essay that will go in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion on monotheism and then I've also got a volume that I'm editing on monotheism based on a conference I put together last year. So when it comes to monotheism and Jesus' relationship with God I'm always happy to play. So those are those are some topics that I think some folks are probably tired of hearing me talk about. And tithing I get asked about a lot I've done a few I've addressed that a few times but that's something that's one of those controversial topics that perhaps I need to delve more regularly into. But yeah, I it would be very difficult to list all of the topics that I need to address at some point that I haven't adequately addressed so far.
Dr. B.: Yeah, it's… yeah… I, me too, I've got a laundry list of things I like to talk about and it I try not to get too far into things that I feel like I'm not an expert on and there and we're getting to the point where I don't think we're there yet where we have people that are qualified enough in different social media platforms to talk about different things like if I want you know I mean people go to Andrew at Religion For Breakfast if they want to learn more about Late Antiquity you know, for example, I mean that's his forte and so on and so forth. You know I'm more on philosophy of religion and things like that so I mean it's but I don't think we're quite there we don't have enough channels and they're not all especially, me my weak point is marketing and so on and so forth and so you know how do we get our you know messages out there so people actually see them and so on and so forth. I, people tell me, that you know you have the best video you know uh I've ever seen on Paul Tillich or whatever and then but you know just because I have the best video doesn't mean that everybody that needs to see that actually has knows that it exists right…
Dan: Right, right.
Dr. B.: And so it's difficult. So I… so moving forward I what is the purpose or the goal of public facing presentations in biblical studies? I mean, is it just providing information, is it rhetorical in the sense you're trying to convince some people of something? What's the overall message that you're trying to communicate?
Dan: I think one of the main things I'm trying to do is expose people to the fact that there is an entire field of scholarship and an entire group of scholars that engage the Bible and religion critically and scientifically and there are all kinds of insights and the and I kind of want to expose people to the gap that exists between the public discourse about the Bible and the academic discourse about the Bible because there are an awful lot of people participating in the public discourse who are either not satisfied or who are being victimized or oppressed or suppressed or marginalized or minoritized by that discourse and so I think there can only be good that can come from making people more aware of the academic study of the Bible and religion and the main themes and the main insights and the consensus views I think that's going to help people when it comes to these power struggles I think it's going to help people when it comes to their relationships with friends and family. I get messages every day from folks who tell me that I have helped them heal from past trauma or repair relationships or even be more faithful or more comfortable around people of faith or things like that. So I think there are a wide variety of deliverables to public scholarship. And I and one for example I'm one of the things I'm working on now is a large scale survey of biblical scholars regarding their positions on over 150 different research questions where I would like to be able to provide robust data and say “This is the consensus view,” and people say, “How do you know?” And I'll say “Because these are the numbers,” and be able to provide exact percentages. I think that kind of thing would be incredibly helpful to a lot of the discourse that is out there that is that is operating frequently in ignorance of these other academic approaches but overwhelmingly without adequate access to them. So I think closing that gap is my main goal.
Dr. B.: Yeah it's tricky because people in their religious context that they're socialized in, you know, they're in a, I guess we're all in a bubble, but I mean they're in a trouble and they don't know that and so how do you find a way to you know when they you know you get pushback you know when you mention consensus sometimes you know and people don't understand that there's this much bigger thing that that's out there beyond your bubble even if you're not aware of it, it exists, and it's sometimes it's hard to convince people of that or make them aware of that you know and I think of like other disciplines that do this outside of religion you know think of like science and you have people that have publicly you know way back in the day it was Carl Sagan you know and then more recently Neil Degrass Tyson and so on and so forth where you know he they get asked questions about religion and he you know they're just like well maybe the social scientific study of religion can help us better understand religion but then they kind of defer the question because it's not the area of expertise. But sometimes I wish they would say well there's this whole like academic side of religion that exists and point people to us you know and just say well you need to ask them about that you know cuz if somebody asked me a question about science I'll say you know he go watch Neil Degrass Tyson or something. I mean, I'm not going to answer that I'm not qualified. You know I wish that they would do the reverse but again they don't know that we exist and so it's kind of a kind of a tricky thing there but um…
Dan: And I and I think I will my job will be or our job but at least talking about myself my job will be done when I stop hearing, “Oh you have a PhD in Bible. Are you going to be a preacher?” Yeah like as if that is the only goal that someone can have for studying religion and and I you know I tell people oh I they're like oh you basically have a PhD in Harry Potter. Well no, I wrote my dissertation on the cognitive science of religion and they're like, “What is that?” And people don't even know that there's a whole field of study out there that consolidates evolutionary psychology and neuroscience and anthropology and archaeology and all this to try to help better understand what religion is from a scientific point of view. And it's not just from believing folks that there's misinformation. It comes from the skeptical side as well. And so yeah, I think just getting people to realize that that we exist would be if you had to distill it down to one thing it would be helping more people realize that the academic study of the Bible and religion exists.
Dr. B.: Yeah, so I so let's get into your books for a minute. You have two books YHWH's Divine Images: The Cognitive Approach, which came on in 2022. And then a new book coming out shortly, again in April, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues. Now the first book I assume is based on your dissertation. It's an academic study on the cognitive science of religion. I read through the last few days Very interesting. A lot of things I like about it. The thing cuz I'm more on the Continental side in philosophy of religion I really liked this section you talked about anthropomorphism because I just I'm in the process of creating a video on Feuerbach and that was a big thing from Feuerbach, anthropomorphism and religion. And then the second book is targeted more towards a popular audience. So what is the connection between the two books, if there is a connection between the two books?
Dan: There's not a huge connection because the second book is a trade volume so it's entirely different. The first one is it's academic it's also open access. It's freely accessible as a PDF. The second one is basically I had a literary agent reach out to me and say, “Are you working on a book?” And I said, “No.” He said, “You should be working on a book. Do you have an agent?” “No.” “All right. I'm going to be your agent.” And we put together a proposal and started shopping it around and took a meeting with a with a publisher who said this is really good but for a first trade volume you want to reach more of your audience so it needs to be something that's going to be closer to them than to this academic point you're trying to make. So they're like could you do like a greatest hits of your content? And I was like, “Yeah I could do I do something like that.” And ended up just whittling it down to what the Bible actually says about a bunch of different issues based on a lot of the content that I've produced. And so I came up with 18 different claims about what the Bible says, from the Bible says Jesus is God, to the Bible says the universe was created out of nothing, to the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination, to the Bible says you should beat your kids, to all these kinds of things and each chapter in a tries to engage that and share what the data actually indicate the biblical authors we're trying to get away with. If there is a connection however undergirding it is a cognitive linguistic concern for the fact that texts don't really have inherent meaning that we're producing the meaning in which sense the Bible doesn't really “say” anything at all. We are saying stuff with the Bible. And so I try to caution people against thinking of the Bible is speaking and to approach this more as based on our best efforts. This is what we think they were most likely trying to get at. But I also use that to show that it's malleable. It's negotiable and that is what results in the fact that so many people think the Bible says so many different things. So that's kind of how I introduce a discussion that's kind of not too far from the surface throughout the discussion and then I kind of wrap up with the with the conclusion that ultimately we're in charge of what we think the Bible says and that we should be trying to approximate at least as a as a point of departure if we're treating the Bible as authoritative we should at least take into consideration what the original authors and editors and audiences were trying to get across and that's not to discount all the different approaches to interpreting the Bible but to say in a lot of the discourse the concern is for originalism of some kind and so from a text or not a text from a historical-critical point of view here's what we think we can say and what we think we probably can't say and so that should just be a partner in the discussion.
Dr. B.: Yeah, it, I mean, you know I have a lot of videos on my channel about philosophical hermeneutics even though I don't know I don't always call it that because when I say that people are like, “What's that?” you know so you have to you know but in these I try to go in my various you know machinations and without using too technical verbiage and trying to say that the meaning you know starts with us and that we you know like you say we negotiate all of these things and I mean with your work which you know we're excited to see in a couple months in April, I see how you have to make it a little bit different to target of course popular audience because a couple AARs ago I heard Pete Enns speak and he has The Bible Told Me So and a number of popular works and you know he has to have a certain writing style that will engage people to read his works and then I think one of the chapters in one of his books was called The Big Reveal where he's talking about how in you know the conquest of you know the land and so on and so forth and they killed all these people and blah blah blah and then he's like the big reveal is it never happened you know you know they never you know it's all and the people are like, “Wait, what?” you know and so but he has to try to explain this in an easy-to-understand simple language not the technical verbiage. And was that any kind of a challenge for you? Or how did you approach that when you were writing?
Dan: It actually was a challenge and I have documentation of the fact that it was a challenge because I got emails from um my editor and my agent when I first started submitting drafts of chapters where they were saying you're still trying to convince your colleagues when what you need to be doing is share your opinion with the public and…
Dr. B.: Yeah they're not your audience. Right.
Dan: Right. And so I was going into the minutia to try to because I thought that a popular book needed to be something where even if academics engaged it they were going to be able to find all the answers and all the references and all the data and they were like…
Dr. B.: It's not for them.
Dan: That's not what you're doing. Yeah so it is a I feel a little vulnerable because there’s going to be an awful lot of opportunities for somebody who's approaching it from a much different academic stance to say, “Well you didn't cover this,” or “You didn't cover this,” or “You didn't cover this,” and I don't. My response is going to be like, “My editor and my agent told me I'm not trying to convince colleagues.” Yeah so it's incredibly difficult and I had always been trained to write in a certain way where you try and you know we have word limits so frequently so we you know the reason we use $3 words is because they say precisely what we want to say and not what we don't want to say and I had to try to not do that and it took an awful lot of work and they were like, “Why don't you just transcribe your videos?” And I was like, “It's not as simple as that.” But it made me realize that there was a big difference between what happens when I hit play on a camera and just start yapping and what happens when I'm sitting in front of a computer putting together an argument that somebody else is going to read and that took that took months for me to feel comfortable getting onto the page the kinds of things I would say to a camera and so I don't know that I was 100% successful with this book we'll see how it's received by the general public. I think there are probably going to be one or two places where people are like, “Didn't quite understand what you were trying to get at,” but hopefully it's a good start and then I can get more into this. The code switching might be the problem though because now I go to conferences and I'm a lot more relaxed and a lot more informal in the way I present and right and that might make some enemies in the...
Dr. B.: So what? They need to loosen up a little bit it.
Dan: Agreed. I was I chaired a session for this cognitive science approaches to the Bible with some with some wonderful scholars and I showed up wearing a Spider-Man t-shirt and so nobody said anything to me but it was a b you know like half the panel was Europeans and so I have to I have to imagine somebody was like, “Who's this clown?” But I'm going to be clowning a lot more so they'll get used to me.
Dr. B.: I, so, what did you like most about framing the contents of The Bible Says So, and what do you hope this book will accomplish?
Dan: I think what I liked the most was the opportunity to take the kinds of things that I've said in videos, which are never comprehensive, they're always you know pretty short clips. I'm always in I'm trying to as directly as possible engage a specific question but it was an opportunity to kind of take a bunch of different things that I’ve said and distill it down to a decent argument that could be used as a reference work for somebody. Because that's so frequently what I've heard other people say when I will talk about abortion and the Bible or something like that they're like, “Oh I need a footnoted version of this.” And so I was thinking of those people when I was writing this. Thinking now I'm providing you with the laying out the argument for the public, not for academics, and you know providing references and things like that so I hope it will become a reference for people who would like to be able to approach the Bible from a more academic critical point of view who may not know where to find the resources. Who may not know how to think critically about these questions. So hopefully it can model the thought processes for them. Hopefully it can direct them to resources that can answer some of these questions. And hopefully it will at least catalyze a more public conversation about these things that honestly are not going to blow the hair back on a bunch of scholarly heads. Like most, this is something that people have said that other people feel like they're criticizing me but I think they're validating me. People will be like, “There's nothing original about his content. This is all stuff that you would get in any introduction to Bible in a decent university.” It's like that's the highest praise I can get. This is all just standard stuff. And so a lot of this is just standard stuff and I would just like it to be a part of a more central part of the public discourse so you know being a bestseller making a lot of money all great but ultimately what that signals is that this is becoming a part of the public discourse where 10, 20 years ago, a lot of the stuff that is in this book would not have been found in the public discourse apart from you know the how Ehrman kind of did very similar things with trade volumes.
Dr. B.: Well I mean, and it's interesting how the standard stuff in academic circles is so shocking for the general public. You know if you, it be like you know the titles of the Gospel authors were you know put on about 100 years after they were composed. You know people would be like, “Wait, what are you talking about?” You know it's just shocking for people to know something and you know and like we've scholars have known that for over a century. You know, I mean it's not like this is new information you know and so on and so forth. And so it is kind of so this is sort of you have sort of this access work which helps bridge the gap and maybe will get people more interested in this which would be very helpful so…
Dan: Yeah, that's the goal. And yeah I owe the publisher a proposal on book number two as soon as this one gets released so I'm trying to figure out what's going to be the next thing that that everybody wants to hear about. But yeah, if this can create this line of communication and this these inroads into the public discourse I think that that would that's the best I could hope for is make these things more public.
Dr. B.: As a lot of my viewers know I'm a former community college professor and so I'm always interested when I talk to people about how they do their teaching. And so you started getting into some teaching which you've done I know number of online courses and so on so forth and mostly centered on topics and biblical studies. What types of things do you do to help students understand and appropriate these issues. Are there things you've discovered that that works best? And then how do they respond to that?
Dan: That's a great question. That's the perennial issue of teaching. Yes and I think just trying to meet them where they're at and give them the tools to be able to get to where you are on their own terms I think is really the key. And I see that in my own kids you know when they're like asking for help with math or something like that and we're not just trying to beat memorization of things into them we're trying to show them how to deconstruct these complex things into more manageable parts and then put them back together and that's how I have always had to approach scholarship. I was not raised in an academic family. I'd never thought of myself as academic at all and so I what I have always done has been like take a big problem and try and break it down into more manageable parts and articulate them in ways that make sense to me and surprisingly I hear from an awful lot of folks out in the public that the ways that make sense to me also seem to make a lot of sense to them so some of the feedback that I really appreciate is that is that I'm able to break it down into manageable parts that are accessible to the public and so I think and also acknowledge what the stakes are because I think a lot of times people are like, “I… why should I care about this?” and if they can if they can have the stakes in mind or the implications or the consequences of these kinds of things in mind I think that's a wonderful motivator to help them understand or to help them want to pursue trying to understand these constituent elements on their own and then reconstruct whatever this larger problem is. So I think I try to do that I try to approach this with a language register and with a pedagogical approach that's that going to meet the general public where they're at. These are not people who are coming to an expensive university. These are not people who are dedicating their lives for at least the next few years to learning whatever I have to tell them. These are people who are like that who might see a video and be like, “Oh that sounds interesting, maybe I'll pay 25 bucks to go listen to that that guy for an hour and a half. He's not too uh ugly.” And so I think I try to approach, I think my pedagogical approach is make this something that is accessible to the general public who may not be on the lookout for it and make be open and upfront about the stakes so someone who may not be on the lookout for it can recognize this would be valuable To know. This would be something that would benefit me to know more about and to commit to learning about and I think I'm more successful in some times than others and with some topics than with other topics but having to produce content every single day I think has conditioned me to have my finger a little closer to the pulse of what the general public wants to hear about and how they want to hear about it. So hopefully that makes me a more successful teacher.
Dr. B.: Yeah, it uh, one of the big things that I all my teaching was pre-covid and in person and one of the big things I had to learn which was a hard lesson for me was not everybody learns the same way that I learn. And so I had to learn all about the field of education just in general and so you know Bloom’s taxonomy and all sorts of other things and that there are many different teaching methods that both in content delivery and then you know later assessment and things that I had to do in order to help people learn because everybody learns a little bit different with their learning styles and it took me a while to figure all that out and tailor all the things I wanted to teach to so that it would it would reach people and so but online is a little bit of a different animal. There you're a little bit more limited on that than you would be in an in-person environment but… So what's next for you? What types of things, you already mentioned a few things, but what types of things are you working on or hope to focus on in the near future?
Dan: I am, I'm, well, the foundation of what I do will continue to be that daily content that I produce but that also makes possible the exploration of a lot of different things. I would love to start to put together some maybe not seminars but symposia conferences and things like that that we sponsor and bring together scholars who are interested in reaching the public. I know that is something that's I have a good friend who was close with Michael Heiser who ran a podcast and had events and conferences like that and I've heard good things about how that helped a lot of folks engage with public scholarship and scholars in a different way than online. It's one thing to watch videos. It's another to have the opportunity to go to a conference and interact with these people in person while they give presentations that are intended for public consumption. So I would like to move in that direction. I'm like I said I've got more books in me that's trade books that I'd like to get out of me and I would like to, yeah improve as a scholar. Like I said I'm still involved in the academy in a lot of different ways. I have not just abandoned the academy to just go tickle the public's fancy. So I want to advance the cognitive science of religion within SBL and kind of evangelize to some degree that field of study. I think it has an awful lot to offer. I would like to continue to write academic books and articles. In fact, I've got several articles that I've been planning to write for a year now that that I just need to sit down and write and yeah I'm editing a vol that volume on the from the conference on monotheism. I'd like to put together another conference on early christology that would hopefully result in an edited volume as well. So got a lot of different things on the menu and these days right now I just want my bathroom remodeling to get done. So that’s kind of the most pressing thing. But yeah, a lot of different things going on and hoping that I can bring my family along for the ride is a big part of it. I was able to take my family to Europe not last not 2024 but in 2023 which is something that I never a privilege I never had growing up that I'm very glad I was able to share with my kids even though even though they overwhelmingly did not like a lot of the experiences but I know they brought some good memories home from it. So yeah, taking advantage of the opportunities that that this has given me and my family is also a big priority.
Dr. B.: Yeah they'll appreciate it later in life.
Dan: Yeah.
Dr. B.: The, I… just a quick note for our viewers. I'm, we're actually recording this on January 15th in 2025 and I'll release this a week later after I do my video editing magic but by that time as of this moment we don't really know that the status or fate of Tik Tok as Dan and I mentioned before we got on the air here. And you mentioned a number of things that you're going to still obviously be doing even though some people kind of only know you on Tik Tok and don't know your other avenues. Do you want us to give a just a for our viewers a quick rundown of places that you'll be just in case Tik Tok is gone by the time this video gets released?
Dan: Yeah, the so the Data Over Dogma podcast is going to continue obviously.
Dr. B.: And that's also on YouTube.
Dan: So and that's also on YouTube if you really want to look at my face and I don't. So but the Tik Tok was always kind of home base for my social media content and that's probably going to transition to YouTube which means if Tik Tok does go away I will probably be I'll have the short form stuff but I'll also probably commit a lot more time to longer form stuff and more live streams and things like that so YouTube will probably become home base and then I have I have long been on Instagram so I will continue to be on there. In fact, I have a lot of a lot of my online relationships the ones I value the most are actually because of Instagram so I'll continue to be on there. Also on BlueSky and Twitter and Threads and I just created an account on this RedNote which is the new Chinese social media. Well I don't know how new it is, but the Chinese social media app that requires I know some Chinese to be able to navigate a lot of the interface but which I don't but I've I posted my first video on there today so in the event that that Tik Tok goes under there will be a bunch of other places to find me. And then I also have my website makelan.org which is where I host most of the online classes that I teach. We're going to be starting up round two or part two of an introduction of Biblical Hebrew starting in March. We did, excuse me, I'm also if you can't tell feeling a little under the weather today, but we did part one last in 2024 and then we're going to start up part two in March so anybody interested in learning Biblical Hebrew that might be a wonderful opportunity for you so yeah. I'm all over and then expect to see me I told people I was going to be insufferable about my book once pre-orders were open so I continue to be insufferable and how frequently I bring up my book because my publisher told me to be so. Yeah once that comes out I will be I've started yesterday organizing some plans for some book events in a few different cities around the U.S. and we're hopefully we'll be expanding that if the if the book does as well as we're hoping it will so I will be I will be coming to a city near many of you at some point soon.
Dr. B.: Sounds great, and I'll try to put a lot of the information down in our description that we just talked about if you want to learn more information about that so… All right Professor Dan McClellan, thanks so much for being with us and chatting with us for today. We appreciate it.
Dan: Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
Okay so what did you think about convo? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Coming up next month is an interview with Sarah Moslener about Evangelical Purity culture and her book Virgin Nation. Another great episode on Feuerbach. And then after that some more great interviews with religion scholars doing some fantastic work. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this support the channel in the link below. Give me a Super Thanks. Also please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.