I have tattoos. A lot of them. My arms are a significant percentage covered in ink, a snake curling around my forearm, some small skulls on my knuckles, a lemon moth on my left shoulder because moths eat what's beautiful and I found that honest. I also have, somewhere on my left ribs, the latitude and longitude coordinates of a place I used to think was holy. I got that one before I read Leviticus carefully, but I would have gotten it after too. I'd just have found it funnier.
Here is Leviticus 19:28: "You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves." It's right there. Clear as day. One sentence. And yet the number of tattooed Christians I met growing up, genuine committed pew-every-Sunday Christians who would cite Leviticus 18:22 without blinking at you, was substantial. The reconciliation of those two facts is what this post is about and it's a conversation I've been wanting to have for a while.
Because here's the thing I've come to understand about how Leviticus works in American Christianity: it functions like a weapon with a safety that only certain people know how to disengage. The same text that gets quoted verbatim in one context gets explained away, contextualized, or simply ignored in another. And the deciding factor for which treatment a verse receives is almost never the text itself. It's always something else. Let's go through it.
The Leviticus Grab Bag (What's Actually In There)
Most people who cite Leviticus have not read Leviticus. I know this because I grew up in church and I can tell you with confidence that the book was not a regular sermon series topic. It's the kind of text that gets mined for specific verses while the surrounding context is treated like the fine print nobody reads. So let me give you a brief field guide.
Leviticus 11 is the dietary law chapter, the source of the shellfish prohibition. Verse 10 specifically: "everything in the seas or the rivers that does not have fins and scales...is detestable to you." Shrimp. Lobster. Crab. All detestable. The word used is the same Hebrew word (sheqets) used elsewhere for things that are ceremonially unclean. The prohibition is not mild. It uses the same structural language as the prohibitions people quote at me.
Leviticus 19:19 forbids mixing fabrics: "You shall not wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material." Cotton-poly blends. Your beloved athleisure. The entire fast fashion industry. All technically Levitically prohibited. The same chapter, literally the same chapter that contains verse 28 about tattoos, also contains verse 27, which prohibits trimming the edges of your beard. Leviticus 19 is doing A LOT.
Leviticus 20:9 mandates the death penalty for cursing your parents. Leviticus 20:10 mandates death for adultery. Leviticus 25 contains the laws of the Jubilee year, including debt cancellation and land redistribution every fifty years. That's a verse that, notably, does not get cited in political discourse about economic policy with anything like the frequency of the sexuality verses. Curious, that.
I've read all of it. Multiple times. I've read it with the evangelical apologetics framework I was raised with and I've read it without. What I've come to understand is that there is no consistent hermeneutic being applied to Leviticus by most of the people citing it. There is a conclusion being reached first and the text is being marshaled in service of that conclusion. The texts that support the conclusion survive. The ones that don't get the "Old Covenant" treatment.
The Old Covenant Defense (And Why It Doesn't Hold)
When you point this out, when you ask specifically about the shellfish or the fabrics or the beard-trimming, you will almost always get some version of the following response: "Those are Old Covenant ceremonial laws. Christians aren't bound by those because Jesus fulfilled the law. The moral laws still apply, but not the ceremonial or civil ones."
This is the standard apologetic framework and I want to take it seriously because some of the people saying it genuinely believe it's a coherent position. The theological concept is called the tripartite division of the law: moral law (still binding), ceremonial law (fulfilled in Christ, no longer binding), and civil law (for Israel specifically, not applicable to Gentile nations). It's a real interpretive framework, not something invented to dodge shellfish conversations.
The problem is that this framework is not in the Bible. I have read the Bible. There is no verse where God says "by the way, here's how to sort these laws into three bins." The tripartite division is a post-biblical theological construct, developed primarily by medieval scholastics and systematized in Reformed theology, that was applied retroactively to the text to solve exactly the problem we're discussing. It was invented, in significant part, to explain why Christians can eat shrimp. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's church history.
And even if you accept the framework, the categorization of specific laws is entirely inconsistent. Who decided that Leviticus 18:22 is "moral" while Leviticus 11:10 is "ceremonial"? The text treats them with similar gravity. The ancient audience reading them would not have made that distinction. The distinction is being made now, by people now, based on what they want the outcome to be. If you're honest about that, you at least have to admit that your hermeneutic is not doing the work you're claiming it's doing.
The Tattoo Question (Personal and Pointed)
Let me come back to the tattoos, because I find the tattoo case particularly illuminating. The prohibition in Leviticus 19:28 is, by any reading, as clear and contextually simple as any verse in the chapter. It's a one-sentence statement. It doesn't require the tripartite framework to explain, you would use the Old Covenant argument to dismiss it, same as the shellfish. And indeed, that's mostly what tattooed Christians do: they say it was an Old Covenant rule, possibly about pagan mourning practices (the "cuts on your body for the dead" part), and that it doesn't apply under the New Covenant.
Fine. I'm not here to tell Christians they can't have tattoos. I have the tattoos, I'm rooting for the argument. What I'm pointing out is: the EXACT same mechanism, "this is Old Covenant, fulfilled in Christ, doesn't apply," is available for every verse in that book. Every single one. The decision about which verses get the Old Covenant waiver and which ones are still binding moral truths is not being made by the text. It's being made by the person reading it, based on what they want to be true.
My tattoos are on my body and they stay there. Leviticus 19:28 is in the Bible and it stays there too. Both of those things are true simultaneously. The difference is I'm not using either one to write legislation or justify discrimination. That's the part that matters to me. Not whether someone has tattoos or eats shrimp, their body, their plate, their covenant relationship with whoever they worship. What I object to is the selective weaponization of ancient legal codes in ways that just happen to land hardest on the people who were already being targeted.
What the Pattern Reveals
When you look at which Levitical prohibitions survive into active political and religious discourse and which ones get the Old Covenant waiver, a pattern emerges that is not subtle. The ones that survive are the ones targeting specific marginalized groups. The ones that get waived are the ones that would inconvenience the people doing the citing. The shellfish commandment gets waived, the ones about gender and sexuality stay. The "cursing your parents" death penalty gets waived, the ones about purity and sexuality stay. The fabric-mixing prohibition gets waived, the ones that can be leveraged against gay and trans people stay.
My problem is not with Leviticus. Leviticus is an ancient legal text produced by a Bronze Age culture trying to construct a distinctive communal identity through ritual practice. That's interesting and worth reading. My problem is with the contemporary use of Leviticus as a selective crowbar, deployed with confident authority against specific populations while the identical literary structure surrounding those verses is cheerfully ignored by people wearing cotton-polyester blends and eating shrimp tacos.
I grew up inside this system. I know it from the inside. I know what it felt like to be taught that certain things in that text were absolute moral truth while other things in the same text were explained away in Sunday school with a wave of the hand. I didn't have the framework to name the inconsistency when I was eight. I do now. And I've made a record that has a few things to say about it, working title currently rattling around in my head, nothing official, but there's a song that started with exactly this question and went somewhere I didn't expect. I'll say more about that when the time is right.
For now: read Leviticus. All of it. Not just the verses you've been handed. The shrimp are in there. The tattoos are in there. The mixed fabrics are in there. The Jubilee debt cancellation is in there. The whole messy ancient complicated contradictory text is in there and it will teach you more about how people use scripture than any apologetics course ever will. That's a promise from someone who read it cover to cover with no filter and came out the other side changed.
My problem is the pulpit, not the pew. Always has been, always will be. The person in the pew who eats shrimp and has tattoos and also quotes Leviticus at their gay neighbor, they're confused probably, doing what they were taught, working with what they were given. The pulpit that taught them to pick and choose and never told them why, that's where I put the accountability. That's where the deliberate maintenance of a useful inconsistency lives.
And that's the one I'm writing songs about.