This is the second of three posts about my recent holiday in the US.
On the morning of Thursday, September 6, we drove from Williams to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Much of the later approach to the canyon was lightly forested, providing no hint or indication of the vista to come. The canyon itself, when we finally saw it, left us scrabbling for superlatives with which to do it justice. Before us opened out a vast valley – 18 miles across – the precipitous slopes of our upland vantage point tumbling down to a lower plane, itself scarred with deep chasms, where, almost a vertical mile down, with the aid of a keen eye or binoculars one could occasionally espy the might of the Colorado River. All the way to the horizon massive peaks and ridges rose as a lithic pantheon, standing in solemn splendour over the canyon floor far beneath.
We spent most of the day at the Grand Canyon National Park, visiting the various viewpoints along the rim, each of which afforded spectacular and varying perspectives of the majesty of the canyon. Between two of the viewpoints we noticed that several cars had stopped and their occupants were taking photos of some elk, which were wandering in the forest next to the road. We were fortunate enough to see a bull elk at very close quarters. In the evening we drove from the canyon to Tuba City, stopping off to buy some Navajo gifts, and visit the Little Colorado River canyon along the way. At Tuba City I ate some traditional Navajo stew with fry bread: a new national form of cuisine that I had never tasted before.
On Friday we planned to visit both Monument Valley and Mesa Verde. However, when we reached the Monument Valley visitors’ centre and viewpoint, we decided to drive through the valley instead of travelling on immediately. A dusty and incredibly bumpy road snaked between the titanic monoliths. Monument Valley looks like the weathered ruins of some ancient city of giants, with towering steeples of sandstone vaunting themselves out from the desert earth, hulking buttes that would dwarf the largest cathedral. After a few hours of driving around the Valley and a gruelling workout for our vehicle’s suspension we arrived back at the visitors’ centre, from where we drove on to Cortez, where we stayed for the evening.
The next day took us to Mesa Verde National Park, the site of several remarkably preserved Puebloan cliff-dwellings are located, over 700 years old. We began by visiting Spruce Tree House, a cliff village with over one hundred rooms, where 60-80 people once lived, after which we visited several other vantage points, from which we were able to see some of the other major complexes, most notably Cliff Palace. Nestled in large clefts of the rock-faces beneath the mesa tops (where the former inhabitants would have farmed the land that they accessed by means of precarious routes of footholds up the rocks) were clusters of stone buildings, aeries from which the plunging valleys beneath could be surveyed. These sites were abandoned in the 14th century, but were known to the local Native American tribes, and later discovered once again by the early prospectors and other settlers that passed through the region.
From Mesa Verde we drove to Durango, where we visited the Durango Railway Museum (my father is a huge railway buff) and ate our lunch. From Durango we drove towards Silverton, the road flanked by the beautiful wooded slopes of the towering San Juan Mountains. We stopped off at a hot spring by the side of the road and also to see the steam train from Durango to Silverton pass by. The mountain pass that led to Silverton rose high into the mountains, over 10,500ft up. Besides the stunning natural beauty of the descent into the valley of Silverton – the golden aspen trees and the immensity of the mountains that surrounded and sheltered the valley on all sides – one found oneself occasionally rather preoccupied with the vertiginous drops from the edges of the road, with no guardrail present to protect the unfortunate person who might lose control of their vehicle.
Sunday morning we worshipped in a Southern Baptist church in Silverton. My first experience of a Southern Baptist church, it was certainly a memorable one. The pastor’s attire was especially striking, not according with the customs of liturgical vestment in any of the traditions with which I can claim a familiarity. Wearing cowboy shoes, a belt with a huge cowboy buckle, a checked shirt, a bolo neck tie with a turquoise clasp, a tan suit jacket, and a Stetson hat (removed during the service), the only thing seemingly lacking to complete the ensemble was a sheriff’s badge. The sermon was a challenging exhortation drawing upon various themes in the book of Daniel. After the service was over, we were invited to join the congregation for a meal. We then went to see the train arrive in from Durango.
In the afternoon we visited the nearby Old Hundred Mine (named after the psalm). From Silverton we then followed the Million Dollar Highway to Box Canyon Falls near Ouray. Entering the maw of the canyon by a metal walkway, you are surrounded by rock on all sides, the walls of the canyon looming over you, with the din of the falls in the background. Later we climbed to the top of the falls and took a circuitous walk back to our car. From there we drove on to Gunnison, where we stayed the night.
The next morning we travelled via Crested Butte to the Black Canyon of Gunnison National Park. Had we realized in advance that the route we chose would take us along a narrow gravel road up and down the side of a mesa, with nothing intervening between us and a more or less sheer drop, we might have regarded the prospect with slightly more trepidation. While the scale of the Grand Canyon was awe-inspiring, the depth of the Black Canyon was more immediately striking, as the sides of the canyon were sheer: we could look down upon the Gunnison River almost 2,000ft down below us. At such a vertiginous height, I confess that I approached the edge rather gingerly. After a meal at Applebees we drove on to Grand Junction, where we stayed that night.
The next day was spent at Colorado National Monument and Arches National Park. Colorado National Monument was very impressive, but the weather began to turn while we were there, so we moved on to Arches. While the rain didn’t follow us, the weather remained overcast all day. We were able to visit many of the principal arches at the park, spending the majority of our time at the Windows section of the park, before climbing up to a vantage point, from which we could see Delicate Arch, perhaps the most famous of all of the arches at the park. My favourite of all of the arches was the Double Arch, two huge stone arches, spanning a large gap in the rocks and converging together at the other side. That evening we stayed in the nearby town of Moab.
For most of the last month, I have been away in the US, on a holiday with my father. Although I have visited the US on a couple of occasions before, this was my first opportunity to explore it to any real extent. I thought that, in lieu of more substantial posting – there is unlikely to be much serious posting over the next few weeks – I would share holiday pictures.
I know. I’m sorry.
My father turns sixty this year and to celebrate the milestone he wanted to spend some time touring the US. My mother, for whom the prospect of long car journeys held little appeal, wasn’t especially keen on the plan. I was invited along instead and enjoyed myself thoroughly, not least the opportunity to spend such a prolonged period of time with my father.
For most of the first week of the holiday we were based in Philadelphia, visiting people and meeting some long time online friends for the first time, enjoying some wonderful hospitality, and getting into holiday mode. We arrived into Philadelphia on Monday 27th August. Tuesday morning we took a tour of Independence Hall. Having recently started watching the John Adams TV miniseries (a few days later I found a secondhand copy of David McCullough’s Adams biography in very good condition for under a dollar), it was particularly fascinating to see some of the sites where certain of its most memorable scenes had occurred.
Moving on to the Liberty Bell exhibition, we quite serendipitously bumped into Andrew Fulford, Joel Garver and his daughter Claire, and Paul Duggan, persons that will be known to many readers of this blog. I had known that Andrew’s time would overlap with mine, but given the way that our plans had taken shape, I had thought that we would not be able to meet up, a considerable disappointment as we have been online friends for so long. However, as we walked through the exhibition I was pretty sure that I recognized Joel and Claire from photos I had seen of them online (I hadn’t met Joel or Paul in person at this point either). Looking for Andrew, who I was sure would be with them, I found him and introduced myself. Having known Paul, Joel, and Andrew for about ten years each, yet never having met them in person, it was wonderful finally to have the opportunity to do so.
From the Liberty Bell exhibition, the whole group of us moved on to Jim’s Steaks, where Andrew, my father, and I were given our first taste of a genuine Philadelphia cheesesteak, hardly the most refined of cuisine, but very appetizing. At Claire’s suggestion we visited the National Liberty Museum, which was a fascinating experience – a museum with a fairly clear and focused message throughout. We then visited the historic Christ Church building, the place of worship of many American Revolutionary War leaders. Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest street in Philadelphia and America’s oldest continually inhabited residential street, was the final place on our itinerary for the day.
On Wednesday, we travelled down south, splitting the journey to Charlottesville, Virginia, in Washington DC, where we met up with Matthew Mason near the Capitol Building, another online friend I was meeting for the first time, who gave us a tour of the city. We walked past the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, stopping at the World War II Memorial on the way there, and the Vietnam Memorial on the way back.
The following day, we went to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s incredible self-designed house, a testimony to the profound fecundity of his creative gifts and the force of his will. Even though one may not be persuaded of the justice of the seditious revolutionary cause with which he was associated, one must admire the unique cast and eminent genius of Jefferson’s mind. The three tours (of the garden, the slave areas, and the house) were superb and deeply informative, a common theme throughout our time in the US. In the afternoon we visited UVA, where we saw the Rotunda – another product of Jefferson’s architectural gift – the dome room of which has been described as the most beautiful room in America.
On Friday I returned to Philadelphia by Greyhound bus, while my father remained down south, to rejoin me on the Monday. On the Saturday I visited the Arden fair with Joel and his family, meeting up with Daniel Stoddart, another online friend I had interacted with for almost a decade, but never met in person. The beer and the books were particularly appreciated. In the evening a group of us watched the first episode of the latest season of Doctor Who. It was heartening to see such a great British TV show receiving such appreciation on the other side of the pond. Perhaps there is hope for the Americans yet… 😉 Sunday I worshipped at Tenth Presbyterian (it has come as a surprise to me how many people I know who have had some sort of connection to that church at some point), after which I spent the afternoon with the Duggans. Monday afternoon was spent with the Garvers.
On Tuesday morning we flew out to Las Vegas. After we had found our hotel and deposited our suitcases we went out to explore the city in the later afternoon, watching as the city came to life as the sun set. Las Vegas is a breathless clamour of tasteless opulence, like fine caviar spread on crème brûlée. One is appalled and intrigued by its style, the chutzpah of its sickly excesses in the middle of a burning wilderness. Its situation lends it the sense of being cut off or detached from the rest of the planet, a world of its own, which runs according to an alien set of cultural norms. Its scandalous and bold buildings are a hotpotch of architectural references to cultural reference points of decadence, luxury, fantasy, and excess – Rome, Egypt, Venice, etc. In Vegas one begins to appreciate the power of money as a transcendent power within many people’s lives. As the night waxes, the seething cacophony of the city begins to wear on you. All of the senses are saturated – the blinking and insistently flashing lights, the rapidly moving images, the bodies that writhe and gyrate on big TV billboards, the clinking of coins, the maniacal tinkling and chirping of one armed bandits, the excited speech of the throngs of people milling on the streets, the din of traffic and beeping of horns, and the floodlit casinos gazing down on it all.
The next morning we drove out to the Hoover Dam. The scale of the engineering feat involved in its construction was something of which I had previously been unaware. There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a four foot wide pavement around the equator. We toured the powerplant beneath the dam. The temperature at the Dam was around a blistering 100°F, not easy for those of us accustomed to the wet and cool climate of the north of England to adapt to. From the Dam we drove on through the wilderness to Williams, where we hit Route 66, explored the station and the town, and had a delicious meal at a store that sold kitschy Christian T-shirts.
I had hoped to blog regular updates of my America trip. Unfortunately, for various reasons this hasn’t worked out. I look forward to telling you all about it – and sharing dozens of photos with you – on my return next week!
Some of my readers might be wondering where I am right now, as I haven’t posted for some time. The first couple of weeks after my last post were extremely busy. Since then, however, I have been enjoying a much needed break. Among other things, I have purchased almost eighty books and have started to read them. At present, I am in Philadelphia, where I have had the opportunity to meet with a number of great friends, some of whom I have been in contact with online for almost ten years, but have only just met in person. If I have the time and the Internet access, I may blog much of the rest of my trip over the next couple of weeks.
Until then, here is a picture of me with a statue of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.
Yesterday I came across yet another piece lamenting how screwed up the views of sex among evangelical men and women who believe in sexual abstinence outside of marriage are. I must have read at least a dozen or more such articles on sites such as the Huffington Post in which Christian writers solemnly warn their prudish and repressed co-religionists of the perils of overvaluing virginity, sharing their cautionary tales of the psychological and spiritual damage suffered by themselves or others who did. Apparently such abstinence and the views associated with it leave people with all sorts of hang-ups, give them ridiculous expectations of the orgasmic excesses of the wedding night, and create an idol of virginity. Oh my!
These virgins spend some of what could be the best years of their lives labouring under dark delusions, subject to one of the cruellest of repressions. They face married lives of bitter disappointment and anti-climax (forgive me…), as the high expectations that they had of marital sex do not materialize as expected. It is important that we don’t ridicule such burdened and benighted persons – poor things! Rather our hearts must go out to them in a loving pity as we gently seek to disabuse them of the mistaken notions that hold them hostage, regarding their unfortunate condition of socially maladjusted leperhood with grace and tenderness.
At this point I must reveal that I am one of these sorry creatures (a mailing address for messages of support and consolation is available on request) and doubly a lost soul in this regard, as I don’t truly feel the lack and misfortune of my condition. Nor am I adequately embarrassed about my state or envious of the sexually ‘liberated’. Reading the descriptions of the psychology and beliefs of evangelical virgins, I am perplexed and bemused, not really recognizing myself in any of them.
Chastity – Quiet and Unashamed
I believe that there are probably some good reasons why I don’t hear voices like mine clearly represented in most discussions of such matters. Not sharing wider society’s sex obsession, we are less likely to devote the same time and effort to speaking out on the subject. For my part, my participation in discussions on sexuality and Christian sexual ethics and the like has been driven by my frustration (not that kind, I promise) at one-sided conversations or poorly argued positions and has generally been a reluctant one. In my experience, conventionally and happily married people and single virgins don’t tend either to start or to participate in conversations about sex to anything like the extent of other groups.
While some might think that it is embarrassment that holds evangelical virgins back from declaring themselves, it seems to me that modesty and discretion – two virtues closely related to chastity – are the more likely suspects. Matters of sex and sexuality are private and should be spoken of in an appropriately discreet and reserved manner, not encouraging prurient attention through overexposure. While certain of our affections may be more publicly visible, I think it perfectly appropriate that our sexuality should not be. Part of what it means to be chaste and modest is to refuse to flaunt our own sexuality or that of our neighbour, to resist the urge to make people’s sexuality or sex appeal (distinct from a person’s beauty or handsome appearance) a focus of public attention, conversation, or judgment (see my discussion of modesty here).
The increasing sexualization of public life and media is a decidedly unhealthy development. Unfortunately, the fact that chaste persons are typically quiet and reserved on the subject, while promiscuous persons are frequently ‘loud and proud’, can lead to the impression that ‘everyone is doing it’ and that those who aren’t are repressed, shame and guilt-ridden individuals, who have an embarrassing condition that they feel uncomfortable about discussing publicly.
Movements towards more vocal and public presentations of sexuality among evangelicals – from pastors who share in great detail the sexual histories that shaped their marriage, to the cringe-inducing ‘sex positive’ celebrations of Christians’ sex lives, to the many vocal ‘purity’ movements – strike me as unhealthy accommodations to society’s obsessive publicization of sexuality. I believe that many of the Church’s problems in the area of virginity and chastity arise from attempts to accommodate its message to the sex idolatry of the age, making unrealistic promises about the sexual fulfilment of marriage, of the centrality and necessity of sex (it is easy to forget that the purpose of chastity is to follow Christ, not to ‘wait for marriage’, for instance), and of the degree to which it defines our existence. When the media that your young people are exposed to day in and day out are fixated with sex, how do you get them to wait for marriage? Many evangelicals in such a position fail to tackle the root problem of the idolatry of sex and merely tweak the cultural myth of sex, so that the focus rests on the steamy sex of the wedding bed. This is largely a novel development in evangelicalism, one arising from its embeddedness in a sex-obsessed culture, not from the distinct resources of the Christian message.
While clear teaching on the subject of sex and sexuality is helpful, this teaching should seek to preserve the discretion that is appropriate to Christian sexuality. It is quite possible to have a non-repressed sexuality without feeling that it has to be a matter of public discourse or saturate public consciousness.
So, in short, I am an evangelical virgin, without need for shame in that fact in the appropriate private realms of my sexuality’s expression. However, I have no intention of being either loud or proud about it.
Given how many voices there are out there pronouncing authoritatively on the character of the beliefs and experience of people like me, I thought that it might be worth providing a voice from the inside. The following are some thoughts on my perspective of sex as an evangelical male who wishes to abstain from sexual intercourse outside of marriage, explaining some of the basic rationale of my position.
The Idolatry of Sex
Sex really isn’t the most important thing in life. When we treat it as the primary and overriding dimension of or reality in our lives, it becomes an idol and, like all forms of idolatry, the idolatry of sex tends to dehumanize its devotees, limiting their realization of the richness of humanity and sexuality.
We are all at risk of succumbing to our society’s obsession with sex, becoming either fixated on its continual expression or repression. Perhaps the greatest thing that we need here is perspective – a vision of the world in which sex plays a far less central role. Through Christian formation we learn to displace sex from its idolatrous pedestal and to regard it as something secondary, subject to the rule of Christ. Freedom from the thraldom of sex and liberation in the form of the de-sexualization of much of life is one of the blessings of Christ’s reign. Rather than being an end in itself, a sex delivered from its vaunted ultimacy can be knit into all of the other ends of life, without eclipsing them and becoming a cruel deity to which we sacrifice other goods.
Sex isn’t the central dimension of human identity, and by treating it as such we risk diminishing ourselves. Those who don’t have (and especially persons who don’t desire) sex can be made to feel like non-persons in a society that fetishizes it. However, while the virgin, celibate, or chaste person may typically be regarded in terms of absence and lack, it is surprising how much room one’s identity has to flourish when you don’t have a huge idol squeezing everything else out, when one’s lust for life isn’t entirely invested in a lust for sex. For instance, removing this idol challenges the simplistic equation of sex and intimacy and frees us to recover the rich potential of friendship.
Dethroning the idol also provides you with a form of sex that has to carry considerably less baggage. Sex isn’t the source of personal fulfilment. Sex isn’t the only or perhaps even primary means of personal intimacy. Sexuality is peripheral to one’s core identity. Sexual satisfaction isn’t the goal of your existence. Sex isn’t the way that you must prove your gender. One’s sexual appeal or prowess or lack thereof isn’t the measure of your personal worth. Once one has absorbed these lessons, one is free to be a lot less hung up about sex.
Sex is at its very best when it is integrated in with all of the other good ends in life, when it draws its strength from and injects life into a host of other intimacies. Sex is at its best when it is an expression of lifelong exclusive commitment, an enjoyment of profound companionship, a deeply personalizing and loving gift of pledged bodies out of which act new life can be produced, an act in which the integral unity of body and soul can be experienced, both in our relation to our own bodies and the body of our spouse, an act that is part of an enduring relationship bound up with and witnessed to by a wider community, and an act carried out under the blessing of God given in the covenant of marriage.
Although sex is integral to marriage, by itself the desire for licit sex is a poor reason to marry, as marriage involves so much more than sex: sex is merely one form of its countless intimacies. These many non-sexual intimacies provide much of the basis for true sexual intimacy. Any attempt to tease apart these threads of intimacies to hang the life of marriage purely upon sex will leave one with a strand that is easily snapped.
The idolatry of sex detaches it from the rich fabric of life, treating it as an end in itself, and as something for which we must sacrifice many other good things. Putting sex back in its place, as one important form of intimacy among numerous other forms of intimacy that we take delight in, can deliver it from the sort of unrealistic expectations that create frustration and dissatisfaction and can allow for the sort of distance that provides a fertile context for playfulness and joy.
What is Good Sex?
Good sex isn’t measured in orgasms, but by the degree to which it provides an expansive context for the sharing and communication of various gifts and benefits. It is found in the degree to which it opens up into a shared history, in the degree to which it communicates a trustworthy mutual commitment, in the degree to which it provides a spring of life for the married couple and their children, in the degree to which it gives a context for the exploration of gender and the deep embodiedness of our personhood, in the degree to which it opens up the lives of both parties to grow, and in the degree to which it unites two people as one. Sexuality doesn’t exist purely as an end in itself, but is a means by which we can honour and serve God and others, and show a high regard for our own selves, as ensouled bodies.
Intensity of feeling is not the measure of what is good or meaningful. Some of the most meaningful of the actions that we perform are routine actions, things such as praying before meals, kissing or hugging someone before they leave, eating and drinking in the Lord’s Supper, things that may have become little more than ritual and habit but which have, through their frequent and quiet repetition, left a substantial and settled sediment, unobtrusively giving form to all that we do or think. Likewise, for all of the pleasure and even potential for novelty and creativity that they offer, much of the deep value of sexual relations between a husband and a wife may lie in the fact that they are routine. Sex need not be exciting to be profoundly meaningful.
As our existential nerve endings become deadened, though the constant celebration of the novel and the extreme, we become less sensitive to the depth and richness of life, to the beautiful subtleties of the everyday. Everything needs to be loud and brash, clamouring or abrasive, provocative or explosive. Marriage can be a place where the understatement, tenderness, delicacy, poetry, and gentleness of sex can be recovered, in a society that is often so desensitized to sex that it must be ever more shocking, taboo, explicit, or aggressive for it to be felt anymore.
Chastity By Grace
Virginity isn’t the real point: holiness is. Chastity isn’t a binary state that, once lost, cannot be regained. Chastity is a spiritual discipline, an orientation of our sexual natures to the service of God and each other, a steady kneading of our sexual appetites into our Christian vocation. Chastity is a matter of practicing sex as a matter of personal agency, rather than an animal appetite that drives us that cannot be channelled. Chastity isn’t just a virtue for virgins, unmarried persons, or celibates: every Christian is called to practice chastity, married or unmarried. We all have to bring our sexual behaviour under the rule of Christ.
Sexual self-control is essential for a healthy marriage, just as it is for faithful celibacy. One honours one’s future spouse with one’s body by the way that one controls it now. You also prepare yourself for the discipline of faithfulness and sexual self-control that will empower your marriage. You also honour your own body and honour Christ in submitting your sexuality to him. Ceasing to be an autonomous force and end, one’s sexuality becomes a servant of Christ, a part of the cosmic drama of his setting of the world to rights, thereby finding meaning, purpose, and value greater than its own satisfaction.
The Scriptures give particular value and significance to virginity. However, virginity is less a matter of what you don’t do, and more a matter of what you do. Virginity and chastity are not the bare avoidance of a sin, but positive virtues, not a matter of lack, but a matter of fullness.
While losing one’s virginity outside marriage is not without some serious consequences, a Christian view of sexuality is one of forgiveness and redemption. Losing your virginity does not leave you as a worthless failure in God’s sight: God has a habit of turning whores into spotless brides. Likewise, retaining one’s virginity isn’t the main goal. We are not playing a game of ‘how low can the dimmer switch go without turning the light off?’ but seeking to conform our sexual behaviour to Christ.
Both the guilt, shame, and condemnation-driven fixation on past sexual sins or abuse or the legalistic attempt to preserve one’s virginity on a technicality fall far short of the Christian ideal and lead to bondage. Chastity is about free forgiveness, repentance, and faith, about rescue from past failures, and becoming something greater by God’s gracious transforming work in our lives. It is about being moulded into a liberated form of sexual behaviour and identity consistent with the ends of our existence, and rescued from all forms that fall short or hold us captive.
Sex is Fallen and Tragic
Sex and our sexual appetites and identities are shaped by the Fall, shot through with sin and tragedy. We struggle both to master and to interpret our desires. Sex, designed to unite man and woman, can be a site of their alienation and mutual exploitation. Our false god, Eros, fails us, while placing heavy burdens upon us.
Our failure to acknowledge the tragic and the fallen character of human life and our expectation of a sexual fullness of life without death often directly leads to our disappointment, disillusion, and despair. Sex is not our saviour and all of our sexualities are broken. A realization of this helps us to fix our attention primarily on God’s promise of eschatological healing and perfection of our fractured world.
Being an unmarried virgin is not a brokenness that marriage will save me from, for marriage is no less broken. My personal eschatology will not take the form of ‘he got married and lived happily ever after.’ The god of marriage and family, no less than the idol of sex, is one that will disappoint us. Marriage and family are a fertile source of evil and wickedness, of tragedy and brokenness. Only Christ can save us.
Chastity and virginity aren’t about ‘waiting for marriage’. They are about the living of life in union with Christ now. They are about pursuing the vocations that God has given us in the present, and supporting our married and unmarried neighbours in the fulfilment of theirs. The fullness that chastity and virginity seek are provided by the presence of Christ, not the achievement of marriage.
Play Not Sport
Sex is play, not sport. While there is nothing wrong with becoming good at something, there is a difference between approaching an activity as a game that can be enjoyed and approaching it as a sport that we really must excel at. People who approach an activity as a sport are often most at risk of losing the innocent ‘love of the game’. The point is not to become incredibly good ‘at sex’, but to rediscover a childlike playfulness with another person, dropping the defences and masks that we establish against the world and each other (one of those defences being the skills that we try to develop to mask our weakness), and entering into an enjoyment of ourselves and each other in the shared practice of God’s good gift, with a fearlessness and lightness of spirit.
The society around us takes sex far too seriously and in the process has lost sight of much of its true enjoyment. Sex has become a thing in itself, detached from those who have it. ‘Sex’ can become like a third party in a relationship. It places demands on us – ‘you must enjoy!’ – and in our focus upon these demands and the pursuit of some erotic ideal, we can lose sight of each other, our increasing goal being the attainment of society’s ideal of ‘great sex’.
With this view of sex, people easily become hung up on becoming sexual athletes, in a manner that cuts them off from others and renders them fearful of others’ judgment, against which they must develop skill as a protection.
The Power of Sex
Sex is about far more than making babies. It is a gift to be enjoyed, a place of play and delight, a sign of the Creator’s own joyfulness in his creation. Sex cannot, however, be separated from procreation, and we should seek to practice it in a context and in a way that affords the same open and gracious welcome, love, hospitality, and joyful excess to those who might be conceived by the act as God has shown to us in giving us a gift in which so much pleasure and joy may be found.
Sex can deeply affect our relationship to others, to ourselves and our bodies, and can bring new life into the world. It can be a place of life’s deepest pleasures, or a source of its bitterest conflicts. It can be a source of new life, but leads others to self-destruction. What it cannot be is ‘safe’. Such a powerful force must be enjoyed for what it is, but in a context where its power is respected and carefully channelled. Marriage is designed for such a respectful enjoyment of the power of sex.
Sex involves a movement outside of ourselves, a movement towards another in their unique subjectivity, into the mysterious realm of the other gender. In sex are dispossessed of control. We put ourselves in another person’s hands. We participate in a form of union that has a created potential to produce new life, engaging with an interpersonal and biological reality that is greater than our individual intentionality.
Sex is a blessed wellspring of life, for the married couple, and for those born of their union. God desires the waters of this spring to remain deep, pure, and satisfying, sources of life and health to all who partake in them.
Becoming One Flesh
The purpose of sex is the forging of interpersonal bonds. For this reason alone, pursuing sex for the end of the maximization of one’s personal and private ‘sex life’ misses the point, as does the individualistic goal of becoming ‘good in bed’. Sex is a place of dying to oneself in order to become brought to new life in union with another. Consequently, sex is a place of weakness and deep vulnerability. This weakness and vulnerability is not pleasant, but is profoundly rewarding in the long term.
One of the great gifts of marriage is a context where sex can be enjoyed as a practice of deep and profound unity. Sex in marriage is not an audition, nor a place where you are typically being marked harshly on your performance. It is a place where the fear of the other who might hurt or reject us is minimized and we can let our guards down. It is a place that is created so that you can be deeply vulnerable to another person, coming to them without needing the emotional prophylactics of the hook-up culture, or the protection of sexual skilfulness, a safe place where you can venture beyond yourself, put your life in another’s hands, with all of your defences lowered.
There is no deep connection without deep vulnerability, and the restriction of sex to marriage is designed in part to form a place where this can occur. Honeymoon sex will likely be a disappointment in terms of physical performance and sensation, but what you give to your partner is not your sexual skill (which will come with time) but your profound vulnerability to them, your courage to be a weak beginner in their presence. What you receive may not be an incredible orgasm but rather the potential of a genuine and profound connection to another person.
So often the belief that sex and intimacy are the same thing has drawn lonely people into the hollow quest of promiscuity. They seek intimacy, but cannot afford or risk vulnerability. Looking for the right things in the wrong places, not only do they fail to appreciate the wealth of intimacy that can be found in friendship and other forms of companionship, but miss the true intimacy that can be found in sex itself, when enjoyed in a context where vulnerability to each other is encouraged and enabled. This alienating fear of vulnerability is one of the great tragedies of our age.
It is not in the supposed mind-blowingness of the sex but in the strength of a connection forged out of deep and exclusive shared vulnerability that the reward of premarital abstinence is found. It is in sex where doubt, fear, guilt, judgment, and the felt need for defences are minimized, and we can truly be completely naked to another human being. Vulnerability and the risk of intense shame are the preconditions of deep and genuine intimacy. Non-marital, pre-marital, and extra-marital sex situate sex in a context apart from a sure commitment, where guards cannot easily be fully dropped, where we cannot relinquish control and skilful mastery, where we dare not be truly naked to each other, and where the rich rewards of mutual vulnerability cannot be known in their fullness.
It would be a genuine blessing to know that you all that you and your spouse have learned practically about sex was something that you learned together, sex being a secret that you share with them alone. Sex is not a thing that you pursue and serve as a thing in itself, but something that exists exclusively between you and your spouse.
A Sexuality of Gift and Gratitude
The conviction at the heart of our culture’s experience and practice of sex is that we are detached individuals with sexual rights. Sex is the prerogative of consenting and autonomous sexual agents, entitled to do whatever they want with their own bodies, provided that the other party is OK with it. Marriage is society’s rubberstamping of the choice of the consenting individuals, a validation to which they have a claim.
The Christian view of sex and marriage arises from a very different understanding of humanity. Within the Christian understanding of humanity, we are not mere autonomous individual agents, but are those who are brought into being through the gracious action of others, and who are co-creators of each other’s being. We are gifted gift-givers, persons whose very being is a divine gift, those who extend the hospitality and generosity of God to others, and who are continually drawn into the goodness that God has shown to our neighbours.
Rather than seeing our sexuality as a matter of our self-fulfilment and self-realization as detached and entitled sexual agents, our sexuality is an aspect of our fulfilment of our being as gifted, giving, and receiving personal expressions of divine generosity. It is on account of this anthropology that sex belongs in and not outside of the marriage bed.
Sex is a mutual exchange of bodies and persons. It forms a genuine ‘one flesh’ union between two persons, a union that can be the loving source of their children’s being, their existence springing from the gift of their parents’ bodies, pledged to each other as they were given into each other’s hands and the service and blessing of God by their community. In such a ‘one flesh’ union, there is no place for autonomous sexual agents: ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ dissolves into ‘ours’.
While the autonomous sexual agent is concerned with ensuring that he is getting what he is entitled to out of the relationship and that he doesn’t forfeit control by putting himself too much in the hands of others, the person in the economy of grace is concerned with being rendered as gift to others, and with receiving them as gift, rather than as right.
Marriage is all about gift. It is about pledging ourselves and our bodies to another person for life, and receiving their freely given pledge in return. It is about giving ourselves as a couple to God and a community in committed service and participation in an intergenerational project. It is about giving up our detached individuality and independence to belong to another. It is about giving up our concerns, our entitlements, our centrality in our own narratives, for the sake of coming generations, and the kingdom of our Saviour. It is about practicing our lives together in a way that grants those who are conceived in our union a place and an identity in the world. It is about being given our spouse as a joyful gift from their family, and graciously being given kinship with them as a beloved son or daughter, brother or sister-in-law. It is about being given a place within a witnessing community that faithfully gives itself to our support. It is about being granted to bear the legacy, example, and love of parents and grandparents to pass on to future generations in our time and being privileged to render to them a heritage and a memorial in return.
Most of all, marriage is about being given a vocation and a blessing from God. It is about being granted to take our place in the great line of the generations, from Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Sarah, to Mary and Joseph, bearing our unique testimony to his goodness and gospel in our time, receiving from those who preceded us what we will one day pass on to others.
Sex is the mutual donation of bodies that fits in the heart of this picture. By never abstracting sex from marriage, we declare the gifts that brought us into, sustain us within, are expressed by us through, and will be passed on by means of our existence. We declare that we are more than detached and autonomous right-bearing individuals: we are dynamic expressions of loving gift in a dance of grace that transcends persons and generations. By entering into this, we gloriously transcend our individuality.
Pre-marital sex is the premature opening of the gift with our name on it. It defrauds both ourselves and others of the chance to enter into the fullness of the gift of marriage. It claims as right what could have been an outflowing of joyous and life-giving generosity. It denies the continual debt of love that we owe to our neighbour and to our Maker, and would treat the hospitality of a community as our entitlement. It deprives us all of the communion of gift that is formed as we realize our being as constantly springing out of the abundant charity of God. It diminishes us from the eucharistic – thanks-giving – beings that God created us to be, as the great Giver and those lesser givers through whom his generosity is known are effaced, and all gifts are rendered as rights.
As an unmarried virgin, I am no less able to realize my sexuality as gift. In my practice of chastity I continually give my sexuality as a gift to God and to my community, from and in whom I have my own being. I can honour others as I steward my body and my personhood as gifts that I receive from them, and to whom I owe a debt of joyful gratitude. In this practice of chastity I can enjoy a union of gift and belonging with others of which those who pursue a right to autonomous sexual enjoyment deprive themselves.
Conclusion
Far from finding Christian views of chastity and virginity repressive and crushing, I have found them to be deeply fulfilling and worthwhile. They give purpose and meaning to my sexuality. They clarify its ends and the best ways to pursue them. They free me from the tyranny of the idol of Sex. They enable me to understand and cope with difficulty and tragedy in sexuality. They expand and deepen my understanding of intimacy.
I believe that an understanding of the purposes of chastity and virginity have much to give married persons too, as the purpose of sexuality in marriage is inseparable from the purpose of sexuality in unmarried states.
I would love to hear the thoughts of my readers on this subject, both married and single. Please leave a comment below!
If people want some more first-person perspectives on what male evangelical virgins are like, I recommend this series as a good one to read.
EDIT (10/8/2012 – 23:30GMT): I have just added the section entitled ‘A Sexuality of Gift and Gratitude’, which wasn’t included in the original post.
UPDATE (30/1/2013): I have posted a follow-up post on the subject of virginity and the gospel here.
Within this series of posts I am commenting on the dynamics of many heated online and offline debates and arguments. These thoughts were occasioned by the recent brouhaha surrounding a quotation from Pastor Douglas Wilson on Jared Wilson’s blog, which was condemned by many, most notably Rachel Held Evans. While I will be making remarks at several points about that particular dispute, my primary intention is to bring into clearer focus forces that are at work, to some extent or other, in the vast majority of debates that I encounter both offline and online nowadays.
In my previous post, I discussed different kinds of bad readers, sought to identify some of the causes of bad reading, and the relationship between the virtues of the good reader and Christian character. Within this post I will be proceeding to look at the matter of offence.
Offence, Vulnerability, and Trust
At the outset, before we discuss the way that offence shapes our debates, it is important to recognize that in the majority of cases the problem of offence arises from the fact that the participants in a given debate do not have the same degree of personal investment within it, or power relative to each other. A discussion that may be largely academic for many participants can be of great personal import and impact for others. It is considerably more difficult for such individuals to establish the distance between person and issue that is demanded for conventional disputation. Establishing this distance becomes all the harder when they feel that their personal stake in the issue is threatened by the other voices in the conversation.
The fact that some people are incapable of establishing such distance is worth reflecting upon. While this alone proves nothing about the legitimacy of either side’s case, problems in this area are generally a symptom of the absence or decay of trust between the parties in the debate. When trust is lacking, even the smallest sense of vulnerability can develop into full blown paranoia, encouraging highly reactive forms of discourse.
In many of our cultural and political debates today, the absence of mutual trust produces paranoia on both sides. When all parties feel vulnerable to other parties that they don’t trust, a paranoid victim mind-set takes hold on all sides, as do reactive modes of interaction. This is quite evident in the ‘culture wars’, for instance, where most parties seem to act as if their existence and identity were on the line, and the discourse plays out like the interactions between two animals that have simultaneously cornered each other. While I will argue that the distrust that prevails in many of our cultural debates is actually a carefully manufactured distrust, this manufactured distrust is seldom a sufficient explanation for the actual distrust that exists between most parties.
In the absence of such trust, discourse between two parties, one or both of whom feel vulnerable to each other, will always tend to revert to reactive forms. If we are to improve the quality of our public discourse, one of the most pressing questions that we must ask ourselves is why and how other parties feel threatened by us, and what can be done to restore or create a sense of trust, especially in situations where persons in the conversation are intentionally manufacturing distrust to serve their own extremist ends. In certain cases the absence of such trust is an indictment on the way that the parties have behaved relative to each other in the past. Reactive persons are poor readers and even poorer at debating and reasoning. Yet the existence of reactivity can in certain case, though definitely not all be its own evidence of mistreatment, mistreatment that has made it difficult to differentiate oneself from the subject matter and/or one’s opponents (as I will proceed to argue, this is definitely not true in every case: often people have little justification for their thin skins and these thin skins can often be cultivated). Consequently, the reactivity of our opponents in debate should raise troubling questions for us too.
The issue of reactivity in debate becomes an increasingly pressing problem as discourse is widened to include parties formerly marginalized from it. As public discourse is no longer limited to the privileged and the less personally vulnerable, it becomes a place where power differentials are more operative, visible, and exploitable. Discourse has to adapt itself to or negotiate these power differentials in some manner or other.
The Transformation of Public Discourse
As Western society has become progressively more sensitized to victims, the unempowered, and the disenfranchised, and has desired to give a voice to them, we have tended to truncate or limit public discourse in various ways to ensure that such groups don’t feel threatened. While well-meaning, this reformation of public discourse has come at considerable cost. It has rendered the taking of offence or the playing of the victim or underdog card incredibly powerful ploys within debate. In many cases these ploys overwhelm the debate, making challenging debate next to impossible. These ploys, as they are often open to only one party in the debate, establish their own secondary power differential, a differential that can frequently provide more influence on the course of a conversation for those willing and able to leverage it than the primary differential would provide to those advantaged by it. I will discuss this in more depth later in this post.
The retailoring of public discourse around these power differentials and the negotiation of the limited amount of trust between parties has resulted in a significant transformation of that discourse in a manner that jeopardizes certain values that are integral to a free society. Within this transformed public discourse, values such as ‘tolerance’, ‘nonjudgmentalism’, and ‘reasonableness’ are paramount – all values that result in the restriction of reason and the claims of challenging discourse from realms in which they formerly operated. ‘Tolerance’ is perceived to deny any right to subject individuals and their core beliefs and identities to the claims of any greater truth or the challenge of a broader conversation. ‘Nonjudgmentalism’ denies the right to be rigorous in forming and applying considered judgments, particularly moral ones. ‘Reasonableness’ denies us the right to introduce our deepest convictions into public discourse. To be ‘reasonable’ is to expect much less from rational discourse and the power of persuasion, reining in the socially unsettling force of challenging debate, seeking rather to settle matters using the decidedly limited resources of consensus principles.
However, each of these commitments entails the closing down of the sort of challenging and searching public discourse that can secure a free and open society. Discourse is increasingly truncated, to the point that it is no longer able to say much that is meaningful, and is unlikely to be able to settle many of our differences without our deeper convictions being smuggled into the debate under vague terms such as ‘equality’, ‘freedom’, and ‘reciprocity’. With the loss of trust in the power of rational discourse, the unifying power of a shared pursuit of truth, and the effectiveness of persuasion, public discourse provides a slender basis for intellectual community, and core convictions tend to become ghettoized. As this truncated discourse is unable either to resolve or clearly to expose the source of our differences, parties end up talking past each other and the temperature of debates swiftly rise.
There is a form of unity and community that can be protected by and within social forms and institutions that give us a defined context and the means by which to articulate and relate our differences and oppositions (parliaments, legal systems, sports, etc.). Without such bounded and rule-governed contexts of interaction, there is a constant danger that rivalries and differences will produce polarization, alienation, ghettoization, or outright and total conflict. It is by no means clear to me that the form that public discourse is moving towards is sufficient to provide us with such contexts. In place of a conversation enabling us to relate our differences and oppositions in a mutually challenging and sharpening manner, controlled by a shared commitment to rational discourse, rules of debate, and belief in the power of persuasion, we have settled for fragile truces between coexisting errors, truces that can be unsettled if anyone is allowed to speak too much. As substantial rational engagement with others’ positions is abandoned, the dominant modes of interaction between opposing viewpoints become offence-taking, reactive dismissal or attack, or ridicule, provocation, and offence-causing.
In contrast to a society bound together by a shared agonistic public conversation in search of truth through engagement with substantive issues, it is by no means clear to me that freedom will thrive in the new context of ‘tolerance’ and ‘reasonableness’, where the public quest for truth has been abandoned and many of the most significant matters in our society’s life are being gradually withdrawn from the realm of public debate. While freedom and emancipation could be advanced in the past by means of the claims of truth, in the context of the new ‘tolerant’ society, the claims of truth hold less weight. Politically inconvenient or inexpedient truths can no longer easily be advanced by recourse to the uncompromising force of reason, as ‘tolerance’ and ‘reasonableness’ start to exclude them from discussion altogether. Society is left ever more vulnerable to political caprice and is progressively dispossessed of the emancipatory discourse that has served it so well in the past.
Contrasting Forms of Discourse
In observing the interaction between Pastor Wilson and his critics in the recent debate, I believe that we were witnessing a collision of two radically contrasting modes of discourse. The first mode of discourse, represented by Pastor Wilson’s critics, was one in which sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values, and in which persons and positions are ordinarily closely related. The second mode of discourse, displayed by Pastor Wilson and his daughters, is one characterized and enabled by personal detachment from the issues under discussion, involving highly disputational and oppositional forms of rhetoric, scathing satire, and ideological combativeness.
When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge. However, these protests are probably less a ploy than the normal functioning of the particular mode of discourse characteristic of that community, often the only mode of discourse that those involved are proficient in.
To those accustomed to the first mode of discourse, the scathing satire and sharp criticism of the second appears to be a vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus, when those who adopt such modes of discourse are typically neither personally hurt nor aiming to cause such hurt. Rather, as this second form of discourse demands personal detachment from issues under discussion, ridicule does not aim to cause hurt, but to up the ante of the debate, exposing the weakness of the response to challenge, pushing opponents to come back with more substantial arguments or betray their lack of convincing support for their position. Within the first form of discourse, if you take offence, you can close down the discourse in your favour; in the second form of discourse, if all you can do is to take offence, you have conceded the argument to your opponent, as offence is not meaningful currency within such discourse.
I also don’t think that sufficient attention is given to the manner in which differing forms of education prepare persons for participation in these different modes of discourse. There is a form of education – increasingly popular over the last few decades – which most values cooperation, collaboration, quietness, sedentariness, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, conformity, a communal focus, inclusivity, affirmation, inoffensiveness, sensitivity, non-confrontation, a downplaying of physicality, and an orientation to the standard measures of grades, tests, and a closely defined curriculum (one could, with the appropriate qualifications, speak of this as a ‘feminization’ of education). Such a form of education encourages a form of public discourse within which there is a shared commitment and conformity to the social and ideological dogmas and values of liberal society, where everyone feels secure and accepted and conflict is avoided, but at the expense of independence of thought, exposure to challenge, the airing of deep differences, and truth-driven discourse.
Faced with an opposing position that will not compromise in the face of its calls for sensitivity and its cries of offence, such a mode of discourse lacks the strength of argument to parry challenges. Nor does it have any means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation. Consequently, it will typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition. While firm differences can be comfortably negotiated within the contrasting form of discourse, a mode of discourse governed by sensitivities and ‘tolerance’ cannot tolerate uncompromising difference. Without a bounded and rule-governed realm for negotiating differences, antagonism becomes absolute and opposition total. Supporters of this ‘sensitive’ mode of discourse will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc.
A completely contrasting mode of education, one more typical of traditional – and male-oriented – educational systems, values internalized confidence, originality, agonism, independence of thought, creativity, assertiveness, the mastery of one’s feelings, a thick skin and high tolerance for your own and others’ discomfort, disputational ability, competitiveness, nerve, initiative, imagination, and force of will, values that come to the fore in confrontational oral debate. Such an education will produce a mode of discourse that is naturally highly oppositional and challenging, while generally denying participants the right to take things personally. Deep divergences of opinion can be far more comfortably accommodated within the same conversation by those accustomed to such discourse. While the first form of education risks viewing persons as passive receptacles of knowledge to be rewarded for their conformity to set expectations, which are frequently measured, this form of education prioritizes the formation of independent thinking agents.
This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions. This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation. It is this separation of the space of rhetorical ritual combat from regular space that enables debaters, politicians, or lawyers to have fiery disagreements in the debating chamber, the parliamentary meeting, or the courtroom and then happily enjoy a drink together afterwards.
This ‘heterotopic discourse’ makes possible far more spirited challenges to opposing positions, hyperbolic and histrionic rhetoric designed to provoke response and test the mettle of one’s own and the opposing position, assertive presentations of one’s beliefs that are less concerned to present a full-orbed picture than to advocate firmly for a particular perspective and to invite and spark discussion from other perspectives.
The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue. Those familiar with such discourse will be accustomed to hyperbolic and unbalanced expressions. They will appreciate that such expressions are seldom intended as the sole and final word on the matter by those who utter them, but as a forceful presentation of one particular dimension of or perspective upon the truth, always presuming the existence of counterbalancing perspectives that have no less merit and veracity.
In contrast, a sensitivity-driven discourse lacks the playfulness of heterotopic discourse, taking every expression of difference very seriously. Rhetorical assertiveness and impishness, the calculated provocations of ritual verbal combat, linguistic playfulness, and calculated exaggeration are inexplicable to it as it lacks the detachment, levity, and humour within which these things make sense. On the other hand, those accustomed to combative discourse may fail to appreciate when they are hurting those incapable of responding to it.
Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement, sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect. Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be sharply attacked. Unable to sustain true conversation, stale monologues will take its place. Constantly pressed towards conformity, indoctrination can take the place of open intellectual inquiry. Fracturing into hostile dogmatic cliques takes the place of vigorous and illuminating dialogue between contrasting perspectives. Lacking the capacity for open dialogue, such groups will exert their influence on wider society primarily by means of political agitation.
The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments.
Granted immunity from this process, sensitivity-driven and conflict-averse contexts seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers. Even the good ideas that they produce tend to be blunt and very weak in places. Even with highly intelligent people within them, conflict-averse groups are poor at thinking. Bad arguments go unchecked and good insights go unhoned and underdeveloped. This would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing. Margaret Heffernan has some very insightful thoughts on this subject:
As I will argue in more detail as I proceed, the problem does not lie with sensitivity-driven discourses per se – there is a genuine need for such discourses – but rather with their immodest demands upon public life and interaction and academic discussion. The expectation that all public and intellectual life must be ordered in terms of the sensitivities of the members of such groups or reformed in terms of the ideas of such groups cripples society, preventing it from engaging adequately in the searching and difficult task of intellectual inquiry. Both confrontational and sensitive discourses are essential in their own place, but both can endanger the other and, by extension, the healthy functioning of society when they have ambitions beyond that place.
I believe that, within the recent debate, such a distinction between modes of discourse and the training appropriate to each could be seen. A deeper appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches is important here. When the sides in a debate are operating using entirely incompatible modes of discourse communication between the two is quite unlikely. What we need are means of communication and translation between the two, and an appreciation of the strengths, weaknesses, and place of each. The common expectation that challenging conversations must yield to the demand of ‘sensitivity’ is unreasonable, but we should seek to provide some degree of protection for those emotionally incapable of participating in such challenging discourse from its combat.
The Culture of Offence
One of the most striking things about the response to Pastor Wilson’s statements was the visceral character of the reactions. The language of the responses is peppered with words and expressions such as ‘upsetting’, ‘I’m shaking’, ‘reduced to tears and trembling’, ‘weeping’, ‘hurtful’, ‘nauseating’, ‘outrage’, ‘makes me want to punch things’, ‘sick’, ‘so mad I’m shaking’, ‘disgusted and hurt’, ‘irate, my stomach has sunk’, etc. The prevailing response to Pastor Wilson’s statements was not focused on a carefully argued case that they were incorrect and unsupported by Scripture or the bounds of the metaphors (some presented a few arguments on this front, but weren’t really prepared to admit a response), but on the assertion that they were hurtful and hateful, a claim that neither invited nor permitted much challenge.
The power of offence and outrage was very much on display in that which followed. Those who protested that they have been offended were able to close down Jared Wilson’s voice and get him to apologize, something that was regarded as a victory for those prepared to attack ‘misogyny’. While I believe that Jared was right to apologize, the empowering of offence-takers is far from a salutary development in Christian discourse.
While we should be aware of the dangers of insensitive language, the empowering of offence-taking is a means by which our conversations become more reactive, by which unwelcome positions are closed out, and illuminating intellectual conflict is prevented. While a call for greater sensitivity may seek to tone down the language and heat of discourse in sensitive environments, without stopping the conversation itself, offence-taking typically functions as a means by which voices and positions can be removed from the conversation simply because they offend our sensibilities, challenge us, or make us feel uncomfortable. Thus discourse becomes tyrannized by the thin-skinned, all parties having to conform to the sensitivities of those who claim to be most ‘vulnerable’. Any position that might upset these sensitivities is immediately dismissed from or muted within the debate.
Such offence-taking has become a standard feature of theological and social discourse. Offence-taking is routinely used to close down voices arguing for the Church’s traditional stance on the vocations of women or voices arguing against same sex marriage. In light of the feelings of gay persons, some argue that arguments against same sex marriage are hateful and homophobic at worst, or insensitive at best, and so must be shut out of or downplayed within public discourse. To protest this limitation of discourse is itself insensitive and offensive. Offence-takers then present capitulation to their demands as the only sensitive route to take. Lacking the nerve to resist, society quickly gives in to their demands. By excluding challenging voices from the debate in such a manner, and expecting acceptance of their demands as proof of sensitivity, offence-takers win by default.
Offence-taking is a tried and tested tactic by which certain movements can dismiss critics without need for engagement, and bend society to their wishes. It is enabled by society’s lack of nerve, and by a persistence and willingness to take advantage of society’s weakness on the part of those employing it. Over the last few decades it has been used extensively by the feminist and gay rights movements. While many of the positions held by these movements may be perfectly justified, they have advanced in many quarters by silencing opponents and inoculating themselves against criticism, characterizing opponents or critics and their positions as hateful or insensitive and petitioning powerful allies to close down their voices.
On account of offence-taking and outrage-making tactics, such movements have rendered society incredibly pliable to their wishes. Given the social value of appearing enlightened and sensitized to the concerns of such groups, other parties can fall over themselves to take offence on their behalf, or to pander to their professed concerns. Those opposing certain of the claims of such movements will not infrequently find themselves marginalized within respectable society, suffering great damage to their reputation, being sidelined within the academy, or removed from public office. Offence-taking and outrage-making parties do not have to win any arguments, just to claim that other parties are being ‘intolerant’, ‘prejudiced’, ‘misogynist’, ‘homophobic’, etc. Little evidence is required to support such claims. Where opposing views are still voiced, they are exposed to an extreme double standard, having to meet standards of argument and evidence considerably greater than other positions. In such a manner, public discourse becomes a closed shop.
Culture War and Hate Speech
One routine tactic employed by offence-takers is to accuse anyone who opposes their (typically radical) positions of waging a ‘culture war’. Offence-takers win by society’s choice of appeasement as its response to their unreasonable demands and incessant agitation. The agitators will generally present themselves as people of peace. They have no desire to start a culture war. All that society has to do is to accede to their – perfectly reasonable! – demands and peace will prevail. Whenever people choose to resist the demands of the agitators they will be presented as beastly bullies and belligerent culture warriors. While they are pressing to achieve their goals, and even more so when they have achieved and wish to consolidate their gains, offence-takers will present themselves as proactive about peace. Any attempt to regain lost ground will be presented as unprovoked aggression. Offence-takers consistently lament the belligerence and intractability of their opponents.
Of course, appeasement never really works as a strategy in such situations: the more ground that you give the more emboldened the appeased party will be in demanding further concessions. In such cases it is imperative that people find the nerve to stand their ground when necessary, learn to resist the agitation, develop a higher level of tolerance for others’ discomfort and offence, and care a lot less about the accusations thrown in their direction.
A further tactic is the use of the language of ‘hate’ with reference to opponents. Offence-takers fixate on the extreme and intemperate voices of opposing camps, and use those –frequently hateful – voices as a means to characterize all opponents and critics. Some might try to present more nuanced arguments for the appropriateness of the use of the language of ‘hate’ with reference to opponents beyond the extremists. However, such arguments typically argue that the language of ‘hate’ is justified by: a) the way that the arguments of opponents will be heard by or impact upon those they are opposing, or b) that the ‘hatred’ in question is a systemic hatred, which supporters are complicit in. There are some immediate problems with these approaches.
First, the way that opponents’ arguments are heard are heavily influenced by the way that they are framed by the offence-takers, as is the impact that such words will have. As I will proceed to argue, communities of offence prime their members to take opposition personally, and to perceive strong disapproval of their actions or disagreement with their beliefs on the part of opponents as a personal attack. The very terminology of ‘hate speech’ will function as a self-authenticating designation in this regard. When all opposition to same sex marriage, for instance, has been labelled as ‘homophobic’, any debate is entirely loaded from the beginning, and it will be merely presumed rather than demonstrated that such opposition springs from an irrational systemic animosity towards homosexuals. Once this has been accepted anyone voicing such opinions will be perceived as being complicit in and expressing this systemic hatred, which merely reinforces persons’ sense of being victims of hatred, and opponents as being perpetrators of it. Likewise, the alienation and polarization that supposedly results from such speech is generally merely reinforced by the community that claims to deplore it.
Second, without clear public criteria of demonstration, this approach can merely underwrite the typically highly unreliable perceptions of thin-skinned, paranoid, and reactive people, and serve as a ploy to displace the measure of responsibility for polarization resulting from a lack of charity in the interpretation of and reactivity in response to opponents and critics onto their supposed hostility.
Third, ‘hate’ is an emotion and a motivation. While some of those referring to the positions of others as ‘hate speech’ or ‘hate-driven’ may claim that they such a description is justified by the systemic injustice that they are, by virtue of their words and actions – often unwittingly – complicit in, it is important to recognize that it is persons who have emotions and motivations, not systems per se. Consequently, in practice the language of ‘hate speech’ typically stigmatizes persons by imputing motivations and emotions to them, in a manner that goes some way beyond a mere statement of their unwitting complicity in sinful structures. The language of hatred in such contexts is also routinely used to demonize opponents. While some might deny that in using such language they are making a personal judgment about the one advocating particular arguments, this is the way that the language will function in popular discourse. And given the ‘hate the haters’ rhetoric that gets thrown around, there isn’t even the fragile nuance of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ to protect you from such persons’ wrath.
Fourth, certain expressions, words, and arguments have legacies of hateful societal use and must be approached with due recognition of this fact. However, the prior hateful use of a word or an argument may not necessarily render it inapt or incorrect. Arguments do not always arise from or serve the same emotion, motivation, or societal impulse. The notion of ‘hate speech’ generally seeks to discredit arguments by the usually unargued assumption that opposing arguments must always spring from the same fundamental impulse.
Fifth, the language of ‘hate’ turns up the temperature of the rhetoric in a debate. It is one thing to say that one’s opponents are unwittingly complicit in injustice, quite another to call their position ‘hate-driven’, imputing motives and emotions to their stance (even if you believe that these motives and emotions belong more generally to the community of thought that they participate within, rather than to them as individuals). I believe, for instance, that the same sex marriage position compromises the rights of children and impacts upon them in very harmful ways. However, it would be quite a serious step were I to move from this to accuse proponents of same sex marriage of being participants in ‘child-hating speech’ or of being ‘paedophobes’. I believe that the use of the language of ‘hate’ needs far more substantial justification than commonly provided.
The language of hate suggests that any opponent or critic is (generally wittingly) serving a societal impulse of irrational fear, hatred, or antagonism. The designation of such viewpoints as ‘hate speech’ immediately discredits them, treating them as unworthy of careful engagement. It stigmatizes opponents, and heightens the sensitivities, fears, and suspicions of one’s group with regard to them. It inoculates your group against hearing its strongest critics. The language of ‘hate speech’, as it stigmatizes opponents and makes judgments concerning the bad motives and vicious impulses of the communities of thought and action that they participate within will generally function as a sort of ‘hate speech’ itself. I cannot count the times that I have been told that I am hateful merely for strongly disagreeing with a popular politically correct position, whose proponents I hold no personal animosity towards, by persons who quite obviously despise me for doing so. The designation of one’s opponents as ‘haters’ provides a justification for exhibiting an animosity towards them merely on account of the animosity that they supposedly hold towards you.
The rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ also justifies the harshest and most intolerant treatment of one’s opponents. If one’s opponents are ultimately driven, even unwittingly, by an irrational and hateful social impulse, they can often be treated as being beyond reason and dialogue. No attempt should be made at engagement. Their views should not be tolerated in a tolerant society, as the argument usually goes. Their freedom of expression can be compromised with impunity, they can be hounded out of public or academic office, and official muscle can be used to clamp down on or suppress them.
The language of ‘hate speech’ is most effective in marginalizing moderate opponents and critics – exactly the sort of people best qualified to unsettle a position that lacks sufficient foundation. By presenting opposition and criticism as fundamentally motivated by a vicious societal impulse, moderates are ignored or frozen out.
Moderates are also discouraged from speaking out as persons heavily sensitized by the language of ‘hate speech’ will perceive themselves as being personally attacked by them. When a direct connection between opposition to a particular position and hate-driven attacks upon other persons is drawn, any moderate who speaks up will be accused of engaging in such attacks and people will denounce their heartlessness and cruelty. Apart from being a sort of gaslighting ploy, this also serves to make moderates lose their nerve. Once the direct equation between opposition to same-sex marriage and homophobia is established in people’s minds, for instance, those speaking out against it know that they will be perceived as directly attacking vulnerable gay teens or expressing a hateful animosity towards the loving lesbian couple next door. Most people lose nerve in the face of this and shut up, concerned that they aren’t falsely understood in such a manner.
Uncritical Suspicion
If the concern were merely to protect sensitive persons from discourse that might potentially hurt them, a number of options would be open to us. Debates could occur in contexts removed from the presence of the extremely sensitive, be accompanied by ‘trigger warnings’, or have toned down rhetoric. However, in a culture of offence, sensitivities are empowered to such a degree that there is a perverse incentive both to maximize and to manufacture offence and outrage. When those who can successfully leverage offence can close down debates in their favour and protect their positions from hostile criticism, the routine employment of offence-taking and outrage-making should take no one by surprise.
One of the immediate effects of the culture of offence is to encourage the thinning of skins, and the raising of sensitivities. Persons are trained to be suspicious to the point of paranoia of all differing viewpoints, a suspicion that enables them to put the worst possible construction on the words and actions of their opponents and critics. Far from representing a triumph of critical thinking, these hermeneutics of suspicion tend to reproduce the same threadbare analyses that have been applied on a myriad previous occasions and create a sterile groupthink (a significant number of analyses that make reference to such concepts as ‘the patriarchy’ or ‘heterosexism’ fall into such a camp – what merit such notions may have is heavily compromised by the way that they function within communities of thought). They do not promote ‘questioning’ in order to start a mutually challenging and open conversation or even to invite a response, but in order to dismiss some existing narrative and replace it with an alternative of their own, a narrative which is often difficult to differentiate from a mere conspiracy theory, frequently framed in a way that discredits all of its critics at the outset, is impervious to rational debate, and which predetermines all discussions. Typically being inculcated in a context closed to criticism, people are indoctrinated with a narrative which is more asserted than argued.
As such narratives usually operate primarily by means of indoctrination and the discrediting of critics, they commonly lack the ability to sustain close critical analysis and engage in challenging discourse. Consequently, those who seek to establish dialogue with the supporters of such positions will not uncommonly find themselves exposed to a barrage of ad hominem attacks, discredited from the outset on the basis of who they are or the supposition of a false consciousness, subjected to constant accusations of insensitivity or hate speech, or shouted out of the conversation. Once one realizes that the dominance of these positions owes as much if not much more to the leveraging of offence and outrage and the silencing of critics than they do to rational persuasion, one is less surprised to find them unreceptive to questioning.
Without constant exposure to critical opposition, the arguments for such positions – and they generally do possess arguments that, well expressed, would be quite worthy of engagement – tend to be fairly blunt, and seldom have their mettle tested. Having cultivated a sense of being under unrelenting siege and a complete distrust of outside voices, the reactivity of such movements can be off the scale: attempts at reasonable engagement can be met with a form of hysteria (though heaven help you if you point this out!). However, a hysterical reaction to challenge can generally be far more successful at closing down criticism than rational and open interaction would be.
The Heightening of Sensitivities
As such discourses gain their dominance through the leveraging of offence, they have a vested interest in making people increasingly sensitive to offence. This end is achieved in several ways. One of the most immediate ways is through the development of paranoia and the sense of being besieged, presenting critics and opponents as evil oppressors and persecutors, defenders of such things as rape culture or the systemic mistreatment of women. Those who feel besieged are highly reactive, will put the most negative construction possible on all actions of opponents and will be hyper-vigilant for any cue to react to their critics.
When attempting to interact with such persons, one will typically find that little attempt is made to engage with the substance of what you argue. Rather, isolated phrases or statements that you make, wrenched from any explanatory context, and presented in the worst possible light are fixated upon. Little attempt will be made to interpret these: rather, they are presented as straightforward evidence of your bad intentions. People who are made to feel besieged in such a manner will seldom seek to interpret their critics: they are looking for cues to react, not for sympathetic understanding of opposing viewpoints. When a single ill-chosen or uncharitably heard word can be sufficient cause for reaction, there is no need for further engagement.
This besieged mind-set, constantly reinforced, primes people to react and take offence or be outraged. Some time before the recent brouhaha developed around Pastor Wilson’s comments, I had commented on this effect on Rachel Held Evans’s blog. Complementarian viewpoints were routinely presented in terms explicitly rejected by their supporters. There was a fixation on decontextualized quotations from complementarian writers calculated to produce outrage, rather than on close and careful interpretative engagement. Motives were imputed to advocates of complementarianism. Complementarianism was consistently – subtly and often not so subtly – connected with matters such as power dominance, patriarchal oppression, and rape, without much seeming recognition or acknowledgment of the manner in which complementarianism, for all of its faults, speaks out against all of these things. When critics are characterized in such a manner, is it any surprise that every one of their statements will be subject to the worst imaginable construction? No one trusts the bogeyman.
The Subject Supposed to be Offended
A further way in which sensitivities are heightened is through the notion of the ‘subject supposed to be offended’. When a person cannot claim to be offended himself, he can always claim to be offended on another’s behalf. There is someone, somewhere, for whom the hurt is immediate, sincere, and completely natural. This displaced offence is particularly effective. No one may know the person who actually is deeply, genuinely, naturally, personally, and justifiably hurt by the statements in question, but by positing the existence of such an individual – who need not be discovered – they are empowered to exercise offence on their behalf. When practically everyone takes offence on others’ behalf, offence can become an immensely powerful social force, even though the actual ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is never truly present in person (admittedly, the subject supposed to be offended is probably curled up in a foetal ball in a darkened room somewhere, whimpering at the cruelty of the world).
The ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is especially powerful as a construction as it can include more empowered and privileged people in the offence game. In fact, the power of the culture of offence arguably owes more to this ‘subject supposed to be offended’ than to anything else. There are few people more zealous in offence-taking and outrage-making than persons doing so on behalf of the ‘subject supposed to be offended’. Few people who actually stand in a position to be personally hurt display anything approaching the degree of offence or passion for political correctness that the person taking offence on behalf of this posited individual can. Such persons regard themselves as sensitive and caring protectors of the weak and oppressed. Offence-taking and outrage-making is not a mere prerogative for them, but is a noble duty and calling. The more of an outrage they create on others’ behalf, the more virtuous they feel.
One of the effects of the ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is a sort of competitive offence-taking on the part of certain persons in positions of power or influence. The most virtuous person is the person who is most successful in kicking up a fuss on behalf of the subject supposed to be offended. The accumulation of such virtue is generally fairly painless, but can win people great adulation, and a sense of moral superiority (which can conveniently serve as absolution for other faults). It is also a perfect way for officials to deflect attention away from other issues and to feel good about themselves. The temptations of this easily-won virtue are considerable, especially when the espousal of politically correct views can be sufficient to outweigh the personal vices of a life that demonstrates little evidence of a commitment to self-binding virtue. The sort of selective and excessive empathy that our culture can celebrate is a virtue that costs one little in comparison with the personal demands of other virtues, but which is nonetheless ideal for public display of one’s moral ‘character’.
This notion of the ‘subject supposed to be offended’ also provides people in power or with influence with a means by which to scapegoat their political and social enemies. The ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is typically employed in order to stigmatize some other party for their insensitivity and cruelty, to hound them out of office, marginalize them from respectable discourse, and silence their voices. By positing the ‘subject supposed to be offended’, opposing viewpoints cease to be treated as arguments demanding critical engagement and become the nasty words of evil bullies and oppressors. The ‘subject supposed to be offended’ is one of the most powerful pieces on the board of society’s power games.
Playing to Weakness
As a culture of offence plays to weaknesses, those weaknesses will tend to become more pronounced. Some might believe that the shocked and hurt reactions of those shaped by the culture of offence are entirely feigned: I am not convinced that they are. Rather, these reactions are cultivated, nurtured, and conditioned through the extensive character formation of particular communities, which systematically drives the offence thresholds and tolerance of their members down and saps their nerve. Initially affected reactions can become second nature through frequent repetition. The members of such communities routinely become weaker, more dependent, more reactive, and more sensitive than they were before they joined them.
The lowering of these offence thresholds and tolerance levels occurs as the members of these communities are incessantly sensitized to their vulnerability and victim status. It occurs as they are taught to think of themselves as besieged, oppressed, and persecuted by malicious and evil opposition. It occurs as the actions and words of opponents and critics are presented as personal attacks. It occurs as reacting with outrage at offence is consistently rewarded with affirmation and encouragement by the group and with the concessions of wider society. It occurs as reactions characteristic of very high sensitivity levels are validated, rather than regarded as signs of excessive weakness. It occurs as sensitivities are privileged with attention and grant the holder protected and empowered status over others. It occurs as ever increasing recourse to protection, comfort, support, validation, and aid is provided by society to those claiming offence.
Strengths are developed as people refuse to pander to our weaknesses, viewing these weaknesses as obstacles that we both need and are sufficient to overcome. While we may not yet be prepared to face certain challenges, and need support and protection in such cases, we need to be pushed beyond our existing limits, to attain to new levels of independent strength.
The community of offence, through its continual accommodation and validation of supposed weakness, stifles this development of strength. Rather than seeking to strengthen its members to the point where they can hold their own in combative debate on level terms, it encourages the notion that they are so vulnerable that, unless one tiptoes around their sensitivities and emotions, they will be deeply hurt. The members of such groups internalize this expectation and are consequently less likely to overcome their overly sensitized condition.
Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, two feminists, comment on the effect of this within the context of Women’s Studies, one area where such playing to weakness is frequently in evidence:
No doubt there were students who gained confidence and a sense of belonging from the sharing, caring, and calls to empowerment that pervaded feminist pedagogy. But we found that others felt excluded by the strict enforcement of whatever the prevailing feminist norms happened to be. And those who did fit in were taking on a worldview that militated against anything but a life as a feminist activist – and this by design. It is right for women to be alerted to the possibility of rape and violent assault and apprised of methods of prevention and legal recourse. But if such topics are to be discussed in a classroom setting, they must be dealt with carefully and analyzed as a complex social issue using the tools of social science. All too often the definitions and doctrines espoused within Women’s Studies seemed calculated merely to make women feel besieged. Their sensitivities were being sharpened to such an edge that some were turned into relentless grievance collectors or rendered too suspicious to function in the workaday world outside of Women’s Studies and were left with few possible roles in life beyond that of angry feminists.
These communities of offence also insist that the whole of society adapt itself to their members. As these psychological invalids are stretchered or wheeled out, and the walking emotionally wounded hobble out, onto society’s field of play, all play must be brought down to their level. Anyone who seeks to use their strength to get an advantage is shamed and penalized. Any result that doesn’t flatter the invalids will be presented as bullying, cruelty, and oppression. Injuries will be exaggerated in order to gain penalties against opponents. While supporting and protecting those with genuine weaknesses that they cannot overcome is laudable, it is quite another thing to use these weaknesses as a means to bend society to one’s will and prevent the expression of strengths. Unfortunately, when the strengths in question are those necessary for open, challenging, and lively public conversation, all of society suffers as a result. Society needs affirmative and supporting contexts for its more vulnerable members, but these contexts must be kept away from the combative contexts that it requires for its critical discourse.
Offence Trolling
A ‘troll’ is a person who exposes others to offensive or inflammatory material in order to produce an emotional response generally in order to sabotage or prevent conversation. While trolling is typically thought of as a hostile action, explicitly calculated to offend the trolled party, there is a commonly ignored but exceedingly widely practiced form of trolling which functions quite differently. This sort of trolling – which I term ‘offence-trolling’ – involves the trolling of one’s own community. Like other forms of trolls, offence trolls use material calculated to be offensive and inflammatory in order to provoke an emotional reaction and to derail debate. However, the offence-troll does not seek personally to offend their community, but rather purposefully seeks to offend and provoke an emotional reaction in their community by means of the sharing or reporting of the words or actions of another party.
The offence-troll will typically take an extreme or ill-worded statement of their opponents, wrench it from context, put the worst possible construction on it, and present it to an audience carefully primed to take extreme offence to it. The emotional reaction, offence, and outrage can then be leveraged against the opposition, helping to push them out of the debate, and relative to the wider society, capitalizing on the offence to gain greater support and concessions. While the offence-troll may claim to desire to protect the weak and sensitive from offence, their real goal is to use the offence that results when the weak and sensitive are exposed to sharp, muscular, and combative discourse to get their way. The goal of the offence-troll is to ‘trigger’ others and thereby to accumulate the social capital of offence.
The offence-troll is the person on Twitter or in your Facebook newsfeed who is constantly posting links to articles or stories calculated to confirm your worst possible impressions of your opponents, yet who never devotes much effort to engaging with those opponents at their best. The offence-troll is typically the person who paints a picture of their opponents as being driven largely by bad motives, by hatred, cruelty, greed, selfishness, or animosity, will generally take a highly selective approach to the evidence in order to prove their case, and then broadcast that ‘evidence’ as loudly as they can to all and sundry.
Such offence-trolling is calculated to heighten polarities and sabotage the sort of receptive discourse that might lead to moderation of positions, convergence, and a bilateral rapprochement. The offence-troll is the extremist who will countenance no compromise and seeks to ensure that all perceive the opposing side to be unreasonable and intractable aggressors. The offence-troll is usually a reactive individual, who wishes to encourage reactivity in others. Consequently, while they could engage critically with their opponents’ most careful and representative statements in contexts where the sensitive are not present, they choose to broadcast distorted and decontextualized extreme statements of their opponents – statements which their opponents will generally have given in more bounded contexts – as widely as they can.
The offence-troll derails conversation, presenting the most extreme voices within a movement as representative of the whole, the isolated ill-worded and uncharitably interpreted statement as the hermeneutical key to the entire ideological system they are arguing against, or the case of abuse through rejection of the practice of the belief system as its paradigm case. By framing the opposition in such a manner and breaking down the conversation on other fronts, the offence-troll loads all of the questions that will be asked of the opponents, making it incredibly difficult to recover meaningful discourse.
The offence-troll also empowers the extreme voices of the opposing camp (who are often trolls themselves). Moderate or balanced opposition views will not be engaged with or reported, as they threaten the desired polarization, a polarization that is in the best interests of the offence-troll.
Human Shields
Offence-trolls and their ilk tend to use the sensitivities and offence of persons within their communities in a fairly predictable manner. Their tactics are incredibly dirty, although I suspect that these tactics are usually employed without a great deal of calculation or consideration. I doubt that most have given much thought to what they are doing.
As Pastor Wilson and others have argued, there are strategic offence-takers. Such individuals may pretend that they have been genuinely and personally hurt or offended, or feign greater feelings of offence than they actually have. The offence-troll is not usually the most vulnerable person. They go out of their way to find offensive material. However, they frequently try to surround themselves with people who genuinely are vulnerable and highly sensitive.
Offence-trolls do not show much regard for the sensitivity and vulnerability of those within their communities, as they routinely expose such persons to the most extreme and potentially offensive statements from opponents. Those opponents are then denounced by the offence-troll as cruel and evil bullies. The offence-troll, morally outraged by the statements of the opponents, will rush forward to attack them, treating any attempt to respond as grossly insensitive and cruel.
This is a tactic that should be familiar to all of us. It is called the ‘human shield’. While terrorists using a human shield will express deep sorrow over the harm caused to those who get hurt, they don’t genuinely care: if they genuinely cared about the lives of vulnerable non-combatants they wouldn’t be using them as a human shield in the first place.
The value of the human shield is twofold: 1) it protects your position from attack, while allowing you to be as offensive as you wish; 2) it gives incredible propaganda value when vulnerable non-combatants are hurt or injured. In some instances, terrorists will even show such callousness towards their human shields that they will seek to draw their enemy’s fire in the direction of the human shield, merely to make the most of the propaganda value (this is where much of the value of offence-trolling comes from). Of course, the terrorists using the human shield approach always present their enemies as the great aggressors and threats to the vulnerable non-combatants, and themselves as the noble defenders and protectors of the weak.
The vulnerable non-combatants in this scenario seldom perceive that they are in a human shield situation. They regard the offence-trolls as their heroic defenders. Onlookers will also frequently fail to grasp the true dynamics of the situation: to them the opponents of the offence-takers will often appear to be the unreasonable aggressors.
The use of a ‘human shield’ to close down challenging conversations and to protect cultural movements from criticism or resistance is a tried and tested tactic. Those using it will seek to prime vulnerable persons for offence as much as possible and then bring them into contact with the strong language of the opponents of the offence-troll’s viewpoint. The tears and hurt that result – the tears of the bullied gay teen who has been taught to think that opponents of same sex marriage believe that God hates him, or the deep fear of the abused woman who believes that the complementarian pastor is seeking to support the male dominance over women involved in rape culture – are then presented as evidence of the cruelty of opponents’ viewpoints, and used to close their voices down. While the offence-troll expresses deep sorrow at the aggression of their opponents and the hurt caused to the vulnerable, there is a hypocrisy and disingenuousness to such declarations of sentiment.
Such situations present us with difficult choices. If we come into such a situation with all truths blazing, we will be perceived as the aggressors, and vulnerable individuals will run from truths that could liberate them, will support those who are employing them as a human shield, and become even more persuaded of their claims. Such a result is especially likely where fair-minded fence-sitters start to become persuaded by the claims of those using the human shield.
To resolve the situation we need first to expose its true character. Unless it becomes very clear to the vulnerable individuals and the many onlookers that they are being used as a human shield by those who claim to be their protectors and that their supposed enemies are actually deeply and genuinely concerned for and committed to securing their good, the situation is lost.
If we respond without regard for the human shield that is being employed, merely blaming the wounded innocents on the offence-troll, we become little better than the debate terrorists themselves. We must go to whatever lengths we can to protect the vulnerable and the weak from genuine spiritual or psychological harm, while seeking to present those employing the human shield to tyrannize their opponents and get their way in the debate for what they are. This demands far more careful, measured, and guarded rhetorical approaches.
The way that we treat the vulnerable and the abused is frequently a central issue in these ‘discussion’. For this reason our language and approach will come under especial scrutiny: our concern for the vulnerable really must be transparently genuine in such a context. Actions outweigh words in such situations, and it will be in the demonstration of a greater true concern for the protection of the weak and the representation and hearing of their voices than other’s partially feigned concern that debates will be won. No matter what truth there may be to our words, if our concern for the vulnerable is not transparent in action, we have lost (and I would be inclined to add that if our concern for the vulnerable is not transparent, we deserve to lose). We can only refute the falsehoods by our actions in the debate: our words are not enough.
The role of fair-minded onlookers in such debates is crucial, and they should be the people that we seek to win over. They often play a deciding role in determining the result of debates. Unless we act very carefully, such persons will buy into the claims of those using the human shield.
The Loss of Truth
One of the most troubling consequences of the culture of offence and the reorientation of discourse around sensitivities is a loss of regard for truth. In challenging discourse, the ultimate goal is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of different arguments and interpretations, revealing truth through this process. In discourse focused on sensitivities, personal validation and the affirmation of people’s feelings and perspectives takes priority over truth.
As I have already stated, not all conversations need to be driven by an uncompromising quest for truth. Some conversations are appropriately focused upon ensuring that people feel loved, accepted, and included, whoever they are, whatever they believe, and however they live their lives. The problem arises when all discourses must adopt this character. When this occurs, the criteria of truth can be neglected or even abandoned in favour of palliative falsehoods.
One of the striking things to witness in the recent debate was how ‘you can’t say that – how utterly beastly!’ style responses to the statements of Pastor Wilson and others took such priority over responses that critically challenged and engaged with his statements as truth claims. The offence-value of Pastor Wilson’s statements seemingly overwhelmed any need carefully to ascertain and probe their truth-value. In the same way, any attempt to argue that Rachel Held Evans’s response involved the overwhelming of reason, argument, and evidence by emotion produced a predictably appalled reaction that one should employ such a sexist stereotype to dismiss a woman’s claims. The supposed offence value of the claim nullified any need to ascertain its truth value.
A further striking thing was the sort of statements that were made in response to Pastor Wilson. All sorts of wild claims and accusations were thrown around. For instance, Pastor Wilson and Jared were accused of being ‘rape apologists’ and ‘praising marital rape’. The offending post was described as ‘overtly misogynistic’ and their position as being ‘about power’ rather than about such things as Scripture. Complementarianism was repeatedly described as being about ‘man’s rule over woman’. Several other highly tendentious and questionable claims were also made about Pastor Wilson’s personal position. Making unfounded accusations (or what the ninth commandment refers to as ‘bearing false witness’) of such a serious nature against another person is not a matter to be taken lightly. However, little attempt was made to make a case in support of such claims – they were merely asserted.
In a society oriented around sensitivities over truth, hurting someone’s feelings can come to be treated as a far more egregious offence than bearing false witness against one’s neighbour. Love is defined relative to feelings, rather than the objective character of actions. The truth value of words and the factual accuracy of statements cease to be matters of primary concern: the validity of words arises not from their accurate communication of the objective character of affairs, but from their emotive, affective, and expressive value, that is, from the feelings of the one who utters them or the one who hears them. I have come to suspect that referring to one’s opponent as a ‘rape apologist’, for instance, is less a truth statement about the objective state of affairs, a statement that one is prepared to defend against criticism with careful arguments, and more an expressive communication of the emotive reaction of the speaker, a statement relatively indifferent to the truth value of the words being employed. This impression is reinforced as one seeks to challenge and question such claims as truth claims. They seldom offer or show much interest in offering a defence for themselves as their justification arises from the person’s own feelings, not from the objective meaning of the words, or the relation that they bear to reality.
This encourages an attitude that treats offensive words as commensurable with lying words. If someone says something that offends you, there is no need to challenge it as a truth claim: the mere fact of the offence justifies your responding with an unfounded accusation for which you have little basis. The speed with which people were prepared to brand Pastor Wilson a misogynist, advocating male violence over women, was breathtaking, suggesting a failure to engage closely with the evidence and to produce careful support of a position that would justify such incredibly serious accusations. Complete ignorance of Pastor Wilson’s more developed position was much in evidence. It is hard to believe that such a rush to judgment is characteristic of persons with a high regard for truth and the importance of the ninth commandment.
Let me stress, I do not believe that people are generally purposefully lying about positions such as Pastor Wilson’s. Rather, I suspect that the culture of offence produces an indifference to truth, as emotions and offence take priority. The truth or falsity of people’s words takes a backseat to the immediacy and strength of the feelings and emotions expressed or produced by them. The liar seeks to deceive, but the reactive speaker merely uses words to play a sort of emotional or expressive ping-pong, without giving thought to the truth value of their utterances (we should rightly recognize this as a form of ‘bullshit’). This sort of speech is demonstrated by the person who says things that they don’t truly mean when extremely angry with another person: the words that such persons speak are chosen merely because they will sting, not because, after careful consideration, they genuinely believe that what they are saying is true, or that they have grounds for arguing it.
Conclusion
As Christians, truth should be the central concern of our speech. A form of discourse that reveals truth and falsehood and which exposes us to realities that unsettle, threaten, and discomfort us must be integral to our life as the Church. At the heart of the culture of offence is the idol of feelings, an idol for which the God we worship shows little regard. God praises persons who overcome the dangerous sense of pity for those who wilfully reject him. God condemns those who are overly concerned about the regard of men, or who pander to the feelings of others in a manner that compromises their witness to the truth. God presents our own feelings as common obstacles to the reception of the gospel message and the life of discipleship.
We need to be attentive to the needs of the weak and vulnerable, and to provide support and protection for those who could be hurt by exposure to overly strong discourse. This involves maintaining clear boundaries for certain forms of discourse for their sake, addressing sensitive issues carefully when in their presence, and trying to keep straight-talking treatments of such issues to contexts where people are equipped to deal with them. As I pointed out in a previous post, the Internet presents us with particular challenges on these fronts. We should also seek to strengthen the weak, so that they can participate more widely in our communities’ conversations.
In maintaining these boundaries we need to ensure that the weak and vulnerable are kept out of our strongest forms of challenging discourse, while ensuring that their concerns are represented within them. We need to ensure that those in these conversations always prioritize truth over sensitivity, and that they can show a high pain tolerance for the discomfort and feelings of others, when that discomfort or those feelings would prevent them from upholding or pursuing the truth, or would cow them into submission to unjustifiable demands.
Towards the end of my next post I hope to move onto the question of appropriate leadership and alternative forms of community – an issue that is especially important in this context. If we are to overcome the culture of offence, it will only be through such firm leadership, a mastery over and wisdom in our words and speech, and healthier forms of community.
Within this post I will continue my analysis of the debate surrounding the words of Pastor Douglas Wilson’s that Jared Wilson posted over a week ago. I have already blogged twice on the subject – here and here. Both of these posts have provoked extensive discussion, with over 230 comments between the two of them. Do take a look. I now intend to move on to the question of reading.
In one of his initial responses to the comments on the Gospel Coalition website, Pastor Wilson made the following remark:
Anyone who believes that my writing disrespects women either has not read enough of my writing on the subject to say anything whatever about it or, if they still have that view after reading enough pages, they really need to retake their ESL class.
At least since this comment, the question of the duties of the reader relative to the writer and the competence of Pastor Wilson’s critics in reading and interpretation has been a key theme in this discussion (both Matthew Lee Anderson and Steve Holmes raise some important concerns and questions here).
I can relate to Wilson’s frustration, having had my positions egregiously misrepresented by poor readers on several occasions. At such points we are faced with a choice: do we focus on fighting for the accurate interpretation of our original words, or do we prioritize being heard and winning our opponents over? While the latter is generally a more productive way of achieving our ends within a particular debate, there are times when I believe that it is thoroughly appropriate and wise to seek to discredit bad interpreters of your past or present statements. This discrediting is primarily for the sake of other people listening in, who are to my mind frequently the most important people in any debate.
While I will be touching directly upon the substance of the recent actual debate between Jared, Pastor Wilson, and their critics at various points, my principal concern in these posts is to initiate and engage in a ‘meta-debate’, rather than the debate that most others have been engaging in. For this reason, at this point I will deal quite directly with the issue of bad reading.
The forms of bad reading that I will be identifying here are hardly limited to one side of this or any other debate, although they do tend to be clustered together, and in this debate I believe that they are especially present among Pastor Wilson’s critics. However, while I believe that the points that I make below will be highly relevant and illuminating to anyone trying to understand the form that the recent debate took and why there was such a failure of communication, my primary goal is to alert us to what bad reading looks like, what causes and drives it, so that we will begin to recognize when it is occurring in a debate, but perhaps most especially in ourselves. Such faults should first be addressed in our own practice. I would encourage everyone reading the following to do so with an eye primarily to themselves.
Challenging the Reader
Not infrequently, I have seen the writer who protests that they have been misinterpreted being told that the full responsibility for being understood is theirs – they are the one trying to communicate their thoughts after all! This approach neglects to reckon with the existence of hostile and uncharitable, lazy, hasty and careless, unskilled or illiterate, and reactive interpreters. I believe that a few minutes spent reading the posts and the comments in this controversy will make apparent that this dust-up is sadly replete with such individuals.
In many cases, such bad interpreters need to be challenged and discredited as interpreters: merely challenging certain of their mistaken interpretations, as one might do with a regular interpreter, may not be sufficient. They give bad interpretations because they do not have the necessary virtues or skills of a good interpreter. Even a technically correct interpretative conclusion arrived at by such an individual can be a bad one, as the process whereby it was reached is frequently flawed. I believe that we should be more alert to and prepared for the activity of such persons.
At this point I want to introduce you all to a rogue’s gallery of bad readers. With a better knowledge of their appearance, contexts, and behaviour you will be equipped to notice them when you encounter them in the wild.
The Hostile or Uncharitable Reader
The hostile interpreter is the individual who is determined to present his opponents in the worst possible light, failing to hold this instinct in check with careful and rigorous interpretative engagement. While there is nothing amiss with engaging with someone’s position in order to find holes, or in arriving at a position that is staunchly antithetical and opposed to that of one’s interlocutor, such positions are only justified in the presence of fair, reasoned, and rigorous interpretative engagement with the position that you are opposing.
For instance, from my perspective on this recent debate, many of Pastor Wilson’s critics seemed to display a personal animus towards complementarian viewpoints, an animus frequently vented in the absence of reasoned engagement with their defenders or careful justification of the antagonistic posture taken. Complementarian viewpoints were typically represented by their opponents as positions in which men ‘rule over’, ‘seek power over’, or ‘dominate’ women and indiscriminately classed with all other forms of ‘patriarchy’. Anyone who knew complementarian positions better would realize that, for all of their faults, they generally explicitly declare ‘ruling over’ and ‘power’ and ‘domination’ oriented hierarchies to be completely antithetical to that for which they are standing, and present their position to be diametrically opposed to much that typically appears under the category of ‘patriarchy’.
As Christians, called to believe the best of each other, we should conclude that our opponents are driven by ill-will only with the greatest reluctance. In all probability, your opponent isn’t the God-hating feminist or the woman-oppressing, rape culture-supporting patriarchalist that you might presume them to be. Most of our opponents are neither evil nor stupid, but well-intentioned and intelligent. In our presumption of malice or gross ignorance we usually display our inability to adopt an imaginative receptivity to the other person’s perspective, and manifest a failure in one of the most basic tasks of true interpretation.
The Lazy Reader
The lazy reader is usually someone who lacks the patience to engage with a writer or interlocutor to whose thought or opinion they give little weight. Lazy readers are often people who give little weight to any opinion other than their own, so they are poor readers of other writers from their own camps too. Prejudices and preconceptions will largely suffice. Reading is hasty and largely concerned with trying to gather sufficient cues to place the writer in one of the pre-existing pigeonholes that one has established, independent of close engagement. For the lazy reader, a statement such as ‘oh, he’s a complementarian/Catholic/liberal/Republican!’ suffices as basis to dispense with the need for further thinking, and to justify the mobilization of all of the prejudices, preconceptions, and judgments already associated with whatever label is applied.
In such a manner, lazy readers generally inoculate themselves against surprise or new insight from all quarters, as their approach is fundamentally inimical to anything that might disrupt the tidiness of their ideological taxonomies. They read merely to reaffirm what they already know.
Lazy readers will still typically throw out strong statements, without bothering to back them up. As the laziness as often as not arises from an overvaluation of or overconfidence in their opinions or those of their own camp, we should not be surprised to find that they are often the most vocal of all. Their laziness is less a willingness to remain in an agnostic ignorance that admits the fact that it is unqualified to have an opinion than it is a conviction that they already know. Once a lazy reader has achieved their end of pigeonholing you, further engagement is virtually impossible.
The Hasty Reader
Hasty readers are closely related to lazy readers in their carelessness. Constantly feeling pressed to have an opinion, hasty readers rush to premature conclusions, failing adequately to process the facts and argumentation beforehand. In my previous post I spoke of the ‘speed of thought’ online. The problem, however, is that thought can only move so fast: the demand for speed comes at the expense of reflection, meditation, and careful and considered judgment.
The recent hue and cry about Pastor Wilson’s words illustrated the manner in which a prima facie case can be regarded by many in such situations as sufficient basis for judgment. Anyone protesting this was presumed to be supporting the indefensible. No time or process was provided for testing the prima facie case. Hardly anyone showed any indication of close interpretative engagement with the rest of Pastor Wilson’s book or his other writings before casting judgment on him. Even the time to engage carefully with Jared and Pastor Wilson’s rebuttals, with the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty, was not taken. Whatever the justice or not of the claims against Pastor Wilson, the whole matter was treated with the reckless abandon and impatient urgency of the lynch mob.
When you are expected to have an instant opinion on every surfacing issue, you will lack the necessary time to devote to the collection of facts and the processing of argumentation. The heat of the antagonisms do not afford us the time or space within which to approach matters with the sort of open minds that can engage with the differing viewpoints carefully and receptively, leading to a time when we are equipped to make up our minds. Rather our minds are already made up, almost at the outset.
Online conflicts can flare up in a matter of minutes, and often tend to die down within a week. Unless you get on the bandwagon more or less immediately, you will find yourself left far behind. This unhealthy time-pressure drives us to scamper through a minimal amount of data and argumentation as fast as we can, seeking to garner some basis upon which to make up our minds. Unsurprisingly, this tends to lead to a careless handling of the evidence, and an overreliance upon our prejudices. The need to make up our minds takes priority over the responsibility to discern, engage with, test, and weigh the relevant evidence and arguments: sometimes the evidence and the arguments do not provide us with sufficient evidence to arrive at a conclusion. Yet seldom are we granted the opportunity to delay judgment, or the right to be agnostic or undecided.
The initial reading will as often as not set the tone of the conversation that follows. For this reason, it is imperative that our initial readings be considered ones, rather than hasty and careless. Had the pace and pressure of this debate calmed down, it might have been easier for people to arrive at careful and reasoned readings. Imagine if all parties had a week to gather a case and respond, with a moratorium on any sort of public accusation or judgment until this time period had elapsed. I suspect that with cooler heads, a firmer and broader apprehension of the relevant facts and evidence, and more closely reasoned arguments, many of the instant judgments that characterized this debate would have been considerably moderated.
Then there’s this other type of person. As nearly as I can tell, they seem to create collages in their mind as they read. Turns of phrase here and individual metaphors there get thrown into different places in the collage until they have what appears to them to be a fairly complete picture, then they react to the picture in more of a qualitative way (this reaction is usually emotional since they don’t really do “critiquing logic” or “refuting ideas”). This sort of person really doesn’t do very well at all with complex writing, especially writing that goes in directions they’re not used to. In my experience, explaining what I wrote to a person like this is a lost cause. I inevitably find myself repeating ideas over and over, quoting my own text, and dissecting my own grammar to prove to this sort of person that I said what I actually said. If your audience is this sort of person, you need to be extremely careful in how you choose your individual words and phrases, or you will set off a negative emotional reaction that makes further communication impossible.
Over the years this same thing has struck me too, and I have pondered how best to account for it. This impressionistic approach to the determination of meaning seems to forestall any process of interpretation: the meaning is vaguely intuited rather than carefully interpreted from the text.
In a fascinating piece on the subject of literacy, Ventakesh Rao challenges the common identification of literacy with the skills of reading and writing. Reading and writing, he argues, are merely mechanical and instrumental skills, distinct from and no guarantee of genuine linguistic and hermeneutical proficiency (which can exist in the absence of the mechanical skills). True literacy is manifested in the ability to exposit and condense texts. Exposition is ‘a demonstration of contextualized understanding of the text, skill with both form and content, and an ability to separate both from meaning in the sense of reference to non-linguistic realities.’ Condensation is ‘the art of packing meaning into the fewest possible words.’
Rao argues that an excessive focus upon the mechanical skills has led to a neglect and decay of true literacy. While some might believe that the loss of literacy is most in evidence in the slang of some demotic patois, Rao argues that it is no less present at the highest levels of education, where people’s inability to think with language is often shockingly apparent. The language of such illiterate readers and writers is a ‘language of phrases borrowed and repeated but never quite understood.’
Words and phrases turn into mechanical incantations that evoke predictable responses from similarly educated minds. Yes there is meaning here, but it is not precise meaning in the sense of a true literary culture. Instead it is a vague fog of sentiment and intention that shrouds every spoken word. It is more expressive than the vocalizations of some of our animal cousins, but not by much.
Curiously, I find the language of illiterate (reading-writing sense) to usually be much clearer. When I listen to some educated people talk, I get the curious feeling that the words don’t actually matter. That it is all a behaviorist game of aversion and attraction and basic affect overlaid on the workings of a mechanical process. That mechanical process is enacted by instrumental meaning-machines manufactured in schools to generate, and respond appropriately to, a narrow class of linguistic stimuli without actually understanding anything.
Rao’s description of educated illiteracy was one of the first things that came to my mind when reading many of the comments in response to Pastor Wilson’s statements. Whatever the justice of the claims made against him, the engagement with Pastor Wilson’s text seldom rose beyond the most rudimentary level of linguistic engagement. Any demonstration of the skills of comprehension involved in discerning and articulating the central claims of a passage and the progression and weighting of an argument seemed to be largely absent, as was one of the ability to unpack the meaning of a condense text. The ‘interpretation’, such that it was, was very much along the lines of what Rao describes: a behaviouristic ‘game of aversion and attraction and basic affect’ involving a ‘vague fog of sentiment and intention that shrouds every … word.’
Perhaps this was particularly clear in the way that the interaction seldom seemed to move beyond the smallest decontextualized soundbites: isolated words or brief phrases. Words like ‘colonize’, ‘conquer’, and ‘egalitarian’ seemed to be fixated upon, but no truly literate engagement with the text seemed to occur. These words were processed impressionistically and behaviouristically, rather than by seeking to understand what they might convey within the context of the broader passage and book, or how they might function within the greater argument.
Wilson contrasts this “God-ordained” relationship of authority and submission to that of an “egalitarian pleasure party,” which I can only assume refers to a sexual relationship characterized by mutual pleasure, mutual authority, mutual submission, and mutual respect—which sounds a lot more desirable to me than being conquered and colonized.
Rather than any attempt to discern what the word might mean in its broader context, there is an unsupported assumption that Pastor Wilson is taking especial aim at a Christian form of egalitarianism, which is actually far from clear in the passage itself, and rather unlikely when read in terms of the book as a whole. Having not read the book (as was obvious from various other comments that she made) Rachel could, as she puts it, ‘only assume’. The depressing thing is that such unsupported assumptions are given any weight at all.
In the same way, while ‘conquer’ and ‘colonize’ may have primarily violent meanings, is it really the case that there are no non-violent metaphorical senses in which they can be employed? I suggest that more literate forms of engagement with language in general, the symbolism of the biblical and literary canon, the offending passage in question, and with the book within which it is found would suggest that there are non-objectionable senses of those words that can make sense in the context.
In the past I have suggested a game of ‘theological taboo’ and of practicing the art of unpacking and repacking our terminological ‘suitcases’ as a means of overcoming the illiteracy that dogs many of our theological conversations. Deprived of the behaviouristic cues and partisan totems of our favourite terminology and shibboleths, and challenged to learn to unpack and repack our beliefs, we will be forced to think with language in a manner that ‘illiterate’ readers don’t and can’t.
The Reactive Reader
The illiterate reader approaches language as something used but never quite understood, as trained or conditioned response to linguistic stimuli: in particular areas, the reactive reader can take this to the next level. I discuss reactivity in my posts on Edwin Friedman’s book, A Failure of Nerve, and will be relying heavily upon his helpful analysis in that which follows.
The reactive reader is characterized by a particular sort of emotional posture relative to the discourse or their opponents. They are unable to self-differentiate from those with whom they are having the conversation, or from the subject matter, to act decisively from out of a clear sense of who they are and what they stand for, distinct from the people, ideas, and environment that surrounds them. When persons can’t regulate themselves, they are vulnerable to all of the events, ideas, persons, and emotions that surround them and will react on a hair-trigger. They are connected to these things within a sort of ‘feeling plasma’, in which they are constantly being bombarded by the emissions of everyone and everything else. They are triggered by external stimuli, rather than acting agentically and determinedly from a self-defined identity.
Reactive readers can have a number of characteristics. First, they are unable to differentiate themselves from other persons. They create polarized oppositions with other parties very easily, fixate upon such rivalries, and determine their identities relative to these opponents. They cannot easily abide the near presence of someone who strongly believes something different to them, or who holds that they are wrong on an important matter. Feeling threatened by such a person, they react with a violent opposition to them. They almost always seem to be either aggressive or flinching, or poised to be so. If such a person feels threatened by you, it really doesn’t matter what you say: it will be virtually impossible for anything that you say to get through to them.
Second, they are unable to differentiate themselves from the subject matter of the conversation. Idea and person are so tightly bound together for them that when an idea that they hold dear is attacked or challenged they will take it personally. This makes debate almost impossible, as they constantly feel assaulted by their opponents, reacting in a manner driven by emotional reactivity, rather than reason (often even on occasions when reason might initially appear to be present).
The triggered person is a particular case of this. The triggered person is, for some reason or other (often on account of prior abuse, for instance), unable to differentiate themselves from some particular person, subject matter, object, or place, continually reacting rather than responding to it. As soon as the trigger is introduced into their environment, they lose true rational and agentic control of their response. Their actions become determined by their surroundings, rather than by their selves.
Third, they are fixated on ‘symptoms’, failing to appreciate the more underlying problem of the reactive emotional processes that bind them to the issues in question. They are crisis-driven. Even though the matter in question may be important, they are psychologically incapable of getting it in perspective. Reactive persons who move away from a particular Christian tradition can, for instance, remain bound up with the tradition that they left. They devote a great deal of their effort and attention to attacking the tradition and its positions, unwittingly defining their identity over against their former background. On account of their reactivity, they will almost invariably caricature wildly and blow up issues out of all proportion.
Fourth, reactive persons raise the temperature of a debate very quickly. As they cannot establish a clear self-identity distinct from other persons and ideas, they continually feel threatened and attacked. As they develop fixations, they lose all perspective on situations. They have an exceedingly limited repertoire of responses, and almost all of these responses undermine debate. When faced with an ideological opponent or a threatening idea they tend either to run for cover, or react aggressively. When they react, they tend to make things very personal, throwing around ad hominem terms and branding their opponents as ‘misogynists’, ‘racists’, ‘homophobes’, ‘liberals’, etc., unable to distinguish between disagreement and personal attack.
Fifth, reactive persons in reactive situations take everything incredibly seriously. They are completely lacking in a sense of humour and the ability to take themselves, their opponents, the subject matter, or the situation lightly when appropriate. They don’t get jokes and can’t make them. The reactive person is paranoid. People who lack the ability to self-differentiate tend to suffer from a sort of anxiety and easily succumb to conspiracy theory mindsets. The slightest turn of phrase, alteration in tone of voice, or choice of word will be imbued with intense meaning. They read intention into everything, finding it incredibly difficult to entertain the possibility that others weren’t giving full weight to every word used, that they might have spoken carelessly, that they might not have meant what they said, that their words might have been misunderstood, or that they didn’t intend to convey anything by a particular action. Lacking playfulness and a sense of humour, the reactive person does not have the ability to see things differently: their minds grasp onto a particular construction of the situation with a fevered intensity, and they are psychologically unable to try on different framings or perspectives for size.
Sixth, reactive persons play to weakness, and encourage all to adapt to those with the lowest levels of maturity and self-differentiation. Reactive persons will frequently use sensitivity as a means to get their way and gain control over debates and over their communities. Everyone has to order themselves around those who are least willing or able to take responsibility for their actions and emotions. Friedman writes:
One of the most extraordinary examples of adaptation to immaturity in contemporary American society today is how the word abusive has replaced the words nasty and objectionable. The latter two words suggest that a person has done something distasteful, always a matter of judgment. But the use of the word abusive suggests, instead, that the person who heard or read the objectionable, nasty, or even offensive remark was somehow victimized by dint of the word entering their minds. This confusion of being “hurt” with being damaged makes it seem as though the feelings of the listener or reader were not their own responsibility, or as though they had been helplessly violated by another person’s opinion. If our bodies responded that way to “insults,” we would not make it very far past birth.
He goes on:
The use of abusive rather than objectionable has enabled those who do not want to take responsibility for their own efforts to tyrannize others, especially leaders, with their “sensitivity.” … It has been my impression that at any gathering, whether it be public or private, those who are quickest to inject words like sensitivity, empathy, consensus, trust, confidentiality, and togetherness into their arguments have perverted those humanitarian words into power tools to get others to adapt to them.
While healthy forms of adaptation encourage people to become more mature, more independent, to develop thicker skins and greater self-control, societies built around those who are reactive privilege weakness and sap persons of strength. The more that people get their way by claiming that they have been offended or that their feelings have been hurt, the less likely they are to develop control over their feelings and self-differentiation, and the more likely they are to become hyper-sensitive to the slightest shadow of possible offence.
None of this is to suggest that the feelings of very sensitive persons should be treated with little regard, especially those who have suffered abuse and mistreatment. It is rather to make clear that we should be helping and encouraging such persons to develop thicker skins and more control over their feelings. One doesn’t encourage the development of strength by privileging weakness – quite the opposite!
Seventh, reactive groups display a herding instinct. Such groups fuse into a sort of ‘homogenized togetherness’. They cannot tolerate the differentiation of other parties, and so everyone is pressured to adapt to those with the least self-differentiated identity. Independent and self-defined voices can’t be tolerated. As a result people lose their selfhood in the group, and tend to stampede with the herd. Friedman observes, ‘in order to be “inclusive,” the herding [group] will wind up adopting an appeasement strategy toward its most troublesome members while sabotaging those with the most strength to stand up to the troublemakers.’ Reactive groups love to characterize those who won’t give in to the immature members within them as ‘insensitive’, ‘lacking in empathy’, ‘uncooperative’, ‘cruel’, or ‘selfish’.
With the loss of differentiation, there is an incredibly fertile context for Girardian mimetic desire, rivalries, and scapegoating. The ideal scapegoat is someone who is similar, but not too similar to the rest of the group. Unsurprisingly, reactive communities can ensure their identities through scapegoating the individual in their midst who is self-differentiated and doesn’t just dissolve into the mass, so effective leaders will often find themselves crucified. It was the experience of the self-differentiated individual in the reactive group that Kipling described in the words ‘if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…’. Anyone who sees things differently or dissents from the group opinion is ripe for scapegoating. Alternatively, reactive communities find unity in reacting against and symbolically scapegoating a rival demonized community to whom they bear some sort of relation. Without such a shared opposition, the unity of the undifferentiated group would soon collapse into vicious internecine violence.
In sum, reactive and triggered persons are bad interpreters. They typically close down challenging conversations: public discourse atrophies in a context where reactive people hold sway. They think in polarizing fashions, caricaturing and demonizing their opposition. They cannot detach themselves sufficiently from the subject matter to withstand debate. They form stampeding herds that will crush those who seek to withstand them. The can only take things seriously and lack the imagination and playfulness to frame situations differently. They make things incredibly personal. They seek to employ their uncontrolled sensitivities to tyrannize the conversation.
Reactive and triggered persons cannot handle nuance, rhetorical hyperbole, irony, humour, linguistic playfulness, or vigorous debate. They respond to words behaviouristically, rather than approaching them interpretatively. The reactive or triggered person perceives everything in black and white terms and invests all of the statements of other parties with a level of meaning that admits no reserve or shading. You are either for them or against them.
A Few Observations
1. In my previous post, I commented on the democratization of discourse. As they have become less bounded and moderated, there has been a proliferation of bad readers within many of our conversations. While this may have made the conversations more inclusive, it has often rendered them considerably less effective. Despite the assurances of our education systems, most people lack the levels of literacy and self-differentiation necessary to engage in effective debate. For the health and survival of our public discourses, I believe that we need to limit or end the direct participation of bad readers as much as we possibly can, and provides means of advocacy for them instead, where their interests and perspectives can be represented by gifted and trained readers.
2. Triggered people are the very last people to go to if one wants to determine meaning. Triggered people are virtually incapable of engaging with a triggering text interpretatively, even if its author is completely innocent of bad intent. Nevertheless, the triggered reader will fairly frequently impute meaning to the text and intention to the author in keeping with the triggering effect that they experienced. For this reason, conversations surrounding triggered persons will often have a nasty and ad hominem character to them. When they claim too much in such a fashion, the core issue of triggering language is in danger of being dismissed along with the false and unreasonable accusations that typically accompany it. Those dialoguing with triggered persons need to recognize this. It is fruitless to debate meaning and intention unless you have dealt with the fundamental issue of the triggering. Those surrounding triggered persons should also recognize this tendency, hold their triggered friends back from the front line of debate, and represent their central concern in a manner that avoids the demonization, polarization, and hyperbolic accusations that typically result when triggered persons present and press their own case.
3. Dialoguing with reactive persons is incredibly difficult. They react viscerally rather than responding as rational and reflective agents. It is akin to trying to handle a cornered animal. In order to interact with them, one must first master one’s own reactivity and keep a cool head. One needs to avoid any sudden movements and ensure that they don’t feel at all threatened. They must be the ones to make all of the major moves. You coax them out with non-confrontational and inviting questions. You can’t press your advantage home, but must wait for them to come to you. Of course, while there are occasions when such forms of discourse are important, it is not healthy to have such persons in important discourse.
4. Few of the matters mentioned above have anything directly to do with intelligence or intentions. Well-meaning and highly intelligent individuals can be reactive or ‘illiterate’ readers. Most of us have been hasty, lazy, or overly hostile readers at some point in our lives.
A Concluding Thought
We often tend to regard the virtues appropriate to a practice such as reading as fairly particular to it. However, if what I have presented within this post is correct, the art of becoming a good reader is one that requires an extensive and intensive development of character and the cultivation of some of the core virtues of the Christian faith. The person who lacks this character and these virtues is a bad reader, no matter how many technical skills they may possess. The bad readers listed above are primarily marked by particular psychological traits and behaviours, rather than by an absence of technical ability. Perhaps the best way to become a good reader is to allow one’s character to be formed by the gospel. Conversely, when we display the characteristics of bad readers, it is often a revelation of the sin that remains in our lives, sin to be responded to with a penitent faith.
The loving reader strives to believe the best of others and is thereby equipped to perform the fundamental interpretative task of perspective-taking.
The humble reader is not exalted too highly in their own opinion and consequently listens far more carefully and attentively to other voices in the conversation. They are aware of the possibility that their readings and positions may be wrong, and are open to being challenged.
The self-controlled reader overcomes their reactivity, commanding their emotions and learning to respond with thoughtful and discerning judgment after careful interpretation. They thus avoid polarizations.
The patient reader is willing to delay judgment and wait for the right time to make up their mind. Their patience provides the time within which thoughtful consideration and interpretation can occur.
The unafraid reader escapes the fear and the paranoia of the reactive or triggered reader.
The hopeful reader has eyes open for happy surprises possibilities, and convergences beyond present polarizations.
The joyful reader has a freedom, playfulness, and imagination that enables them to frame things differently and not become locked within the driven ruts of the debate.
The kind reader puts the most generous construction on the words of others, preventing disputes from being blown out of proportion.
The gentle reader is forgiving of the human failings of writers, and recognizes that others sometimes make mistakes, express themselves poorly, or don’t fully mean what they say.
The peaceful reader reads others in a non-hostile and receptive manner, leaning in favour of those interpretations that foster unity.
The trusting reader takes others at their words, and seeks to avoid imputing intentions to them and meanings to their words that they deny.
The long-suffering reader is prepared to go to considerable effort to read a person thoroughly and well and won’t merely hastily skim.
These virtues are formed, not by mere human effort, but through faith in Christ. As we take our bearings from him, this character – the character of a good reader – is worked out in us. As I will argue in later posts, the gifted reader is also generally an able leader. It is important to seek such virtuous readers, to surround ourselves with them, and to be formed by their leadership. While bad reading is highly contagious, good reading is also something that can be formed in us by the company that we keep. In attending to the connection between our character and our reading much needless pain and difficulty that we cause to ourselves and each other could be avoided.
Durham Cathedral tower is one of my favourite places, as many of you probably already know. I climbed it again with housemates a couple of days ago. Here are a few pictures:
In my previous post, I dealt with the controversy that had developed around Jared Wilson’s post: ‘The Polluted Waters of 50 Shades of Grey, Etc.’ and the quoted comments from Pastor Douglas Wilson within it. Since writing that post, Jared has removed the offending posts, and posted an apology. I believe that issuing such an apology was definitely the right thing to do under the circumstances, and I thank Jared for the humility that he manifested in giving it. Pastor Wilson, by contrast, has stood very forcefully by his original remarks in subsequent posts on his blog.
I gave thought to removing my original post on this subject, published as it was before this conflict calmed down following Jared’s apology. I also questioned whether I should post follow-up posts, as I had originally intended: would I merely be risking reigniting a fire that was about to go out? I have decided that I ought to go ahead as originally planned. The following are some of the reasons why:
1. While Jared was right to apologize, the issues raised within the debate haven’t really been settled. Rather than accepting an airbrushed account of events and responsibilities that keeps agitators appeased, I want to press the narrative that most have adopted to defend itself. We shouldn’t be content to settle for a peace obtained by means of questionable tactics and sustained by suppressing truth and genuine challenging discourse.
2. The appropriate apology of one party does not put the other antagonizing party in the right. It might be helpful to point this out before anyone sets off on a victory lap.
3. Some of the participants in this debate would like to cast it as a heavily polarized conflict between two diametrically opposed parties, where no other ground or party exists. It isn’t. There are many of us who stand unconvinced by or opposed to both parties on different grounds and who have very strong opinions on the matter, opinions that aren’t being represented much in the debate. We have a stake in the conversation too. This post is a ‘hey, you guys, we’re here too!’ for anyone who is listening.
Many of our concerns have yet to be properly addressed by the antagonizing parties and we should not be silent until they are. The power-grabbing and polarizing moves that have been on display in this conflict affect us too. Our desire for a cessation of extreme conflicts and our distaste for the polarizations that they produce should not lead us to adopt an appeasing stance towards unreasonable agitators.
4. Some very dirty and dangerous tactics have been employed in the recent conflict, and I have yet to see apologies for these from the worst of the offenders, even though I suspect that few realized exactly what they were doing in using them. When such tactics have not been foresworn – and especially where they have succeeded in achieving their ends – we can be quite certain that they will be used again.
5. There are many lessons to learn from the recent incendiary conflict, if we are to prevent a recurrence of it. The different positions have not gone away and we can be assured that there will be continued flare-ups and skirmishes in these areas. Until some of the deeper problems with the way that we discuss these matters are diagnosed and dealt with, we won’t really make much progress. Yes, I am the sort of person who thinks that the post-match analysis is the often the most important part of the big game: the bare ‘result’ seldom tells the whole story.
6. There are more general lessons to be learnt here about the way that we engage with each other’s viewpoints and the problematic shape of Internet discourse. Even with people of good intentions on all sides, the common form of such discourses will tend to press us towards conflict. Within these posts I hope to present some thoughts about positive alternatives to the current forms of debate, forms within which both the strong concerns articulated by such as Rachel and others are represented, and the dismissive ridicule of Pastor Wilson’s responses can be avoided, forms within which substantive and challenging disagreements can be carried out in a manner that produces light rather than heat.
My hope in continuing this series is that we will all be prompted to think about appropriate and inappropriate forms of dialogue, and work towards creating conversations and communities that are more conducive both to constructive discourse and protecting the emotions and interests of the more vulnerable.
Since writing the original piece, I have also found myself blocked from commenting on Rachel Held Evans’s blog, after my challenge to her in these comments (she also seems to have blocked me on Twitter).
The following are some clarifications on my stance relative to the debate. The recent brouhaha has been characterized by extreme polarization, by two sides heavily and often militantly invested in one side of an issue. I have some sympathies with the complaints raised by both sides, sympathies that should become clearer to anyone reading these posts attentively and in their entirety. I also have strong opinions on a number of the key issues within this discussion. Again many of these opinions will come to the surface within my treatment.
I do not align myself with either of the parties in this fight. When I defend one side against the false claims or unreasonable rhetoric of the other, I am not putting myself in a camp. While it would be mistaken to regard my sympathies as being equally poised between the two sides, it would be no less mistaken to believe that my participation is driven by such sympathies. I am participating because I believe that there are important issues at stake in these discussions, issues about which I have a genuine interest in fostering a productive and charitable discourse. I believe that this is being made practically impossible by the way that both parties are approaching the debate.
I do not view either side as a homogeneous and amorphous mass. I believe that some persons bear a considerable weight of responsibility for their unhelpful actions and reactions, while there are mitigating considerations in the case of others. Those who play a leading role are those who must be most accountable here. A leader is held to a higher level of responsibility: even though they may prove to be utterly insufficient for the role that they are playing, this is no excuse.
What I would like to encourage here is a ‘meta-debate’, a debate about the way that we debate. I believe that the recent strife over Pastor Wilson’s words and Jared Wilson’s post provides us with a perfect specimen of a debate that face-planted, with multiple injuries. We may have picked ourselves up afterwards, but perhaps now might be the right time to ask ourselves what went wrong.
How was it that this particular debate so quickly overheated? Why did it take such a polarized form? Why did people react to Pastor Wilson’s comments as they did? Why were the earlier responses given by Jared and Pastor Wilson so ineffective in calming the waters? Why was charitable judgment so noticeably absent from most responses to the remarks, especially in the early stages of the debate? Why was there so little evidence of careful interpretative engagement with Pastor Wilson’s words? Why did so much of the debate on both sides take the form of sciamachy, rather than genuine mutual engagement? What could have been done to avert the problems that arose within this debate? What structural changes in the form of Internet theological debate could address the failings that we witness here? How can we keep cool and level heads in such an antagonistic environment?
Much of what I am saying within these posts won’t actually engage with the substance of what was said, but rather with the way that the debate was handled. As I will be arguing that a significant number of the people participating in the debate manifested their incompetence or inability in interpretation, reason, and discourse, and that much that was said had no substance whatsoever and isn’t worthy of engagement, I don’t suspect that my comments will receive a favourable reaction from such corners. Pointing out that people are poor readers, for instance, seldom serves the purpose of persuasion. However, my chief concern is less that of persuading those antagonists, who have their heels deeply dug in, of the errors of their arguments, as it is one of persuading the majority of us who do not fall into this category of the intractability and ineffectiveness of debate on such terms, and the tendency of such engagements to produce great heat but no light. I wish to show why I believe that this is the case, and what we can do to improve the situation. The people that I am writing for here are primarily the bystanders and observers, people who do not feel able to associate themselves closely with the actions or words of either side.
In many respects, I have treated my forays into this debate as fieldwork, providing me with material and insight for the far more important meta-debate that I want to open up in these posts. This has long been an issue that has fascinated me, as I have reflected upon the shape that our conversations take, the emotional processes operative within them, framing metaphors and questions, the forms of argumentation that we employ, the effect of different forms of rhetoric, the directions in which different ecologies of discourse will evolve, the complicating influence of factors such as power differentials of class, gender, age, education, and race, the structural and institutional dimensions of disputation, how we are best equipped to participate effectively within them, etc. As so much of our lives involves discourse, I believe that devoting time to reflection upon the dynamics of conversation is a highly worthwhile and potentially greatly rewarding effort.
The Internet and the Changing Environment of Discourse
I want you to cast your mind back to 1999. Back before the Nyan Cat meme. Back before Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Back before 9/11. Back when Google was still a minnow, in a year of fevered prognostications about the effect of the Millennium Bug. Back when Britney Spears released her first single and the word ‘blog’ was coined. Back in the year when George Lucas destroyed your childhood.
In 1999, fewer than one person in four in the developing world was on the Internet. Internet usage was largely limited to a few first world countries. The Internet was a very different sort of beast. We connected using dial-up and it was as fast as swimming through syrup. Social networking as we know it today was practically non-existent. Webpages were garishly coloured and had few images. The web was navigated very differently. You had to navigate to the big stories and lively discussions: they were less likely to come to you. News and buzz still travelled fairly slowly and kept within fairly limited bounds. It wasn’t until a number of years later that it really became possible for something to ‘go viral’. The web was ordered around ideas and taxonomies of subjects, rather than around networked individuals.
When Pastor Wilson published Fidelity, back in 1999, it came into a world quite different from the one that we now live within. Within this world, a book such as Fidelity would not have been likely to venture far from its original context. The possibility of a decontextualized quotation flying around the Internet, being seen by a large population of people with absolutely no relationship to the original context from which the text hailed, and with limited knowledge of its theological provenance was very slight.
Back in 1999 you generally had to look for such things: you were unlikely to be passively exposed to them. Perhaps quotations from Fidelity would have been discussed within a moderated intramural Reformed theological forum. If it spread beyond a Reformed context, it would have been unlikely to have made that much of an online impact. The quotation, appearing as it did in a book explicitly addressed to men, would be read primarily by such an audience, and the ‘trigger warning’ with which the book begins would be far more effective at keeping unsuitable readers out. In such an environment, commenters were far more likely to be informed and qualified to comment and one was considerably less likely to be exposed to ideas originating from a context rather alien to one’s own. It was only through the most circuitous of routes that I first came across Pastor Wilson’s writings around that time, largely by word of mouth and connection with other writers with whom I was already acquainted.
It would have been hard to whip up a large firestorm around something supposedly outrageous. The discussion of ideas was more distinct from the emotional and relational connections between persons as social networking wasn’t really developed. Ideas were far more likely to pass from person to person through active engagement, rather than through a sort of passive contagion. Those who were outraged would have found it difficult to spread their outrage far.
I don’t think that we reflect enough on the manner in which the current form of the Internet affects the manner in which we discuss things and the manner in which ideas spread, and how significantly the Internet has changed over the last 10-15 years. Here are a few of the key changes:
1.A collapsing of contexts. As the Internet became more connected, contexts once fairly hermetically sealed started to collide with each other. The writings of someone like Pastor Wilson were exposed to a much wider audience, many of whom had little notion of the sort of unusual cultural and ideological world it originated from. With this collapsing of contexts comes the realization that there are people in close relational networks to us who hold radically different beliefs and exposure to those opinions.
2.A decontextualization of thought. With the loss of highly distinct cultural contexts, theological communication was increasingly likely to have to abandon peculiar contextual idioms and ideological dialects and accommodate itself to a less defined readership. The readership, in turn, came to presume the ready intelligibility of thoughts arising from different contexts to persons within their own. This leads to a forgetfulness of context, and the manner in which deeper shared cultural knowledge can permit less guarded formulations. One’s audiences became potentially much less defined or circumscribable. In such an environment it is harder to hold straight-talking conversations without more sensitive individuals being exposed to them. The possibility of having one’s position reduced to a decontextualized soundbite is also greatly increased.
3. A personalizing of ideas. As the Internet becomes more oriented around social networking, the way that we engage with ideas changes. Ideas become far less distinct from personal relations, as ideas follow the trajectories of social networking connections. Rather than having to go out of our immediate space and into a public conversation to encounter challenging and threatening ideas, they start to intrude upon our private spaces. It is far more likely for emotions to be prominent in such a debate. It also raises the possibility of Girardian mimetic patterns of emotional and ideological contagion and rivalry taking effect.
4. A collision of undifferentiated conversations. Following on from the previous point, there are different sorts of conversations. Some conversations are designed to be intimate, affirming, non-threatening, welcoming, and accepting. Other conversations are designed to be combative, disputational, confrontational, and challenging. Some people find the former type of conversation incredibly stifling and relish the latter. Other people find the latter form of conversation very threatening and unsettling and need the former. The former conversation affirms people in non-threatening difference: the latter conversation challenges people to defend their differences against strong criticism. The former welcomes the expression of emotion: the latter gives emotion no privilege or protection in the conversation (all emotion is not excluded). As contexts collapse, it is far more difficult to keep these radically different forms of conversations from colliding. When they do, lots of heat is created and virtually no light whatsoever.
Most people lack the training, reasoning ability, confidence, or self-mastery necessary to engage in challenging conversation. This wasn’t so much of a problem when such conversations were limited to closely defined contexts, generally engaged in by trained representatives of positions, rather than by more vulnerable people, who would feel threatened by the ideas raised, but lack the skills or temperament with which to attack them. In the past, it was much easier to leave the theological conflicts to one’s pastor, for instance: nowadays they turn up in your Facebook newsfeed.
5. Decreased moderation of and democratization of discourse. Almost all of us have many means of broadcasting and sharing our positions nowadays. In the past, these means were far more limited, and few people had them. Most conversations would be bounded and moderated, and people who didn’t belong or who didn’t play by the rules could be excluded for their own good, for the health of the conversation, and the focus of the group. When everyone has means of self-expression and participates in less bounded conversations, there is a lot more noise surrounding the signal and it is harder to keep discussions on target.
6. The spread and speed of thought. The breakdown of contextual boundaries and the rapidity of the spread of information makes emotional reactivism so much easier (about which more in a later post). There is less time within which to rally one’s wits and arguments when faced with something that offends you. The speed of communication and the pace at which conversations move and develop gives us little time for consideration, reflection, and patient processing. As the initial reaction all too often sets the terms for the conversation that follows, this encourages far more emotionally freighted conversations (also as we find ourselves trying to keep faith with our original emotional reactions, trying to maintain self-consistency and not wanting to appear to back down). Being encouraged to make up our minds in a matter of minutes, in the heat of the moment, we are far more at risk of reacting, rather than responding.
I believe that all of these factors can be seen to have shaped the evolution of the recent conflict to some extent. I do not believe that such an environment is generally conducive to productive and challenging discourse. Until we start to become conscious about the ways that it shapes things, I suspect that many of the problems that it produces will only continue.
Writers and Causing Offence
As I made clear in my first post, I believe that Pastor Wilson did express himself very unclearly and unhelpfully on this matter, in a manner that invited misunderstanding and mischaracterization, and which threw far too many hostages to fortune. I hope that he will express at least a measure of regret for the offence that his words have caused to some and for the role that they have played in a polarizing conflict. Jared’s transplanting of Pastor Wilson’s comments from a book written for men to a more general context is also significant here. In the original setting of the reading of the entire book by a male-only audience in a relatively well-defined Christian milieu, the offending statements are much less problematic, being tempered by clarifying contexts.
I have no reason to believe that Pastor Wilson’s statements in their original context were either technically or intentionally misogynist. However, their effect in their new context has been to provoke a sense of genuine hurt, offence, or alienation in some. Quibbling over the original contextual meaning and the meaning intended by the author, without acknowledging the very real effect that they have had in their new context risks a callous indifference to the genuine possibility that some emotionally and spiritually vulnerable individuals have been hurt by them. I submit that it is within this indifference, rather than within the original meaning of the statements themselves, that the risk of a form of misogyny most clearly lies. We are taught by Scripture to take especial concern for the needs and spiritual wellbeing of the weak and vulnerable, and I believe that setting up unnecessary causes of offence or scandal falls very clearly within this area. The judgment that Christ declares against the person who causes one of his little ones to stumble should provoke a godly trepidation in our speech in such areas. Of course, a different standard applies in the case of the less vulnerable.
Part of the problem in the reception of such statements is that Pastor Wilson has a track record of causing such offence, of tackling extremely sensitive issues with seemingly little sensitivity. I strongly believe that the true character of Southern slavery is a worthy subject for critical and close historical study, and that such study should be driven by the demands of truth and accuracy over the demands of either party or sensitivity. I take issue with Pastor Wilson’s historical reading of the institution of slavery in the South. However, I don’t believe that such unpopular and revisionist readings are automatically to be dismissed as driven by racist animus, although they will naturally (and I believe quite appropriately) raise troubling questions on this front. What does deeply trouble me is that a public figure and white minister of the gospel, working in a theological context troubled with a racist legacy, should tackle such a sensitive issue with such academic and rhetorical recklessness, and in a publicizing format, with a seeming disregard, indifference, or insensitivity to the effect that such a work would have. This strikes me as grossly racially insensitive and I really struggle to see how this advances the cause of Christ.
Pastor Wilson’s motives in writing such a shoddy, dangerous, and racially insensitive book are not entirely clear to me, but I find it considerably less likely that they have to do with racial hatred than that they arise from a temperamental intolerance for unchallenged consensus positions driven too powerfully by concerns of sensitivity and political correctness, a contrarian desire to advocate strongly for an alternative perspective in an area where critical assessment can feel stifled by fear of causing offence, and a wish to mitigate some measure of the opprobrium that has been heaped upon the South, by presenting another side of the picture. Such contrarian impulses can be very healthy in the context of stifling and stagnating discourses, but they are incredibly dangerous if used recklessly and without sufficient sensitivity, as clearly seems to be the case in this instance.
I don’t believe that Pastor Wilson speaks and writes in such a manner because he is cruel, callous, vicious, uncaring, racist, or misogynistic. I suspect that the subjectivity of more emotionally vulnerable persons is so far removed from his own that he struggles to relate to and sympathize with them in their experience and in their perception of his speech and actions. Pastor Wilson strikes me as a man with the hide of a rhinoceros, and I believe that he was well matched with the likes of Christopher Hitchens in debate. This is one of his greatest strengths, and one of the things that I most appreciate about him. However, as is often the case in such instances, the greatest weakness can be the flipside of the greatest strength. Not all persons have the gift and privilege of such a sense of personal invulnerability to criticism and challenge, and I am not sure that Pastor Wilson sufficiently recognizes this. This is especially the case for those who come from abusive, marginalized, or painful historical backgrounds.
I love the way that Pastor Wilson can wield his rhetorical hammer, but there is a time and a place. When you are a privileged male leader interacting with a group of concerned and often hurt women, many of whom have personally experienced physical and spiritual abuse or sexual assault, and a number of whom suffered such treatment at the hands of men who claimed the system that you are defending as justification, surely it is not the appropriate occasion.
As I will proceed to argue, the concept of the ‘trigger’ and the demand for sensitivity in discourse have been grossly misused, not least in the present debate. However, the misuse of such concepts does not negate their appropriate use.
Within my next post, I hope to move to the problems associated with poor reading and the sidelining of interpretation and literacy within such debates.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the issues above in the comments! Please try to keep as close as possible to the subject matter of this post, as there will be occasion to discuss other issues relating to this debate following later posts.
A few days Jared Wilson unwittingly started a firestorm. He posted on the subject of the recent erotic fiction bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey, arguing that the book represented a sinful distortion of the God-honouring form of authority/submission in marriage. The bulk of the post consisted of a quotation from Fidelity, written by Pastor Douglas Wilson (no relation to Jared) back in 1999. I haven’t read the book in question, but it is available for full view on Google Books. The offending quotation reads as follows:
A final aspect of rape that should be briefly mentioned is perhaps closer to home. Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.
When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.
But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.
True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours.
– Douglas Wilson, Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 1999), 86-87.
Originally posted last Friday, it swiftly sparked a negative reaction. However, the full force of the storm didn’t begin to hit until Tuesday evening, when Rachel Held Evans posted the following tweet:
WTF, Gospel Coalition? “A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts” buff.ly/Pfu8CQ
— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) July 18, 2012
Yesterday Rachel posted on the subject, and since then the furore has blown up to extreme proportions. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere have been thrown into a screaming tumult. I think that even Google+ registered a tremor.
Rachel writes:
There is so much about this passage that I, as a woman, find inaccurate, degrading, and harmful that it’s hard to know where to begin. That Wilson blames egaliatarianism for the presence of rape and sexual violence in the world is ludicrous and unsubstantiated. His characterization of sex as an act of conquering and colonization is disturbing, and his notion that women are little more than the passive recipients of this colonization, who simply “accept” penetration, is as ignorant as it is degrading. What is perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that even after multiple women expressed their concerns in the comment section, both Jared Wilson and Doug Wilson repeatedly dismissed these concerns with exasperation and condescension, ridiculing the commenters’ lack of “reading comprehension.”
When your sister in Christ tells you that your words trigger upsetting images of rape and sexual violence, you should listen to her, not dismiss her.
Today is the day after. I hope that we have all taken a few deep breaths and a cold shower, prayed for ourselves and for each other, and thought about something completely different and positive for at least a couple of hours. The Dirty Projectors have a great new album out.
The following are some of my thoughts on the whole situation.
The Offending Statements
The statements that appear to have provoked the strongest reaction are the following:
In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.
A number of things immediately strike one about these statements. First, Pastor Wilson is bringing complementarianism firmly into the bedroom. There are many in complementarian circles who view their marriages as ‘functionally egalitarian’, their complementarianism only kicking in on the rare occasions where an irresolvable difference of opinion necessitates a deciding vote. Pastor Wilson, at least in this quotation, does not appear to belong to such a camp. Second, in the context of his wider quotation, Wilson’s relating of ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ to the marriage bed raises a host of concerns and questions. Third, he uses exceedingly strong words to describe the man’s actions. Fourth, he uses words that suggest passivity – a ‘lie back and think of England!’ approach – to describe the woman’s part.
I commented as follows on the original post, just before the comments were closed:
Rev Wilson, while agreeing with you that much of the sort of imagery that you refer to is quite clearly alluded to in Scripture, especially in such places as the Song of Solomon, I still wonder a couple of things.
First, while these images are poetically allusive, and many of their referents should be quite apparent to the person familiar with biblical imagery, I would be interested to know why you didn’t feel the need to qualify and clarify their sense to guard against less charitable interpretations that you might feel that they have been exposed to, or simply to set the minds of people for whom such words have very different connotations at ease. While you might read the concept of ‘penetration’ in terms of the biblical comparisons of the bride to a city with walls and a guarded door, or an enclosed garden that the bridegroom enters, for many of your readers it will be nothing more than a crude and reductive fixation on one dimension of the physical act of intercourse. While you might see the notion of ‘conquest’ in terms of one party’s breaking down of the other’s defences through loving action, much as Christ’s overwhelming grace broke down our resistance to him, many of your readers will process such language in terms of common cultural expressions such as ‘sexual conquest’, expressions that denote something objectifying and uncaring. While you might see the concept of ‘colonization’ in terms of the woman’s walled garden being given up to the man and being spoken of as his to enjoy and to cultivate (Song 4:12—5:1), the notion of colonization rings far less pleasantly on the ears of those for whom its primary relation is the callous ‘rape’ of other cultures by Western nations in previous centuries. While you probably understand the term ‘planting’ within the rich, expansive and allusive web of biblical imagery, symbolically relating men and women to sowing seed and answering earth, I suspect that many of your readers are unfamiliar with this background. My concern is that, by failing carefully to qualify and clarify such language in a cultural context where such images may land uncomfortably on our ears, you expose yourself to alienating misunderstandings or confusion, which compromise the reception of your message, and you give your message a potentially objectionable cast which provokes dismay and hurt, or easily hands others the cause they desire to take wilful offence. Have you given thought to the way that such language will be heard by a rape survivor, for instance? I suspect that greater sensitivity to such concerns would mollify many who have been offended to an excessive degree and make uncharitable readings less understandable.
Second, the way that you frame the woman’s role seems to me to represent a failure to explore the rich poetic biblical imagery that seems to underlie your description of the man’s role. The woman seems to be reduced to the mere passive object of the male’s action. Now, I am pretty sure that this is not what you mean, but to many this is how your statements will read, and to the extent that you seem to make little attempt to explore the woman’s action, I am inclined to share their concerns to a great extent. For instance, the agency of the Shulamite is throughout the Song of Songs, and the beloved says rather a lot about what the Shulamite does to him, things that represent a sort of counterbalance to the action of the man. The Shulamite is an image of great strength, an image that leaves viewers awestruck. She is like a great army with banners (6:4, 10), like a glorious tower of strength, or the beauty of Jerusalem. If Solomon penetrates the Shulamite’s walls, the Shulamite totally overwhelms him: ‘you have ravished my heart with one look of your eyes!’ (4:9), ‘turn your eyes away from me, for they have overcome me’ (6:5), ‘the king is held captive by its tresses’ (7:5). Solomon may gently conquer the Shulamite with his love, but the Shulamite has already completely overwhelmed him. His ‘conquest’ is not the victory of superior and secure force, but something that occurs to one who has himself been utterly defeated. In this sense, one could argue that the action is less his ‘conquest’ and more her free ‘surrender’: while he is the one awestruck and overwhelmed by her mighty beauty, his victor still surrenders to him (the surprise of this should be marvellous to us). Likewise she is the one who invites the one she has conquered to ‘colonize’ her garden. The freedom of her invitation is no pallid ‘acceptance’, ‘reception’, or ‘surrender’, but a completely free action, neither determined nor reduced in the fullness of its agency by the action of the man.
There is definitely asymmetry within the biblical depiction of the sexual relationship of marriage and of male and female in general. However, this asymmetry is not of a purely unilaterial authority/submission or active/passive character. I believe that a more sensitive and careful reading of the biblical texts will bear this claim of mine out (I am pretty sure that I could match you verse for verse on claims of the man being overcome by the woman next to claims of the man conquering the woman, for instance). The seemingly (I stress, seemingly – I want to attempt to read you charitably here) unilateral character of your vision of free and clear agency in marriage produces a troubling muting of the biblical teaching of women’s agency and even authority relative to men (cf. 1 Corinthians 7:4).
While I disagree with the egalitarians – quite strongly, in fact – I find your views, and those of many other complementarians, no less concerning and sub-biblical on this front, and perhaps even more so given the character of the abuses that it might unwittingly and unintentionally be opening itself up to, especially as they leave themselves exposed to dangerous misunderstandings. Knowing your respect for the Scripture’s authority and guidance on this and all other matters, and admiring your commitment to follow it wholeheartedly in a manner that denies all supposed claims of party, cultural sensitivities, or political correctness, I would ask you to explore more carefully what the Scripture has to teach on the subject of female agency, and not merely absolutize one side of the picture. As you well know, such relationships are not a zero-sum game but a spring of life, freedom, and agency for both parties: I believe that it would serve as an encouragement, reassurance, and blessing to many of your hearers were you to sound with a far less uncertain trumpet the implications of this for women. It might also set the minds and keyboards of a number of your strongest critics at greater rest.
While I disagree with him on this and several other issues, I do not believe that Pastor Wilson is a misogynist, and definitely do not regard him as a supporter or defender of rape culture. Nevertheless, I am concerned that such unguarded and one-sided statements may leave themselves open to the abuse of those who are (and more particularly to the abuse of offence-mongers), especially when abstracted from a clarifying context. My primary concern is to see such unguarded statements replaced with more carefully worded ones. My secondary concern is to see Pastor Wilson publicly, personally, and strongly dissociate himself from the impression that a prima facie reading of his statements might give: that the man’s part in marital relations is oppressively forceful and dominating and the woman’s essentially passive. Why did he choose the words ‘conquer’ and ‘colonize’ over words such as ‘win over’ or ‘build up’? While he has laid a number of these concerns to rest, I would still like to see more clarity on this front. I would also appreciate an acknowledgment that his position was worded poorly and that the same point can be expressed in more appropriate terms.
On top of these concerns, I would like to see Pastor Wilson demonstrate more extensive engagement with the scriptural text on this matter. While one cannot expect a person to say everything at the same time, I believe that we are justified in asking to see counterbalancing and contextualizing statements from writers who make such bold and controversial claims. I would also appreciate Pastor Wilson explaining more closely how he sees the categories of ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ relating to the marriage bed. While I share his conviction that conjugal relations have an inescapable and God-given asymmetry in mutuality, I regard ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ to be, at the very least, unhelpful terms in such a context.
I also believe that the dominance of the categories of ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ in complementarian theology leads with considerable frequency to a theoretical diminishment of the agency of women relative to men. I believe that ‘authority’ and ‘submission’ should have a place in our understanding of the asymmetrical mutuality of marriage, but also believe that the mutuality of marriage is far broader and more multifaceted than this, and that it is quite mistaken to give authority/submission the currency that it possesses in most complementarian discourse. Within the relationship between men and women there is also an asymmetrical reversibility, whereby men must submit to their wives in certain respects. The dominance of a unilateral authority/submission causes us to miss this.
Now, I am persuaded that Pastor Wilson is probably considerably better in practice than he appears to be in theory here. One of the most impressive things that I have witnessed in this entire debate has been the strength, spirit, humour, confidence, independence, and agency of Pastor Wilson’s daughters, especially when witnessed against the embarrassing foil of the (frequently calculated) wilting weakness, passive aggression, and overwrought emotion that is widely on display from Rachel Held Evans and her cohorts (about which more later). The proof of this pudding may well be in the eating: I for one know which characteristics and virtues I would most value and admire in a wife or daughter. All I would ask is for Pastor Wilson to tell us more about how he values such virtues, and how strong male fathers and leaders can empower, cultivate, and support their expression, rather than stifling or undermining them. I believe that this is a message that many complementarians could benefit from hearing. However, as the theory and terminology that Pastor Wilson employs have a lot of influence, I don’t want to let them off the hook.
A Little Context
Pastor Wilson’s original comments were made in the context of a book addressed directly and pointedly to males. The opening paragraph of the first chapter reads thus:
This book was written for men and their sons. I suggest that wives read this only when their husbands give it to them, and not the other way around. The introduction mentioned the issue of “straight talk”—and this means, in part, a rejection of euphemism. Some of what is said here may be offensive to some Christian women, but the point is certainly not to give offence. The point is to provide biblically specific and pointed help to Christian males.
I think that there are occasions when it is completely appropriate to ask women to leave the room – or to stay in at their own risk – and to speak directly and without mincing words to men. There are certain forms of speech that are possible between men that are difficult to engage in when women are allowed to participate in the debate on their own terms, a truth that has frequently impressed itself upon me over the years through my experience in various contexts, and which witnessing the events of the last few days has only reinforced. Speech and debate are fraught with gender issues and within this post I want to speak directly to some of the ignored or repressed gender issues that cause problems in such online and offline engagements on all sides. More about this anon.
The fact that Pastor Wilson’s original comments occur within a work directed to men only is important to take into account when we interpret his words. Read in their original context, I suspect that many of us would take strong issue with his statements, but few if any men would genuinely have been personally hurt or offended by them.
Jared Wilson took Pastor Wilson’s words and put them in a new context. Jared’s concern was to speak against the false vision of authority and submission that emerges in such popular works as Fifty Shades of Grey. As I read Jared’s post, it seems apparent to me that the accent of the quotation from Pastor Wilson as employed within it falls squarely upon the claim that domination and submission paradigms, such as those in Fifty Shades of Grey (and for that matter in less explicit books such as Twilight), represent a reassertion of creational patterns of marital relations in highly distorted, abusive, and sinful forms. While much of the Internet’s ire has been directed against the statements concerning the supposedly ‘conquering’ and ‘colonizing’ character of men’s sexual relationship relative to women, I see little evidence that this was anywhere near the heart of Jared’s point, which was to condemn a form of abuse that people can so easily fall into on account of created predispositions.
All of the above said, I believe that Pastor Wilson’s words were poorly chosen in the context of his book. I also believe that Jared’s use of Pastor Wilson’s statement in the context of his blog post was ill-advised.
Lightening Up
I believe that context and emphasis must be taken into account when determining proportionality in response. People will often say rash or intemperate things in the heat of the moment, or careless things on occasions where they speak too hastily or without proper consideration, things that they would probably like to take back if they were given the gift of space and time in which to reflect, and greater insight into the way that their words would be taken. Sometimes people flail out in anger and say things as a kneejerk and unconsidered reaction, expressing hurtful sentiments that they do not truly and deeply hold, simply because in their anger they wish to cause the other person pain.
We should resist giving such statements weight. In giving them weight, we immediately respond by attacking, and in so doing force the other party onto the defensive, forcing them to give weight and to stand by statements that are at best an ugly caricature of their deepest thoughts and sentiments. If we are generous enough to believe the best of each other, query statements before giving weight to them, and to allow overheated conversations time to cool down, we might be surprised at how readily such statements are withdrawn. By refusing to give much weight to statements uttered carelessly or in anger, we also protect ourselves from hurt and offence, and preserve relationships that might otherwise have broken down. People seldom truly mean the most hurtful things that they say to us. I am persuaded that the way that this debate has been handled has put both Jared and Pastor Wilson in a position where they are pressurized to put more weight on careless and ill-advised expressions than they originally intended to, or would have done had people responded carefully, rather than just reacting.
There is a flipside to all of this, of course. People who frequently speak carelessly, unguardedly, overreact, shoot their mouths off, become shrill, or lose their tempers will find that thinking and cool-headed persons accord ever less weight to their words as time goes on.
In order to give people the space and atmosphere in which they feel able to retract comments, we need to cultivate charity, patience, and good will towards each other. We need to master our own instinctive urges, learning to respond thoughtfully, rather than merely reacting in kind. Crucial to this picture is good humour. The reactive person always treats everything with extreme seriousness. The good humoured person is able to take things lightly when they need to be taken lightly, without losing the ability to take things seriously when necessary. This sort of good humour can defuse such conflicts with surprising ease. Sadly, I fear that such Internet debates would make humourless reactives of us all.
Look, here’s a Pomeranian puppy:
Authorial Intent
Our words are like sons. They bear our image, but can become prodigals. Pastor Wilson’s words wandered far from their original home and – dare I say it – have engaged in a little of the semantic version of riotous living. In such situations, though, I believe that we should beware of visiting all of the sins of the son too readily upon the father.
The meaning of our words exceeds authorial intent. Authorial intent and, more particularly, authorial care in expression can set certain limits upon meaning, but they can never completely determine this meaning. Like children who grow up and fly the nest, our words having left our tongues can work all sorts of unwitting good or mischief.
Pastor Wilson has all sorts of fun with his words. When I encounter his words I am often impressed by their brimming confidence, spirit, and forthrightness, a sure sign that their father is a boisterous and playful rhetorician. They make a refreshing change from the pusillanimous, disingenuous, manipulative, nervous, passive aggressive, and mean-spirited words that I so often encounter from other writers online. This said, sometimes they do so love to throw their weight around in a careless manner and can hurt some people who should be protected, or clumsily bump into carefully arranged furniture. On such occasions, I wish that their good-spirited and playful father had exercised a little more careful discipline on them while they were still at home.
Still on the issue of authorial intent, there appears to be a failure to distinguish between the meaning of the statement, and the intention of the author. I believe that there are occasions when the objective meaning of statements should be pressed against their author’s avowed intentions. I believe that this is one such occasion (even employing the most generous senses of ‘colonize’ or ‘conquer’, I believe that the choice of these terms over others remains a curious misstep from a wordsmith who generally exhibits such detailed knowledge of his tools). However, although we can argue that the statement does not actually mean what its author intended it to mean, we should not impute to the author a belief that he denies, even though we may hold him responsible for not exercising careful discipline over his words.
On the basis of such statements, people are calling Pastor Wilson a ‘horrible trainwreck of a human being’ and speaking of ‘advocacy of rape’. In response to such people, I must ask where they see Pastor Wilson, or anyone else for that matter, supporting their interpretation of the statements in question. Does anyone really recognize themselves or their beliefs in such characterizations of the import of the statements? If they don’t, would it be possible to turn the temperature down in here just a little, and to try patiently to work with each other, discovering what each party really does mean, and how we might go about couching our convictions in language more propitious to the charitable reception of our arguments?
If we have the duty to exercise discipline over our words, to ensure that they represent us honestly and clearly, especially in our absence, we also have a duty to seek, in the reception of other’s words, that we are taking those words in a sense that represents them most fairly and accurately. If our opponents cannot recognize themselves in our interpretation of their words, something has probably gone wrong along the way.
A Few Remarks on Persons
One of the things that has saddened me in this debate have been some of the extremely defamatory statements that have been so readily hurled in Pastor Wilson’s direction, by persons who have obviously made little effort to acquaint themselves with the details of the situation, or who have gone on little more than Rachel’s word. We have a playbook for dealing with such situations. Here is one important principle from it:
Do not rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father, the younger men as brothers, the older women as mothers, the younger as sisters, with all purity. – 1 Timothy 5:1
Biblical speech is conditioned by considerations of age, office, and gender. Certain forms of speech are appropriate in some settings and between certain persons, but not appropriate in contexts or between different persons. This is an issue that I will return to at a later point.
Pastor Wilson is almost 60, and an ordained minister of the gospel. He has been instrumental in the founding of a church, school, university, ministerial training programme, and denomination. There is a biblically-enjoined way that we should speak to such a man, even when we disagree sharply with him. We should accord him respect and speak to him in a manner that shows the particular honour due to those who are our elders and also ordained servants of Christ’s Church.
The Internet exacerbates our modern egalitarian atmosphere of debate, where age and office are no longer accorded their rightful honour, and where office holders and our elders are routinely subject to disrespect. I have certainly failed in this regard in the past, but I believe that this is a principle that is especially important on such occasions. In order further to underline this point, I have referred to Pastor Wilson with his title throughout this post. There are other persons who are in a position to rebuke Pastor Wilson were it necessary, but young and unordained bloggers like Rachel Held Evans and me are not in such a position. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we must agree with him, nor that we can’t speak in opposition to his expressed positions.
Rachel Held Evans is a young blogger, who originally made her name from a book chronicling her movement away from her fundamentalist upbringing to one with greater room for a questioning faith. She has since gathered a large audience for her blog and has a new book coming out at the end of this year on her experiments in different forms of biblical womanhood. Her theological training is limited. To my knowledge she is not an ordained minister, isn’t subject to the authority of any Christian institution, nor, by her own account, is she attending any church at the moment.
Why is any of this relevant? Because one’s qualifications and credentials to speak matter, especially when one makes such bold statements. Because one’s accountability for one’s words matters. Because the degree to which your words have been invested into actions that show fruit matters. Now, I don’t deny that Rachel is free to express her opinion. However, I believe that we should be more careful in the weight that we give to such voices in these debates. Not all persons are worthy of the same hearing.
Lest I be seen to be holding Rachel to an inconsistently applied standard here, let me make clear that my voice should be treated in much the same way. I do not speak from any position of authority or honour, but trust that some of those who occupy such positions will see some merit in my words. We all need to recognize the place from which we are speaking.
For most of the last month, I have been away in the US, on a holiday with my father. Although I have visited the US on a couple of occasions before, this was my first opportunity to explore it to any real extent. I thought that, in lieu of more substantial posting – there is unlikely to be much serious posting over the next few weeks – I would share holiday pictures.
Alastair's Adversaria 