I’m not talking content here, folks. I’m talking style. I’m not talking about what we should argue, or what we should argue about, or even what conclusions we should reach. I’m talking about how we should argue.
In his famous passage on love, Paul shifts our attention from the what to the how:
"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but have not love, I gain nothing."
He’s not talking about the content of our arguments. He’s talking about the process. For Paul, it is not enough that we do “Christian” sorts of actions, no matter how great they are. We must act in a Christian style — with love.
Christian arguments, then, should reflect this style. They should be patient and kind. They should not be boastful or arrogant or rude.
But the reality of our Scriptures and the reality of our God is that love can — and in some cases, should — be tough. This love sees that there must be space for righteous anger. It recognizes that patience can too easily become a luxury for the privileged. We believe in a God who gets angry on behalf of those he loves. We believe in a Jesus who overturns tables in the temple courts.
The problem is that most readers of this article will applaud at either the thought of a kind, patient argument or at the thought of a tough, angry argument. The trick is to deeply desire both.
In order to do so, our loving arguments must emerge from humility.
Let’s consider our culture of argumentation for a moment. I recently heard James K.A. Smith, editor of Comment magazine and author of Desiring the Kingdom, lament our media culture of “sabre rattling.” Speaking at a conference of the Augustine Collective, a student-led movement to of Christian journals on college campuses, Smith described how too many blog posts, TV spots — even entire publications — make dramatic appeals whose only aim is to confirm preexisting biases.
Such appeals are often accompanied by an angry rhetoric that demonizes opponents. “Can you believe those stupid, evil conservatives?” “Can you believe those godless, pandering liberals?”
Audiences predisposed to such descriptions applaud emphatically. Everyone pats themselves on the back. Outsiders who stumble into these echo chambers are left unaffected or confused. This culture of “noisy gongs” and “clanging cymbals” spans left and right, liberal and conservative.
An article on the Sojourners blog recently employed such angry rhetoric. In The Social Cost of Vaccination, the author called anti-vaxxers “ludicrous,” “like drunken drivers,” and deserving of jail time. Although this tone is unloving and uncharitable, one could argue that the piece more radically forwarded the cause of justice, and thus “love,” than something more nuanced.
But the reality of our public discourse is that we have too many people holding microphones and yelling obscenities across a chasm. This is not how Christians should argue.
In this spirit, another article at Sojourners, Confessions of a Church Snob, points out that we too often value “being ‘right’ about theology and worship and how Christians should be in the world” more than “being able to love [our] neighbors and be charitable to them though we disagree.” I wholeheartedly agree.
Yet, how can we ethically relativize the value of “being right,” when being right often matters so much? How can we talk about charitable style when “being right” on racial injustice, for example, means the difference between resisting the slavery and segregation of past and present, or being complicit in its perpetuation?
Ross Douthat, the conservative Catholic columnist of the New York Times, recently raised an excellent point on this issue. Responding to a critique of progressive arguments that do not allow their opponents to speak, Douthat called for more collective humility in our public discourse:
If you know that your opponents are in error, and that their errors are at least on the same continuum with the errors of segregationists, why would you want to give them oxygen and space? [Why, in other words, extend to them any sort of “love”?]
The strongest answer ... has to rest in doubt as well as confidence: In a sense of humility about your own certainties, a knowledge that what looks like absolute progressive truth in one era does not always turn out to look that way in hindsight, and a willingness to extend a presumption of decency and good faith even to people whose ideas you think history will judge harshly.
If we are to argue Christianly, I believe we must preserve this sense of humility about our own certainties, and a willingness to extend decency and good faith to all. This is the spirit of love. It is not “being nice.” It is a commitment to the idea that we cannot forsake love in the quest for justice. Lest we slip into an idolatrous and prideful fundamentalism, we must hold our truth claims cautiously — humbly.
But our commitment to humility also dictates that we call into question our confidence in the absolute necessity of humble, kind, patient discourse. It is possible that history may judge this commitment harshly.
Imagine a woman recounting sexism in the workplace to a male boss and him replying, “Could you change your tone of voice? You’re not speaking very nicely (or Christianly).” This sort of attention to style can function as a sort of last-ditch effort of the privileged oppressor to detract from the claims of the oppressed.
After all, isn’t this the same tone of the white moderate that Martin Luther King Jr. rebukes in Letter from Birmingham Jail? For all King’s love for his fellow white churchmen, he still lambasts the one who says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action” — the one, Dr. King says, “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
When faced with angry arguments, we must have a willingness to listen, to turn inward in reflection, to lovingly wonder at the source of anger, and perhaps even to lift up this voice of anger as a voice of love.
We cannot let our zeal for justice become a glorification of self-righteousness and pride. But neither can we let our commitment to humble, loving discourse become a devotion to order before justice.
I will continue to unapologetically argue for more humble, more loving, more Christ-like discourse — both in my own arguments and in the public sphere. But I cannot help but extend my commitment to humility to the creation of space for, and indeed a celebration of, righteous anger — angry arguments born of centuries of oppression that scream, “This is not okay.”
May I, and we all, strive to argue with love.
Ryan Stewart is Online Assistant at Sojourners.
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