Closing Arguments

I never thought about it like this before, but there’s a part of evangelical Christianity that carries over into the way we look at . . . everything without realizing how much it affects us, even after breaking out of the evangelical matrix: What you believe means everything. Christianity hasn’t cornered the market on this phenomenon, but they, especially the Protestants, have mastered the trade.

One of the main divides between Catholicism and Protestantism, as I understand it, is the distinction between salvation by works and salvation by faith. If you’re a Protestant, your faith must be placed entirely in the saving work of Jesus Christ and all your good deeds are like worthless filthy rags. If you’re a Catholic, you’re framing the conversation around the reasoning that what you believe is little more than rhetorical decoration until you prove it with good works. Both sides have a point, and both sides have a propensity for abusing their stance on that point. On the Catholic side, there developed a tendency to outsource good works by just paying the full-time church people to do the good works. You scratch my back, I keep your ass out of hell.

In Protestantism, though, it leads to a spectral blend from neurotic overthinking of your motivations (think T. S. Eliot worrying, “The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason”) to rubber-stamp justification of all misdeeds (think . . . pretty much everyone else dismissing, “Ah, screw it”). The point is this: when, on the eternal scales, what you believe trumps what you do, an awful lot rides on your ability to believe rightly.

Put way too simply, when what you believe determines your eternal destiny, your opinions become super important.

This helps explain the prevalence of splits in the Protestant faith tree. If misplaced or distorted faith leads to damnation, agreeing to disagree is agreeing to die. So when these people argue, they’re essentially arguing to the death.

Fast forward to the era of social media, the era of amateur arguments as sport, a realm in which literally no topic can escape public debate. There’s this weird sense that when someone’s publicly expressed opinion is bad enough, it defines them as a terrible person. That’s coupled with this mentality, both online and on TV, that somehow people on the opposing side can be conquered into oblivion if they’re rhetorically outmaneuvered to the point of embarrassment. In 2023, your opinions define you, and your ability to defend those opinions is the only thing keeping you out of hell.

Public arguments serve as both proclamations of our personal identities and battles for our eternal (or at least social) destinies. A public debate is like a gladiator battle or more often a bullfight. I say this because many public forums for debate are arranged intentionally to pit one person who essentially makes a living debating dopes against . . . well, a dope. And it’s not just a dope, it’s a dope who’s been provoked and slapped around into a psychological frenzy. The audience (which routinely numbers into the millions) laps up the shame of the idiot and the arrogance of the professional bully—it’s all so delicious.

I guess for every public dismantling of a layman by a professional, there are several thousand backyard fight clubs where mental mortals duke it out in the comments of social platforms and Thanksgiving dinner tables everywhere in the styles of their heroes. And when we see it happen, when we hear and read these horribly foul and misguided hot takes, we think we’re seeing who these people really are.

But I don’t believe that’s true. People who argue online aren’t professional thinkers. They aren’t very good at forming opinions, let alone expressing them. They’re good at believing their opinions are important, and that’s about it. But plenty of them are good graphic designers or diligent ditch diggers or immensely entertaining people to watch a movie with. They could be great moms and dads and delightful brothers and sisters. I fully believe that the Venn diagram of “People with terrible opinions” and “Terrible people” overlap but are far from being concentric circles. Judging people by their opinions, given the complete lack of formal education in critical thinking in this society, seems harsh to me.

I don’t know. I think part of seeing things less black and white is seeing people as just another form of organism. If certain flowers or plants in your garden looked shriveled or discolored, what would you do? Spit on them and call them losers or feed them, water them, protect them, and care for them?

I think people need more love. I think people need to be met outside of the public fighting arena. I think people who are drowning in money need to be taxed back to health. There’s a lot we can do to make things better. But judging the quality of the person by the quality of their arguments doesn’t really work for me. Not anymore.

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