On Dialogue and the Conjuring of Opponents

As you probably suspect, I don’t listen to a lot of conservative Christian radio—or radio of any sort, actually. However, my grandfather is a prolific and notorious CD-burner and sermon-distributor, and he has given me a pile of CD’s and DVD’s from the range of speakers from Christian radio to whom I’m most likely to listen (mostly stuff from Ravi Zacharias’ organization). One of the CD’s in the most recent pile was from David Jeremiah, pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in California and a preacher who gets quite a lot of play in my grandfather’s church lately. And on the way home from Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago, I put in the David Jeremiah sermon to check it out.

Ideologically, Jeremiah and myself probably aren’t that similar. In fact, I admit that at my worst I usually listen to evangelical Protestant preachers of that sort in a critical mindset, picking apart arguments and tagging differences in exegetical and hermeneutic approaches throughout. I tend towards this mindset all the more during Jeremiah’s sermons because I’ve seen some things from him with which I strongly disagree. But these disagreements are not the things I wish to discuss here.

I noticed that one of his primary rhetorical methods involved the construction of opponents to his message. For example, if he were discussing the importance of church involvement, he might begin such a discussion by saying, “Some Christians will insist that Sunday morning attendance and a monthly tithe are all they have to do for their church.” Against this backdrop, he will then proceed to construct the model of church involvement which he wishes to persuade his congregation to accept.

As a somewhat hostile listener to Jeremiah’s sermons, I identified this strategy pretty quickly: If a person gets to define and construct one side of a fabricated debate, then that person can use that definition and construction to manipulate the model with which they want to operate and to which they wish to persuade others. The force of the constructed (and often exaggerated) opponent also has the added benefits of lending a sort of urgency to their message and of rallying their side. To the sympathetic audience, the rhetoric is simple and potent. It remains largely untroubled, and draws the listener to the speaker’s desired model.

Having identified this strategy and dismissed a lot of the arguments based around it, I was feeling pretty smug indeed. But about the time that the sermon ended, thoughts of Sosipater hit me hard. Pretty quickly, the sixth-century mystic’s warning to his friend undercut the feeling of rightness (righteousness?) that had developed as a result of my internal argumentative and rhetorical treatment of David Jeremiah’s message. The similarity of my internal method of confirming myself in my position to Jeremiah’s rhetorical method soon became apparent: all of the rightness I felt as I was arguing with Jeremiah’s sermon in my head was a result of coming to believe in the wrongness of my opponent. I began to wonder about the operation of that rhetorical strategy of conjuring opponents in order to persuade myself and other people to my opinions.

I realized that this sort of dialectical method is embedded pretty deeply into my thought processes. And I became pretty suspicious of it. It seems dangerously close to C. S. Lewis’ model of “beginning to wish that black was a little blacker,” a process which he claims leads to the construction of “a universe of pure hatred” where one sees antagonism and animosity everywhere.

I wish at this point that I had some remedy to offer, some philosophical or rhetorical overhaul which will render my argumentative mode more acceptable. Unfortunately, I do not have such a magic bullet. I don’t have an answer for the questions of how to deal with ideological opponents and how to go about challenging dangerous ideas. Certainly they are not to be dealt with by making straw men out of them, but how does one draw the line between dispute and dialogue when serious matters are at stake? How can we avoid seeking to make black a little blacker when we feel ourselves emboldened by the gravity of those serious matters? These seem like questions which must lead to almost unceasing self-evaluation (perhaps of a crippling sort) during the project of any sort of critique or argument.

I suppose that—apart from the strategy of seeking to always engage in dialogue rather than dispute in so much as possible—pseudo-Dionysius’ advice to pursue positive assertions rather than negative rhetorical and philosophical postures is about as much as I can offer now. And I still have a hard time seeing how that works out practically sometimes.

A Letter of Pseudo-Dionysius

To the priest Sosipater.

Do not count it a triumph, reverend Sosipater, that you are denouncing a cult or a point of view which does not seem to be good. And do not imagine that, having thoroughly refuted it, all is therefore well with Sosipater. For it could happen that the one hidden truth could escape both you and others in the midst of falsehoods and appearances. What is not red does not have to be white. What is not a horse is not necessarily human.

This is what you will do if you trust me. You will cease from the denunciation of others and you will speak about truth in such a manner that everything you say will be irrefutable.