“Many contemporary forms of education privilege non-agonistic modes of discourse, seeking to avoid confrontation, combat, and threatening challenge, and to foster an inclusive, egalitarian, affirming, and safe community. People trained within such contexts are affirmed and protected from exposure to direct, forceful challenge and opposing voices. The modes of discourse privileged and taught within such contexts are heavily weighted towards the non-oppositional and involve little direct disputation or interaction between opposing voices.”

The Internet has introduced a new level of visibility to areas of our social life, exposing certain uncomfortable realities. Rod Dreher recently wrote a perceptive and troubling piece on the way that the Internet reveals corruption and abuse within the Church and other institutions, provoking a reaction of distrust and a loss of these institutions’ effective authority. While the dramatic collapses of trust in the institutional authority of the Church following the exposure and scrutiny of cases of abuse may receive the most attention, there are other ways—albeit slower and more gradual—in which this trust is being eroded. Perhaps the most significant of these in my experience has been our greater exposure to Church leaders and their thinking.

On Twitter earlier today, I remarked that the Internet exposes the fact that most people were never trained to function effectively in the context of an argument. As forms of discourse such as debate, disputation, and oral cross-examination are largely absent within people’s education, relatively few have the ability to keep a level head in an argument, to have a close rein on their passions, to spar with opposing viewpoints, to open their strongly held beliefs up to questioning and challenge, or to operate well in contexts that allow for the expression of many different perspectives and arguments.

Many contemporary forms of education privilege non-agonistic modes of discourse, seeking to avoid confrontation, combat, and threatening challenge, and to foster an inclusive, egalitarian, affirming, and safe community. People trained within such contexts are affirmed and protected from exposure to direct, forceful challenge and opposing voices. The modes of discourse privileged and taught within such contexts are heavily weighted towards the non-oppositional and involve little direct disputation or interaction between opposing voices. As Walter Ong has observed, the individual voice of the essay displaces the conflicting voices of the disputation. While other voices may be represented within the essay, they are much less directly engaged.

All of this leaves people singularly unprepared for the world of the Internet, where they are exposed to opposing viewpoints and have to engage with them more directly. People who can appear to be brilliant in non-oppositional forms of discourse can crumple when subjected to critical cross-examination or manifest themselves to be emotionally incapable of interacting in a non-reactive manner with contrary perspectives. No doubt we can all think of many instances of this online. However, my concern in this post is to draw attention to how commonly I witness this failure in pastors and church leaders.

On the Internet, one soon discovers that many respected church leaders are quite unable to deal directly with opposing viewpoints. In fact, many of them can’t even manage meaningful engagement with other voices. Their tweets may be entirely one-way conversations. They talk at their audiences. They can talk about other voices, but fail to talk to them, let alone with them. Their representations of opposing viewpoints reveal little direct exposure to the viewpoints in question. They may talk about ‘postmodernism’, but one has good reason to believe that they have never read any postmodern philosopher. They make bold generalizations about ‘feminism’, but you can be pretty certain that they don’t know their Butler from their Greer or their Irigaray. When they are actually exposed to an intelligent and informed critic, they reveal themselves to be reactive and ignorant. Their views are quite incapable of withstanding the stress-testing of disputation.

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