It is certainly true that if people are bound and determined to misunderstand you –whether you’re the pope, the president, or a plumber — they’re going to misunderstand you, take your words out of context, and twist them to their own ends. That is unavoidable. But it is also true that if you want to be an effective communicator, you have to consider both your audience and the medium through which you are trying to communicate. Your hearer has a responsibility to make an effort to understand you clearly. 

Above, two controversial recent tweets. Pope Francis you know. Dan Haseltine is the lead singer of the Christian rock band Jars of Clay. He kicked up a huge storm among his Christian fan base with that tweet above. I read his subsequent Twitter feed, and it was almost painful; the guy was trying to discuss a complex moral topic on a 140-character medium, and he couldn’t pull it off. Who could? He felt battered and misunderstood by the end, and if you read his feed, you can see why.

On the other hand, as he admitted in a blog post at week’s end, he brought it on himself. Excerpt:

In my questions and dialogue with people on Twitter, it became evident that the issue I had chosen to discuss was far too personal, nuanced, and deeply connected to faith and our human condition to honor the amount of wrestling that others have done on this topic.  And though they were my questions and it was a dialogue provoked by me, it bled into the Jars of Clay world, and my other band mates felt people’s dismay, frustration and the projection of my views and ideas back on to them. It is not theirs to shoulder.

It was a poor choice of venue on my part.  I chose some of my words poorly.  And I was unable to moderate the conversation in such a way that it kept everyone’s views with a shared validity and civility as I had hoped.    And so, I am not going to continue the conversation on that forum.  I do apologize for causing such a negative stir.

If you read Haseltine’s blog post, you can see that his thinking about same-sex marriage is significantly more nuanced than you can pick up on a tweet. At the same time, it’s simply disingenuous to think that a rock star who has made his name as a Christian genre artist, and who publicly identifies as a Christian, won’t attract serious criticism for throwing that kind of rhetorical bomb into the mix among his 19,000 Twitter followers, given the clear Scriptural teaching on homosexuality and marriage. It is, of course, possible to make a case for why traditional Christian teaching is wrong, or why even if it is correct, the law should not reflect a Christian understanding of matrimony. But Twitter is not the place to make that argument, especially if you are a Christian with a big public following. Haseltine knows that now.

Pope Francis ought to know it, though his bizarrely undisciplined (for a pontiff) manner of public communication makes one wonder if there’s method here. The tweet above attracted lots of comment, including this somewhat critical remark from me.  A couple of readers, including Catholic theologian Michael Peppard, responded by saying that what Francis tweeted is straight out of authoritative Catholic social teaching. They pointed out that “social sin” has a particular meaning in Catholic social teaching, and linked to past statements by popes, showing that there may be a lot more nuance behind the @pontifex declaration than there appears to be.

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