On the impotence of argument

In my previous post, I mentioned the ways that liberal Christians often seem to be attempting to superficially “hijack” Christianity for liberal ends. By this I didn’t mean to say that Christianity is necessarily incompatible wtih such ends, only to point out the inadequacy of their methods. For instance, when liberals try to reach out to “persuadable” evangalicals, they will often point out the wealth of evidence that concern for the poor or environmental conservation are “biblical” values — and I should say that the liberal advocate here is completely, 100% factually right. I agree with them completely, and indeed I think it’s indisputable for anyone who takes an objective look at the Bible. And yet these arguments basically don’t work. Why?

One could point out the fact that evangelicals don’t “really” take the Bible literally, but that just repeats the problem: it’s a superficial, “gotcha” type of argument that doesn’t engage with the issue at the appropriate level. People don’t generally change their minds when you catch them in a surface-level contradiction — they either shrug it off or get mad. In fact, I’m going to risk a bold hypothesis: reasoned argument never produces a change in basic worldview or practice.

This is not to say that reasoned argument is useless. It’s a valuable intellectual skill, but one that only really holds within the boundaries of certain intellectual games. The basic error of liberal proceduralism is that it assumes all of life can be made into one of those intellectual games — that politics and religion, which touch on the most intimate and important matters in our shared life, should conduct themselves in basically the same way as a debate about how you can tell if someone is a philosophical zombie or how to explain the behavior of quantum particles.