The trouble with God blogging

My professor was saying that a key component of a graduate level education is learning how to analyze and critique arguments. But once you're awarded your PhD, you are expected to put the gloves back on, so to speak, and imply critiques in your own arguments rather than baring your fangs, either in print or at some conference.

I was thinking that this explains my general dissatisfaction with religious blogging. Blogs, given their spontaneity, brevity, anonymity, and lack of editorial oversight, are by nature a sucker-punching medium, more so than a "Come, let us reason together" medium. When you add blogging's built in bias toward polemic to the fact that a lot of religious bloggers are also grad students, you get a mode of discourse that's as far away from "speaking the truth in love" as you can get. It strikes me that much of what passes for sophisticated theological anaylsis in the blogosphere is actually quite infantile. The lack of charity indicates immaturity more so than courageous, uncompromising truth spoken to power, or whatever.

But strangely, this doesn't bother me at all when it comes to political blogs. Matthew Yglesias can say that the people who blog at The Corner are idiots, and I don't blink an eye. And I think there's more to it than the fact that I happen to agree with Yglesias. But am I right to hold religious discourse to a higher standard?

Comments

[Mike]

Perhaps your acceptance of the "lack of charity" in political blogging correlates with the objective truth that the people who blog at The Corner ARE idiots.

/sarcasm (sort of)

[Elliot]

I've come to feel that arguing on the Internet is usually a waste of time, especially about the big, big questions. In large part for the reasons you describe. Maybe in politics you can point to some readily accessible hard facts to prove your points, but even then you're not going to change too many dissenting minds with one argument. If someone has a blog and their worldview and ideas come through it in a non-aggressive way, seasoned with humor and wisdom and graciousness and glimpses of them as a person, well, maybe over a long period of time they could win people over. Though I guess that's usually how it works in real life too.

[NJL]

Marvin, I agree with your point about God Blogging completely. I don't think you are wrong to have different standards about polemics in political blogs. First of all, politics often involves a lot of arguing over knowable facts and measurable statistics, in a way that relgion usually doesn't. When something is known and provable to be true or false, there are not two sides of the issues to be regarded equally (despite what CNN may think). Secondly, I think mockery can be a very good thing in politics, a moderating factor. Sure, it is not always used for good, but when faced with crazy beliefs it is the best option. A lot of popular conservative columnists rely heavily on absurd political mythology and irrational conspiracy theories (such as in the post you linked to). It does no good to give credance to these beliefs as viable opinions. Usually crazy beliefs are best ignored, but in the case of politics, a lot of crazy beliefs are embedded in the mainstream political discussion and have to be mocked to be pushed out. There are a lot of people with crazy religious beliefs to, but for the most part they are not mainstream columnists and TV pundits, so they can be easily ignored.

[Brandon]

I'm inclined to think that, yes, allowing lower standards in political discourse is a straightforward inconsistency. I'm not sure how much hinges on it, but I see no principled basis for distinguishing much between the two. (I'm skeptical of the argument that politics is particularly fact-laden discourse; political discourse is the ultimate cherry-picking discourse: pick the experts that agree with you, find the facts that seem to support you, the rest is being made up by crazy people on the other side.)

Part of the reason (although not the whole reason) I think this is so is that much of what weighs down religious discourse in the blogosphere is, in fact, the political discourse. A lot of bloggers read a great many political blogs; political bloggers often serve both as models and distributors of blogfodder. They are a bad influence. And in the long run, how consistent can we really expect ourselves to be if we wink at things in political discourse that we would never approve of in religious discourse?

Easier said than done, of course.

(Of course, my view of the problems with religious blogging is the unpopular one that theological education is currently in a very degenerate state, and that the problems are due almost entirely to this; so this may color some of my view here, since I think the same is true of civic education on the political side.)

[Marvin]

Brandon, I'd be interested in hearing more from you about the degenerate state of theological education.

[Brandon]

Well, it's much the same complaint I have about contemporary ethics (and this is not a new thing, I think we've been in a degenerate state for quite a long time now). I think the problem is that it has become primarily an occasion for academic life rather than vice versa, and so what we get when people specialize in theology and ethics is not theology or ethics, but a set of puzzles for academics to busy themselves with. And it's the academic that predominates and controls the theology or ethics, rather than vice versa. Living a Benedictine life of prayer, manual labor, and study: that is a theological education; sitting in a course or seminar is not a theological education (although it may be ancillary to it). Bringing food and agricultural innovation to poor villages in Malawi: that's an education in ethics; doing graduate work on ethical topics is not an education in ethics (although, again, it may be ancillary to one). Of course, it need not be quite so dramatic a contrast, but it's a matter of what is dominating what. If you go into something like theology or philosophy you have to be prepared to recognize that academic life cannot capture the most important elements of these fields; it can merely be instrumental to them, and in the case of theology, not even the most important. And I think it's just difficult for people, particularly graduate students, although often any of us who are academics to keep in mind that merely because academics often act like this or do that or argue about such-and-such or talk in such-and-such way doesn't mean that that's a good thing for theology or philosophy. In other words, I don't think academia is set up very well at present to do justice to things that are bigger than it, and I think a lot of people never realize this, so end up failing to do justice to their field.