A Response to David Aikman

by Frank Turk

{For those to whom this sort of thing matters, I e-mailed this letter to Mr. Aikman earlier this week so he had a head's up}

Dear Mr. Aikman;

Undoubtedly, you have already received a raft of e-mails from so-called "attack dogs" regarding your essay in the August 2007 edition of Christianity Today. Let me first of all apologize for those who don't have the sense to apologize for themselves, and agree with you that there's a problem with civility in our civilization. And I say this as someone who, frankly, has frequently been accused of violating such a thing because of my opinions.

However, I have two topics I'd like to propose to you for your consideration related to what you wrote for CT: consistency, and criticism.

On the first topic, here's what I'm thinking: it is possible that your essay is correct in its assessment of the plethora of organizations that are critical (particularly) of the American Christian landscape. But problematically, your essay does what it sets out to criticize. For example, you broad-brush the matter of what kind of criticism is out there by putting all kinds of criticism in the same bucket. You equate criticizing Joel Osteen with KJVO enthusiasm – trying, I guess, to demonstrate how backwards and uninformed these opinions must be.

Your criticism of them, in a nutshell, is that their "approach" is flawed – and this may well be true. But your approach to reproach is not really much better – because it does the kinds of things you are very sincerely worried about, only without the Biblical epithets of "whitewashed tombs" and "vipers".

I realize that you had space restrictions and a word-count to abide by, so making an encyclopedia entry for the various phyla and species of "attack dogs" and their arguments was not in the scope of your work here. That's fine – in fact, I think that's admirable that you were willing to take on such a broad topic in a one-page essay. But if that's an out for your own mistakes here – and let's face it: equating criticism of Joel Osteen's preaching to a KJVO bibliology is a stretch at best – it at least takes the edge off the "attack dogs" complaints as they work mostly in a blog environment which works with blog readers' limited attention span. {Note the readers: I'd apologize to you at this point, but the ones who will be offended stopped reading at "vipers", above}

And in that, here's my second thought: there is more to criticism than merely having an opinion. There's a scene in Star Trek VI where the president of the Federation is addressing the Kitimer Conference, and he's on about Interstellar politics, and he says to the gathered delegates, "Let us redefine progress to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily mean we must do that thing." I realize that that's not a Biblical prooftext, but I think that's great advice for people who think they have something to say, especially in an age when you can set up a blog and, if you get yourself added to the right blogrolls, have an audience of thousands in a matter of weeks.

See: one's criticism ought to be able to both demonstrate the problem and outline or present the solution to that problem – and in doing so, perhaps it ought to in and of itself be an example of what it's talking about. So if your concern, for example, is how mean it is to publicly criticize other Christians, and how confused that makes non-Christians and the marginally-churched, I'm not sure that publishing that essay publicly dispels the problem: it is by definition part of the problem because it is a public criticism of other Christians.

Rather, what if one took some of the examples you used in your essay, and pointed out that there is a wide diversity of criticisms pointed at that object of criticism, and that some of it is well-considered and useful while other critics don't really grasp how the tools of criticism work. What this would do is advance the idea that criticism is both useful and necessary for the body of Christ, but that some criticism is like using a salad fork to take an eyelash out of someone's eye.

And in that, we have another aspect of criticism: being a receiver of criticism, which is something you did not even brush up against in your essay. One of the main reasons that popular criticism reaches such a fever pitch in this iteration of popular culture is that people have no idea how to receive criticism without taking it personally and being the wrong-kind of defensive. Every criticism coming in is received as personal, vengeful, spiteful, mean, hurtful, unloving, etc. And in that, all people who are disagree with "me" are seen as "ag'in' me", and only those who are in agreement with me are seen as my friends.

Let me say something plainly: if this problem was resolved in popular public discourse, it would be the end of most of the hard feelings in both the blogosphere and in public life. And those who trade in this currency are the real villains, the ones who are actually moving public conversations away from civility and toward intellectual warfare.

So, for example, it is not unloving for Christians to be critical of Pat Robertson for speaking for God and calling down judgment on this person or place – because Mr. Robertson has demonstrated frequently that he is not a prophet; he gets it wrong often and makes the supernatural claims of the Christian faith look like superstitions and folk religion. And on the other side of the fence, it is right for Christians to be critical of Tony Campolo for pointing fingers at Christian conservatives when he cannot be bothered to represent their theology or their good social work in any meaningful way. Dr. Campolo is an educated man, and for him to use the kind of provocative language he uses to discredit those with whom he disagrees does not wash – he ought to know better, and ought to do better if he has a case which is solid and compelling.

And lastly, things like humor, sarcasm, polemics, hyperbole and the biblical categories of thought are the tools of the trade for criticism – and it is not wrong to use them. It is wrong to misuse them. It is wrong to be a one-note tuba, especially when one can't get that one note on-pitch. But when these tools come into play, and someone finds sarcasm (for example) offensive, it only demonstrates one's inability to receive criticism and does not speak to whether the writer meant something vile by it.

That last bit probably could use some more unpacking, but I've chosen to make my letter not any longer than your original essay. I didn’t quite make it, but I don't have an editor making me stay on one page.

My thanks for thinking about this with me, and for giving a public stage to the criticism of Christians by Christians. It's the right thing to do.

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