Straw Men and the Chick-fil-A Kerfluffle

As I've followed the heated Chick-fil-A kerfluffle, one thing I've noticed is the plethora of straw men.

The "straw man fallacy," as it's called in critical thinking textbooks, is the fallacy of rejecting a view (or argument) by attacking a related but different view (or argument) that's easier to discredit. You thoroughly discredit a position that your opponent wasn't actually endorsing but act as if you've refuted your opponent (perhaps hoping no one notices the trick, perhaps not noticing it yourself). The fallacy is, I believe, named after the practice of burning in effigy a straw stand-in for the real target of outrage.

Sometimes the straw man fallacy is deliberate, sometimes inadvertent. I think the latter is more common: We don't listen carefully, we jump to conclusions, or a pithy retort springs to our lips before we can examine whether it's really fair. We fail to notice a distinction, and so attack what strikes us as outrageous rather than what the other person actually meant (a point which suggests that the straw man fallacy is related inversely to the principle of charity). I'm sure I'm guilty of this myself.

So, for example, Abe encounter progressives who are upset by Chick-fil-A's unapologetic financial support of organizations committed to perpetuating discrimination and social marginalization of sexual minorities. Abe then represents them as being upset about Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy exercizing his right to express an opinion, and trumpets how importance freedom of speech is to the American way of life and how awful it is that people are trying to deny Cathy this right. That's the straw man fallacy. To be opposed to practices that promote discrimination isn't the same as being opposed to someone's right to express an opinion.

There are other examples, from both sides of the debate. I know that some who came to Chick-fil-A's defense were actually opposed to Cathy's anti-gay practices but were equally appalled by certain city mayors who seemed to be threatening the right of Chick-fil-A franchises to operate within their cities. They were worried about the precedent that would be set if the right to do business could be jeopardized by where you donated money--but they were treated as if they thought there was nothing wrong with those donations. Defending someone's right to do X is not the same as saying X is right.

I'm sure you can provide your own examples.

My own favorite example comes in response to my own post about the Chick-fil-A business. Not many days later Methodist pastor Brent White, on his blog, vigorously critiqued a distorted variant of my post--rendering my argument easy to attack by ignoring terms like "many" and "in most cases," and by uncharitably interpreting an ambiguous use of the phrase "these people" so as to make the people referenced a much broader class than I had intended to be talking about. I suspect, given his tone of righteous indignation, that the straw man fallacy in this case was inadvertent--that his sense of affront led to a failure to read with care and charity. The result is that the view he was attacking, although it wasn't mine, burned very brightly indeed--as straw is wont to do.

So the question is, what do you do when you've been "straw-manned"? In fact, I think the most useful response is to use it as an opportunity for clarification. If a distinction has been missed, you now have the chance to make it explicit. If a qualifier has been overlooked, you can call attention to it. If you've left something out of your discussion for the sake of focusing on a particular issue--but what you've left out leaves you open to misinterpretation--you can fill in the blanks.

It's easy to get mad and defensive when you've been straw-manned. But it's better, I think, to treat it as an opportunity. One might say something like this: "I actually agree that the position you're attacking is mistaken for the reasons you offer. But I'm afraid you've misread or misheard me if you think that view is mine. Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. Here's what I meant to say..."

If you're a blogger, I think responding to straw-manning in this way is especially important. Because if one person has misconstrued your position and dismissed it based on the misconstrual, then it's quite likely that others have as well.

But if all of this is right, then I suppose I should do all of this in relation to Brent White's critique of my Chick-fil-A post. Here's how White understands my argument:

The author, Eric Reitan, says that the Christians who turned out last week during “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” did so because they have an “allegiance to an untenable theory about the Bible, a theory about how the Bible’s words are connected to divine self-disclosure, a theory that, as I see it, cannot stand up to any serious engagement with the Bible’s actual content and history.” They are, he says, inerrantists.

Really? For the record, while I’m not aware that my position on marriage and homosexuality differs from Dan Cathy’s, be assured, dear reader, that I am not an inerrantist. John Wesley wasn’t an inerrantist. Neither was Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Anselm, Augustine, Athanasius, Origen, or St. Paul, for that matter.

This is classic straw-man reasoning. After all, go back just a few words in the very sentence White quotes, and you hit on the qualifying phrase "more often than not." While a universal claim can be refuted by a short list of counterexamples, the corresponding non-universal claim cannot be thus refuted. "All X's are Y's" is refuted by finding an X that isn't a Y. But "Many X's are Y's" is not thus refuted. For White's retort to work, he has to attribute to me a universal claim I didn't make.

But while this is adequate to expose the fallacy, I don't think stopping there is sufficient if one's aim is to use the straw-manning as a springboard for helping to clarify one's position.

So let's step back a little further and put the passage White quotes into its broader context. I begin by claiming that the Chick-fil-A "appreciators"--more precisely, those who stand with Cathy in endorsing the social and legal marginalization of gays and lesbians, as opposed to those who showed up simply to stand against any infringement on Chick-fil-A's right to do business--are guilty of a short-coming in love. But I think the problem lies with their actions more than with their motives: while what they are doing is unloving towards their gay and lesbian neighbors, they don't want to be unloving. They mean well. There is a disconnect between motives and actions.

Of course, this way of putting the issue is premised on the view that the categorical condemnation of homosexuality and the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage really is harmful to gays and lesbians. It wasn't my aim to make the case for that premise in a definitive way (one can only do so much in a blog post)--and so all I did was sketch out my case.

Here's the sketch, put in slightly different terms: Those of us who have really paid close and compassionate attention to the lived experience of gays and lesbians--those of us who have really sought to uncover the fruits of conservative anti-gay teachings--have a very hard time finding those teachings even remotely plausible. In practice, systematically excluding gays and lesbians from access to the bedrock instiution of society, treating their intimate life-partnerships as something less than familial, regarding their love as sin and hence treating their most meaning-bestowing relationships as something that ought to be broken up--all of this damages the lives of gays and lesbians in a holistic way. Hence, all of this is unloving in practice, no matter what the motives.

But it seems to me that many of those who engage in this unloving practice are no less loving in their underlying character and motives than most of the rest of us. So what is the source of the disconnect between heart and action? One answer lies in false beliefs.

So which false beliefs can cause well-meaning people, motivated by love, to endorse practices that bear such bad fruits--often tragic ones--for our gay and lesbian neighbors?

There are, of course, multiple answers. Back in the respective eras of Wesley and Calvin and Luther and Aquinas and Anselm and Augustine and Athanasius and Origen and St. Paul, the answer wouldn't be belief in biblical inerrancy--since, as White rightly points out, inerrancy is a fairly modern notion. But before the modern era, people knew next to nothing about homosexuality. The concept of sexual orientation as we understand it today was essentially unknown. The cultures of these eras lacked the conceptual categories that would have enabled those with a homosexual orientation to make their experience understood in the way that we can understand it today.

And so, in these earlier eras, it is quite likely that the theologians White mentions would have had false beliefs about homosexuality and false beliefs about the effects of church teachings (since those most affected by those teachings lacked the public voice to make their experiences known and understood). If, in relation to sexual minorities, there was a disconnect between their motives and their actions, I'd locate the source, not in a doctrine of inerrancy, but in understandable ignorance.

But the question I was posing wasn't about what caused the disconnect among long-dead theologians. It was about all those decent, ordinary American Christians who showed up on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day to "appreciate" and facilitate Dan Cathy's financial support of discrimination and social marginalization. What explains the disconnect between their ordinary decency and their committed endorsement of the indecent treatment of fellow human beings?

Again, there are multiple answers. But the modern notion of biblical inerrancy has developed enormous currency among contemporary Christians in the pews, even in mainline churches that do not (at the level of their theology) endorse inerrancy. While I haven't done a sociological study of the matter, I suspect from my personal experience that the opposition to homosexuality among conservative Christians today is most often supported by an appeal to "what the Bible says"--an appeal of the sort that at least implicitly presupposes biblical inerrancy (in the sense that, without inerrancy as a hidden premise, the conclusion simply wouldn't follow).

But this is hardly true of all those who oppose homosexuality and same-sex marriage. White is absolutely right about that (which, again, is why I said "more often than not"). Among Roman Catholics, appeals to various natural law arguments or to Church authority are likely to be invoked. Others offer a range of arguments based on the purported social harms of normalizing homosexuality--which is why I have considered various arguments of this sort on this blog. It's also why I haven't contented myself with critiquing arguments against same-sex marriage, but have sought to make positive arguments in support of it.

And because conservative Protestant theologians from mainline denominations are likely to be conscious of the limitations of proof-texting and more conventional natural law arguments, my first published work on this issue (back in the '90's) took on a holistic biblical and natural law argument offered by a Lutheran theologian, one which tried to read into the Bible a "heterosexual order" to creation and attempted to ground opposition to same-sex relationships in their "violation" of that order.

Perhaps, at some point, I should summarize the argument from that paper (co-authored with John Kronen and published in Faith and Philosophy on this blog. Perhaps I should also devote a post to the various permutations of the natural law argument. There's something to be said for completeness.

But to take up all of these possibilities in the Chick-fil-A blog post would have distracted from its more focused aim--which was to zero in on what I take to be the most influential force underwriting anti-gay discrimination among lay Christians today. And that's why I prefaced my discussion of inerrancy and the way it prevents people from connecting compassionately with their gay and lesbian neighbors by saying that "more often than not" (not "always") the source of the disconnect between motives and actions on this matter can be attributed to an unreflective assumption of inerrancy.

And to be clear, I didn't mean "more often than not" in the history of Christianity. Prior to the modern era, the source of the disconnect was more likely, as already noted, to be invincible ignorance about the nature of homosexuality. Wesley and Luther and Calvin, etc., formed their understandings of sexual ethics without the benefit of being able to appreciate what it is like to be gay. They knew none of the things that can and should inform our thinking today. The question is why so many today don't inform their thinking in the light of this new knowledge. For some it may be misguided allegiance to a traditional teaching that was formed in the midst of profound ignorance. For others it may be something else. But for most Christian conservatives in America today, it seems to be allegiance to "the Word of God."

When I said that "these people aren't biblical scholars," I was referring to most of the conservative Christians lining up to give money to Chick-fil-A last week. Most of them were, I suspect, convinced they were standing up for what the Bible teaches--but not in some nuanced sense of "what the Bible teaches," according to which the teachings of the whole may deviate from and override the teachings of the parts. They weren't there because they had done a study of the Bible as a whole, uncovered the roots of its overarching sexual ethic (perhaps in the light of a careful critical reading of L. William Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex) and taken a side in a controversial theological debate about what the Bible's sexual ethic is (if it has one at all) and how its authority for contemporary Christians should play out in the case of homosexuality.

Perhaps one or two among thousands fit this description. If you're one of them, I'll note here that your arguments should emphatically not be discounted just because they aren't the most prevalent. If they are to be rejected, they should be rejected because they aren't sound. If you are in this camp, you should know that I haven't been convinced yet by the arguments of your peers, and I think your burden of proof is extremely high given the despair and suicidal self-loathing that the views you support sow in too many gay and lesbian hearts. But if you want to share your own substantive positive case for the moral rightness of something that I have observed to cause so much life anguish for my gay and lesbian friends, I'll skeptically consider what you have to say, perhaps in the book on this topic that I've started working on.

But I'll also note here that you aren't typical of those who showed up for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day. My post was about the typical conservative Christians who stood in solidarity with the Cathy family and the Chick-fil-A franchise, who stood with Chick-fil-A because of shared values. And what would these average conservative Christians waiting in line, if asked why they believed Cathy was in the right to use Chick-fil-A profits to support discrimination, have said?

I'm pretty convinced from the body of anecdotal evidence available to me that they would have pointed to the fact that Paul calls homosexual acts unnatural and indecent in the first chapter of Romans. Or they would have invoked some other "clobber passage." Or offered a vaguer claim to the effect that "the Bible calls it a sin."

But I will concede that my evidence is anecdotal--and my experience may be colored by the fact that for the last 12 years I've lived in the Bible belt. Suppose the numbers game turns out differently. Suppose it was only 40% who fit the description I was focusing on in my earlier post--that is, well-meaning Christian Chick-fil-A supporters who failed to allow their choices to be shaped by an appreciation of the anguished cries of their gays and lesbian neighbors, and failed because they were trapped behind walls created by an unreflective allegiance to a doctrine of inerrancy.

Then I'd be wrong in my claim that "more often than not" inerrancy shaped their views. But my deeper point wasn't about how many were trapped behind walls of inerrancy. My deeper point was about how inerrancy can trap otherwise decent people behind walls, how it does so with many Christians, and how in those cases we should treat the misleading doctrine as the villain rather than the people who are misled.

But none of this is to say that every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is an inerrantist. That is clearly not true. I agree wholeheartedly with Brent White on that point. Where we disagree is on the issue of whether every opponent of same-sex romantic intimacy is mistaken.