Iâm going to break an internet rule and respond to an article published in January because I have just now got my life in enough shape to write a response. It was written by Joe Rigney, published at WORLD Magazine and is titled âLiving Under the Progressive Gaze.â In it, Rigney takes Toni Morrisonâs concept of writing under the gaze of a white audience and applies it to the Christian context. His basic thesis is that too often Christians speak, write, and post on social media with a coastal liberal elite gazing over their shoulder, scrutinizing every word and forcing the Christian to ânuanceâ ideas until they no longer speak the truth.
I think Rigney is describing a real phenomenon. I have seen plenty of Christians who are so afraid of offending progressives that they wonât come out and say that (for example) sex is designed only for a married biological man and woman. Or they are so afraid of appearing to support Trump that they wonât criticize Biden (a problem that my far-left friends donât have at all!). But at the risk of nuancing, I want to nuance his argument a bit.
For one thing, I think he conflates trying to âpleaseâ a progressive audience with trying to persuade a progressive audience. Early in the essay he says that Christians âwrite and speak in such a way that our words (we think) will have maximum persuasive power to them.â But when he begins turning to Scripture for support, he drops the language of persuasion and focuses on âpleasingâ: âWhat we call âthe gaze,â the Bible calls simply fear of man or people-pleasing.â I agree that we shouldnât be concerned with âpleasingâ progressives or any group, but I donât agree that we shouldnât bother persuading progressives.
For example, he poses the question, âWhat happens to the imagination of a Christian who is at some level always conscious of representing oneâs faith to, or in spite of, a group of rebellious and unforgiving people who are impossible to please?â One might imagine Jonah saying these exact words as he trekked his way to Nineveh. Maybe progressives are impossible to please, but are they impossible to persuade? Should we just not bother with them?
Rigneyâs answer seems to be, no. We should not bother thinking about how a progressive audience will perceive our arguments. In fact, he laments that âmany Christians have an imaginary progressive in their head (or on their shoulder), and this imaginary progressive shapes our rhetoric, orientation, and framing of various issues.â While I agree that this imaginary progressive should not shape our orientation to an issue, they should shape our rhetoric and framing. Thatâs just basic rhetoric. You know your audience and you choose your words and argument based on that audience. Jesus did it. Paul did it. Everyone who desires to persuade anyone else thinks about the way an audience will receive those words. Rigney thought about his rhetoric and framing when he wrote this article for WORLD.
Now, in Rigneyâs defense, I think he has in mind a perversion of rhetoric, where one sacrifices truth and goodness for the sake of beauty, we could say. We want our faith to be attractive so we hide the hard parts. And so, Rigneyâs call is for us to speak with the gaze of God upon us, which I think is exactly right. But writing with the gaze of God on us doesnât mean we ignore the people right in front of us. And one of the challenges of the Internet is that there are lots of people in front of us. So âknowingâ our audience is no simple task. If weâre posting publicly on social media, anyone has access to our words, so how can we meaningfully speak the truth in love? Rigneyâs answer seems to be to ignore the audience altogether and speak the truth. But I donât think that fulfills our obligation to speak to the truth in love. To speak the truth in love we must keep in mind our audience and desire that they are convicted and turn from their sins to God, regardless of how ârebelliousâ and âunforgivingâ the audience may seem to be.
Rigney also implies that aiming our rhetoric to a progressive audience ignores the reality that coastal progressives are not the whole of the nation. With that I agree. As I said, speaking the truth on the Internet is difficult because your audience is potentially everyone. (Although if you are discerning, you can make an educated guess about who your audience is based on your social media followers or the platform youâre writing for. For example, if I write an article for the New York Times, I do expect a progressive audience.) And I think itâs important to note that while coastal elites are a small group, thanks in part to the Internet, their ideas have wide spread. We can imagine a teenage girl in rural Utah who has adopted the same sorts of progressive views as someone living in D.C. from watching Tik-Tok videos endlessly. So crafting our rhetoric so that it hopefully persuades progressives is not catering to a obscure, elite minority. A quick glance at current events will tell you that progressive ideas are tremendously popular (even as they are also tremendously unpopular with others), and are therefore worth challenging. And if we intend to challenge them, why wouldnât we try to be persuasive in that challenge?
In summation:
Should we try to please progressives or any social group? No.
Should we carefully and faithfully use rhetoric, in a spirit of hoping all things and a desire for the good of the audience, to persuade progressives and other groups? Yes!
Should we only focus on progressives? No.
Do different people have callings to speak to different audiences? Yes.
The use of rhetoric to persuade an audience is basic to speech. My fear with Rigneyâs argument is that it leads us to write-off progressives as an unpersuadable group. All we can do is let them wallow in their false ideology until they grow so sick of it that they find Christ. But I donât think thatâs an appropriate stance for Christians to take towards a vast and diverse social group. Itâs not hoping all things and itâs not loving. Itâs hopeless and even, potentially, spiteful. However, as I said in the beginning, I agree with Rigney that there is a harmful way of using rhetoric that throws the gospel under the bus to please an audience. But I think itâs possible to speak the truth in love, and I think that does require us to occasionally âhave an imaginary progressiveâ in our heads, just as we have other audiences in our heads when we write.
As always, well said my friend. Persuasive rhetorical communication is the spice of language for our thoughts.