Why I Am Not Speaking Out

Any possible benefits of publicizing my opinions are far outweighed by the cost of feeding the Beast.

16 November 2023 — A friend asked by text this morning (in a friendly way, I should add) whether I had “spoken out” on the attacks and subsequent war in Israel and Palestine, and whether I thought “Christian leaders” have an obligation to do so. I could have been asked the same thing about countless terrible and urgent matters over the past many years.

I have not, and do not plan to. Here is why.

“Christian leader,” in this context, is a very broad term. If a Christian is President of the United States (as indeed is the case at this moment), then almost certainly that person’s job requires (at the very least) speaking out on such a matter.

What my friend meant, of course, was more specifically some combination of pastoral leaders and Christians who have established public voices in some way — the latter being, in Mary Harrington’s delightfully accurate phrase, “professional opinion-havers.” In my view, the answer to the question is highly dependent, for pastoral leaders, upon the nature of their congregation and the contexts in which such leaders shepherd them; and for professional opinion-havers, on the nature of voice and expertise that the leader is understood to bring to public conversations.

I am not primarily in a pastoral position, and while I am a professional opinion-haver on many subjects, I have absolutely no special insight or expertise on modern Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East, or terrorism and warfare generally. So I certainly will not go out of my way to publicize my opinions on such matters. If asked in a public setting in person, I would do my best to offer general thoughts with as many caveats and expressions of humility as the audience could bear.

But my reticence is not just because of my own lack of expertise in a given area. I do try to be as well informed as I can about our bewildering and complex world, and it may be that on many matters I know enough to have an informed and relevant opinion. There is a much deeper matter at stake here.

Here is the truth: terrible things, truly terrible things, happen every day. When they happen to people directly related to you or those you are entrusted with shepherding, you need to drop everything to help (or simply be present).

But mediated terrible things — terrible things that are presented to us only through the power of word, sound, and image — only come to our attention in the era of modern technology insofar as they are embedded in a powerful feedback loop in which what the Apostle Paul called sarx (generally translated the flesh — unredeemed human will and appetites) plays, as far as I can discern, a massive role, and in which the Spirit Who sustains and heals the world plays, as far as I can discern, a very small role. Therefore I understand media in general to be very much in the grip of what Paul also called the principalities and powers. These powers have a quite literally ungodly interest in fixating the modern public’s attention on somewhat arbitrarily chosen terrible things (though terrorism specifically, by its very definition, involves terrible things done precisely to compel public attention).

Any possible benefits of publicizing my opinions on such terrible things are far outweighed by the cost of feeding the Beast that holds them before our attention in the first place.

So when I speak out, it is almost always on topics that I feel are neglected to some extent, not the fixation of the moment. (I admit I also consider whether perhaps the moment is opportune to gain attention for a particular topic, but that is different from merely following the news cycle.)

If I were (still) a professional journalist, I would consider it part of my job to operate at least to some extent within the news cycle, beastly as it may be. And I did, as an editor and columnist, drawing on the expertise of others when that was necessary (as it was most of the time) to do the job well.

I am very, very grateful that is no longer part of my job.