The Steelwool Scrub – A Fallacy

This case is picture-perfect for making a simple point in debates about religious liberty: ‘sincere religious belief’ is not a ‘get out of bigotry free’ card. It is no carte blanche defense (legal or moral).

The man is nothing if not religiously sincere. Anyone who wasn’t would have kept his mouth shut, not blurted the following:

I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I believe … I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.

Shocking, but unsurprising. If there’s something you want to believe, and you are a sincerely religious person, it won’t be too surprising if you end up believing whatever-you-want on sincerely-held religious grounds. (If it weren’t for the human power to deceive ourselves, after all, lots of people wouldn’t have nearly so many sincerely-held religious beliefs.)

There’s a common ‘religious liberty’ trope I’ve been meaning to critique in connection to this. It’s an invalid variant on a Steelman-style argument. Steelman arguments enjoy relatively good reputations. They have their uses – raising the bar, elevating the tone. ‘Ideal’ theory has its place. Utopia is filled with Steelmen. Of course, we also have an instinct that utopianism has limits; ‘ideal’ theory can get a bit head-in-the-clouds. Yet, even so, how much harm can it do, experimentally reinforcing some belief in the solidest possible way, just to see?

Quite a bit of harm, is what. The Steelwool Scrub is quite bad. (That’s what I’m calling it.) Take same-sex marriage (more recently, trans issues): you can always rustle up some Ryan T. Anderson-type to spin up some Thomistic-ish natural law (Christian anthropology etc.) argument. Even if this is weak ‘steel’ (I would judge), belated scholasticism, wandering the modern world, looks ornamental – harmless, innocent, unassuming. At worst, a curious mooncalf; at best, considerably more academically polished than old-school fag-bashing. Now comes the bait-and-switch (indulgence-by-proxy, steelman-to-absolve-all-sins.)

If anyone now says ‘opposition to LGBTQ rights is bigotry and irrational animus’ – the response comes quick. ‘Unfair! Will no one think of poor Ryan T. Anderson! Of his elaborate, perhaps failed yet earnestly-exposited, to-all-appearances sincere arguments! Is the world so unable to tolerate a little [insert squirrel gaze GIF] DIFFERENCE? Can all this be dismissed as mere, base homophobia! Mindless bigotry! Surely not! Surely, then, it is those who call it ‘bigotry’ who must be [squirrel GIF again] the REAL BIGOTS!’

Intellectually, it IS unfair to strawman a position by conflating it with its least thoughtful, most irrational, animus-afflicted exponents. Yet descriptively – sociologically – it’s absurd to steelman a socio-cultural order-or-group by conflating its practices and norms with unrepresentative, intellectual outliers. If you think the reason trans people struggle for respect, recognition, rights is that they are surrounded by well-meaning, rationally-convicted neo-Thomists, you’re nuts. Trans people struggle and suffer because they are members of a despised, oppressed minority group. SSM was a fight because gays face irrational animus, not a thicket of para-Aristotelian arguments. Spinning actually-existing bigotry as, ideally, the better angel of some natural law argument, is just a weird way to excuse what’s right there in front of you.

[At this point it might be useful to insert a sidebar about legal arguments – rational basis tests, so forth. Reason being: the legal bar can go pretty low. Often all you need is some hypothetical reason that could be reasonable. It doesn’t even need to be anyone’s real – psychologically-motivativing reason – let alone characteristic of the population as a whole. But let’s skip it. Fact is: Ryan T. Anderson-style arguments couldn’t pass the lowest basis bar. Not because they are so pathetically illogical; just too religious, despite attempted spin to the contrary. Also, they would have to be applied in pretextual and capricious ways to do all – and only! – things social conservatives would want. That’s a no-no, rational basis-wise. I leave it there for legal argument purposes, for post purposes.]

But isn’t it awfully mean, ad hominem and unfair if thoughtful Christian philosophers and theologians, Thomistic would-be anthropologists, get lumped in with bog-standard bigots?

Rod Dreher thinks so. Damon Linker thinks so, too.

There IS an element of unfairness. But now we come to the tell. Who should Ryan T. Anderson-types be indignant with, by rights, for unfairly trashing his reputation? Well, that would obviously be, first and foremost, the bigots he is consistently mistaken for.

You have a society in which certain forms of bigotry are endemic. You have, by hypothesis, a few rare eccentrics who exhibit outwardly similar attitudes, allegedly on a completely alternate, inwardly entirely bigotry-free basis of rather outré philosophical argument. These eccentrics should fully expect to be mistaken for the bigots. How not? Therefore, they should rail first against the bigots whose bigotry is not merely dragging down their reputations but surely serves as the single greatest obstacles to the spread of their allegedly good teachings.

It’s almost Kierkegaard’s birthday – just two days ago. So here’s a Kierkegaardian thought: nothing harder than being a conservative Christian in a conservative Christian culture! Reason: if everyone accepts for cultural reasons, they accept for bad reasons. The barrier to conservative Christians adopting the right, conservative, Christian view of homosexuality is not, say, Mayor Pete, it’s conservative Christians. You shouldn’t disapprove of LGBTQ folks just because it’s the way your tribe marks itself off as superior and virtuous. But that’s obviously what’s actually going on. (Not some Thomistic secret sauce.)

Now, who am I to lecture Christians about how they should have faith, to be good Christians – or whether they should read more Kierkegaard, or whatever? I am no one. But I am, all the same, someone permitted to notice psychological dynamics, and draw reasonable conclusions from them.

Within the ecosystem of Christian cultural politics and belief, the role of someone like Ryan T. Anderson is not to scourge conservative Christians for having something in the neighborhood of right attitudes, but only as a culturally bigoted, hence surely spiritually poisonous inheritance of animus. Rather, his role is to apologize for bad attitudes as defensible and righteous – to ensure no one can call bigotry ‘bigotry’, by inserting himself in the line of fire as a model, steel-reinforced unbigot.

This is, to shift metaphors once more, belief laundering. Not money laundering, but the same principle. Someone takes in ill-gotten goods, of a sort, and sends them back out with a counterfeit (counterfactual) paper-trail of legit provenance. (This is a harsh thing to say but it seems to me fair.) A money launderer does not help criminals go straight. A money launderer may do that, but mostly helps criminals appear to go straight, while not doing so.

So this is what I call the Steelwool Scrub. Somehow, if there is one steelman – or even if there just could be one – everyone actually gets scrubbed clean by proxy.

But that can’t be right, can it? So what presents as intellectualizing, aspirational, uplifting ideal moral theology betrays itself, psychologically, as culturally stubborn refusal to admit fault. Refusal to admit fault translates into unwillingness to face, hence redress real wrongs.

This is a lot to spin out of one dumb guy’s racist blurt. He’s sure to find no defenders. But the very clear contours of his case can make something clear that may not be so clear in other cases.

1) Sincere religious belief can still be plain old bigotry.

This obviously means you can’t take sincerity as a mark of spiritual ‘goodness’ – not because it may be false; because it’s so likely to be real-as-real.

Slightly more elaborately and less obviously:

2) The fact that someone can come up with an ingenious philosophical defense of a view that most people, who hold something like that view, hold for plain old bigoted reasons, is not a good reason to treat those who are, actually, bigoted, as if they are, instead, ingenious philosophers – just of a closet sort.

One steelman can’t scrub away the sins of a community of non-steelmen. Doesn’t work that way. So it seems to me.