train wrecks in public deliberation Archives - Page 3 of 3

Folk rhetorical theory and the “argumentum ad Hitlerum”

[This is a talk–a revised version of one I posted earlier–so it doesn’t have links.]

Wayne Booth once complained that, when he mentioned he was an English teacher, people on trains wanted to talk about commas. If he had told them he taught rhetoric, they would have said something about Hitler. In papers in argumentation classes, Hitler references are as common, and as welcome, as dawn of time introductions. Like dawn of time introductions, Hitler references aren’t unwelcome because they’re always wrong, but simply because they’re so easy, so thoughtless, and so rarely relevant. In politics, it’s even worse; hence the argumentum ad hitlerum fallacy, or Godwin’s law. Despite the miasma of Hitler references in politics, and Hitler’s reputation as the most powerful rhetor, teachers and scholars of rhetoric tend to avoid him.

We do so for various reasons, but at least one is that the popular (and even, to some extent, scholarly) understanding of Hitler’s power is far more simplistic than the case merits that it seems hopelessly complicated to try to get in and untangle it. I want to argue that is why Hitler should figure more in our teaching and scholarship. The popular (let’s call it folk) explanation of Hitler’s success is simplistic and inaccurate, but it’s powerful in that it fits with the folk explanation of persuasion, which fits with the folk explanation of what distinguishes ethical from unethical persuasion, which fits with folk notions about what constitutes good versus bad citizenship.

Talking about Hitler is a way of talking about the problems with all those mutually confirming, and similarly damaging, folk explanations.

And here a note about terminology: when I proposed this paper, I was strongly influenced by Ariel Kruglanski’s discussion of lay epistemology—that is, the common sense way that non-experts think thinking works. But, the more I worked on the issue, the more I realized that it isn’t a question of experts v. non-experts—Kenneth Burke, various scholars of demagoguery, some historians, and other experts assume the explanations I’m talking about. I came to think the better analogy is Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels’ discussion of what they call the “folk theory of democracy” which, as they point out, serves as the basis for a lot of scholarly work on political science and theory.

Here are the four folk explanations:

- The folk explanation of what happened in Germany is that Hitler is the exemplar of a magician rhetor because he “swung a great people in his wake” (Burke 164), hypnotized the masses (and his generals, the generals claimed post-war). The disasters of Nazism are thereby explained monocausally: Hitler was a pure rhetorical agent, whose oratorical skill transformed the German people into his unthinking tools.
- This explanation appeals to the folk explanation of persuasion, in which a rhetor determines an intention, identifies a target audience, and then creates a text that contains the desired message (often presented visually as an arrow) and shoots it at the target. If it hits, the target audience now believes what the rhetor wanted them to believe, and it was effective rhetoric. (Obviously, this reduces all public discourse to compliance gaining.)
- Ethical rhetoric is one in which the rhetor, and the message the rhetor is sending, are ethical. And that is determined by ethical people asking themselves if the message is ethical (sometimes by whether the rhetor is ethical); Hitler’s rhetoric was unethical because it was intended to do unethical things. This is the folk explanation of the ethical/unethical distinction.
- There are unethical rhetors out there, and, therefore, good citizens are ones who think carefully about the message being shot at them.. That is, the dominant popular way of describing and imagining participants in public deliberation is as consumers of a product—they can be savvy consumers, who think carefully about whether it really is a good product, or they can be loyal consumers, who always stick to one brand, or they can be suckers, easily duped by inferior products (and so on). Good citizens think carefully about the political messages they consume. Ethical citizens recognize an unethical rhetors and unethical messages, and resist them.

These are powerful narratives in that they enable the fantasy that each of us is a good citizen, an ethical person, who recognizes unethical arguments, and would, therefore have opposed Hitler, and continues to oppose anyone like Hitler. (Hence argumentum ad Hitlerum—it isn’t about the political figure in question; it’s about a performative of being an ethical person with good judgment.)

These models are refuted by theoretical work (e.g., Biesecker’s 1989 “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation”) or empirical work on political reasoning (e.g., the work summarized in 2013 The Rationalizing Voter). They aren’t just wrong; they’re importantly wrong. They rely on a pleasurable but entirely indefensible othering of Germans.

That’s wrong, as I’ll discuss, but it’s importantly wrong because this explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany can make people feel good about themselves while they’re replicating the errors that Germans made. It says that, if you believe you are thinking critically about what a rhetor says, you are making sure it fits with what you think is ethical, and you only put your trust in someone you think is ethical, then you will never make the mistake Germans did.

This explanation of what happened in Germany is partially the consequence of post-war renarrrations of pre-war events. Large numbers of Germans post-war claimed they didn’t know about the genocides, they had nothing to do with it, and they resisted Hitler in their hearts. The Wehrmacht officers claimed they were just following orders (sometimes unwillingly), didn’t know about the genocides, and couldn’t break their oath to Hitler. Officials of churches claimed they were the real victims, and had resisted the Nazis all along.

None of that was true. Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men), Robert Gellately (Backing Hitler), Ian Kershaw (Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution), Michael Mann (Fascists) and various other scholars have shown that participation in, support for, or pragmatic acquiescence toward the genocides, imprisonment, and war-mongering of the Nazis were considerable and often strategic and instrumental. People were not swept up by Hitler’s rhetoric. Support for the Enabling Act was a strategic gamble. Support for Hitler and the Nazis increased after he took power because people liked the improved unemployment rate, the remilitarization of Germany, the rejection of various treaties, the reassertion of German’s entitlement to European hegemony, the conservative social agenda. Ian Kershaw says,

“The feeling that the government was energetically combating the great problems of unemployment, rural indebtedness, and poverty, and the first noticeable signs of improvement in these areas, gave rise to new hopes and won Hitler and his government growing stature and prestige.” (Hitler Myth 61)

They either liked or didn’t care about the antisemitism, jailing of political opponents, politicization of the judiciary. They didn’t think Hitler was unethical, and they didn’t think his policies were unethical. Many thought he was a decisive leader who was getting things done, and many thought he was chaotic and unpredictable, but getting them what they wanted.

For instance, the Wehrmacht was not constituted of innocent victims of Hitler’s rhetoric or hopelessly bound by their oaths. As Robert Citino says, “The officers shared many of Hitler’s goals, however—defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, rearmament, restoration of Germany’s Great Power status—and they had supported him as long as his success lasted” (Last Stand 205). The officer class helped Hitler come to power in 1932-33 because

“They saw Hitler as a fellow nationalist, a bit crude, but one who could win the masses to the nationalist and conservative cause. His opposition to Marxism, his plans for German rearmament, his anti-Semitism: all these things harmonized well with the essentially premodern world view of the officer corps.” (Citino, Last Stand 211)

That he would later destroy Germany, enable the USSR to gain territory, and destroy the German officer class meant that post-war they could try to present themselves as having been victims all along—but they had helped him get into power, supported him in power, knew about the genocides, and engaged in them.

Similarly, that Hitler did, as he said he would, disempower the churches and imprison those who resisted Nazi control of the churches means that some people now try to claim that the two major confessions—Catholic and Lutheran—resisted Hitler and Nazism. But they only resisted Nazi interference in Church power, and then only fairly late. There was criticism of the euthanasia program, and some criticism of the extermination of converted Jews, but it was little and it was late. The Church Wars were about issues of Church autonomy, not genocide. Like the officer class, many Catholic and Lutheran church officials would regret having supported Hitler (many would claim that the problem wasn’t Hitler, but Nazi administrators acting on their own initiative), but support him they did. Had the Catholic party (the Centre Party) not unanimously voted for the Enabling Act, it would not have passed.

Catholics and Lutherans were concerned about reinstating the privileges reduced by the Socialist Democrats (who believed in a separation of church and state) and the political agenda they believed was the core of being “Christian”—opposition to birth control, homosexuality, abortion, pornography.

Germans were persuaded during the Nazi regime—people came to accept and act on policies they would have balked at before 1930—but not because they heard a Hitler speech and were magically hypnotized. They did so, largely for instrumental reasons.

Culturally, our discussions of Hitler are dominated by what Ian Kershaw calls “the Hitler myth”—that he was a magically charismatic leader who overwhelmed Germans’ capacity to judge. That isn’t what happened: Germans judged, and they liked what they saw.

My point is that these four folk explanations–of Hitler, persuasion, ethical rhetoric, and good citizenship– are not just inaccurate, but are inaccurate in ways that reinforce factionalism, obstructionism, and politics as performance of in-group loyalty. Talking. more about Hitler is a way to talk about what’s wrong with those explanations.

I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to.

The 1978 edition (ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper) of Goebbels’ Final Entries begins in late February 1945. By that time, the Battle of the Bulge was over, and it had failed. At this point, Germans have lost Budapest, Breslau is encircled, they’re calling up women, Dresden has been firebombed, bombings of major German cities are a nightly event, American troops have reached the Rhine. It goes downhill from there.

28 February. Goebbels’ reading of the situation is that Western countries are facing a “profound political crisis” with strikes “the order of the day”–so, any minute now, the Allies will collapse.[1] That same day he expresses outrage at “bolshevist atrocities” and, after a conversation with General Vlasov about the USSR in 1941, concludes, “The Soviet Union has had to weather precisely the same crises as we are now facing and that there is always a way out of these crises if one is determined not to knuckle under them.” [Thereby ignoring that USSR got through 1941 by having moved factories, still having access to resources, getting help from the US, and having a much larger potential military force. It was not just the will.]

2 March. “We can count on major operations in the east German area being possible by the end of March” and “if all goes well we can anticipate enormous success” [which is a nice example of a tautology, and summarizes Nazi strategic thinking at this point]. Also, the situation “is not reassuring” and “In the East too operations have not gone through as we expected.” But, meanwhile, he got a lot of letters telling him he made a great speech. Oh, and he condemns Roosevelt for megalomania.

3 March. Anglo-American troops are making progress. “We had never really visualized such a course of events.” [He did another speech that went over well, though.]

4 March. The population in the West is welcoming the Anglo-American troops. “This I had really not expected.” [Later he would—in many entries– blame this problem on the Nazi leadership rejecting his argument that they should openly abrogate the Geneva Convention.] He’s reading Carlyle on Frederick the Great, and that proves it will all be fine. Oh, and a lot of people thought “four weeks ago the situation was such that the majority of military experts had given us up for lost” but Hitler sure showed them! Hitler has a bullet-proof plan: “we must somehow succeed in holding firm in the West and the East.” Hitler also hopes to open talks with some one of the Allies, but, before they could start talks, “it is essential that we score some military success.” So, it’s a clear plan: hold the line everywhere, have some major military successes, and then open talks with one of the Allies. That’ll work.

7 March. [And a lot of other entries.] Goebbels is puzzled that publicizing Soviet atrocities isn’t turning world opinion in favor of the Nazis. [This is a common plaint: why can’t people see that Nazis are the real victims here?] He’s also grumpy that a lot of the “Germans” coming in from the East don’t really look German to him. At this point, he begins to blame Goering for all of the Nazis’ problems [a nice instance of projection—yes, it’s true that Goering screwed up, but Goebbels has screwed up just as much if not more].

8 March. Goebbels makes fun of Churchill for saying the war would end in two months. [VE-Day was 8 May.] “Our sole great hope at present lies in the U-boat war.” And “Rendulic has now put things in order in East Prussia.” So, really, everything is fine.

13 March. Hitler says there are new airplanes, so it’s all good (and, besides, Hitler had been right all along about what kind of aircraft Germany should have been producing) [This topos–what really matters here is who was right–runs throughout Hitler’s deliberations with his generals, and, less so, through Goebbels’ diaries. That’s interesting.][2]

14 March. “I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eyewitnesses.” [Germans in the west are cheerfully welcoming Anglo-American troops.]

21 March. He and Hitler have a long talk and agree “that we must hold firm at the front and if possible score a victory in order to start talking to the enemy.” Well, as long as he and Hitler have decided that the people at the front should hold firm, it’s all good. [It’s fascinating how often Goebbels and Hitler decide that the problem can be solved by telling people to be more steadfast. Sometimes they take a lot of time to yell at people to be more steadfast. ]

22 March. “The military situation both in East and West has become extraordinarily critical; during the course of the 24 hours it has changed noticeably to our disadvantage.” [Because up to that point it was pretty good?]

23 March. “I think that my work too is no longer being totally effective today.” He was getting a lot of reports of people surrendering instead of fighting to the death for Hitler. This might cause some people to think that perhaps things were getting a little bleak for Germany. But, no, his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great shows that, although Frederick “too [who else is feeling this? Goebbels or Hitler?] sometimes felt that he must doubt his lucky star, but, as generally happens in history, at the darkest hour a bright star arose and Prussia was saved when he had almost given up all hope. Why should not we also hope for a similar wonderful turn of fortune!” So, the fact that things were going badly was proof that things would be fine! As long as you continue to beleeeeeve.

30 March. “This is the beginning of the catastrophe in the West.” He and Hitler agree on the military strategy: “we must now make every effort to re-establish a fresh front.”

31 March. He’s getting letters that are a little “despairing.” Some of them even suggest Hitler might be at fault. He blames it on Goering.

1 April. People in France, he says, must really be regretting the Allies’ success because they are facing a serious food shortage. [Did he really not know that Nazis had always been starving occupied countries? He mentions, approvingly, Hitler’s decision not to try to feed POW. He has several entries where he says that the liberated peoples must be miserable now, so maybe he really didn’t? On the other hand, he knew about Nazi extermination policies, and the extraordinary atrocities, and yet he expresses outrage at Soviet atrocities, so is all just in- v out-group?]

4 April. “We must act at once if it is not to be too late.”

It was too late in November 1941.

In other words, this is how an administration steeped in charismatic leadership and blind loyalty who believes it’s all about marketing responds to failure. They never learn. They never start behaving rationally.

Never. They will take everyone down with them.

[1] Editors of Goebbels’ diaries always have to decide what to do about the fact that he is writing the next day about what happened the previous. So, on February 28, he wrote about what happened on the 27^th(“yesterday” in Goebbels’ words). Some editors (e.g., Fred Taylor, who edited Goebbels’ 1939-41 entries) keep Goebbels’ dates, but Trevor-Roper doesn’t. I’ve used Trevor-Roper’s dates.

[2] This is also the entry where Goebbels makes clear that it was genocide, and he knew it, and he was happy about it: “Anyone in a position to do so should kill the Jews off like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job. I trust that the world will take its cue from this.”

Making sure the poor don’t get any food they don’t deserve

“But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind”

In a recent interview, Kellyanne Conway said that “able-bodied” people who will lose Medicare with the GOP health plan should “go find employment” and then get “employee-sponsored benefits.” Critics of Conway presented evidence that large numbers of adults on Medicaid do have jobs, as though that would prove her wrong. But that argument won’t work with the people who like the GOP plan because their answer is that those people should get better jobs. The current GOP plan regarding health care is based on the assumption that benefits like health care should be restricted to working people.

For many, this looks like hardheartedness toward the poor and disadvantaged—exactly the kind of people embraced and protected by Jesus, so many people on the left have been throwing out the accusation of hypocrisy. That the same people who are, in effect, denying healthcare to so many people have protected it for themselves seems, to many, to be the merciless icing on the hateful cake.

And so progressives are attacking this bill (and the many in the state legislatures that have the same intent and impact) as heartless, badly-intentioned, cynical, and cruel. And that is exactly the wrong way to go about this argument. The category often called “white evangelical” tends to be drawn to the just world hypothesis and prosperity gospel, and those two (closely intertwined) beliefs provide the basis for the belief that public goods should not be equally accessible (let alone evenly distributed) because, they believe, those goods should be distributed on the basis of who deserves (not needs) them more. And they believe that Scripture endorses that view, so they are not hypocrites—they are not pretending to have beliefs they don’t really have. This isn’t an argument about intention; this is an argument about Scriptural exegesis.

Progressives will keep losing the argument about public policy until we engage that Scriptural argument. People who argue that the jobless, underemployed, and government-dependent should lose health care will never be persuaded by being called hypocrites because they believe they are enacting Scripture better than those who argue that healthcare is a right.

1. The Just World Hypothesis and Prosperity Gospel

There are various versions of the prosperity gospel (and Kate Bowler’s Prosperity Gospel elegantly lays them out), but they are all versions of what social psychologists call “the just world hypothesis.” That hypothesis is a premise that we live in a world in which people get what they deserve within their lifetimes—people who work hard and have faith in Jesus are rewarded. In some versions, it’s well within what Jesus says, that God will give us what we need. In others, however, it’s the ghost of Puritanism (as Max Weber called it) that haunts America: that wealth and success are perfect signs of membership in the elect. And it’s that second one that matters for understanding current GOP policies.

In that version, in this life, people get what they deserve, so that good people get and deserve good things, and bad people don’t deserve them—it is an abrogation of God’s intended order to allow bad people to get good things, especially if they get those good things for free. For people who believe that God perfectly and visibly rewards the truly faithful, there is a perfect match between faith and the goods such as health and wealth. People with sufficient faith are healthy and wealthy, and, because they have achieved those things by being closer to God, they deserve more of the other goods, such as access to political power. Rich people are just better, and their being rich is proof of their goodness. So, it’s a circular argument–good people get the good things, and that must mean that people with good things are good.

I would say that’s an odd reading of Scripture, but no odder than the defenses of slavery grounded in Scripture, nor of segregation, nor of homophobia. All of those defenders had their proof-texts, after all. And, in each case, the people who cited those texts and defended those practices had a conservative (sometimes reactionary) ideology. They positioned themselves as conserving a social order and set of practices they sincerely believed intended by God as against liberal, progressive, or “new” ways of reading Scripture.

[And here a brief note—they often didn’t know that their own readings were very new, but that’s a different post.]

Because they were reacting against the arguments they identified as liberal (or atheist), I’ll call them reactionary Christians for most of this post, and then in another post explain what’s wrong with that term.

In some cultures, political ideology and identity are identical, so that a person with a particular political belief automatically identifies everyone with that belief as in the category of “good person,” and anyone who doesn’t share that belief is a “bad person.” We’re in that kind of culture.

That easy equation of “believes what I do” and “good person” is enhanced by living within an informational enclave. In informational enclaves, a person only hears information that confirms their beliefs—antebellum Southern newspapers were filled with (false) reports of abolitionist plots, for instance,—so it would sincerely seem to their readers as though “everyone” agrees that abolitionists are trying to sow insurrection. In an informational enclave, “everyone” agrees that the Jews stab the host for no particular reason (the subject of the stained glass above–a consensus that resulted in massacre).

Informational enclaves are self-regulating in that anyone who tries to disrupt the consensus is shamed, expelled, perhaps even killed. By the 1830s, it was common for slave states to require the death penalty for anyone advocating abolition, and “advocating abolition” might be understood as “criticizing slavery.” American Protestant churches split so that Southern churches could guarantee they would not have a pastor that might condemn slavery (the founding of the SBC, for instance), and proslavery pastors could rain down on their congregations proof-texts to defend the actually fairly bizarre set of practices that constituted American slavery.

As Stephen Haynes has shown, the reliance of those pastors on an odd reading of Genesis IX became a Scriptural touchstone for defending segregation.

Southern newspapers were rabidly factional in the antebellum era, and (with a few exceptions) pro-segregation (or silent on segregation) in the Civil Rights eras. (This was not, by the way, “true of both sides,” in that the major abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, often published the full text of proslavery arguments.) Because those proof-texts were piled up as defenses, and reactionary Christianity was hegemonic in various areas, many people simply knew that there were three kings who visited the baby Jesus, that those three kings related to the three races, with the “black” race condemned to slavery due to Noah’s curse.

If you’d like to see how hegemonic that (problematic) reading of Scripture was, look at older nativity scenes, and you will see that there is always a white, someone vaguely semitic, and an African. Ask yourself, how many wise men visited Jesus? Try to prove that number through Scripture.

That whole history of reactionary Christianity is ignored, and even the SBC has tried to rewrite its own history, not acknowledging the role of slavery in their founding. My point is simply that, when a method of interpreting Scripture becomes ubiquitous in a community, then people don’t realize that they’re interpreting Scripture through a particular lens—they think they’re just reading what is there.

For years, the story of Sodom was taken as a condemnation of homosexuality, but there is really nothing about homosexuality in it—the Sodomites were more commonly condemned for oppressing the poor. There are rapes in it, and one of them would have been homosexual, but there is no indication that homosexuality was accepted as a natural practice in the community. Yet, for years, the story of Sodom was flipped on the podium as though it obviously condemned all same-sex relationships.

For readers of The New York Times, The Nation, or other progressive outlets, the Scriptural argument over homosexuality was under the radar, but it was crucial to how far we’ve gotten for the civil rights of people with sexualities stigmatized by reactionary Christians. The Scriptural argument about queer sexuality was always muddled—Sodom wasn’t really about gay sex, the word “homosexuality” is nowhere in Scripture, people who cite Leviticus about men lying with each other get that sentiment tattooed on themselves while wearing mixed fibers, Paul was opposed to sex in general.

Reactionary Christians managed to promote their muddled view as long as no one raised questions about exegesis, and the Christian Left raised those questions over and over. And now even mainstream reactionary churches who argue that Scripture condemns homosexuality have abandoned the story of Sodom as a proof text. That success can be laid at the feet of progressive Christians.

One thing that turned large numbers of people, I think, was the number of bloggers, popular Christian authors, and pastors making the more sensible Scriptural argument: there isn’t a coherent method of reading Scripture that demonizes queer sexuality and allows the practices reactionary Christians want to allow (such as non-procreative sex, divorce, wildflower mixes, corduroy, oppressing the poor).

Similarly, an important realm in the Civil Rights movements was that in which progressive Christians debated the Scriptural argument. One of the more appalling “down the memory hole” moments in American history is the role of reactionary Christians in civil rights. Segregation was a religious issue, supported by Genesis IX, and various other texts (about God putting peoples where they belong, and all the texts about mixing). Even “moderate” Christians, like those who opposed King, and to whom he responded in his letter, opposed integration.

That’s important. The major white churches in the South supported segregation, and all of the reactionary ones.The opponents of segregation (like the opponents of slavery) were progressive Christians, sometimes part of organizations (like the black churches) and sometimes on the edge of getting disavowed by their organizations. And that is obscured, sometimes deliberately, as when reactionary Christians try to claim that “Christianity” was on the side of King—no, n fact, reactionary Christianity was on the side of segregation.

Right now, there is a complicated fallacy of genus-species among many reactionary Christians, in that they are trying to claim the accomplishments of people like Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael on the grounds that King was Christian, while ignoring that their churches and leaders disavowed and demonized those people (and, in the case of Jackson and Carmichael, still do).

Reactionary Christianity has two major problems: one is a historical record problem, and the second, related, is an exegesis problem. They continually deny or rewrite their own participation in oppression, and they have thereby enabled the occlusion of the problems their method of exegesis presents. If their method of reading got them to support slavery and segregation, practices they now condemn, then their method is flawed. Denying the problems with their history enables them to deny the problems with their method.

Reactionary Christianity’s method of reading of Scripture begins by assuming that the current cultural hierarchy is intended by God, that this world is just, that everything they believe is right, and then goes in support of texts that will support that premise. And there is also a hidden premise that the world is easily interpretable, that uncertainty and ambiguity are unnecessary because they are the signs of a weak faith, and that the world is divided into the good and the bad.

2. The Scriptural argument

The proof-text for the notion that poor people don’t deserve health care or other benefits is 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you: that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

Thessalonians may or may not have been written by Paul (probably not), but it certainly contradicts what both Paul and Jesus said about how to treat the poor. There are far more texts that insist on giving without question, caring for the poor, tending to people without judging, and for humans not presuming to be God (that is, we are not perfect judges of good and evil, and our fall was precisely on the grounds of thinking we should be).

That we have a large amount of public policy wavering on that single wobbly text of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 is concerning, but it isn’t new—the Scriptural arguments for slavery, segregation, and homophobia were and are similarly wobbly. Prosperity gospel has a very shaky Scriptural foundation, and the whole notion that Scripture supports an easy division into makers and takers isn’t any easier to argue than the readings that supported antebellum US practices regarding slavery.

Their reading of Scripture says that they should feel good about health insurance being restricted to people who have jobs (which is why Congress is cheerfully giving themselves benefits they’re denying to others—they see themselves as having earned those benefits by having the job of being in Congress). They can feel justified (in the religious sense) in cutting off people on Medicaid, those who are un- or underemployed, and those with pre-existing conditions because they believe that Scripture tells them that those people could simply stop being un- or underemployed, or have made different choices that wouldn’t have landed them on Medicaid, or could have prayed enough not to have those pre-existing conditions. They believe that they are, in this life, sitting by Jesus’ side and handing out judgments.

I think they’re wrong. But calling them hypocrites won’t work.

This is an argument about Scripture, and progressives need to understand that, as with other policy debates, progressive Christians will do some of the heavy lifting. And progressive Christians need to understand that it is our calling: to point, over and over, to Jesus’ passion for the poor and outcast, and to his insistence that the rewards of this world should never be taken as proof of much of anything.

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