The Importance of Being Sincere

And why we should value it in ourselves and others

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, during the shutdown, I made the rookie Twitter mistake of tweeting something political, specifically about the Trump administration’s insistence on not funding SNAP during the shutdown, and some people objected, which was their right. But other people objected and insinuated nefarious things about me based on my concerns about people going hungry during the shutdown. All of this is very normal for Twitter, nothing worth writing home about, but what stood out to me was the one person who disagreed with my take and stood up for me. This person said that while I may be wrong, I came to my position honestly.

What stood out to me here was the assumption of good intentions and sincerity on my part. Most of my other critics did not share those assumptions. They tended to treat me with contempt and scorn. They treated me as a bad faith actor, and accused me of working for the democrats and baby-killers. I may have been naive in my tweet. Sometimes I make mistakes! But accusing of aiding baby-killers is absurdist, which is why it meant a lot to me when one of my critics stood up for me and my character while disagreeing with me!

What this little episode revealed was a larger trend in our society—a tendency to dismiss other people’s convictions as insincere and to not hold our own beliefs sincerely. In an insincere society, everything and everyone is up for suspicion and scorn. We don’t have to take our opponent’s views seriously because they are not serious things, seriously held. He or she has perverse, secret, alternative reasons for holding those views which we can attack instead. This is a dysfunctional way to live as a society. It doesn’t allow for persuasion or dialogue. But when our opponents can say to us, “I disagree with you, but I know that you come to your beliefs honestly and sincerely,” it goes a long way to building solidarity and the common ground necessary for debate and public discourse, which our country is entirely lacking at this point.

The ability to disagree affably is a supreme virtue, to disagree with your opponent precisely and carefully and even forcefully and yet gracefully. And part of that involves believing that they hold their beliefs sincerely, not because of some secret, perverse motive. The latter is a logical fallacy C.S. Lewis called Bulverism. We fall into this fallacy all the time in the contemporary world, a suspicion of our neighbor’s motives which distracts us from his or her arguments. The opposite of Bulverism requires an act of hope that your rhetorical opponent holds their view honestly and deserves to be addressed in good faith.

Of course, there are times when you must recognize that you are dealing with bad faith actors and treat them as such, particularly on social media which so strongly promotes trolls. Just yesterday I posted an article I wrote for Christianity Today on gratitude to Twitter and some random person responded by accusing me of being responsible for getting National Guards shot in D.C. Clearly this is not a good faith actor or an argument I need to take seriously. This is not a person I have a relationship with. This argument is a non-sequitur. This accusation is prima facie absurd. This is bait meant to draw me into an argument. I can let this go.

But what about arguments that aren’t trolls? What if we began to assume that our neighbor sincerely held their views and even came to those views honestly and earnestly? How would that change the way we interacted in public discourse?

For one, I think it would mean that we would have to assume the best from our neighbor, even when we deeply disagreed. We should be able to say, “I think you are deeply wrong, but I understand how you came to your position.” It seems to me that we have basically lost that common ground in our culture. We’ve even lost the desire to move toward that common ground. We’ve lost the belief that common ground is possible, desirable, or good. Instead, we’re locked in our silos, our distinct visions of the world, viciously, passionately clawing away for power and control.

As I’ve argued before, Christians have a duty to “hope all things” about our neighbor. And that includes what we think about their beliefs. We should be people who hope that they sincerely hold to their confessed beliefs instead of suspiciously analyzing them for secret motives.

But there’s another lesson here for us. We need to be people who hold our own beliefs tightly, sincerely. Which means being slow to speak (and tweet—a lesson for me) until we are confident in our position. By “holding a belief sincerely” I mean not holding a position for ulterior motives. For example, are you sharing this story because you genuinely care about it, or because you want to be seen caring about it? Seek a purity of motive. Inevitably, our motives will be mixed and ego and sin will creep in, but if we are honest with ourselves, we should be able to work toward holding good, true, and beautiful positions because they are right and therefore glorify God, not for other, egotistical motives. The more we act like people of sincere beliefs, the more we give people a reason to treat us as people with sincere beliefs.

Suspicion may be the death of us as a culture. And A.I. is only accelerating this problem. Today one has wonder if half the trolls one sees online are even humans at all. To combat suspicion requires the virtues of hope, prudence, and courage. We must have hope that our rhetorical opponents truly believe what they claim to believe, we must use prudence to decide what we will truly believe, and we must use courage to commit ourselves to believing it with sincerity. A society of individuals who can disagree while understanding each other can negotiate and navigate challenges together, not perfectly, but possibly, with sacrifice. A society of individuals who cannot disagree has no hope of overcoming problems but brute force, will-to-power. And that is a frightening prospect. It seems to me that right now many on the left and right have resigned themselves (in despair!) to the will to power in public discourse and politics. I continue to hope and believe we can do better.