The ‘slippery slope’ is considered a logical fallacy. If I argue against your desire to do one thing because it will inevitably lead to another then I’m engaging in this fallacy.
If you go and read a definition of the fallacy it might identify it as an ‘informal’ fallacy because the error lies not in the form of the argument but in its content. Which means that sometimes slopes are slippery, even if this form of argument is often catastrophised or poorly thought through.
We’re discouraged from making them. It’s been much documented that in political discourse a new thing will be made legal, people will say ‘don’t do it we’ll be doing x before you know it,’ people will say ‘don’t be silly,’ (often rightly, we should argue against the thing in question instead) and then five years later the same people will be advocating for ‘x’ to become legal.
That doesn’t validate the form of argument, but it might help us to see that moral taste is shaped by what’s permitted and liberal societies will push at the boundary of morality constantly even after you move the boundary.
The same is true theologically. Some slopes are slippery, though the slide down them isn’t inevitable. Your doctrine will inevitably drift towards wider cultural norms unless you put in place the fence required to stop it.
This is probably easiest to see in the world of ‘soft complementarianism.’ In the UK its increasingly common that complementarian churches—those that understand the office of elder to be male by definition—would have female preachers. Some of our American cousins would just tell us that means they’re not complementarian, but we are talking about churches that are clear in their doctrine and practice that Pastors are men, so perhaps we need more categories.
Almost always these churches have moderated from a more conservative stance. They would argue that they’ve been overly limiting in the way they’ve applied the Bible’s teaching and are trying to be Biblical. This is perhaps accompanied by an argument about the restrictions in 1 Timothy 2 being about ‘office’ rather than ‘sex’ along with the proviso that the vast majority of teaching should be done by elders but any teaching done by others is not restricted by sex but rather by whether or not they hold the office of elder.
The reason I’m mentioning this is because I’m interested in the question of doctrinal drift. I’m not intending to write about the rights and wrongs of that argument (I’m sure I will one day), I do want to suggest that the position runs into a slippery slope problem. I think this is true for any theological conviction where you change your conviction in the direction of the prevailing wind of culture.
It is not inevitable that moving to start having women preach leads to women elders—though I’ve seen this in a church I know well—but it requires more effort not to do so, not less. Of course, if your convictions are egalitarian then we’d need a different example, but the same principle would be true.
I think we assume that if we moderate in a direction people will like we will find the doctrine easier to hold. The thing is that when you held something that was difficult for people to grasp because it seems culturally surprising you actively taught it and talked about it a lot. The more nuanced your position and the nearer it is to a cultural norm the less you will probably talk about and teach on it.
The less you talk about and teach on it the more likely you are to drift. Drift will inevitably be in the direction of the culture. It’s easier to hold very conservative convictions firmly because they are so strange in our culture that everyone knows you’ve got to fight for them. It’s when you stop fighting for your convictions—whatever they may be—that they start to drift.
You see, all slopes are slippery. They aren’t less slippery at the ‘top,’ it’s just much more obvious that you need a fence. This is the theological equivalent of Conquest’s law: “Any organisation that is not explicitly right wing will sooner or later become left wing.”
In our current cultural moment you’d frame that as: “any church that is not explicitly theologically conservative will sooner or later become theologically liberal.” I don’t love the way the discourse equates ‘conservative’ and ‘right wing,’ since they aren’t the same thing, but we’re so used to it that you’ll recognise the move I’ve made.
I should nuance that in two ways: firstly, this isn’t a package deal, this is about specific doctrines. If you don’t explicitly fight for them then you will lose them.
Secondly, this would be true the other way around if the culture was more ‘conservative’ coded than the church on a particular issue or question. I’m sure this has been true the other way around a numerous points in the past two thousand years. The slope runs towards the culture, wherever that might be on a particular question.
You can stake out a place in the middle of a slope happily. After all, if you think that’s what the Bible teaches then it’s not the middle of a slope, it’s a mountain peak with slopes on both sides. It’s just likely that the side that would be moving against culture isn’t slippery. You still need to firmly fence your positions, teach them to your people, require that those who teach (however you define that) to assent to them formally, and contend for them against whatever winds you perceive in your local context. Sometimes those winds aren’t the same as the online discourse might make us believe, though our general Americanisation through the social internet does often import concerns and ways of framing questions that are foreign to our contexts; navigating and understanding those cultural pushes and pulls is part of what shepherds do.
In my experience though, churches with more ‘moderate’ positions talk about them less. This exposes them to the likelihood of drift. Drift comes from many directions, it could be outright institutional capture, where people slowly change the direction down the slope over time; it can also be a lack of institutional memory, where people don’t remember why this specific nuanced position was chosen and so gradually soften and blur their positions.
To take the same example again, if they aren’t firm about contending for their positions it’s likely that the soft complementarian church finds over time that people want ‘more women’ preaching because ‘diversity’ is important, rather than remembering that the church wanted the majority of its teaching to be from its elders. If this happens it’s likely it keeps softening, and any attempt to pull it the other direction becomes increasingly difficult. Eventually people start to question the complementarianism at all, especially if the church has become functionally egalitarian in the process. That’s usually the way, theology follows pragmatics if not fenced, and so your functional realities may be different to your confessional realities for now. This can be hard to see, the cognitive dissonance required to maintain a different functional and confessional reality is such that blinds us to itself.
Of course, there are as many cases where this doesn’t happen as there are when it does. I’m not arguing ‘do x get y,’ I’m arguing that our intuition about not needing to contend so much for a position that seems more palatable is wrong.
Ultimately, what should your church do? Have firm convictions you’ve formed form the Bible, whatever they may be. Then teach them and contend for them firmly.
The knowledge of this slope should also make us check our convictions. If your opinion on what the Bible teaches is changing, that could be a good or a bad thing, none of us have everything right and we should strive to be thoroughly Biblical. Reforming our views and practice towards the Bible is good.
However, if that reforming is also in the direction that gives us the least grief, that our neighbours will find most palatable, that will be easiest to swallow in our settings, and that is the direction that the wider (or notable local) culture would pull us in, we should have significant pause. On its own that doesn’t mean we’re wrong, but it significantly raises the likelihood that we have mixed motives for wanting to change our mind and that we have subconsciously lowered the burden of proof required to convince us. Instead, it should cause us to carefully check ourselves and then recheck our arguments and indeed raise the burden of proof required for changing our minds. We are self-deceptive creatures.
There are strong winds about, if your ship isn’t either moored in safe harbour or being sailed by steady hands with an eye on their direction then it will drift out into the big wide ocean of ‘where are we anyway?’
If we believe that our doctrine is, to the best of our knowledge and ability, what the Bible teaches, then we should contend for it. We shouldn’t be ashamed of it; we shouldn’t hide it. If it’s the truth, then it’s good and beautiful too. We should teach it as good and beautiful, even if we know that we live in a culture that thinks it’s anything but.
Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash
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