Is Silence Violence? Or, Knowing When (Not) to Shut Up [2 of 5]

Confronting Our Confusion

Whatever the issue, dialogue is the only antidote to our confusion, and we need to speak sincerely in order to have real dialogue. Of course, dialogue needn’t be public, and much of what qualifies for public discourse these days is hardly dialogue. But sometimes it’s necessary to speak your mind for the sake of contributing to a public understanding of an issue—including your own understanding.

The scale of the public in view doesn’t matter per se. I’m thinking of everything from a social gathering beyond your closest friends to a church gathering to a college classroom to a school board meeting—any place in which there is a sufficiently delimited social group to specify "our" confusion.

Social media fails to serve real dialogue in a variety of ways, but one critical failure is that public position-taking on social media does not genuinely engage an "us" with shared social identity and stakes. In fact, all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that these media reinforce the idea of public position-taking as an exercise in self-representation rather than participation in good-faith dialogue. I’m not suggesting that no one ever intends to engage in a friendly exchange of ideas on Facebook, etc. This seems to happen all the time, and obviously we can cheerfully @ fellow church members or classmates. I’m saying, nonetheless, that there is no actual "us" there to engage in the dialogue that would mutually confront our confusion. I think there can’t be for a variety of technical reasons, but that’s for another article. Suffice it to say that the difficulty of deciding when to "speak out" is amplified at any level that exceeds the local.

There is at least one major exception, which the populist ethos of social media has made quite confusing: apologia. Apologia refers to "a defense especially of one’s opinions, position, or actions" (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apologia). The style and medium of these contributions to public discourse have varied through the centuries, and the printing press and then the internet have increasingly leveled the playing field. Social media might be the apogee of this trend—it’s difficult to imagine a further reduction, anyway. Even blogging becomes micro-blogging, and apology becomes position-taking without substance.

Still, the historical manifestations of apologia represent substantive contributions to public discourse (if not real dialogue) beyond the local level. There is a place for defending our understandings in writing (or audio, or video) for public consumption, with the concession that consumption is not dialogue. This sort of discourse can be massively consequential, and I suppose the hope of most position-takers is to be just that—consequential. But consequence is a function of substance. Provoking a reaction is not consequential, if your intention is to defend an opinion.

I should say at this point that I’m not a fan of contemporary Christian "apologetics." As a sub-genre of literature, it has been coopted by agendas that I find uninteresting and sometimes detrimental to Christian witness. The best impulses of Christian apologetics, however, are relevant to this discussion. Whenever Christians attempt to offer a public defense of our understandings and way of life in writing (or audio, or video)—not in the sense of defensiveness but of careful explanation—we can consequentially engage in public discourse at a level that exceeds the local. This possibility does not make the determination of when and how to do so any easier, but it does carry us into the realm that sounding off on social media—and the slogan silence is violence—aims to engage.

It is important to remember that the consequences of apologia—or local dialogue, for that matter—are not always favorable. The second-century Christian philosopher Justin Martyr’s writings offer a paradigm of apologetics, and Justin is . . . a martyr. He died for arguing publicly at the widest level of his day, the Roman Empire, for the Christian way of life. He did not do so through trite statements and position-taking in a free society. Rather, he offered a reasoned argument against the ongoing persecution of Christians. He wrote not because silence is violence (for very few Christians offered this sort of defense, and none would have been morally culpable for such silence) but because he had the training and gifts necessary to write a substantive argument in a manner the emperor might find compelling. In doing so, he addressed the empire’s confusion about Christianity. Some of the opening lines of his First Apology seem poignant:

Reason requires that those who are truly pious and philosophers should honor and cherish the truth alone, scorning merely to follow the opinions of the ancients, if they are worthless. Nor does sound reason only require that one should not follow those who do or teach what is unjust; the lover of truth ought to choose in every way, even at the cost of his own life, to speak and do what is right, though death should take him away.¹

This is a challenge to his first readers, but it is also a challenge to the church today. Later he adds:

It is for us, therefore, to offer to all the opportunity for inspecting our life and teachings, lest we ourselves should bear the blame for what those who do not really know about us do in their ignorance. But it is for you, as reason demands, to give [us] a hearing and show yourselves good judges.²

There is a mutuality here, circumscribed by a shared social obligation to remedy ignorance and confusion about the truth. Justin is concerned not with position-taking, with showing himself to be on the right side of history (though God’s judgment is in view!), but with the church’s responsibility to give an account of its life and teachings in such a way that others might perceive the truth.

The example of Justin Martyr should cause us to consider the difference between silence is violence and truth gives rise to justice.

The former leverages a vague sense of private guilt in order to compel speech in the form of position-taking. The latter appeals to a shared obligation to justice in order to impel a discourse sufficiently substantive to bear the weight of our responsibility for the truth.

1. Justin, 1 Apol. 2; Cyril C. Richardson et al., trans. and ed., Early Christian Fathers, The Library of Christian Classics (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 242.

2. Justin, 1 Apol. 3; Richardson, 243.