Hard and Soft Tribalism in Evangelical Social Media
Evangelicals on social media (ESMs) have a tribalism problem. The conversation about political tribes is fairly well trodden ground at this point. There are a few organizations that have sprung up to try and rectify that problem. One is The Dispatch and another is The Heterodox Academy.
My guess is that some evangelicals would immediately recognize that evangelical social media (ESM) has a tribal problem and say “Yeah, there’s a tribe of ‘discernment’ folks obsessed with finding SJWs and liberal drift under every rock, and then there is the rest of evangelicalism!”
In other words, there’s one tribe on ESM ruining it for the rest of us. But I think there’s two groups exhibiting tribal tendencies on social media. Yes, there’s the “discernment folks” who I’ll refer to as the “hard tribe” for reasons that will become evident later. They exhibit tribalism in totalizing narratives and purity tests.
I’m going to give a concrete example here, because I think one of the dialectical problems that makes it hard to escape tribalism, while at the same time giving an appearance of escaping tribalism, is simply having a meta-discussion that never descends to the level of actual arguments and disputed points. However, I’m going to blur out the name so the person doesn’t feel personally attacked without their knowledge.
The example, then, is that when Denny Burk retweets John Lewis’s call for de-escalating violence, they think that means Denny Burk must be endorsing everything John Lewis has said in the past.
But the other side has its own tribal tendencies. I’m going to call this the soft tribe for reasons that I will explain below. I don’t mean for this to be a pejorative term, though I know some in the hard tribe would like to think “soft tribe” fits for other reasons. Terms that the hard tribe — which the soft tribe would label the “discernment tribe” — uses to describe them are “woke evangelicals” or “SJW evangelicals” or sometimes “BigEva.” These terms aren’t helpful or accurate, but it’s clear that the discernment tribe has accurately perceived a loose connection between these people, if nothing else.
They all tend to follow one another on social media, they all tend to retweet and ‘like’ each other’s posts, they are all fairly prominent within ESM, and they all tend to be on roughly the same page when it comes to the intersection of political issues. None of that, per se, is what makes them tribal. The tribal tendencies here are less obvious on the surface. But they do have their own sort of purity test, where any criticism or push back on their comments leads to being seen as a troll or someone belonging to the discernment tribe. I saw the perfect example of this Thursday or Friday last week, as a hard tribe member tweeted something about how we should take note of evangelicals who aren’t speaking out agains the riots and later that day a member of the soft tribe tweeted something about how should take note of evangelicals who aren’t speaking out against Floyd’s murder as a racial injustice. Unfortunately, I didn’t save those tweets at the time, nor do I remember which accounts they came from.
However, I think the primary problem for soft tribalism is an echo chamber, even as they decry echo chambers. The echo chamber tribalism is evident in how fallacious or bad reasoning never gets push back from fellow members of the tribe. There appears to be little self-reflection or challenging from within the group. Instead, it gets echoed throughout the tribe with retweets and likes.
Here I’ll give a concrete example, as I did for the hard tribe (pictured left). The idea here is that if you don’t support the justice of my specific protest, you can’t consistently support my right to protest. The mistake here should have been glaringly obvious — it’s one that is often made and pointed out in regards to free speech debates. Yet within the tribe it received only likes and retweets. (A few other small accounts, like my own, did call out the mistake, but this just received pushback from other followers who maintained the error.)
Most people are familiar with the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” There’s a distant cousin to this disposition that has an insidious tribal manifestation. Maybe we could express it as the soft tribalism of an “ignore those people” mindset. (It’s not unusual to see members of the soft tribe flaunting how often they mute and block people, which gets lots of ‘likes’ from fellow tribe members.) And here I’m not simply reiterating the sort of purity test tribalism that writes any criticism off as coming from the opposing tribe. I’m also talking about a failure to reach out to the other tribe. The opposite manifestation of this from the discernment tribe is, thus, a hard tribalism that says “confront those people!” (Sometimes getting blocked is flaunted as a badge of honor among this tribe.)
This is why I’ve labeled these groups as the soft tribe and the hard tribe — it’s not because the soft tribe people are effeminate and the hard tribe people are masculine.
Prima facie, hard tribalism looks worse and certainly sounds worse than soft tribalism. Maybe there are some ways in which it is worse, but I think if that’s true then most of those ways in which it is worse are more obvious — they are floating on the surface for all to see.
But the harms in soft tribalism might be the more insidious because they float beneath the surface and because soft tribalism insulates itself from engaging with opposing voices (“ignore those people”). Hard tribalism, insofar as it seeks to engage the other tribe, at least has the potential to be made aware of counter-arguments in a way that soft tribalism doesn’t.
In practice, things rarely work out that way for hard tribalism. The hard tribalism side usually never gets the chance to hear counter-arguments, because their chest thumping battle challenges are ignored as a matter of strategy from the other tribe and because their rhetoric is their own worst enemy when it comes to finding someone willing to engage them.
Both tribes are guilty of a failure to reach out and persuade the other tribe. The soft tribe simply goes about doing what it sees as the correct mission to the church and the culture — and here they deserve a lot of credit for trying to understand and persuade the culture. This is their best case for not being as bad as that other tribe. Hard tribalism tends to be blind to how counterproductive its own tactics and rhetoric are both to the church and the culture. But it seems to me that soft tribalism’s ‘ignore those people’ mentality has, in effect, given up on their evangelical brothers. Two weeks ago I wrote about how #NeverTrumpers can slide into tribalism when they stop trying to persuade other people and only aim to prove them wrong, dumb, or immoral. And many who are in the soft tribe wear (or wore) the #NeverTrump label.
But it’s not just that the soft tribe might be missing opportunities to persuade some of their evangelical brothers in the hard tribe, it’s also that the soft tribe could actually learn where their own positions may be weakly evidenced and, thus, gain some epistemic humility.
In the opening paragraph I mentioned The Dispatch and Heterodox Academy. I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of content from The Dispatch lately and I’ve also been checking out the comment section from paid subscribers, after hearing people like Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Sarah Isgur praise the quality of discussion in the comments. And though it isn’t perfect, they really aren’t exaggerating. Seeing how well The Dispatch commenters manage to navigate sharp disagreement, with grace and reason, among liberal and conservative and non-Christians and Christians, should really put evangelicals to shame. Evangelical social media should be a shining light in a medium darkened by tribalism. Instead, it’s often just a funhouse mirror of the broader political tribalism.
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On a personal note, I don’t want this to come off as though I’m righteously standing outside both tribes as the lone rationalist. First, there are other evangelicals with better platforms who’ve managed to avoid tribal tendencies while attempting to correct error on both sides, as they see it. The two most obvious accounts that come to mind are Jeremy Pierce and Chris Bolt. Second, the faults most evident in tribalism don’t only have tribe-level manifestations. They can manifest themselves at the individual level. So I don’t assume that not seeing myself as belonging to either tribe entails that I’m free of the sorts of errors in tribal psychology.
I also want to add a caveat in terms of having a sense of proportion. The tribal problems of ESM are extremely small. The vast majority of evangelicals probably aren’t on social media and, if they are, aren’t engaged in tribalism or even engaged to such an extent that they could be engaged in tribalism. But this doesn’t mean that the issue isn’t important. A small group can have a nudging effect with large consequences. And those evangelicals on social media who do engage in tribalism (mainly from the soft tribe) are usually in positions of influence with regard to education, evangelical media, and publishing.
