The Weaponization of Disregard

The Southern Baptists spent part of this year's annual meeting arguing over the wording of a single sentence about women in ministry. What matters here is not where the line gets drawn, but the shape of the language Albert Mohler needed to draw it.

He could not simply write that the office of pastor is limited to men. The Baptist Faith & Message has said essentially that since 2000, and saying it again would have accomplished nothing. The plain phrase was not the problem. It carried its intent plainly enough for anyone reading in good faith. The problem was opponents who had decided not to read it that way — who circumvented it and mistook the circumvention for cleverness when it was really a selective disregard for an intent they understood perfectly well. So the amendment had to spell out the office or function of a pastor, elder, or overseer, and then narrow even that to the specific act of preaching to the assembled congregation. Every clause in that sentence exists because someone found a way around the sentence before it.

There are two ways to read what he did. His opponents will paint him as a man who simply adores restriction, stacking clauses because narrowing things is what he enjoys. That reading vilifies him, and everyone who holds his position, without cause. The more honest reading is that a man does not pile up that many qualifiers without reason — he does it because he has watched his opponents abuse plain language. Each loophole had already been used, and the only way left to name the thing was to keep naming it until the abuse had nowhere to go. That is not aggression; it's cleanup. It's also a tired solution for a symptom of a bigger problem.

How the Exploit Works

The move it's responding to is equivocation, and it's clean enough to admire if it weren't dishonest. A church that wants a woman doing the thing the confession describes, while keeping the ability to say it does not, stops calling her a pastor. She is a teaching director, a ministry leader, a communicator, a Sunday morning "voice." She does from the platform exactly what the office describes, and the church reports — truthfully, on the surface — that it has no woman pastor. The label is the only thing that changed. The function is untouched.

Before anyone reads a position into this, I have not said whether Mohler and the SBC are right or wrong, and I'm not going to. I'm commenting on the mentality behind the intent to circumvent, not on the underlying question of who may hold the office. Anyone who wants to know what I actually believe about women in ministry can ask me directly. My theology on that point doesn't change my read on the equivocation, which one side is playing maliciously whether or not it has the better of the argument.

I wrote in an earlier post about the difference between the deep structure and the surface structure of a sentence — the underlying meaning and the particular words that happen to carry it. Two different surfaces can sit on top of the same deep structure, which is ordinarily just how language works. Equivocation weaponizes that fact. You keep the deep structure intact, swap the surface for one the rule doesn't mention, and then point at the new surface as proof the deep structure was never there.

This is why Mohler's sentence reads the way it does, and why calling it overreach gets things exactly backwards. You cannot write clean prose against a counterparty who treats words as negotiable as long as the function survives. The target moves, so the language has to chase it, and chasing it is ugly. The bluntness is the cost of dealing honestly with someone who isn't.

Plainly, Not Exhaustively

We are told to let our yes be yes and our no be no — to speak plainly. Plain speech is possible at all only because it assumes a hearer who will supply the obvious intent instead of hunting for the gap. No sentence, no rule, no command closes every loophole; language has never been able to do that, and it was never asked to. The speaker says the thing plainly and trusts the listener to take it the way it was meant. The whole arrangement runs on good faith, and exhaustive language — the kind Mohler was driven to — is the fallback you reach for only after good faith is gone.

There is exactly one setting where we cheer for the gap being exploited. In the old story the devil grants a man a single wish, and the man wishes for the devil to get lost. We laugh, because we know the devil would have twisted any honest wish into a trap, so turning the offer back on him is poetic justice. The cleverness lands because the devil is dealing in bad faith and has it coming. That instinct is correct. It also happens to be the only case where it is.

Aim the same move at a brother in Christ and it stops being clever — but only if he came in good faith, and that is a real question. People do not always, and being a brother in Christ exempts no one. When a man did mean a thing plainly and honestly, though, and you drive through the gap he left — because he left one, since everyone does — you are treating someone who dealt with you honestly as though he were the devil in the story. You knew what he meant. That is the entire problem. The cleverness that is righteous against an adversary is malice against a brother, because the only thing that decides which one you are doing is whether the other party was dealing honestly. Claiming you couldn't tell what he meant, when you could, is not a defense; it is a lie about your own comprehension.

That hinge is the whole of the SBC case. Whatever you make of the theology, which I am still leaving alone, the convention's prior language carried a plain intent, and the thing that provoked the amendment was a decision to disregard that intent while keeping up the appearance of compliance. The bad faith was there before Mohler wrote a word; his wording was the answer to it. He did not invent a restriction — he spelled out one the plain language already carried, and in doing so made himself a large and easy target for people who had a stake in pretending the plain language had never meant what it plainly meant.

The childish version of this wears a halo. Andy Stanley has made a career of one form of it, and plenty of others parrot it on cue: Jesus did not hand down hundreds of commandments, he gave two — love God and love neighbor — and really just one underneath them, so the Golden Rule is the whole of what he requires and the rest of the law can be left in the past where it belongs. It is a stupid argument. Jesus' audience could understand the slogan that is the Golden Rule because they already lived the Law of Moses daily and knew the norm of what God wanted. Absent the Law, the Golden Rule justifies buying drugs for every addict, because that's exactly what the addict would do for you.

A summary is parasitic on the thing it summarizes. Paul makes the logic explicit in Romans 13 — do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet — and then says the whole list is gathered up in "love your neighbor as yourself." The one command collects the many; it does not abolish them. This is the same equivocation in a higher key: keep the summary, throw away everything it was summarizing, and behave as though the word still carries the freight. Mistaking that compression for a repeal is either a failure to understand how summaries work or a decision not to.

Justice as a Password

Progressive theology runs the same exploit at a higher register, and it has a favorite word for it. It frequently self-describes its identity in the margins — the overlooked, the marginalized, the prophetic voice standing outside the seat of power. That instinct is old and partly right; the prophets did stand outside the court. But the edge then gets treated as if it were proof — as though standing outside the center were itself evidence that a reading is the faithful one, which it plainly is not. A position is a fact about where you stand, not about whether you are right. The kings of Israel sat at the center and were thrown to the margins precisely because of their disobedience. The ones cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, are not sent to the center but to the margins. Being "marginalized" is not an automatic license. Standing outside proves nothing on its own. The reading still has to be shown to be true, and that demonstration is exactly the step the move skips.

Calling a position "marginal" only means anything relative to a center, and you get to choose which center you measure from. Pick one and your side is on the outside looking in; pick another and it is sitting at the head of the table. Whoever wants the badge of marginalization just selects the center that grants it, and is never asked to justify the choice. Peter stood at the margins of Roman society in Acts, with no standing and no power the empire would recognize. Inside the church he stood at the center, holding as much authority as anyone alive. Both were true at the same time, because there were two centers to measure from. Once being marginalized counts as a badge of honor, you can always find the frame that puts your side in the weaker seat — redraw the center until your position looks like the underdog and the badge is yours. Plain meaning gets recoded as the voice of power, and evasion gets recoded as justified defiance, and the whole move rides on a choice of frame nobody made you defend.

This is why the standard you measure against has to be one that does not move. Scripture does that job well; it does not easily slide when the culture leans on it. Modern progressive theology, however, makes an odd choice and aims even for the margins of Scripture, as if trying to convince the world that the devil himself somehow lives in the center of it. It hears plain language in 1 Corinthians that is not a slogan — "Or do you not know that the unjust will not inherit the kingdom of God?" — and, reading the list that follows, decides to side with the people on it and call that the real center of Christianity.

The word that does most of the work in that recoding is "justice," and it works the way a slogan works. I've argued before that a slogan, used honestly, is a memory hook — a few words pointing back to an argument the listener actually sat through. Used dishonestly, it performs agreement without earning it. Nobody wants to be standing against justice, so attaching the word to a move does the persuading the argument was supposed to do. The listener nods because the word is good, not because the case was made.

That is unearned agreement, and it is a tactic rather than a conviction. When "justice" gets fastened to the project of redefining an office out from under a settled text, it isn't summarizing an argument that was had. It's substituting for one that wasn't. The slogan is doing the lifting precisely so that the exegesis doesn't have to.

Borrowed Authority

"Justice" carries this much freight, where other moral words do not, for a specific reason: Scripture loaded it. It is not a value the Bible admires from a distance — God is just, God commands justice, and the prophets hammered Israel for the lack of it, so the word comes attached to God himself. When the prophets used it, they were not reaching for a warm feeling about fairness. Amos told Israel to let justice roll down like water, and he meant specific crimes: judges taking bribes, the poor cheated in court, the needy sold off for the price of a pair of sandals. Justice meant a particular way of living that God had already spelled out in his law, and Israel was breaking it in particular ways. The word has a shape, and God is the one who gave it that shape.

That is exactly what makes the word the perfect instrument. Attach a contested claim to "justice" and you are not borrowing the warmth of a pleasant word; you are borrowing God's own authority. The surface everyone shares — justice is good, God loves it, the prophets demanded it — comes pre-stamped with divine weight. The deep structure underneath, the actual content of what justice requires, is where the real disagreement lives, and it is precisely the part that gets swapped out and never examined. Keep the word, change what it means, and the divine stamp transfers to the new meaning for free.

This is why the appeal is constant rather than occasional. The same exploit runs through a whole vocabulary of borrowed words. "Love" carries it — "God is love," deployed not to describe God but to forbid any judgment he might actually make. "Welcome" carries it, sliding by degrees into "affirm," as though opening a door and endorsing everything that walks through it were the same act. "Dignity," "inclusion," "the right side of history" — each is a surface no decent person wants to oppose, wrapped around a deep structure that would not survive five minutes of open argument if it had to make its case without the word. Strip the borrowed vocabulary out, ask for the argument underneath, and very often there is none, because the persuasion was never located in an argument. It was located in the word.

What makes this parasitic rather than merely mistaken is that it feeds on something true: there is real injustice in the world, God hates it, and a Christianity indifferent to it would be false — which is exactly what traps the honest critic. Question the specific claim and you are recoded as an enemy of justice, defending "oppression" before you have said a word about the actual question — and "oppression" is the next term being stretched past its meaning the same way. Real oppression exists, which is precisely what lets the word be pulled over things that are nothing of the kind. God forbids homosexuality among his people, and forbidding it gets called oppression. Push the logic and it proves far too much, since forbidding pederasty would then make the pederast a victim, which it plainly does not. Disagreement is not oppression, and a thing being forbidden, even forbidden by God, does not make the person who wanted it a victim.

The tell is in what happens when you ask the word to define itself. When justice is doing honest work, it can take the question — what do you mean by it, by what standard, measured against whose definition — and the honest user answers, because there is an answer. When justice is functioning as a password, the question itself is treated as an offense, because the entire point of a password is that it is never meant to be cashed out. The request for a definition gets met not with a definition but with suspicion of the person asking. That refusal is information; it tells you the word was carrying weight it never earned.

The SBC's plain language ran straight into this. It said no, and a group treated getting around the no as if it were the same as being right — which it is not. Being subversive does not make you righteous, any more than claiming to be a victim of oppression makes you one; both swap a posture for a verdict the argument never earned.

When It Wears My Jersey

Somebody is going to say that traditionalists do this too, and they are correct. I have no interest in defending the tactic when it shows up on my side of the aisle. "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" is the move in its purest form — a slogan that performs a high view of Scripture while skipping the one thing a high view of Scripture actually demands, which is the work of reading the text closely enough to know what it says. The conservative who announces that "the Bible is clear" on a question it does not, in fact, settle is doing the same thing: winning agreement he hasn't earned by bolting his conclusion to a surface nobody wants to argue with. It is the same move and the same dishonesty, and it does not get cleaner because the conclusion happens to be one I hold.

We already know this is wrong, because we correct it in children before they're old enough to dress it up. A child told not to hit his brother kicks him instead and defends himself on the technicality — "you said don't hit him." No parent alive accepts that. We recognize the maneuver on sight: the child found the gap between the word and the plain intent and drove straight through it, and we don't reward the cleverness. We expect more of adults, not less of them.

A grown person who exploits the space between the surface of a rule and its obvious meaning is doing what the child did with a better vocabulary. The vocabulary is the only upgrade. The honesty is identical, which is to say there isn't any.

None of which makes the two sides equivalent, and I am not going to flatten the difference for the sake of looking balanced. When a traditionalist pulls this, it is usually laziness — a man who could make the argument reaching for the slogan because the slogan is faster, and the argument he skipped still exists. When progressive theology pulls it, the slogan is frequently not a shortcut around an argument but a replacement for one that was never there. In a great many cases "justice" is not standing in for a case that could be made the long way if someone insisted on it; it is the entire case, and taking the word away leaves nothing behind. That is the difference between a lapse and a method, and it is why the weight of the criticism falls where it does.

Equivocation works because meaning rides on words and can be pried loose from them by anyone willing to do it, and the words with the most force are the ones most worth stealing. There is no counter-slogan that fixes it. Where the move hides behind a borrowed word, the only defense is the slow insistence that the word cash out — that "justice" produce its standard and "pastor" produce its function. Where it hides in a gap, the defense is plainer and harder to manage: read the way you would want to be read, honor what a person plainly meant, and refuse to pretend you couldn't tell. Neither is glamorous, and together they are most of the actual work.

Which is the whole reason Mohler's sentence is built the way it is. It refuses to let the word "pastor" float free of the thing it names. It is unlovely on purpose, because the people it answers had spent years prying the word loose from the function, and the only way to pin it back was to name the function in detail exhausting enough that no relabeling could slip past it. The ugliness is the evidence that the work was necessary — proof that somewhere upstream, plain language had already been refused. A clean word — the one Mohler and others would have preferred, and the one everyone knew he meant — would only have left the bad-faith actors holding the weapon they should never have used.

God bless, everyone.