The Right Way to Argue

by Eddie Pipkin

A big part of ministry leadership is convincing people to support your vision.  Whether you’re the head honcho of the whole shebang or a foot soldier in charge of arranging chairs, part of the job is leading your team to follow you on the designated path, while simultaneously helping ministry participants appreciate the reasons it’s important to embrace changes and new initiatives.  Of course, team members and ministry participants have opinions, too.  Sometimes they have very strong opinions.  Treating these concerns and convictions with respect is the starting point for bringing them around to your way of thinking.

We have a habit of being dismissive of critiques from others.  We feel attacked when they disagree with our plans.  It often feels personal.  We have reached our conclusions after careful thought and considerable prayer, and suddenly these people parachute in with an objection that can derail our proposals.  Our emotional response is, therefore, natural.  But it’s not helpful.  It triggers us and causes us to react in ways that can be detrimental to relationships and decision-making processes.

Other people may have also been thoughtful and prayerful, and yet – somehow, some way – they may have reached a totally different conclusion that we have reached!

Of course, they may also be bad actors, not responding with a sincere, thoughtful disagreement, but reacting to guard their own territory, pet peeves, or sacred shibboleths.  Fighting back seems like our sacred duty.  The problem with our own natural defensive, emotional, gut-level reaction to this misalignment in objectives is that although we see our own motives as virtuous, we default to seeing others as nefarious.

What if instead of habitually seeing others’ points of view through an automatically contemptuous lens, we trained ourselves to see their perspectives through a favorable filter, assuming that their motives are honest and good?

I was thinking about this pivot in attitude because of a podcast interview I heard between New York Times writers Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat (you can watch/listen to it yourself on YouTube at this link.)  These two highly regarded commentators have made have established their careers by writing persuasively in columns and books and now podcasting.  Their modus operandi is trying to change the minds of those who disagree with them on contentious political and cultural issues.  Klein asked Douthat this question (I’m paraphrasing), “Over the course of decades of argumentative writing, what have you learned about persuading an audience?”  Here’s Douthat’s response:

I mean, this is banal advice, but it’s still the fundamental thing: To argue effectively, you need to understand why people you disagree with hold the views that they do, and you need to start from a version of their argument that is high-minded rather than low-minded, and that is the best version of the perspective that they hold.

And that doesn’t mean that you can’t think that secretly or subconsciously they hold their opinion for bad or wicked reasons, or because they want to just destroy their enemies and salt the earth. You can believe that exists somewhere in their mind. But to argue with them, you have to actually engage with the version of the argument that they themselves would put forward as their own best defense.

He takes their argument seriously and addresses that argument.

He gives them the benefit of the doubt that they start from a sincere place and that their concerns, from their perspective, are legitimate.

Wouldn’t many of the ministry leadership debates in which we find ourselves be much different in tone and potentially outcomes if we followed that advice?