Name-calling in the Church

Scot McKnight has a thoughtful post entitled Name-calling in the Church concerning the ways in which we use "labels" for people — sometimes in appropriate and useful ways, but regretably often as weapons.

I long ago noticed that the web is a place where negative labels tend to get throw around quite a lot — by persons of all persuasions. It's one of the reasons I lurked for so long, and still am somewhat hesitant to engage too often on other's sites.

The very nature of blog comments and forum posts, with their "keep things short and to the point" credo, makes the use of shorthand expressions (i.e. labels) invaluable — if everyone understands the shorthand in the same way, that is. But the great diversity present in the blogosphere almost guarantees that at least some — if not many — of the readers and engagers will not understand these shorthand terms in anything like the same way. Indeed, even saying that a particular label is "negative" probably is true only in specific contexts with specific groups of "speakers".

Regretably, it seems to me that more and more of the world is becoming like the blogosphere, with more and more avenues of life involving people from vastly different contexts engaging each other quickly and tersely, using the same words and phrases, but rarely realizing that they do not mean anything like the same thing to the other. And the more important a subject, the more likely we are to be discussing it in just such a highly diverse, rapid-fire environment.

It's no wonder that our "civil society" seems to be becoming so much less "civil". Maybe we all just need to slow down a bit, and spend a lot more time listening.