Winsomeness: A Tale of a Pseudo-Virtue
It is not that the word winsome is brand new. It can be found as early as the middle 12th century. The common meaning that has held is something like pleasantness. Of course, what is pleasant to some may often be downright odious in other contexts. The affective response of others—or “vibe,” as the kids call it today—is no sure indication of whether or not we are speaking of a genuine virtue.
Etymological pedigree aside, there can be no doubt among those paying attention that the word “winsome” has experienced an inflated coinage in the Reformed community over the past thirty years. Surely the rise of “New Calvinism” has been no small contributing factor. Its sudden proliferation into the suburban consciousness and easy-access medium of the internet had to bill itself in unassuming and frankly effeminate categories.
As best as anyone can tell, winsomeness first appears as a cluster of virtues, such as humility, gentleness, discretion, and a generally good-natured disposition. I use the word “discretion” to cover both prudence in one’s actions and carefulness in one’s words. All other things being equal, this would be a great virtue indeed: four in one! In reality, this cashes out to be what is merely likable and jovial and inoffensive and undemanding.
In short, to be winsome has turned out to be that which gets the representative of the product in the least trouble with the market. And that market is shaped by such distortions of all that is gendered, that we might accurately call the demographic androgynous. Beyond the matter of sexuality, that which is winsome becomes indistinguishable from that which is egalitarian.
Yet there is also an underbelly that emerges in the course of this tale. It is not simply that sloppy thinking has begotten a misnomer. Rather, I suggest, it is that a pseudo-virtue has been gathering an increasingly deliberate momentum and been weaponized. In the old place of orthodoxy opposed to heresy now stands winsomeness opposed to the essentially masculine and hierarchical.
To succeed at being winsome is rewarded with status. Conversely, the man who has failed to be winsome is penalized in concrete ways.
It hardly needs pointing out that only those descendants of all that is embarrassing about our Western past are required to pass the test of winsomeness. No one modifies the product of this or that woman or this or that ethnic minority or this or that member of x sexual identity as “winsome.” Each simply gets to be who they are and say what they say. When there are exceptions, the shape of those exceptions is easily mapped out by what we now know as intersectionality. By contrast, a heterosexual white male maintains social access only once he has qualified as winsome. It functions as the jizyah did for those colonized in the Muslim caliphate. It is the tax one pays to maintain even his servile condition, which, for most people, is preferable to immediate execution. This ought to prompt in us the deeper question as to whether or not winsomeness is more prescriptive than descriptive, more punitive than appreciative, more revolution than custom.
The Winsome Gestapo
Perhaps you have heard of “The Tone Police” or “Concern Bros.” Those are perfectly accurate descriptions as well. They each hit on a distinct aspect of what I used to call “The Winsome Gestapo.” These are those self-appointed monitors of males who have committed the high crimes of proposing, from a classical Christian perspective, that “x is true” or “x is morally imperative” or “if x social metric is not curtailed, y serious consequence will result,” or some combination thereof. I say “self-appointed” because we can all only handle so many conspiracy theories at once and it is easier to explain all this as learned behavior with benefits. No smoke-filled room or marching orders required.
When people lose meaning, they resort to idle activities. Being made in the image of God, such idle folks retain their original “program” but with a dead operator at the keyboard. They have long forgotten what they were supposed to be doing, but if they catch anyone else doing it, this alone will rouse them to a meaningful response. It is their lone protest.
None of this simple psychology is to deny that there is also a more organized front. They are often called “gatekeepers.” In one sense, that imagery is not very innovative. All in-groups have mechanisms to ensure their group’s solidarity. In this case, the term has been used to identify the way in which the leadership of previously conservative Evangelical denominations, seminaries, and permanent conference cultures have used their positions and developed a lexicon, complete with acceptable tone, to marginalize voices and trends that are anywhere “to the right” of the modern liberal consensus on any conceivable topic. Moreover, the gatekeepers at the top have no shortage of volunteers to do much of their enforcement in the everyday rhythm of conversation, appointments, and other shared tasks.
The Winsome Gestapo at Church
It may be suspected that those virtues which were identified as “elements” of winsomeness are indeed real biblical virtues, and how dare anyone throw shade upon them! No such shade has been intended. Indeed, there is a thick line in between the pseudo-virtues and the genuine article. I contend that true biblical humility, gentleness, discretion, or even simply being good-natured are such good things that they are worth distinguishing from their counterfeits. In fact, such distinctions are so vital that it is worth a separate study altogether.
Our question regards how this has played out in the local church, and specifically in Reformed churches in between roughly 2000 and 2010. The beachhead of attack was the pulpit, now made popular again through the Calvinistic version of the life coach or talk show host. The pulpit was plexiglass, moveable, and did not restrain the sweater-vested Ted-talker from walking around. Elders who paid attention took note of who newcomers were listening to. Who were their “gateway drugs” to harder doctrine? Invariably it was the likes of C. J. Mahaney, Joshua Harris, Mark Driscoll, Francis Chan, and Matt Chandler. I should point out that there are several spectrums here, so that some charity should be observed in my lumping them all together.
What they had in common was a noticeable distancing from structured, propositional communication, and an absence of weighty admonitions and exhortations that such things mattered beyond one’s own self-help sphere. It was a cake of pietism with pastel Calvinistic icing.
I remember my impressions of listening to Chandler for the first time and instantly realizing why those who liked listening to him did so. His most frequently used word was “um,” and he ended a disproportionate amount of his sentences in the standard interrogative inflection, even when no question was being asked. In saying so, I am not making fun of anyone. This actually signals some grave psychological transformations.
This delivery plays to the distorted feminine proclivity to keep her options open, and to the fallen masculine reaction to that proclivity, which is to further withdraw from certainty and decisiveness in one’s own mind and will, and from the momentous in one’s field of vision. Driscoll avoided these androgynous tendencies with a confronting tone, yet the habits formed from listening to him ended in the same place by a different path. One could avoid the effeminate, but they still received innovation and suspicion cast on the ancient, the clear, and the reverent.
On a popular level in that first decade, books on the subject of humility surged. Titles with modifying adjectives were designed for mollifying suspicions. Generous Orthodoxy and Humble Apologetics were published just in the shadow of George W. Bush’s new collective moniker, “Compassionate Conservatism”. What were such modifications designed to communicate? A kinder, gentler product that had expertly extracted the kernel of yesterday’s convictions and removed the embarrassing husk that used to frown and beat its chest and get in fights with others about it. This was still “a more excellent way” but with a warm smile and always at your own pace. No judgment zone.
I do not think it an exaggeration to say that many of our Christian heroes of the past could not even be hired as pastors today. Forget the extreme of Luther. Simply pick up Calvin’s Institutes, or even writings as recent as the nineteenth and early twentieth century—Charles Hodge or even C. S. Lewis. Such emphases as shape their every page would be viewed as sarcastic or morbid, overly-confident or needlessly divisive, and reading into the motives of others. Even one generation back finds the “gruff” tones of a John Gerstner, Jim Boice, and R. C. Sproul as a sort of verbal relic of a more barbaric speech pattern. However, we must not be deceived about the exact objects to which winsomeness finds itself in opposition.
On the surface it is the tone. One layer deeper, it makes a showing of moral qualities. Deeper down, upon further review, it turns out that a particular content calling out the spirit of the age is what is causing the discomfort. What Paul referred to as “doctrines of demons” (1 Tim. 4:1) are being challenged and the hounds of hell are quite agitated.
But they have been around for a while, and have learned a thing or two from their forefather, Satan. In view here is his oldest Edenic strategy of shifting from the heart of the matter to the fairer sex’s heart—which can be made worlds apart with the prior positioning. If one does not understand this about winsomeness, he or she will understand nothing else about it, and likely will already be under its spell.
The Winsome Gestapo in Christian Academia
Anyone familiar with the history of the modern intellectual class will understand why the nerve center of this gatekeeping class will be on the faculties of supposedly biblical Christian colleges and seminaries. Many have addressed how this story plays out with respect to the now infamous concept of “Wokeness.” What lies further under the surface is the way in which post-graduate programs weed out those who are perceived as right-leaning threats. To be right-minded is to be a realist, to view the world in terms of objective truth and permanent things in the created order. It not only affects one’s reading of Scripture and view of the church, not only one’s politics and views of sexuality, but it also tends to issue forth into two very different manners of speech (and writing). It is here where “a slip of the lip can sink the ship.” The gatekeepers know this, and the few conservatives who may be on institutional boards and hiring committees do not.
The chief instrument of this regulation is among the most difficult to see. The reason is simple. It is read between the lines. Consequently, one must not only be well read but read well in order to begin to sniff it out. It is a demand for false humility in propositional form.
Over a hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton prophetically wrote,
“But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason … We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”1
As this perversion of the intellect runs its course, the error becomes less innocent. Is today’s intellectual death by a million qualifications indeed a “mental modesty” or is there something more sinister at work? Objective-reality-minded males who make it far enough into post-graduate work or even academic reading will notice a tendency among “acceptable intellectuals” to speak in ever-interrogative tones. One can almost see the wince through their ink when some authoritative and comprehensive claim is made.
What counts for “scholarly” turns out to be an infinite regress of understatement. It is the academic manifestation of winsomeness. One must not claim “too much,” though criteria for what constitutes this excess of the dreaded “much” is seldom offered. Instead, scare words like “triumphalism” are sprinkled through the literature to speak of an arrogance which has its root in the assertive mind and its branches out in a political boast that is (you probably guessed it) right wing.
That word triumphalism gained currency in the first decade of our millennium. Pervasive in the new Christian literature, and not only among the authors of the so called Emergent Church, was the criticism of the older speech in everything from apologetics to systematic theology to culture war—that these all assumed a posture of “being right” and of those on “the other side” as being malevolent.
The New Calvinism was taking its shape as this fixation over triumphalism grew, and the all-encompassing pseudo-virtue of “winsomeness” was sold to millions as its antithesis. The reason for this overlap of churchmen and academics was largely because the most popular churchmen (they had to be popular choices to compete in the new media and conference realities) had to also lead the schools in order to attract and keep attractive.
Even among those hesitant to embrace the trends of this New Calvinism, it was simply assumed by the traditionally Reformed that the seminaries and denominational machinery belonged to a different world. But it was the brain of the same world, and in fact it was firing the theoretical neurons of those very same practical trends.
In this realm, the purpose of the gatekeeping intellectual class has been to ensure that each new batch of gatekeepers says even less (with more secondary sources) than the previous generation had failed to say. As the man who lost his meaning in general society is ashamed of his idleness, so the pseudo-intellectual who has never uttered a confident word about a profound truth is ashamed of his pusillanimous professorship. The very title is a mockery. To profess is to at least claim to know and to say it without having to start a therapy session to tone down the profession because a dozen academic journal articles no one will ever read have offered their uncertainty libations to the god of false humility.
The realist Anglican theologian, E. L. Mascall, in doing battle with the liberals of his day, noted how many words they multiplied to say so little:
“I do not think that the prolixity of these writers is accidental or purely temperamental. It is, I think, almost inevitable in a thinker who feels bound to justify the validity of knowledge before he allows himself to indulge in the luxury of knowing. For, once you have refused to assume the reliability of your apprehension of beings other than yourself and have postulated that the objects of your perception are prima facie states of your own mind, you are launched on the endless process of trying ineffectually to escape from the prison of your own subjectivity. To change the metaphor, you are involved in ever more complicated gymnastics in your attempts not to saw off the branch on which you are sitting.”2
There is a little soul that shudders at the news of an ultimate battle between good and evil spoken in broad daylight. He will mouth the Creed on Sunday, but will work hard to insist that things are “not that simple” in his more “serious” workspace. Oh, yes, and I should point out here that he also hates “scare quotes,” unless his favorite postmodern authors use them to deconstruct. He views any dogmatist invading his serious and understated space with the utmost alarm. His insincere profession would only be unmasked by such declarative tones.
It is a mistake to think that this is merely a social phenomenon or the result of a particular personality disorder. Such analyses have their place. However, circling back to Mascall’s observation about the “thinker who feels bound to justify the validity of knowledge before he allows himself to indulge in the luxury of knowing,” we must notice that one’s philosophical outlook will determine all of their tendencies as an intellectual.
A metaphysical realist is going to see the purpose of thinking and speaking and writing and hiring as an embrace of the real world, its truth, and a corresponding duty to advance that cause in the classroom, through publishing, and the whole furtherance of those institutions. The nominalist or idealist viewpoints—well, they will feign doing the opposite, but we must remember that this is not just an innocent mental modesty run amuck. They will do what they must to disqualify the realist, to expose him, by a war of attrition, where the realist is bogged down in answering for his tone, for his grandiose claims, such as that someone very recently might be wrong and that a course correction might be in order.
In concrete terms, how are would-be conservative voices in academics chased away? There are countless ways in the undergraduate years. By the time graduate school comes around, the conservative male has already embraced family life and the ivory tower doesn’t pay for that. These causes are simple enough to understand, and those such as F. A. Hayek or Paul Johnson can tell you all about it.3 But what about those right-leaning males who sneak through the cracks to the doctoral level? To see how narrow these “cracks” are, do yourself a favor sometime and check out the website of the typical European doctoral program. Many of them proudly display their current projects. Once you get past a few iterations of “The Queering of the Apostle Paul” and “Jesus’s Socialist Agenda” and the like, do keep in mind that the conservative seminaries in the States will be looking to these programs first for their next faculty picks. All very serious business.
“But,” someone will protest, “there are still x number of solid colleges and seminaries that are committed to biblical this and gospel-centered that.” If their strings are attached to the Department of Education, their Sunday sentiment matters little. Even J. Gresham Machen had to learn over the course of the entire decade of the 1920s that an institutional ship cannot be turned around to the right so easily.
Albert Mohler once made an analogy between turning around such an institution, such as he had initially done at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and turning an aircraft carrier. A naval friend of his had counseled him in this way during that season. Essentially, there are two ways to turn an aircraft carrier in the course of a battle. One is slowly and imperceptibly. The advantage is that no one notices. The other is to turn all at once on a dime. The disadvantage is that everything on board not strapped down is going into the ocean, but one will have secured the ship and a new, pure position. The first way is the way of the left, the radical. The second way is the way of the right, the conservative.
It is a paradoxical law of reality that, when it comes to change, the radical must be conservative and the conservative must be radical. Why? Because to conserve is to work with the grain of nature, adhering to things of their own course (natura), and to be radical is to cut at its root (radux). But nature is a train that can be hijacked, and once it is, the force and velocity of that “train,” that is, that institution or society, does not have the requisite stock of intelligence and virtue to sustain an about-face. Only a sufficient and sudden counterforce will do—either a declaration of total war or a secession.
This is why winsomeness is the radical’s weapon of choice. Women were not made for war, and winsomeness is the ultimate “next generation warfare” that comes in peace, peace, when there is no peace. To point it out is to lay the proverbial egg in the punchbowl (It wasn’t an egg, but winsomeness made me substitute.). Machen had to learn all this the hard way and eventually succeeded, dislocating his cargo onto a new train that gained momentum. Mohler knew it at first, but then capitulated to later hijackers.
Winsomeness means changing the subject of this conversation as soon as possible because it is giving me the creeps.
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1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image Books, 1990), 31, 32.
2. E. L. Mascall, The Openness of Being: Natural Theology Today (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1971), 91.
3. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Intellectuals and Socialism (Kessinger Publishing, 2010); Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
