The Problem With Vilifying People

Three reasons why we should avoid it

Photo by ALEXANDRE LALLEMAND on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read)

I recently watched a few presentations from a seminar that a friend encouraged me to watch. The presenters were looking at trends in America in light of various end-times scenarios, highlighting the ways in which liberty was slowly being eroded on multiple fronts.

I don’t know the degree to which such concerns have validity, though I do have some passing thoughts on it. But the larger issue that challenged me, and which caused significant discomfort, was the ease with which the presenters painted whole groups of people with such broad strokes, essentially vilifying them and treating them as ideas—and threatening ones, at that—and not humans. The LGBT community wants to destroy the family and financially bankrupt all Bible-believing institutions, one presenter explained. Black Lives Matter is trying to advance Marxism in America and undermine western Democracy. Those pushing for COVID vaccine mandates are mainly concerned with controlling the masses and eroding freedom.

I know such concerns are widely promulgated and extensively published. And the general ideas may or may not have merit to them. But, again, the bigger concern for me is not the desire to squelch genuine and open discussion about any particular issue or idea; the larger issue is the unfortunate tendency for humans to dehumanize other humans, reducing them to disembodied ideas who primarily need to be argued with, warned about, and attacked.

This, I think, is one of the underlying concerns when it comes to so-called “cancel culture.” I would contend that American society is not as hostile to open and free discussion as some would have us believe; what people are reacting against is the tendency to vilify and attack others in the process of trying to promote one’s particular ideas. It’s one thing to passionately argue for a sincerely-held position; it’s another thing to wage attacks against whole groups of people who disagree with you, painting them in dehumanizing language. Many conflate the latter with the former, and then complain that American society is not us pluralistic as it claims to be.

This is not, it must be pointed out, unique to any one “side.” It’s not as though “conservatives” are the only ones who ever offend on this point. It’s not only a conservative or Democrat or Independent or Christian or atheist or Muslim thing. It seems to me that there is, within the human spirit, a tendency to reduce others to a singular objectionable character trait or philosophical position, thereby allowing us to interact with them on this basis. It’s easier and safer that way, after all. And one could easily acknowledge and explain this using various theories of human behavior—be they the “fight-or-flight” model that a psychologist or evolutionary biologist might offer, or the “original sin” model that a Christian might propose.

It bears mentioning, of course, that I am not at all immune from taking such a posture. In fact, I’d say that I have historically struggled with this a great deal myself. But as I’ve (hopefully) grown and matured and wrestled with my own faults, I’ve come to see the dangers and drawbacks of having such an attitude and engaging with people on that level.

So I’d like to offer you three reasons why vilifying people is so problematic (though you likely don’t need to be convinced), and then next week I’ll offer a perspective on how one can know if they are engaging in this type of behavior, and a few steps to avoid it.

Before sharing the three reasons, however, perhaps a definition is in order. After all, I’d imagine that no one consciously seeks out to “vilify” others. So what exactly do I mean when I use the term? I’m not sure if it aligns perfectly with the Dictionary definition, but when I speak of “vilifying” people I am talking about the act of reducing a whole group of people to a singular characteristic, viewpoint, or behavior—which is almost always explicitly or implicitly negative—and then acting or speaking of or to them on this singular basis. In some ways, it’s like stereotyping others, though I prefer to use the word vilifying in this context, since the former word seems to be mostly associated with racism.

Three Reasons Why Vilifying Others is Problematic

1. It undermines our ability to love others well. As I touched on above, when we paint others with a broad brush, we essentially reduce them to a single idea, behavior, or perspective. In so doing, we dehumanize them, disconnecting them from the totality of their being and personhood. No longer are they fellow human beings who have thoughts, feelings, and experiences; no longer are they individuals who experience the full range of emotions like we do—happiness, sadness, loneliness, joy. They are simply the “other” who become wholly unrelatable, and therefore people with whom we can’t empathize.

I remember speaking at a conference a few years ago when I met another presenter who was a part of an organization I’d looked negatively at before. This organization seemed to promote ideas that I was uncomfortable with, and I assumed everyone connected to it had a sinister agenda. When I met the presenter, however, suddenly I saw the humanity in her and, by extension, the others who were also a part of the organization. She was a person just like me; a loving, kind, genuine human who had the same motivations and sincere desires I had. She was far more than just a few ideas that I disagreed with—and a year later, she and her husband stayed with us for a few days when they vacationed in Maine.

It makes me think of what Brené Brown has written: “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.” I’ve found that to be true over and over again. I so often create a certain one-dimensional picture of people based on what they’ve written or spoken about or based on what group they’re a part of. Then I’ve met them in person and been blown away by their three-dimensional humanity.

But when I simply relate to others as “those people” (or as “they”) with those ideas, it’s easy for me to disdain them, to lose sight of their humanity, and to steer clear of them altogether. And it’s a lot harder to love people well from a distance.

As a Jesus-follower, I believe my primary calling is to draw close to, empathize with, and love others well. My primary calling isn’t to debate or tear down their opinions. Much less is it to avoid people because they have a different perspective—or engage in different behaviors—than I do. Jesus, you may recall, was notoriously known for being a “friend of sinners” (see Matthew 11:19) who was more concerned with loving people than debating them. But when I reduce people to their opinion, or my perception of what their motives and agenda are, it is awfully hard to love them.

2. It undermines our ability to persuade others of our perspective. Even if, for the sake of argument, other people’s agendas, motives, or perspectives are dangerous or problematic, what is the best way to persuade them otherwise? It’s not by vilifying them. As I shared the other day on Instagram: attacking someone’s opinion doesn’t cause them to change it; it just causes them to defend it. A friend of mine shared a thought from Pastor Craig Groeschel that was also along these lines: you can either make a point or you can make a difference. Presumably, it’s hard to do both at the same time, however.

This is, really, Emotional Intelligence 101. Think about the times people have attacked or vilified you. Were you prone to listen to them? Did they successfully persuade you away from your perspective and to embrace theirs? On the other hand, think about the people who’ve been most successful in moving you away from your opinions: they likely interacted with you with patience, kindness, empathy, and understanding. They affirmed your humanity and assumed the best of your motives. They displayed faith and confidence in you.

One of my favorite quotes along these lines was written over a century ago by a very wise woman who has been extremely influential on my thinking. I think she understood Emotional Intelligence long before it was a thing. “If we wish to do good to souls,” Ellen White proposed, “our success with these souls will be in proportion to their belief in our belief and appreciation of them.” Read that a few times, carefully. And then recite it often.

Simply put: vilifying and demonizing and painting others with a broad brush is a very poor strategy for winning them over to our perspective. Of course, if winning political points and galvanizing our “side” is our main objective, then it’s a pretty effective strategy.

3. It undermines our credibility. In response to a series of talks I gave at a conference this last summer, a young woman told me about her experience growing up in a sheltered home. She was raised in a conservative Christian family that homeschooled her right through high school, and tried to keep her away from outside influences as much as possible. Whether it was what her parents explicitly told her, or simply the impression she somehow came away with, she was led to believe that everyone outside her narrow faith community was dangerous and evil.

All that came crashing down, however, when she went to state university, and suddenly started interacting with “secular” people. To her utter shock and surprise, she discovered that they were just normal, kind, and loving people. Her impression was that “secular” people were out to attack her views on creation, for example; instead, she sat with a group of her new friends who sounded intrigued by her perspective, even while not agreeing with her. They gave her the space to explain her views without condemning her.

This, in turn, shook her confidence to some degree in her own faith commitments and community. After all, if these outsiders were not the villains her parents or faith leaders made them out to be, perhaps her parents and faith leaders were not credible and trustworthy sources of other information?

That is one of the serious risks of vilifying others. Instead of inoculating people against their perspective, we do just the opposite—especially when people start to realize that those who’ve been vilified are a lot more nuanced and complicated, and often more loving, than they’ve been made out to be. As Preston Sprinkle writes in People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality Is Not Just an Issue: “People will gravitate to where they are loved the most.”

In some ways, it’s like the old act of “book burning.” Instead of annihilating the ideas contained in the books, we actually create a greater curiosity for and even attraction to that which is forbidden. So, too, when people discover that the people we’ve vilified aren’t the monsters we’ve made them out to be, we actually create a deeper empathy for and interest in them and they ideas or behaviors they espouse. And all this undermines our credibility.

So those are just a few reasons why we vilify others. Next week, I’ll unpack how we can identify whether we are vilifying people, and what we can do to avoid doing so. But for now, hopefully we can all resolve to navigate the world with a little more kindness and compassion, recognizing the humanity in others.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.

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This month, I also became a regular columnist for Adventist Review, which is the flagship and oldest journal of my denomination. The title of my column is the same as this newsletter, “Reimagining Faith,” and the title of my first piece was “Are we answering the right questions?” To read it, you can go here.