The Logic of Reacting to Christianity Today

The Editor in Chief of Christianity Today Mark Galli recently argued that the president “Should Be Removed from Office” because “[n]one of his positives” outweigh his “grossly immoral character.” Galli, after invoking the magazine’s founder Billy Graham, said that he is worried that, if evangelicals continue on the path they are on, they’ll lose their moral credibility. “If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?”

Caricature of Willaim Franklin Graham III

Source: DonkeyHotey/Flicker

In response, Franklin Graham (son of Christianity Today’s founder Billy Graham) condemned the article, by suggesting that his father would not have agreed with the piece and revealing for the first time that his father voted for the president in 2016. “He believed that Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”

This, I thought to myself, is the perfect opportunity to do a bit of logic and clarify some logical fallacies—or, at least one logically fallacy in particular: the “inappropriate appeal to authority.” Why? Because I think one might be tempted to think that Franklin commits a fallacious “inappropriate appeal to authority” fallacy here. In fact, that’s what I initially thought. But I don’t think he actually does, at least, not exactly. Why?

It is appropriate to appeal to authorities in numerous cases. One, of course, is when they are experts in their field—although even that can be complicated, and I plan to talk about that more in a later post. But another is this: when someone else invokes an authority, what that authority actually thinks becomes relevant to the discussion. And Galli did invoke Billy Graham’s founding of the magazine as a way to add moral authority to his claims; so what Billy Graham would have thought is relevant. Now maybe Frank is wrong about what his father would not have “agreed with” and been “disappointed” with the piece, given recent revelations—but it’s not fallacious to think what Billy Graham would have thought is relevant to the disagreement between Galli and Franklin.

Now, to be clear, what Billy Graham would have thought about the morality of anyone’s behavior is not actually relevant to whether it is actually moral; that is an inappropriate appeal to authority. Moral questions cannot be settled by the opinions of “experts,” whether individually or collectively. So it was fallacious of Galli to invoke Billy Graham in the first place, it would be fallacious of Franklin to think that his father’s opinion is relevant to whether or not the president has a "grossly immoral character," and it would be fallacious to suggest that the president must have a “grossly immoral character” just because Galli said so. We’d need to look at the arguments and evidence and do some moral philosophy to determine that. (To be fair, Galli does present an argument; Franklin did not.)

But because some people do (fallaciously) hold the opinions of popular religious figures to be relevant to what is moral or immoral, if and when the debate does turn to what some religious figure thinks, clarifying what they actually did think is not “inappropriate.” (Although, I admit, it would have been nice if Franklin would have also said, “Of course, my dad’s moral opinion doesn’t settle the matter; he was only a man. We shouldn’t actually care about what he would have thought about this. Let’s look at the evidence," and then actually egnaged with Galli's argument.)

But Franklin did commit an inappropriate appeal to authority fallacy when he claimed that the fact that certain house members voted the way they did proves that the president didn’t commit impeachable offenses.

“I know a number of Republicans in Congress, and many of them are strong Christians. If the President were guilty of what the Democrats claimed, these Republicans would have joined with the Democrats to impeach him. But the Democrats were not even unanimous—two voted against impeachment and one voted present.”

These members could have had any number of motivations for voting the way they did. The two democrats, for example, came from districts that the president won in 2016 and (as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita argues in “The Dictator’s Handbook”) politicians tend to just do whatever keeps them in power. Of course, to be fair, this means that democrats voted to impeach the president doesn’t by itself mean he did commit impeachable offenses, either. (They might just be protecting their power too.) To determine whether the president did commit impeachable offenses, we would need to look at the arguments and evidence for ourselves.

There is much more to say about appealing to authority, and I plan to do so soon. (If there are witnesses in the impeachment trial, the topic is about to become much more relevant.) But for now, it will do to understand how irrelevant invoking the opinion of religious figures is to determining the morality of someone’s behavior.

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Copyright 2019, David Kyle Johnson