How Did I Get Here
This started as a reply to a tweet—a reply that got sort of out of hand. I didn’t think to ask the original tweeter whether they’d be okay with my cross-posting their material, but they aren’t locked or anything, so as a middle ground I will reproduce the text alone, without directly crediting or linking (unless they ask me to later).
The original tweet was a complaint, one that I had and have a lot of sympathy with, having to do with how Catholics tend to argue. I’m a convert, and my journey to Rome was a long affair of abruptly-found dead end streets, drifting forward in neutral unawares, surprise shortcuts, and flooring the gas pedal while the car was in park. And some of the least helpful people on this journey were that crew of self-appointed traffic cops, the professional Catholic apologists.
Apologia Pro Weblog Sua
To be fair, I did run into a handful of apologists who were smart, clear, honest, and well-informed. One or two got really wild, and tried imagining or describing things from a non-Catholic perspective; it was like they had some bizarre confidence in their beliefs that caused them to be more respectful and generous with pushback instead of less.
But these were exceptions. For the most part, apologists are a hall-monitor-ass group of people who got an F in debate club (whether their school assigned grades to debate club participants or not).
Now. I’m not quite prepared to call it a sin to be an apologist.1 What I will say is, “winning hearts and/or minds for Catholicism” is a gross way of looking at this. Because if you think about the actual words there, what they’re saying is that other people’s thoughts and feelings are a game to you. And this is indeed the problem ninety-nine apologists out of a hundred evince; the aura most of them radiate is basically “Debate me, asshole,” and that’s always about ego rather than truth.
Nor, as I have found by experiment, is demanding that strangers debate you typically an effective way of making friends. One of the salient features of most debate clubs is that it’s debate club, not debate class; and even in schools that do have debate class, the teacher is the one assigning work, not fellow students. You are within your rights to request a conversation (as they are to decline one); but you have to approach conversations on their own terms. You cannot win a conversation. And if you try, you are not only a dork, which is fine, but a jerk, which is not.
Prolegomenerds
Anyway. Here’s the content I was originally answering.
When it comes to a number of Catholic teachings or practices, such as indulgences, papal infallibility, the brown scapular, etc., there seems to be a disconnect between what is being said and what is being meant. For instance, they say the brown scapular keeps you from going to hell, but then apparently what is meant is if you aren’t sinning and have faith in Christ etc. etc. AND are wearing the brown scapular you won’t go to hell. Seems like the scapular is totally unimportant. Then infallibility, it gets called infallibility and then actually just means that the pope is right when he’s right. And indulgences are described one way but then (now) just means a little extra grace if you aren’t sinning.
I guess my point here is that there’s a common theme of motte and bailey arguments going on where you can’t attack the justifiably problematic bailey without being accused of not understanding the motte. If the church truly means the motte, then why set up the bailey?
For those who spent their young adulthood cultivating non-debate hobbies—Habitat for Humanity, learning to play an instrument, getting laid, all the air-quotes stuff—a motte-and-bailey is a type of fallacy related to equivocation. The name comes from a type of medieval fortification setup: a motte was a serious fortress, usually on a hill and easy to defend; a bailey was a simpler structure, perhaps just a big fence, which enclosed a larger area surrounding the motte. The idea was to build a settlement within the bailey, which gave plenty of security for everyday life, but if the Swiss hordes attacked, you could retreat to the motte and hole up there until they left.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy works on similar lines. The “bailey” here is some controversial idea, like being a Nazi or a flat-earther,2 and it’s in those terms that the idea or argument is expressed—at first. But when this crackpot theory is attacked, the weirdo in question retreats to the “motte”; this is a far more modest position that’s easier to maintain, like “being a patriot” or “just asking questions.” The idea here is not only to wriggle out of rebuttals,3 but to give the false impression that if the motte is not refuted, the bailey is valid too.
The Forts of the Latins
Catholic apologists do indulge in the motte-and-bailey quite a bit. As the OP states, papal infallibility is a good example. “The Pope is infallible” definitely sounds like a wide, ostentatious bailey. Then, when you start to examine the arguments and see just how circumscribed infallibility is, it really can feel as though the motte might not be big enough to fit an actual Pope in.
Fallacies normally work because they sound like cogent reasoning in some way: what makes them fallacies is that they smuggle in something else, something irrelevant or biased or otherwise flawed. Sometimes, the motte-and-bailey fallacy works because it sounds like a person explaining a complicated or sensitive concept. And the popular impression of what an idea implies is can be different from what it actually implies. Maybe the idea is hard to follow, or people have spread misinformation about it.
Unluckily, Catholic doctrine does include a lot of statements that are tricky to explain. In a handful of cases, this is thanks to the ideas being genuinely hard to understand, no matter what you do; sometimes, it’s thanks to the cartoonish excuse for an education in history most of our schools offer. But most of the time, it’s due to jargon.
In the Middle of a Conversation Was the Word
Jargon is not unique to the Catholic faith. Every technical discipline has specialized terminology, and Catholic doctrine is no exception. People who like to talk about theology tend to pick up some of its technical terms, which are strongly influenced by Latin. However, those terms frequently also exist in other registers3 of English, and mean something different there. Which would be fine, if everyone knew about the difference and kept it in mind—but we’re talking about people here.
The word grave is a useful example. As a technical word in Catholic theology, e.g. as it appears in the Catechism, grave is just a synonym for serious. But in other contexts, the English word grave implies not just seriousness or importance, but an atmosphere of gloom or anxiety; a funeral is grave, but it would be weird to call a wedding “grave.” The upshot is that when most people read that missing Sunday Mass “except for grave cause” is a mortal sin, they think this means “you’d better be skipping Mass to save somebody’s life or something or you’re going to hell,” when what it’s really saying is “missing Mass for a serious reason like being sick is fine, but doing it over something petty like feeling cranky is not.”
So why not use the word “serious” to make things a little clearer, you ask? Because grave comes from the Latin gravis, and Latin still influences ecclesiastical culture. Many guides to Catholic doctrine and morals were originally written in Latin—because it was the international language, not just of the Catholic Church but European culture in general, right down to the end of the eighteenth century if not later. Writing in Latin was accordingly more accessible than writing in most vernaculars, which only locals might be able to read: anywhere a Latin book went, most educated people would be able to read it without trouble, and would likely be able to produce a translation for the less-educated. And now? Even if we’re talking about a modern book, written in English, the register in which people discuss Catholic doctrine and morals has been shaped by that history; the precedent of using grave to translate gravis has centuries of force behind it.
Would it be worthwhile to break that habit? I think so. But it would require two things: first, an awareness of the problem, which most people don’t have. (Ironically, this is partly because of the problem! Miscommunication often works like a self-perpetuating infohazard.) And second, it would require some detachment from our habits of speech (and therefore of thought). None of us are very good at that, and especially not strongly religious people, who are often anything from uncomfortable with to aggressively hostile toward such detachment.4
Don’t you hate it when they say “to be continued”
Footnotes
1I do wish they wouldn’t identify that way, though. You are not “an apologist”: you may do apologetics, but your identity is in Christ.
2As a rule, the bailey is what the person deploying this fallacy really thinks. Don’t be surprised if the person who keeps saying Nazi-adjacent stuff, even “as a joke,” turns out to really be a Republican.
However, people do experiment with arguments for views they aren’t committed to. On rare occasions, this is for the mere pleasure of argument; this is the true “devil’s advocate.” Much more often, a person will say they’re playing devil’s advocate, when they’re just indulging in the popular pastime of being annoying. (Interestingly, the pleasure of being annoying normally has nothing to do with whether we like the people we seek to annoy.) And thirdly, some people do it—with or without the devil’s advocate pretense—as a way to explore ideas they want to accept but haven’t yet taken the plunge for.
None of these habits is necessarily bad. Experimenting with ideas, or “thinking” as our remote ancestors called it, is a perfectly health hobby in moderation. Fallacies and dishonesty, however, are bad.
3In linguistics, a register is a style of speech associated with a specific context. For instance, the casual register allows a lot of things (like sentence fragments or slang) that would earn you a bad grade in an English paper, because papers are supposed to be written in the academic register. Or, telling a friend who just got to a party “thou art with me” would come off either confusingly or as a joke, because, even though it means the same thing as “you’re here,” the vocabulary is reserved for the religious and poetic registers.
4There can be lots of motives behind this. On the more rational side, some devout people worry that being or seeming careless about traditional verbal formulæ (e.g. the creeds) is a danger to orthodoxy. On the worse and more superstitious side, some devout people get mad any time something they’re familiar with changes—maybe they don’t like the new stuff, maybe they did like the old stuff, maybe what they actually like is being mad.
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