Neckties and Orthodoxy

Years ago, an older Christian told me I perplexed him. “You’re liberal on neckties (I declined to wear them) but conservative on scripture,” he said. He probably capitalized “Scripture” to himself when he said it. At that church, traditions mattered more than they probably should.

Neckties and orthodoxy are light years apart in spiritual importance. Unfortunately, in those days they often came as a package deal.

Creating Cognitive Dissonance

A little over a week ago, I was watching one of those bog-standard political videos you find on YouTube these days: you know, the ones where a conservative interviews a group of young Leftists without revealing his own political leanings. He asks each interviewee a series of apparently random questions about what they believe, after which the results are cleverly edited together to demonstrate the rank hypocrisy of Progressivist thinking.

In this case the subjects being discussed were tolerance and compromise, and the results were absolutely predictable. Every young Lefty being interviewed claimed tolerance was the most important of all values and that compromise was critical when engaging in political discourse, but of course the moment they were given a list of specific conservative values and areas of possible agreement with the Right, it turned out they were all hopelessly intolerant and refused to compromise on anything at all.

“Aha!” said the conservative writers and editors. “Hypocrisy!” Well, no. Not exactly.