12 ANGRY MEN and the Gish Gallop.

[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or accusation commonly lobbed against us on X.]

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I’ve noticed something that certainly isn’t unique to energetic critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but that is a common attack tool in their online arsenal.  You may know it in slightly other contexts as the “Gish Gallop,” but if you don’t, it is best explained by hearkening back to that superlative motion picture of yesteryear, 12 Angry Men (1957), which I’m certain is kept fresh in your memory with an annual rewatch. (What’s that? You don’t rewatch 12 Angry Men at least once a year? You’ve NEVER seen 12 Angry Men?! What are you doing wasting time on the Intertubes with a shameful gaping hole like that in your cultural education?! Leave this here website this instant, and don’t come back until you’ve watched it! Kids these days…)

So. NOW you can hearken back to the fresh memory of that movie.  As you most certainly recall, Lee J. Cobb as Juror #3 can easily list off the reasons that the accused seems not only guilty, but obviously so: The novelty of the knife, the two witnesses to his presence and his shouted threats, etc.  During the course of the movie, Henry Fonda as Juror #8 brings up and discusses each of those bits of evidence, and he and the other jurors notice that there are flaws in every one of them, so that by the end of the 90-minute running time, every single one of the “open-and-shut” evidences of the accused’s guilt has been shown as unreliable or flawed, and every member of the jury now votes “not guilty”… Except Juror #3, who still rehearses the same list of evidence, and looks like he’s going to hold to his guns (and maybe even force a hung jury), until he realizes that it was some factor other than the weight of the evidence that caused his insistence on a guilty verdict… (Yes, I’m purposely being vague because I just know that there’s STILL someone who went ahead and read this post without (re)watching 12 Angry Men.)

For the purposes of this discussion, the point is that, at the start of the movie, Juror #3 can list off the damning evidence in under 30 seconds, but Juror #8 can’t refute that evidence in a similar length of time.  It instead takes the entire rest of the movie (pretty much shown in real-time) for Juror #8, and his growing number of backers on the jury, to examine, interrogate, and discover the flaw in each of the prosecutor’s claims.  It they hadn’t been literally locked in a room that they couldn’t leave without a unanimous verdict, most of the jury members would never have stopped and thought about what they had blithely accepted as the truth which they first entered the jury room.

The “Gish gallop,” named after the combative creationist Duane Gish, is an even more precise description of the pseudo-debating technique under examination here.  In Wikipedia’s calm and precise language, it is

a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.

And how does this style of argumentation show up in discussing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Pretty much exactly like it says on the tin.

Joseph Smith was a conman pedophile! The endowment is stolen from Masonry! The Kinderhook Plates! Fanny Alger! Swords and horses in ancient America! Kirtland Anti-Banking Society! Galatians 1:8! Potrzebie!

(I’m exaggerating, but not by much.)

Now, a cogent and well-reasoned doctrinal discussion is already at a disadvantage on X, where 280 characters at a time is barely enough even to give an opening sentence.  But the bigger problem is that the Gish Galloper rarely wants a well-reasoned doctrinal discussion.  I can answer every one of those objections, either refuting allegations or showing why the stated objection is actually plausible, but there’s no reason for me either to write an essay-length reply (I’m a Premium user on X, so the 280-character limit doesn’t apply to me), or even to link to other resources which would say everything I want to say, if the Galloper isn’t going to read it, or respond honestly and respectfully. Because a Gish Galloper isn’t interested in arriving at understanding or learning what the other person believes; he’s just trying to “win” by volume (in both senses of the word).

As a matter of fact, when conversing with an anti-Mormon critic a couple of times, I have offered to take one of his list of objections and answer it as fully as I can, if he will commit to reading it.  The responses have ranged from “lol sure, braindead Mormon” to simple silence.

So why continue to engage in any degree?

For the benefit of the third-party audience.  As it further states on the Gish gallop Wikipedia page,

The technique … may cast doubt on the opponent’s debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.

For the casual audience, if all they see is a string of accusations and no rebuttal, what message will they take away? That Latter-day Saints can’t explain and defend their faith.

Thus, once more into the breach…