“No true Christian” is the fallacy of the year

Evangelicals can’t get enough of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy

You may have seen people jumping into online debates trying to call out logical fallacies. These fallacies—unfair, mistaken, or flawed uses of logic—are wrong and unhelpful by definition, but still, no one likes a social media logic enforcer.

And yet, unliked though we may be, it seems important to specifically address one defective argument that evangelical Christians have pulled out in the last couple years more often than their million-dollar-bill gospel tracts: the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy.

The name of this bad-logic maneuver, credited to philosopher Antony Flew, comes from a fictional conversation like this one:

Person A: No Scotsman takes his tea with sugar.

Person B: Actually my uncle Ewan was born and raised in Scotland, and he loves sugar in his tea.

Person A: Oh, well… no true Scotsman takes sugar in his tea!

Basically what happens in this routine is that someone makes a sweeping generalization that is not true. When presented with a factual counterexample, they should admit they were wrong (or perhaps provide evidence that uncle Ewan only pretends to like sugar, or that he’s really Belgian, etc.). Instead, Person A moves the goalposts, so to speak, by just offering a new sweeping generalization that features an appeal to purity or a slightly altered definition.

Now, the fallacy doesn’t always feature such a neat and tidy back-and-forth when it’s out in the wild. So you may not always be able to recognize it quite that easily. But anytime you hear an appeal to purity like that (“no true X” or “no real Y”), you can be pretty sure there’s a sugar-loving Scotsman afoot.

This tactic has always been a favorite of religious people in debates, since moving goalposts and moving gates of exclusion are so similar. But this fallacy has been the MVP since January 6, 2021, when a group of people that included many evangelical and fundamentalist Christian nationalists violently attacked the US Capitol.

When people react to this fact, you can identify the fallacy by the appeal to purity: “Those weren’t real Christians who stormed the Capitol.” The reason that this is a clear-cut no-true-Scotsman is because of the assumptions and counterexamples that lead to this statement being made. The largely unspoken conversation about tea and sugar is something like this:

Person A (unspoken belief): Christianity and violent insurrection are incompatible.

Person B (or any news source other than Fox News): [Presents evidence that a violent attack took place at the Capitol by a group of people waving Christian flags and holding Jesus Saves signs.]

Person A: Oh, well… no true Christian would storm the Capitol!

This tactic, when used in discourse about January 6, is not unique to evangelicals, or even Christians. When Trump supporters are confronted with the fact that other Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, they often say, “Those attackers must have been Antifa, because no true Trump supporter would do such a thing.” Even lovely liberal Protestants can be heard reacting to the insurrection with something about how fundamentalists aren’t real Christians anyway.

Why do people resort to this sophistry? I think it’s pretty simple: when the generalization that is being contradicted is deeply held and important to one’s self-identity, it must be protected at all costs. I’m not sure why a Scotsman would hold a belief about sugar this way, but it makes sense that evangelicals—and really any Christians—would want to protect their religion from claims that it sometimes links arms with racism, violence, the slave trade, etc.

But sometimes very painful counterexamples crush our deeply held beliefs.

For many people, such was January 6. Christians—I’m not sure what else we can call people who attend church regularly, read the Bible, and profess a personal faith in Jesus Christ—viciously attacked the Capitol police and seemed ready to literally kill Nancy Pelosi (and staunch evangelical Mike Pence!). They weren’t “fake Christians.” For us to move the goalposts on the definition of “Christian” because they did something heinous is a disingenuous attempt to make our faith, and ourselves, look better.

It’s much harder to own the fact that our faith tradition is a malleable thing, and that it has been expressed many different ways across space and time. Some of those expressions have been cruel and evil. (Others have been beautiful and liberating.) But acknowledging this painful fact might help us take responsibility for the ways we inhabit and exhibit our own faith.

We won’t automatically get it right just because we’re real Christians. It’s still on us to reject hate and to figure out how to follow Jesus toward justice and peace.