“He talks about racism a lot lately and has bought into this ‘cultural Marxism’ nonsense.” 

“She’s raised some concerns about the social justice movement. She must be a white supremacist.”

“He liked that author’s Facebook status. I think he’s walking away from his faith.” 

“Her books are sold in airports, and I’m skeptical about books sold in airports.”

I have seen these and similar statements made and labels hurled online (yes, even the last one about airport books). Since the election of 2016, guilt-by-association tactics like these have only worsened. “Guilt by association” occurs when guilt is ascribed to someone not because of evidence but because of his or her association (real or perceived) with a person or group.   

Associations are not always bad. Psychologists use the word “schema” to “refer to patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world,” as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write in The Coddling of the American Mind. 

God gives us wisdom and discernment to form accurate associations when a person’s consistent words and behavior over time reveal those associations to be true. (In the words of Maya Angelou, “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”) 

Jesus talked about such consistency in terms of fruit: “Beware of false prophets, who will come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles (Matthew 7:15-16)?” Associations are fair and cautions are warranted when someone consistently bears fruit inconsistent with the teachings of scripture.

But we are also in the middle of a very polarizing moment in our nation’s history and must be aware of its influence on our ability to think. I have noticed an uptick of guilt-by-association tactics employed on the Internet, and they are tempting when all around us people are dividing along tribal lines. But I am afraid this makes us as Christians poor thinkers and neighbors when we give into guilt-by-association tactics too hastily.

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Why poor thinkers?

We train our eyes to see and tune our ears to hear certain words, phrases, or names that signal to us who’s in the “ingroup” or “outgroup.” Thinking is social. We cannot avoid this, and Alan Jacobs explains why in his book How to Think: 

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”

This is a point worth dwelling on. How often do we say “she really thinks for herself” when someone rejects views that we hold? No: when someone departs from what we believe to be the True Path our tendency is to look for bad influences. She’s fallen under the spell of so-and-so. She’s been reading too much X or listening to too much Y or watching too much Z. 

Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

When we only think in these terms, our schemas of association tell us which words, individuals, or groups to be leery of with little thought given to whether the content of their message is actually true or false. 

I recently heard someone reference Luke 20:1-8 as an example of this phenomenon, and the groupthink involved in this passage had not before crossed my mind:

One day, as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, “Tell us by what authority you do these things, or who it is that gave you this authority.” He answered them, “I also will ask you a question. Now tell me, was the baptism of John from heaven or from man?” And they discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘From man,’ all the people will stone us to death, for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know where it came from. And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

Luke 20:1-8

As the chief priests and scribes discussed Jesus’ question of whether John the Baptist was “from heaven or from man,” notice how they never asked, “What is true? Was John the Baptist sent from God or man?” Instead, they deliberated their answer in terms of who it might associate them with. They were so concerned about which “tribe” others might perceive them to belong to that they never got at the truth, either of Jesus’ question or their own. 

Guilt-by-association tactics usually make us think in terms of categories like “safe” or dangerous,” “liberal” or “conservative,” “Christian” or “non-Christian.” In a new book called Mama Bear Apologetics, the writers explain why teaching children to divide the world into categories like these hinders critical thinking, and this also holds true for adults: 

“The danger of dividing up the world into simplistic ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ or even ‘Christian’ and ‘non-Christian’ categories is that our kids will eventually (and perhaps accidentally) swallow a lie from something they thought was safe or Christian, or reject a truth from something they thought was dangerous or non-Christian… Why? Because it gives them the mistaken impression that as long as they categorize something correctly, they can turn their brains off and operate on autopilot.”

Mama Bear Apologetics: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies

As the saying goes, all truth is God’s truth. If we really want to think critically about the world and people around us, we must resist the temptation of easy categories and associations. 

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Guilt-by-association tactics also make us poor neighbors as Christians, first, because they make us poor witnesses to truth.

Isaiah 59:14 says, “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter.” Christians are called to be truth tellers in the public square, and this includes accurately representing others’ views, even when we disagree with them, and refusing to participate in the spread of “fake news.” 

Employing guilt-by-association tactics that are inaccurate is a way of “bearing false witness against your neighbor” online (Exodus 20:16). We are sometimes all too ready to impute guilt on others, even though we would never want others to do it to us. 

But there is another way guilt-by-association tactics make us poor neighbors.

A couple of weeks ago a blog circulated on Twitter, calling for a Christian leader to clarify her position on gay marriage, in part, because of her “public affection and admiration” for people on the other side of the debate.

I truly understand the desire for people to clarify their beliefs, but guilt-by-association tactics such as this one are an uncharitable means for asking they do so. We’ve lost sight of what it means to love our neighbors when we assume someone’s beliefs because of their kindness and charity towards those we perceive to be “on the other side.” 

Jesus calls us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48). If we are called to love even enemies, how much more should we love people with whom we have strong disagreements? 

I am often tempted to withhold compassion and charity from those with whom I disagree, whether out of frustration with them or fear of what others might think. When the lure of guilt-by-association tactics is strong, God always brings to my mind the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. 

Someone who knew the Old Testament very well asked Jesus what he should do to have eternal life. When Jesus told him to love God and his neighbor, he responded: “And who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29)?” Rather than answering him directly, Jesus told a parable about a “good Samaritan” who stopped and cared for a man beaten and left to die by the road, after two others had passed by him. Jesus then asked the man, “Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man (Luke 10:36)?”

We are often like the man asking Jesus how we determine who is our neighbor: “Jesus, just tell us what boxes they should check before we extend our grief, compassion, and charity.” But Jesus didn’t define “neighbor” like this man wanted, and he doesn’t do it for us. Instead, he flips the question around and asks, “Are you going to be the neighbor?” 

Guilt-by-association tactics are tempting, especially online. In How to Think, Jacobs writes, “The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup.” 

For the Christian, a commitment to the truth both about God and reality and love for neighbor are both good strategies to start with when we open Twitter or Facebook and set out to think.