The Debate About "Winsomeness" Is Really a Debate About Living On the Internet

If your life and income depend on offline relationships, winsomeness is merely the alternative to disaster.

Briefly, I want to expand one point that I made in my post about the Tim Keller controversy. One of the words that’s getting passed around during this evangelical conversation is “winsomeness,” and if you’re paying attention you might remember that it wasn’t that long ago that a very similar argument was had over the word “civility.” The upshot is simple: Winsomeness and civility are nice, idealistic words, but when it comes to defending biblical truth they are little more than false flags. Winsomeness, we are being told, is just one more performative shibboleth that forces Christians to water down their message and usually turns into a rhetorical Trojan horse into which heterodox complicity is smuggled.