What does it mean to be worldly? I still find David Wells’s definition unbeatable: “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.”
Wells emphasizes the perniciousness and pervasiveness of worldliness. We get so accustomed to sin we don’t see it. And that means we should always ask, What sins appear normal today? What sins are so common we hardly shrug at them?
The more I contemplate this question in a digital age, the more I’m convinced we’ve entered an era marked by the normalization of slander.
What Is Slander?
Slander is spreading untruth about someone else so their reputation is damaged. These untruths are sometimes flat-out lies designed to inflict maximum harm, but often slander takes the form of deceptive inferences, assuming the worst of others instead of the best, or deliberately crafting a preferred narrative out of conveniently edited facts.
God hates slander (Prov. 6:16, 19) because he is the Truth. Satan loves slander because he’s the father of lies. Jon Bloom remarks on “its poisonous power” as “one of the adversary’s chief strategies to divide relationships and deter and derail the mission of the church. . . . He knows that slander deadens and splits churches, poisons friendships, and fractures families. He knows slander quenches the Holy Spirit, kills love, short-circuits spiritual renewal, undermines trust, and sucks the courage out of the saints.”
The antidote to slander is found in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s description of keeping the ninth commandment against bearing false witness. Faithful Christians will be inclined toward these actions: “the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own, . . . a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them.”
Instead, we often demonstrate a propensity for slander. The Puritan writer Thomas Manton believed the source of slander is self-love and the desire for human praise. Slanderers feel contempt toward someone with a sterling reputation. “They blast their gifts with censure, aggravate their failings, and load them with prejudice, that upon the ruins of their good name, they might erect a fabric of praise to themselves,” he says. Slander and censure go together, ever blasting outward, never looking inward. “Self-lovers are always bitter censurers; they are so indulgent to their own faults, that they must spend their zeal abroad.”
Slander’s Poisonous Effects
Matthew Lee Anderson describes the soul-sucking nature of slander by pointing to the New Testament’s framing of this sin in terms of consumption. Galatians 5:15 warns against the tendency to “bite and devour one another,” which echoes the psalmist who speaks of people with teeth like “spears and arrows” and tongues like “sharp swords” (Ps. 57:4). Anderson also quotes a medieval text that describes a woman “slandered, eaten away at, gnawed at, by the people, for the grace that God performed in her of contrition, of devotion, and of compassion.” He writes,
Slanders and defamation limit the sphere of the victim’s action: they constrict his agency and move them to the margins of the community. To that extent, they impose a form of poverty, as they are designed to remove the social conditions necessary for that person’s flourishing. In stripping away the person’s “good name,” slanders, detraction, and defamation hollow out their social identity and reduce the person to whatever interior resources they have left to survive. And while the material dimension of slander is not the primary one, it can in fact take “food off the table”—leaving a person incapable of feeding themselves. To that extent, the language of “devouring” each other through our speech is apt.
Social media platforms grease the tracks for an easy slide into slander or its amplification. Through an emphasis on speed and quick reactions, social media often cultivates accidental slander. While some people intend to slander, others simply want to appear knowledgeable and will participate in slander unwittingly.
Slander spreads because slander works. Social media algorithms favor slanderers, raising their profile, attracting more and more attention to the accusers and the people who receive the blows. In an era of institutional decline, social media has shifted the incentives away from looking for common ground or trying to get along. Now the aim is to tear down (so others can get ahead).
If church leaders from just 20 or 30 years ago were dropped into today’s world to witness the many interactions that take place on social media, they’d be shocked at the prevalence of slander—the acceptability of this sin and the ease with which people engage in it. What’s most frightening about slanderous activity is how invisible it is to us.
Slander and Friendship with the World
One of the strange ironies of our time is the pervasiveness of slander among Christians who take a firm stand for truth, who oppose values that don’t align with scriptural teaching, and who shun any appearance of trying to be on good terms with the world (whether through “niceness” or “winsomeness” or “accommodation”). “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?” they say, quoting James. “So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God” (4:4). The way you show yourself to be on God’s side is by demonstrating your hostility to the world—confronting the ideologies that have harmed the family, the church, and the wider society; or railing against the moral quagmire of sexual immorality and pornography and the shallow allure of pop culture.
This impulse, motivated by a good and godly desire for holiness that provides a stark contrast to the world, can easily become a cover that excuses or minimizes sinful speech toward other Christians. It misses the subtler form of worldliness that’s truer to James’s context. James isn’t describing “friendship with the world” as a soft or overly accommodating posture toward anti-Christian people and positions. For James, the signs of “friendship with the world” and “hostility toward God” are the “wars and fights among you” and the “passions” and “wrong motives” that drive this descent into conflict.
What’s more, James’s warning about worldliness comes just after his admonishment to tame the tongue, whose power can set forests ablaze (James 3). And right after James’s warning comes this command: “Don’t criticize one another, brothers and sisters. Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law” (4:11). In context, then, friendship with the world results in “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” leading to “disorder” (3:14, 16).
Friendship with God is demonstrated in heavenly wisdom marked by “good conduct” and works done in “gentleness” (v. 13). Righteousness isn’t just taking the right stand against the darkness but taking the right stand the right way: as a holy people “pure” and “peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who cultivate peace” (vv. 17–18).
Resist the Spread of Slander
Our social media habits have made slander so prevalent, so normal, that we’re willing to overlook its pernicious effects as long as it helps our cause or confirms our narrative. We no longer see this sin as disqualifying. We no longer even see it as sin. I fear we’ve normalized this form of worldliness to the point that the righteousness described by James (“peace-loving, gentle, . . . full of mercy”) now gets reframed as soft, or squishy, or compromised.
These dynamics should scare us. Social media makes slander seem normal and righteousness strange. Few of us can maintain the discipline necessary to stop the spread, or refrain from furthering our own cause on the backs of others’ broken reputations, or keep our hurt at being slandered from turning to gall. All the incentives pull us toward the vortex of these works of darkness.
I don’t have simple solutions here, apart from repentance (it’s hard to find anyone with clean hands on this front) and desperate pleading with the Lord to open our eyes to this form of worldliness. Perhaps the first step would be to slow down, to make sure we never spread any statement or accusation if the veracity may be in question. Above all, we must learn to sow peace, as James says. To be marked not by tongues that set forests ablaze but by the tongues of fire that rest on all those filled by the Spirit. May God help us resist the impulse to be so blinded by the rightness of our cause that we do the work of the Accuser.
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