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One form of argument which is often used in politics is the concept of the slippery slope– that if you allow one thing it will eventually lead to another and you will end up in a place you do not want to be because all it takes is step after step. It’s followed up by the example of how to boil a live frog– you turn the water up gradually.
The counter balance to the Slipper Slope is the Pendulum Effect– but both of imply that the world is constantly in a game of tug of war, seeing how far they can pull one side in the direction that they want to go.
The culture war is the biggest area where Slippery Slopes are pulled out. For the left, the Slippery Slope is being brought out against Abortion. Now that Roe v. Wade is gone and some Republican states are putting on strict bans, the left would have you believe that the whole country is going to ban abortion tomorrow.
For the right, the current Slippery Slope they’re working on is the one against ESG and DEI. If you haven’t heard of these acronyms, they stand for Environment Safety Governance and Diversity Equity Inclusion. Both of these are left-wing programs put into companies and states via investment and private equity firms are all about a left-wing agenda. The right would have you believe that everyone will be leftist and that all freedom of speech will be taken away.
To prevent these things from happening, people put pressure on corporations for and against these things, creating boycotts over sins against the cultural issues that they support and canceling people who dare utter opposing views. The left did a bunch of this over same-sex marriage opposition and the right did it with transgenderism.
Both groups complain when someone on their “team” loses their job, or is the target. And every time one of these things is called, the believer has to weigh whether they can patronize a place and stay firm to their convictions, or whether there’s even a way to replace the store or service they’ve been called to boycott.
And then there’s the efficacy of it all. Very seldom does a boycott work– with the exception maybe of Bud Light last year, they rarely make a splash or cause people to change. Many believers end up just staying out of it altogether simply because of the hassle and the fact that stores have things from multiple places and it would be hard to keep up with the good or bad ones– I mean, there are now sites keeping lists!
As believers, we’re called to show love, and to have mercy because God had mercy on us. We are called to forgive, to consider one another first, and to live lives pleasing to God. That’s our top priority.
