True Believers?

1. Introduction

One popular image of the ‘brainwashed’ person is someone who repeats what their leader says and who professes conviction in what they repeat.[1] But do brainwashed people really believe what they say? On the one hand, interpretative charity suggests that they are committed believers but, on the other hand, common sense suggests that they don’t really believe what they are saying, that they are only parroting what they were taught or even told to say.

Brainwashed people parrot what they’re told but could they really parrot belief as well? What I want to ask is whether there is any coherence to the notion of parroted or mimetic belief, when someone believes something in a way that the belief is not truly their own, but merely copies what others believe (or seem to believe) in a way that makes their affirmation inauthentic.[2]

2. Case Study

Consider the case of Ryan Duffey Strode (‘Duffey’), a street preacher who, at ten years of age, would shout Biblical passages at passerbys. Ryan would of course profess belief in what he preached, but people were skeptical. On the Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah and the audience scrutinized his authenticity. Sticking to his trademark, Duffey shouted certain Biblical passages, but Oprah asked whether he could tell the people, in his own way, what those passages he was shouting meant. Duffey replied that “it means just what it says”. A baffled audience member immediately chimed in, inviting Duffey to pretend that she had never heard of the Bible, and to explain to her what he meant. But Duffey’s answer was another Biblical passage, this time about what preaching is. At this point, Duffey’s father intervened to defend his son, saying that the Bible tells them not to interpret it. Oprah, however, remarks that while that they all understand this, they still want to know whether Duffey could explain what he thinks in his own words. Duffey replies, seemingly sobered by the experience, that “I know what it means but it’s just hard to understand”, and that the prophets didn’t know what they were saying either.

Did Duffey believe what he asserted? Clearly, he wasn’t merely entertaining those Biblical passages, or pretending that they’re true. He wasn’t just hopeful either, or merely assuming them for the sake of argument. It wasn’t make-believe, the way I pretend with my son that Pikachu is hiding under the table. Duffey affirmed the passages he preached. He seemed convinced. But I also think there’s an important sense in which he did not believe them, which is precisely what Oprah and the audience were picking up on.

Philosophically, however, this is puzzling. Duffey seems like zealous religious believer, but calling him a ‘believer’ feels misleading. We feel Duffey doesn’t ‘get’ what he is saying, and this suggests that he isn’t really a believer at all. At best, he merely thinks he is. And yet this attribution of misperception about what one really thinks feels equally off, arrogant and uncharitable.

Of course, Duffey’s case is meant to generalize. Consider certain zealous proponents of political, religious, or moral views. Do they believe what they passionately say they believe? Here, the question is not “Are they really convinced, or do they have their doubts?” The question is rather “Do they even believe what they say, or are they just parroting?” and relatedly “Are they merely ‘blind followers’?”[4] What does it mean to qualify someone as a ‘true believer’? While being a ‘true believer’ is part of our ordinary thinking, how should we philosophically unpack this notion?

3. On True Believing

One immediate reaction to the Duffey case is that grasping the relevant proposition is necessary for qualifying as believing it, and so we might explain Duffey’s case as one in which it’s unclear whether Duffey grasped the relevant propositions and so whether he believed them at all. The audience in the Oprah Winfrey Show were inviting Duffey to provide evidence of this, and that’s what he couldn’t deliver.

I think the grasping condition is perhaps too weak and maybe even too strong. If grasping just means linguistically comprehending the sentences that one asserts, then Duffey likely met the condition. The passages weren’t Klingon for Duffy, and he seemed keenly aware Biblical narrative. He knew that he should say the Bible is not meant to be interpreted, and he knew to refer to the Bible with this reply.

However, if grasping is a matter of interpreting the sentences in a certain way, namely the way they ought to be understood (which I’ll assume goes beyond basic linguistic comprehension), then Duffey might not have grasped and so might not have believed what he purported to believe. The trouble is that many of us will thereby not qualify as believers of much of what we purport to believe as well because we similarly do not understand the relevant propositions in the right way. We have to distinguish between basic linguistic comprehension and ‘accurate’ understanding.

Something like a stronger version of the grasping condition is at play in fundamentalist criticism of moderate religious believers. According to ISIS, moderate Muslims are of the faith partly because they don’t ‘correctly’ understand the Koran. That is, they don’t grasp the relevant passages. Even wearing western clothes can be seen as apostatic (Wood 2005). Some evangelicals say that other Christians are not true believers of Christ partly because they don’t understand what Christ really meant. Incidentally, this is sometimes exactly the criticism that moderate Christian’s give of fundamentalists—that they are the ones who fail to understand Christ’s teachings in the Bible and per force the relevant Biblical passages.[5]

So, let’s try out a different view. According to what I’ll call ‘Answerability’, what distinguishes true believers from mimetic believers is that true believers can defend what they purport to believe with reasons. If you ask them “Why do you think God exists?”, they can give you a reason. Now, what Oprah Winfrey’s show made clear was that Duffey couldn’t defend any of what he was saying, at least not without resorting back to more Biblical passages, which in turn he couldn’t independently defend. Believers are supposed to be answerable for what they believe, but Duffey couldn’t answer for his purported beliefs.

Answerability doesn’t take us far enough. The problem is that, just as there is potentially mimetic belief, so too one can learn, through mere repetition of what someone says to one (“To that, you should say this”), to defend (or ‘defend’) what one asserts with reasons.[6] There are mere mimetic reasons for belief as well. Duffey was not only parroting certain religious views, plausibly he was parroting what look like reasons for those religious views as well. Here, I don’t mean that whenever someone parrots reasons for belief, they are not good reasons for the belief, only that they can look just like the reasons for which the person believes what they do, even if they aren’t. Mimetic believers can be mimetic reasoners as well.

Now, mounting template responses to criticism is a familiar practice, something we even teach students in university philosophy courses. For example, we might teach students an argument for mind-body dualism and then teach them a standard criticism of it. Both are templates: the arguments and objections are a kind of distillation of the more nuanced work we find in academic literature. It involves simplification, but it helps students to see the structure of arguments and how objections target specific elements of the arguments. Armed with these templates, the philosophy 101 student could defuse the untrained person’s belief in the separation of mind and body. The process can work almost algorithmically: plug in a position, output an objection. As with algorithms, there need be no ‘understanding’ of what’s believed for the process to be effective. Of course, the difference is that, as educators, we also try to facilitate understanding and the space to think critically about these arguments, but when the goal is not quite education but garnering more followers—‘true believers’—it might be enough to simply arm them with template reasons and responses.

4. Owning our Beliefs

I now want to try out a different account. What’s missing in cases like Duffey’s is ownership over our beliefs. Something can be in your possession without being your own. You can have a belief without it being your own. If you accept the repercussions and commitments of what you purport to believe, then you are not merely parroting belief, but going beyond the act of repetition, inserting you own agency.

Given his age and limited experience, Duffey couldn’t take ownership of what he purported to believe yet, just as children—although they can say the same words as someone who exclaims “Yes, that’s fine with me”—do not thereby consent to certain actions. I want to say that there is a lack of ownership over what one takes to be true.

Taking ownership of belief is multifaceted. Like Answerability, there is an epistemological aspect where one knows not only what the reasons are for the belief, but additionally has their own reasons for the belief. Here, I don’t mean that the reasons originated with them, only that the reasons have undergone their scrutiny. This doesn’t mean their reasons are any good, but it makes sense to qualify them as their reasons rather than just the reasons that there are for the belief. The person has mixed their agency with the reasons they’ve been exposed to.

What this means is that, if you simply affirm what someone tells you, you don’t qualify as a bona fide or authentic believer of what they said. More is necessary. Importantly, this doesn’t mean that you lack good reason to believe what they said, only that, as far as authenticity goes, you differ from the ‘true believer’.

There are moral and practical dimensions to this as well. When you take ownership for your thinking, you take on certain commitments. What these commitments are will depend on the kind of belief it is and what your conditions are like, both intrinsically and extrinsically—what are your capabilities and interests? What is your social environment like? What is your sphere of influence? Sometimes it means making a commitment to certain ideals, people, causes, or institutions, or to doing certain things. It can be very personal.

5. Conclusion

Coming back to Duffey, he believed certain evangelical Christian views, but the experience we have of him as not being a ‘true believer’ can be explained in terms of lacking ownership of his beliefs. In epistemological terms, the reasons Duffey was likely exposed to for his evangelical views were reasons that he could not yet make his own. It’s not that there were no reasons that he could give for his beliefs. Rather, the reasons he could give were not yet mixed with his agency.

When we see children holding politically charged protest signs or shouting political slogans, we don’t look to the children for a defense but to their parents or guardians. The kids can’t take responsibility for being believers in those kinds of claims yet. In Duffey’s case, his proselytizing and repetition of certain Biblical passages is something he couldn’t take ownership for, and this rift in our experience of him leads to the puzzlement that he’s at once a believer and not a believer of what he asserts.

Picture: Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

Acknowledgments

This blog is the fifth post of the series “Extreme Beliefs and Behavior.” Research for this post has been made possible through the project Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) in the program Horizon 2020 (851613) and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Bibliography

Hassan, A., Barber, S. J. (2021). The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect. Cognitive Research 6, 38: 1-12.

Hieronymi, Pamela (2006). Controlling attitudes. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (1):45-74.

Nguyen, C. Thi (2017). The Uses of Aesthetic testimony. British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (1):19-36.

Taylor, Kathleen (2016). Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control. Oxford University Press.

Notes:

[1] According to the illusory truth effect, repetition can increase the sense that something is true, so perhaps eventually the claim does seem true to the recipient. See Hassan and Barber (2021). For a careful study of brainwashing, see Taylor (2016).

[2] Nguyen (2021) calls a similar phenomenon ‘doxastic repetition’, when someone asserts or testifies that p and the recipient comes to believe that p without qualification on the basis of that testimony along.  Mimetic belief is very similar, but is rather belief by copying rather that belief by the recipient’s trust in the testifier’s word alone.

[3] From the Oprah Winfrey Show, 04/14/188: https://www.oprah.com/own-oprahshow/did-this-child-preacher-understand-the-words-hes-yelling-video

[4] We can distinguish between two kinds of ‘blind followers’. There are those who truly believe something because of their extreme trust in some authority who tells them what to think and those who follow a crowd, group, or authority, without having any grip on what they profess or why. They just affirm what they’re hearing. Brainwashed people can come in either form. Thanks to Alessandra Tanesini for pressing me on this point.

[5] For example, evangelical leader Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, said that “Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—‘turn the other cheek’—[and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” … “When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,” he added. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis”. (Quoted in Slisco 2023). https://www.newsweek.com/evangelicals-rejecting-jesus-teachings-liberal-talking-points-pastor-1818706

[6] Consider Hieronymi (2006) for this view of belief: “In self-reflective, language- using creatures like us, believing p will thus leave the believer answerable to requests for a particular kind of justification – a justification that bears on p’s truth – and open to possible charges of inconsistency. If you believe p, you can be asked why you do – what you take to show it to be true – and you can be asked to explain how that belief comports with your other attitudes and even your actions” (Hieronymi 2006, 49-50). Moreover, we can probably believe on hunches or through wishful thinking, in which case we also can’t answer for what we believe with reasons.