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Musings for Friday - Anecdotes or Parables [1]

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Date: 2023-10-06  

Many years ago I was having a conversation with someone who had grown up in a Southern Evangelical church (theirs being Southern Baptist, now attending a mainline church. Mine, Independent Christian, formerly Church of Christ) about the use of parables by ministers and how they told them as anecdotes. They were disbelieving. They argued at first that their most recent pastor (one of the few women pastors within this church) wouldn’t do that, but that all of her stories were anecdotal, real life experiences. I pointed out that all of these pastors, somehow all had remarkably similar life experiences.

Granted, my explanation took longer than one sentence in an essay about an anecdotal experience. Why am I telling you here? Politicians. Politicians do it too. Some of them use stories that are more outrageous than others. Usually, it’s a vague recollection about some person they ran across or maybe a distance relative. Why don’t they get called out? Sometimes they do. Sometimes not.



What happens when they do? It depends. If it’s egregious enough and not explained it can be devastating, but increasingly if it’s someone from the GOP and the story was really over the top, they get rewarded. News outlets friendly to their cause come to their cause and tell their viewers that this politician is only being attacked because they’re defending freedom or some other nonsensical phrase.

What’s my point? Cautionary. When calling out someone’s story we should be slow to call it a lie when it might be a poor use of a parable told as an anecdote.

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