People Are Saying

Humans have a significant tendency toward joining the bandwagon: we are social beings, and we want to fit into our preferred group of people. We will more likely than not adapt our clothing preferences, linguistic idiom, and thoughts and feelings about the world in order to share in a group identity. The bandwagon effect, as it is known, represents a powerful force and influence in people’s behavior.

A similar tendency can be found at work in the way people think, reason, argue, and discuss various topics and ideas. It is the informal logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum, Latin for “appeal to the people”: believing or claiming a given idea, matter, or proposition is true because it is popular and accepted by many people. It goes by many names: bandwagon or common belief fallacy, appeal to the consensus, majority, people, or popularity, mob appeal, or the authority of the many. We can call it the “people are saying” fallacy, because such is often how the fallacy gets defended or justified: well, people are saying this or that, so therefore it must be true and you must take it seriously.

Argumentum ad populum is related to argument from authority, in which a given truth claim is justified because a person with authority or prominence accepts it as true; when the source of authority and popularity are people from the past, it becomes argument from tradition. Arguments from authority are akin to peer pressure from famous or powerful people, and arguments from tradition are peer pressure from dead people.

Most people like to think of themselves as free and rational thinkers, accepting things as true or rejecting things as false based on reasoned consideration of all available evidence. In truth, however, we tend to follow gut instincts about whether we accept or reject a given premise as truth and then use our faculties of reason to justify and rationalize our decisions. Since we are social creatures, and almost every truth claim we encounter is communicated in some kind of social and cultural environment, we should not be surprised to discover how much of our thinking and belief system may be formed and shaped by what is acceptable and popular in our preferred social context. Ironically, this trend might be best exemplified by those who claim to resist it: many will make much of their rejection of what seems most popular in general social and cultural norms, but in so doing will, as a group, tend to affirm very similar “alternative” viewpoints and ideologies. In this way people either seek to conform to the in-group or what seems to be a favored out-group; underneath it all, however, remains that tendency towards conformity.

We can see the argumentum ad populum at work in all sorts of disciplines and aspects of life. Consider science: even in what most people see as the most logical and rational of the disciplines, stories abound of scientific breakthroughs which took many years to be accepted because they defied what had been commonly accepted by authority, tradition, and popularity. This is as true for plate tectonics in the twentieth century as it was for the Copernican revolution in the seventeenth. The bandwagon effect and argumentum ad populum have become the basis of modern advertising and marketing: all kinds of psychological and rhetorical tricks are used to get you to think you must use a given product or use certain services because everyone else is doing so. The effectiveness of such advertising and marketing has not been lost on the political realm: far too often, politicians will attempt to defend whatever exaggeration or distortion of the truth they have declared by asserting it is based on what “people are saying.”

Bandwagons and argumentum ad populum prove quite pervasive in religion. Many religious people today have seen the advertising and marketing success of appealing to authority: they try to get celebrities to get associated with a given religious organization, and many people become more interested in a set of religious beliefs on account of the people who are following it. Argument from tradition has proven even more prominent: it is explicitly the dogma of many religious organizations, and plenty of people accept and follow a given religious path almost entirely because such is what their ancestors practiced. Every elder and preacher has been approached by a Christian with some sort of “concern,” and that concern is almost invariably phrased as, “people are saying,” even though, quite often, the only “people” so saying are the person with the concern and anyone else s/he has been able to influence.

We can see the power of the argumentum ad populum at work in the resistance to the prophetic exhortations of Jesus and the prophets as manifest in the Scriptures. Many sincere Christians wonder how the Israelites could have possibly denied or rejected the messages of the prophets. Israelites did listen to prophets: the false prophets who seemed to abound in greater numbers than prophets faithfully warning the people.

Consider how the prophet Micah lamented how a man who would come and prophesy of beer and wine would be a prophet accepted and approved by the people in Micah 2:11; they would not hear a message of humiliation and destruction, remaining overly confident God would never allow such a thing to happen to them (Micah 2:6-7).

Consider Hananiah’s message of YHWH defeating Babylon and restoring all those exiled in 597 BCE back to the land versus Jeremiah’s message of YHWH expecting everyone to submit to Nebuchadnezzar and death and devastation for those who resisted him in Jeremiah 27:1-28:17: which message would have proven more popular for Judahites in their national pride and confident theology?

Consider how the religious authorities appeal to the officers who heard and were mesmerized by Jesus in John 7:45-52. How could those officers be mesmerized by Jesus? After all, none of the Sanhedrin members or the Pharisees believed in Him (although that was not as true as they imagined it was; John 7:48). Instead, the “accursed rabble” believed in Him, and they did not know any better (John 7:49). Thus the religious authorities displayed the obvious and the pernicious forms of argumentum ad populum: they appealed to the authorities not believing in Him, as if their views represented the sum of all truth, and also condemned the viewpoint of the majority simply for being the viewpoint of the majority, as if because so many people accepted it, it must therefore not be true.

There is one time in which argumentum ad populum is valid, and it is in lexicography: since language is designed to functionally convey ideas and concepts, dictionaries and lexicons ultimately reflect the most popular ways in which words are used. For example, in English, “church” primarily means “a building in which Christians gather for worship.” We might protest how the Greek word ekklesia, which translates “church,” means people and never a building; even so, in English, when most English speakers hear or think of “church,” they think of a church building, and so such is the primary meaning, even if it is not entirely consistent with the intention of ekklesia in Greek.

Otherwise, we must be on guard about argumentum ad populum, because “people are saying” is not the basis upon which something is true, or, for that matter, false. Sometimes most people reject a given truth and cling to some kind of delusion; sometimes the majority recognize a given thing as true and it is a deluded minority who insist it must be false because the majority thinks it is true. Many times, truth proves unpopular, especially when truth becomes uncomfortable and would require significant change and repentance. Nevertheless, just because a given idea or statement proves uncomfortable does not automatically make it true and valid. Unfortunately, a lot of forces will often conspire to attempt to leverage all kinds of influences and resources to get people to accept something which is false and/or damaging as true and/or beneficial; on the other hand, sometimes people passionately dedicate themselves and all their resources to affirm and promote the truth.

As Christians we do well to recognize the powerful influences which social acceptance and belonging can have in our quest to ascertain and uphold what is true, right, and good in God in Christ through the Spirit. Strong temptations will often exist to affirm and uphold what “people are saying”; equally strong temptations will often exist to deny and reject what other “people are saying.” We do best to critically examine any and all truth claims in terms of what God has made known in Christ and through the Spirit as revealed in Scripture: all truth is rooted and grounded in Him despite the winds of popularity and unpopularity (cf. Colossians 2:1-10). When confronted with what “people are saying,” we should try to figure out who is saying it, and to what end, and most importantly, with what evidence behind it. May we always seek to uphold the truth of God in Christ, no matter how popular or unpopular with others, and never allow our loyalty to being part of any given group come between us and maintaining the truth of what God has accomplished in Jesus. May we entrust ourselves fully to Jesus the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and to share in the resurrection in Him!

Ethan R. Longhenry