It has never been easier to have a voice in the public square. Virtually anyone with access to the internet can make his (or her) ideas and opinions known to hundreds or thousands or even millions of people. And of course, there are still older forms of print communication with a large following—books, journals, magazines, newsletters, and the like. It would seem that more people are talking to each other about more things than ever before.
Or are we just talking past each other?
There will always be people who disagree with each other. That’s not necessarily a problem. And there will always be people who make bad arguments. That’s inevitable. But if we are interested in debating ideas (not just destroying people) and interested in persuading (not just performing), we will try our imperfect best to speak and write in a way that aims to be clear, measured, and open to reason.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Venting one’s spleen is easy; cultivating a disciplined life of the mind is hard.
So how do we get off the rails? How does the noble pursuit of truth turn into a hot mess of hurt feelings and recriminations? How should we not debate ideas in the public square?
Here are eight bad ideas when it comes to communicating our ideas in public:
1. Take everything personally.
I’ve learned over the years that anyone anywhere could be reading what I write or listening to what I preach. That means I try to be sensitive to the fact that people with different objections and different experiences may be on the other end of my communication. I do not want to needlessly alienate or offend. And yet, no writer or speaker can possibly anticipate every bad experience someone may associate with what is said. We’ve all suffered loss, and we’ve all been hurt—some more than others. Basic human decency says, “Let’s try not to make things worse.” At the same time, basic commonsense says, “Let’s not expect everyone else to know everything I’ve been through, and let’s not read my own sensitivities back into someone else’s motives or ideas.” In other words, try not to hurt people, and try not to be the sort of person who is easily hurt.
2. Turn everything up to 11.
If you want to rally a loyal core of followers and alienate most everyone else, crank up the rhetorical dial on everything you say and write. Get angry quickly, scold constantly, and be eager to die on every hill. We may think that we are helping the cause by making every controversy sound like the Battle of Britain and every opponent resemble the evil eye of Sauron, but in the end such rhetoric is usually self-defeating. Most people don’t want to live in a state of unrelenting intensity, and most issues are not as important as stopping Hitler’s conquest of Europe. If you want to be an effective communicator (over the long haul), move up and down the emotional register. Save 11 for when you really need it.
3. Assume your experience is the way things really are.
Most of us do it to some extent: we look at the world figuring the world as we’ve experienced it is normal. If we’ve been treated fairly most of the time, we assume the world is pretty fair. If we’ve worked hard and got ahead, we think others should be able to do the same. If we’ve seen good authority or have been in positions of authority, we tend to trust authority. On the other hand, if we’ve been betrayed by those in authority, we tend to assume the worst about persons in authority. If we’ve been lied to and abused, we tend to see abusers and enablers around every corner. If we’ve been hurt by conservative Christians, we may be especially wary of conservative Christianity. And on and on. Of course, our experiences—good, bad, and ugly—can be powerful motivators, pushing us to guard against theological error or speak out against dangerous people and patterns. But we must not assume that our experience has been everyone’s experience. We must be careful not to present assumptions as facts. We must not let a wonderful “normal” make us blind to corruption and evil, nor should we allow our painful “normal” to so color our vision that we take down people who do not deserve our wrath.
4. Refuse to deal in nuance.
Complex problems rarely have simple explanations, and even more infrequently do they have simple solutions. If the solutions were easy—especially for problems that everyone would like to see changed—they probably would have been implemented by now. People are usually multilayered, a mixture of good and bad and everything in between. History is usually complicated, filled with villains who get some things right and heroes who get some things wrong. And explaining why things are the way they are is not always straightforward. Monocausal explanations for social ills and societal trends are rarely right. The better explanation for the way things are the way they are is usually a combination of personal choices, cultural forces, intellectual assumptions, technological innovations, and a staggering array of different experiences, opportunities, gifts, abilities, advantages, and disadvantages.
5. Make everything about everything.
Our communication will never be profitable if we expect every article or every post or every book to say everything that needs to be said. We must be able to focus on a specific topic, debate, or idea without insisting that our opponents provide a caveat for every possible exception, a paragraph for every possible hurt, and an answer to every related problem. Of course, we don’t want to be ignorant about the various connecting ideas (see “nuance” above) or indifferent to the various questions people might raise, but we have to be able to deal rationally with the issue at hand. It’s okay to talk about one thing at a time.
6. Discount individuals and their ideas based on their group identity.
Although individualism can be of the dangerous expressive type, there is also a good kind of individualism. As Christians, we believe that each person is made in God’s image, that each person is responsible for his or her actions, and that each person will stand as an individual before God. To be sure, we are more than individuals. Being a man or a woman, an American or a Pakistani, a Black upper-class father or a White lower-class single mother shapes who we are and how we see things. But we should not dismiss other people’s arguments because the one making those arguments is male or female, Black or White, rich or poor. Bad arguments are bad even when our tribe makes them, and good arguments are good even when they come from the group we’ve been told we cannot trust. Argue with ideas not with stereotypes.
7. Pay no attention to the type of communication you are having.
As digital communication has gotten easier, the lines of demarcation between different kinds of communication has gotten fuzzier. This confusion can be found across different digital platforms (i.e., using Twitter for intricate and emotionally charged debates), but it also stretches across entirely different modes of communication. I’ve had people say to me before, “I read that article. Is that how you would counsel someone struggling with X?” But of course, a book or a blog post is written to a general audience not to a specific person. When talking in person in a private setting, you can ask questions, read facial gestures, ask for follow up, express sympathy, say a prayer, listen to someone’s story, and acknowledge pain. Public communication should not be rude and uncaring, but it will always be to some degree impersonal. When we load all means of discourse with therapeutic expectations—held hostage by the emotional needs of those listening or speaking—we treat books and articles and reviews and sermons as private encounters, just on a larger scale, instead of different kinds of communication altogether.
8. Forget that your opponents are real people.
I’m sure I’ve told this story before. Soon after I started blogging I wrote a snarky article about another Christian leader. A few days later I was speaking at a conference, and to my surprise I was sharing the platform with someone who worked with this leader. The man confronted me about what I had written. As much as I didn’t enjoy that interaction, it was the Lord’s grace to me. It reminded me of what I should have known but so many of us forget, that the people I disagree with are still real people. I’m sure I haven’t done it perfectly, but since that interaction over a decade ago I’ve always tried to think as I write or speak, “Is this what I would say and how I would say it if this person or these people were in the room? Would I be embarrassed to run into this person at a conference next week?” That doesn’t mean we cannot challenge each other in books and in blog posts. It doesn’t mean we cannot say hard or even pointed things to and about each other. But that lesson many years ago cemented in my brain that even famous people—athletes, movie stars, politicians, well-known Christians—are flesh and blood human beings. They may be better or worse than I think, but they have feelings too and are deserving of basic decency and respect.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

Collin, Justin, and I enjoyed sitting down with Dr. Miguel Núñez, Pastor for Preaching & Vision at IBI and President of Ministerios Integridad & Sabiduría, who left his medical practice to follow his passion of preaching the Gospel. When COVID-19 broke out in 2020, he used his medical expertise to assess the situation for The Gospel Coalition. Now, one year later, he offers his insights along with a conversation about how the preaching of the Gospel is spreading in the Dominican Republic.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

We’ve heard it so many times that it’s practically part of the Christmas story itself.
The Romans celebrated their seven-day winter festival, Saturnalia, starting on December 17. It was a thoroughly pagan affair full of debauchery and the worship of the god Saturn. To mark the end of the winter solstice, the Roman emperor established December 25 as a feast to Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Wanting to make Christianity more palatable to the Romans and more popular with the people, the church co-opted these pagan festivals and put the celebration of the birth of their Savior on December 25. For whatever the Christmas holiday has become today, it started as a copycat of well-established pagan holidays. If you like Christmas, you have Saturnalia and Sol Invictus to thank.
That’s the story, and everyone from liberal Christians to conservative Christians to non-Christians seem to agree that it’s true.
Except that it isn’t.
For starters, we should distinguish between roots that suggest a rip-off and roots that suggest a rebuke. The presence of some connection between a Christian celebration and a pagan celebration could imply a synchronistic copy-cat (“Hey, let’s Christianize this popular pagan holiday so as to make our celebration more palatable”), or it could mean a deliberate rejection (“Hey, this pagan holiday is horrible, so let’s put something distinctively Christian in its place”). After the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, Christians did sometimes adapt and Christianize pagan festivals. Whether they did so wisely and effectively is open to historical debate, but the motivation was to transform the paganism of the Roman world rather than raze it to the ground. Even if Christmas was plopped down on December 25 because of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, that by itself does not entail that the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth really began as a pagan festival.
But in the case of Christmas, there is good evidence that December 25 was not chosen because of any pagan winter holidays. This is the argument Andrew McGowan, of Yale Divinity School, makes in his article “How December 25 Became Christmas” (first published in Bible Review in 2002). Let me try to distill McGowan’s fine historical work by addressing three questions.
When did Christians first start celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25?
Unlike Easter, which developed as a Christian holiday much earlier, there is no mention of birth celebrations from the earliest church fathers. Christian writers like Irenaeus (130-200) and Tertullian (160-225) say nothing about a festival in honor of Christ’s birth, and Origen (165-264) even mocks Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries as pagan practices. This is a pretty good indication that Christmas was not yet on the ecclesiastical calendar (or at least not widespread), and that if it were, it would not have been tied to a similar Roman holiday.
This does not mean, however, that no one was interested in the date of Christ’s birth. By the late second century, there was considerable interest in dating the birth of Jesus, with Clement of Alexandria (150-215) noting several different proposals, none of which was December 25. The first mention of December 25 as Jesus’s birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century almanac called the Philocalian Calendar. A few decades later, around AD 400, Augustine would indicate that the Donatists kept Christmas festivals on December 25 but refused to celebrate Epiphany on January 6 because they thought the latter date was a recent invention. Since the Donatists, who arose during the persecution under Diocletian in 312, were stubbornly opposed to any compromise with their Roman oppressors, we can be quite certain they did not consider the celebration of Christmas, or the date of December 25, to be pagan in origin. McGowan concludes that there must have been an older North African tradition that the Donatists were steeped in and, therefore, the earliest celebrations of Christmas (we know about) can be dated to the second half of the third century. This is well before Constantine and during a time period when Christians were trying to steadfastly avoid any connections to pagan religion.
When was it first suggested that Christmas grew out of pagan origins?
None of the church fathers in the first centuries of the church makes any reference to a supposed connection between Christmas and Saturnalia or Sol Invictus. You might think, Well of course they didn’t. That would have been embarrassing. But if the whole point of basing your Christian birth holiday on an existing pagan birth holiday is to make your religion more popular or more understandable, surely someone would say something. Besides, as McGowan points out, it’s not like future Christian leaders shied away from making these connections. Gregory the Great, writing in 601, urged Christian missionaries to turn pagan temples into churches and to repurpose pagan festivals into feast days for Christian martyrs.
There is no suggestion that the birth of Jesus was set at the time of pagan holidays until the 12th century, when Dionysius bar-Salibi stated that Christmas was moved from January 6 to December 25 to correspond with Sol Invictus. Centuries later, post-Enlightenment scholars of comparative religions began popularizing the idea that the early Christians retrofitted winter solstice festivals for their own purposes. For the first millennium of the church’s history, no one made that connection.
Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25?
The first answer to the question is that some Christians don’t. In the Eastern branch of the church, Christmas is celebrated on January 6, probably for the same reasons—according to a different calculation—that Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 in the West. Although we can’t be positive, there is good reason to think that December 25 became the date for Christmas because of its connection to the (presumed) date of Jesus’s death and to the date of Jesus’s conception.
There are three dates at play in this calculation. Let’s start with the date of Jesus’s death.
Around AD 200, Tertullian of Carthage noted that Jesus died on the 14th day of Nisan, which was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman solar calendar. In the East, they made their calculation using the 14th day of the first spring month in their local Greek calendar. In the Roman calendar, this was April 6. So depending on who you asked, Jesus died on either March 25 or April 6.
In both the West and the East, there developed the same tradition that Jesus died on the same date he was conceived. An anonymous Christian treatise from fourth-century North Africa stated that March 25 was “the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Augustine in On the Trinity mentioned that same calculation. Similarly, in the East, the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis maintained that on April 6 Christ took away the sins of the world and on the same date was “shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin.” The fact that this curious tradition existed in two different parts of the world suggests it may have been rooted in more than mere speculation. If nothing else, as McGowan observes, these early Christians were borrowing from an ancient Jewish tradition that said that the most important events of creation and redemption occurred at the same time of the year.
From the date of Christ’s death, to the (same) date of his conception, we can easily see where the date of Christmas could have come from. If Jesus was conceived on March 25, then the best date to celebrate his birth must be nine months later on December 25 (or, in the East, January 6). While we can’t know for certain that this is where December 25 came from—and we certainly can’t be dogmatic about the historicity of the date—there is much better ancient evidence to suggest that our date for Christmas is tied to Christ’s death and conception than tied to the pagan celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.