One of the least known but common rhetorical tactics I’ve ever heard of is the Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine. I believe Nicholas Shackel is the originator of the term, and one of my favorite bloggers Scott Alexander helped popularize it.
Scott Alexander explains it precisely,
The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
He follows it up with several examples. I’d like to throw in a few of my own.
Socialists often want to switch to a radically different economic system, one where the means of production are held by private individuals to one where they’re held by “society” which ends up being government. When it is pointed out that socialism was tried by several societies, each ending up in desperate poverty, the socialist will counter with examples from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and other Scandinavian countries. Well, that’s really nice, but they’re mixed economies like ours. If by socialism you really meant mainly private means of production mixed with heavy taxes and a large welfare state, then why are you quoting Marx again? Why are you trying to dismantle “Corporate America” again?
Biblical inspiration means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the variance is almost always among more academically minded. For most Christians it means both inerrancy in historical events and inerrancy in teaching. When this definition runs up against some really tough to swallow texts, inerrancy becomes interpreted much more loosely. With historical events all of the sudden interpretation becomes a thing. With teaching all the sudden opinions become a thing. And inerrancy doesn’t conflict with these two things. Okay, but you would malign anyone who tried to pull such a thing with passages that agree with the popular Christian worldview.
