A reminder that Twitter is reality, but a louder version of reality that prioritizes the edges and extremes of whatever argument is discussed and tends to dull the middle.

I have my own thoughts on this from a Christian perspective, but I also think that Twitter seems uniquely able to foster vice signaling, the portrayal of vice as an inherent good, or at least a more “accurate” depiction of how people actually are and how they think.

If virtue signaling is based on disbelief — i.e. the person is signaling virtue they don’t actually have — then vice signaling is based on a post-Christian ‘realism’ — everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallen, but actually, that’s awesome and we should’t pretend otherwise.

I wrote on virtue signaling a few years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/magazine/virtue-signaling-isnt-the-problem-not-believing-one-another-is.html

In that piece I quote from Matthew 6:5, in which Christ decries the hypocrites who "love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” But the point of that verse isn’t the praying on the street corners, it’s doing so “to be seen by others."

The next verse is: "But when you pray, go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

As in, be virtuous, not because it looks dope, but because it’s the right thing to do.

To vice signal is to read Matthew 6:5 and conclude that the virtue was the problem, not the signaling or the hypocrisy.

This has been Jane Talks About the Bible, Which You Probably Didn’t Ask For, stay tuned for the next time I read 2 Timothy and think “Paul, maybe it would have been easier if you’d used fewer metaphors”

(If we’ve learned anything about Christ’s earliest followers, it’s that they did not get metaphors.)