Slander Between Siblings, Biological and Spiritual

David W. T. Brattston

A Pattern Between Slanderers and Their Victims

A country lawyer frequently writes letters on behalf of clients who feel they have been slandered by someone. Such letters are all the same: They accuse the recipient of making defamatory comments about the client, deny the truth of the allegations, and threaten court action if the recipient repeats them to anyone, ever. The letters never ask for an apology; the lawyer knows human pride is such that no one will ever offer one. Not even a court will order an apology.
Once I even had another lawyer write such letters on my behalf when I believed myself libeled by the Law Society. It was lawyer against lawyer, of which more below.

From writing many such letters I have noticed a pattern in contexts in which people are accused of slandering another, a pattern in the type of relationships between slanderers and their victims. I believed this pattern to be peculiar to my own practice until I compared notes with a lawyer two counties away. The patterns were identical: The largest numbers of slanders are between brothers and sisters; the second largest category is between members of the same church congregation.

Psychologists might explain the first pattern as sibling rivalry, but what about church members? The other lawyer and I dealt with members of traditional mainline denominations, not those groups where all enthusiastically regard each other as brothers and sisters. However, a common element may underlie both types of relationships, more on this after reviewing slander in Christian history.

Traditional Christian Teaching

One would think that Christians would never engage in defamation. Our holy book takes a dim view of it, beginning with “You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people” (Lev. 19:16 RSV). Psalm 27:2 and 140:11 classify slanderers as evildoers. Psalm 50:20 says God will punish anybody who slanders his natural brother; in 101:5 it is the psalmist himself who will destroy whomever defames his/her neighbor. Proverbs 10:18 opines that “he who slanders is a fool.” 

Jesus in Matthew 15:19-20 and Mark 7:20-23 denounces slander as evil and defiling to the slanderer. Romans 1:29-30, 1 Timothy 6:4 and 2 Timothy 3:3 discountenance it, while Ephesians 4:31, Colossians 3:8, and 1 Peter 2:1 exhort believers to put away slander along with other sins. Christian women in particular must not be slanderers (1 Tim. 3:11; Titus 2.3).

The thrust of the last paragraph above is not merely one possible interpretation of the Bible among many, concocted by me two millennia after the Scriptures were written, but was shared by post-biblical Christian authors before the third century. There is much value in consulting these early authors: 

(1) They demonstrate how biblical teachings were understood by their first audiences, within the same culture and worldview as theirs, and hence give the best idea of how the biblical authors intended themselves to be understood.

(2) They, or Christians not long earlier, still had the oral teachings of Christ and the apostles fresh in memory, before the body of Christian ethics could stray far from its roots.

(3) They indicate how the earliest recipients of grace through Christ responded to it under the supervision and unwritten examples of the apostles and other early disciples who were inspired by God.
Included in some early editions of the New Testament, the first-century First Letter of Clement 35:8, like Psalm 50:20, discountenances defaming one’s neighbor.

Another work so useful and influential that, like First Clement, it was included in some early editions of the New Testament, is the Shepherd of Hermas. Mand. 8.3 and Sim. 9.26.7 give slander similar treatment in the first half or middle of the second century.

The same is true of the Epistle of the Apostles 35 and 49, written between A.D. 140 and 160, about the same time as Letter to the Philippians 5.2 by Polycarp (not the apostle Paul), pastor-bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John. Polycarp wrote that deacons in particular should not slander. (Polycarp may have been “the angel of the church in Smyrna” addressed in Revelation 2:8).
Already we are surrounded with a great cloud of witnesses without examining the ancient restatements of “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exod. 20.16; Deut. 5.20) or biblical and early post-biblical Christian strictures against evil-speaking in general.

Another Pattern: Slander and Envy

Another pattern: “envy” often appears in lists of sins where “slander” is also condemned, such as in Mark 7:22, Romans 1:19-20, 1 Timothy 6:4, and 1 Peter 2:1.

In the mid-second-century, exhortations against envy and against slander are also close to each other in Second Clement 4:3, the oldest surviving Christian sermon outside the New Testament. In the A.D. 190s they appear together in the Eclogae Propheticae 30 of Clement of Alexandria, a great Christian thinker and educator of his day.

Perhaps the ancients linked the two because people often utter derogatory remarks about others out of resentment and hence to lessen the importance of their victims’ achievements in the estimation of other people. These may be achievements that the slanderers wish they themselves had accomplished but lack the talent or willingness to do so.

A Modern-Day Case

This brings us to the time I had another lawyer threaten libel proceedings against the Law Society. I was sitting on a court that adjudicated disputes over lawyers’ fees. One lawyer questioned whether such court should continue to exist and had himself appointed to a Bar Society committee to look into the matter. (Either he was the most prominent member or it was a committee of one.)
I admit that as then constituted there were deficiencies in the court’s procedures and internal communications. However, his report not so much questioned these but attacked the characters and competence of its judges, including me.

The Society reproduced and circulated his report. I considered that it libeled me. As is the law, I believed that my remaining silent in the face of such allegations would be deemed an admission of the truth of them, and hence grounds for my dismissal or being passed over for promotion to a higher court.

I contacted the top libel lawyer in the jurisdiction, who then sent letters similar to those described in the first paragraph of this article to the committee member and the Law Society. My demands were modest: I did not request money but only a retraction and correction of the report’s negative comments about me and that it circulate this rectification to the same persons as the original report. 

The Society did so; my objections were satisfied; my reputation was restored. Rather than vainly strive to overcome the mountain of human pride, I had not asked for an apology.

Points to Ponder

The above raises a number of questions. Did the slandering lawyer prove the link many early Christian authors made between envy and defamation? In churches and families, why are people defamed by those who should love them most? Why are Christian congregations such fertile grounds for statements that prompt their victims to seek legal counsel? 

Could the equality between brothers and sisters and the ethos that all church members and all lawyers are equal be a motive to lessen others’ achievements? Are slanderers cutting down what they would have liked to have accomplished but lacked the talent, divine favor, or work ethic to attain? In a twisted and misleading way, slander restores the appearance of equality by alleging that the victim is not such a great achiever after all.

—David W. T. Brattston is a freelance writer in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, whose articles on early and contemporary Christianity have been published in Canada, England, Australia, South Africa, the Philippines, and the United States.