When to Respond to Slander (and When to Ignore It)

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Not long ago, a woman told me about a conflict she was having with a fellow member of her church. Conflict might be the wrong word, since it seemed mostly one-sided. The woman said that the other church member was telling falsehoods about her in hallway conversations and social media groups.

“You seem to mostly ignore it when people lie about you,” the woman said to me. “Is that because it would be wrong for me to defend myself? Should I just ignore what they say about me?”

Part of the problem with answering this question is that we often think wrongly about what it means to “ignore.” Ignoring something sounds, by definition, passive—it is, literally, not to know and thus not to respond. And yet, ignorance—rightly defined—is active. In order to ignore well, we have to know well. That’s perhaps the biggest obstacle to making the decision to ignore or to engage.

Responding to slander about oneself is biblically complicated in a way that some other questions—say, “Should I have an affair?” or “Should I embezzle from my company?” —are not. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself,” the Bible says in one verse (Prov. 26:4, ESV throughout). And then the very next verse says, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” This isn’t a contradiction. There are times when responding is the right thing to do, and times when it’s the wrong thing.

Morality is not the compilation of data but conformity to a Person. The example of Jesus is complicated too because, as the wisdom of God, Jesus could see perfectly what we see imperfectly—which situations call for a Proverbs 26:4 ignoring and which call for a Proverbs 26:5 engaging.

When it comes to slander about himself, Jesus sometimes directly contradicted untruth (John 5:19–46). Sometimes, he responded not with a defense of himself but by asking questions or telling stories that revealed the underlying motives (Luke 14:1–6). Quite often, he simply ignored what was said about him altogether (Mark 11:33). At least once, he even ridiculed the slander (Luke 7:28–34).

In all those contexts, though, Jesus modeled what it means to avoid the warning of Proverbs, that is, to avoid sinning in response to sins against us. He said: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well” (Matt. 5:38–40).

The apostle Peter commands us to be less concerned about what people say about us than about what we actually are. “If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you,” he wrote. “But let none of you suffer as a murder or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler” (1 Pet. 4:14–15).

That requires a knowing of your own vulnerabilities. My church-slandered conversation partner noted that I usually ignore untrue things said about me, but she probably overestimated how much I even know about them. I don’t search my name or look at tagged replies from people I don’t follow on social media. That’s not because I think people are wrong to do that but because I know myself; if I paid attention to that stuff, I would be distracted. I couldn’t do what God has called me to do.

The woman I was talking to might be different. But if you have a tendency for quarrelsomeness or an oversensitivity to other people’s approval, you might be best served not just by ignoring slander but by trying to avoid, so much as is possible with you, knowing about it altogether. If you can’t respond to slander without retaliation or revenge, don’t do it.

This also requires knowing the situation. Jesus treated people who were genuinely confused by misinformation (John 1:45–51) differently from those who were seeking to, as Matthew put it, “entangle him in his words” (Matt. 22:15–22). Many of the people I know who exert time and energy “correcting the record” about themselves often don’t recognize the reasons behind why the lies are told about them.

Sometimes it’s genuine misinformation—in which case, confronting the lie with the truth might be the right thing to do. In many cases, though, the problem is not that the truth isn’t available but rather that it isn’t useful. In such cases, people are trying to build a “platform” for themselves by making inflammatory statements about someone other people in their world know. To respond to that makes as much sense as Jodie Foster responding to John Hinckley shooting a president to get her attention.

There are sometimes quite different principles involved in defending others from slander than in defending oneself. Joseph forgiving his brothers for their injustice (Gen. 50:19–21) is commendable. If he had waved away their mistreatment of others, though, that would have been unjust. Generally speaking, the principles of Proverbs 27:2—“Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips”—often can be applied to the question of responding to lies about oneself.

When someone’s lying about you, lean in the direction of ignoring it, unless obviously not applicable. When it comes to lies about someone else, do the reverse. To silently pass by while someone tells what you know to be lies about your neighbor is to get on the wrong side of Jesus’ parable of the beaten man and the Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). Jesus waved off a lot of slander about himself, but he didn’t stand for it when it was directed toward, for instance, the man he healed from blindness (John 9:1–5).

The first-century church at Smyrna suffered slander from all directions: Their home religious community disowned them. The Roman Empire labeled them as seditious and erosive of national character. Jesus told them he knew about the slander, that it would get worse, but that what it means to overcome is a matter of his judgment seat, not the judgment of everyone else (Rev. 2:8–11).

The woman who asked me how—or whether—to respond to lies about her needs to know, above all, that Jesus knows the difference between the truth and lies; he is the difference between truth and lies. When deciding whether to correct the record or to remain silent and entrust yourself to God, seek to know yourself and your situation—but, most of all, seek to know him.

Sometimes a response is right. But more often than you might think, ignorance is blessed.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.