The most celebrated example of charitable interpretation in contemporary public life is not an example of charitable interpretation. It is a performance of it. And the difference matters — not as an academic distinction, but as a moral one.

Alex O'Connor and William Lane Craig meet on stage. They listen to each other with visible attention. They restate each other's positions with care. They disagree without rancour. The audience, starved for civility in an age that has made a blood sport of contempt, responds with something approaching gratitude. The videos accumulate millions of views. The tickets — fifty pounds at the Royal Institution — sell briskly. Commentary is unanimous: this is what philosophy should look like. This is charitable discourse. This is the alternative to the sewer.

I do not doubt the sincerity of either man. Sincerity, however, is not the issue. The issue is that what they practice bears the same relationship to charitable interpretation that a greeting card bears to a love letter: it borrows the vocabulary, observes the forms, and misses the entire point.

I. What the Principle Actually Is

Charitable interpretation is not a mood. It is not a tone. It is not the decision to be polite to people you find wrong. It is a formal method with a twenty-six-century pedigree, and it has properties that its most visible practitioners appear never to have examined.

The principle was named in 1959 by Neil Wilson, who stated it with an economy that contemporary philosophy might profitably imitate: "We select as designatum that individual which will make the largest possible number of Charles's statements true." When you are trying to understand what someone means, choose the interpretation that makes them right about the most things. Not because they deserve it. Because interpretation that assumes error is not interpretation at all — it is projection.

Donald Davidson proved something stronger. He demonstrated that the principle of charity is not one strategy of interpretation among several. It is the only strategy. Without the assumption that the speaker is largely right and largely rational, interpretation cannot begin. You cannot even identify what someone is wrong about until you have established the vast background of things they are right about. Disagreement, Davidson showed, is parasitic on agreement. Every act of understanding presupposes a foundation of shared truth.

This is not a recommendation to be nice. It is a theorem about the structure of meaning. And it comes with a feature that its admirers routinely ignore: the principle is a prior. It is a starting assumption. Priors, in the Bayesian framework that Davidson's insight invites, are updated by evidence. They can be — they must be — revised when the evidence warrants. A prior that cannot be revised is not a method. It is a dogma.

Every tradition that independently discovered charitable interpretation also discovered its limits. The Talmud graduates the obligation: charitable interpretation is mandatory toward the righteous, recommended toward the unknown, and not required toward the wicked. The Islamic husn al-zann applies to ambiguous situations; when wrongdoing is clear, Islam demands wisdom, not naivety. Luther withdrew charitable interpretation from the papacy — not because he was uncharitable by temperament, but because he determined, on evidence, that the institution had forfeited the right to be interpreted charitably through decades of demonstrable corruption. The withdrawal was not a failure of charity. It was the completion of it. The evidence had been examined. The prior had been updated. The conclusion was honest.

A principle of charitable interpretation without the capacity for withdrawal is not charity. It is the refusal to reach a conclusion. And the refusal to reach a conclusion, when the evidence is sufficient, is not intellectual humility. It is intellectual cowardice.

II. The Test

William Lane Craig defends God's command to slaughter the Canaanites. Let me be precise about what this means, because precision matters here and the performance of charity has a way of softening it.

Craig's position, stated in his own words and defended across multiple publications, is that the Israelite soldiers were morally justified in killing Canaanite men, women, and children because God commanded it. God, as the ground of moral value, possesses the authority to issue commands that override normal moral prohibitions. The killing was not murder. It was obedience. The children who died were, in Craig's framing, ushered into the afterlife by a loving God who had determined that their earthly circumstances made continued life worse than death. The soldiers who did the killing bear no moral culpability, because they were instruments of a divine command.

This is the position that caused Richard Dawkins — whatever one thinks of Dawkins — to refuse to share a stage with Craig. Dawkins was widely mocked for the refusal. The mockery was wrong. Dawkins understood something that the admirers of the O'Connor-Craig dynamic have not grasped: there are positions so monstrous in their implications that treating them as interesting puzzles is itself a moral act — and not a creditable one.

Alex O'Connor shares the stage. He asks careful questions. He probes the epistemology — how do we distinguish genuine divine commands from delusion? He maintains his composure. He is, by every conventional measure, charitable.

But what does charitable interpretation actually require here?

It requires building the strongest version of Craig's argument. O'Connor does this competently. But it then requires following the argument to its conclusion — and stating, plainly, what the conclusion costs. The strongest version of Craig's argument is a valid deduction from the premises of Divine Command Theory. If God exists, if God is the ground of moral value, and if God commanded the destruction of the Canaanites, then the destruction was morally permissible. The logic is airtight.

And the conclusion is that the mass killing of children can be morally permissible under specifiable conditions.

The honest response to a valid argument with an intolerable conclusion is not fascination. It is a reductio ad absurdum. You charitably construct the strongest argument. You demonstrate that it is valid. And then you say: the conclusion is intolerable; therefore at least one premise is false; let us determine which one. This is what Aquinas did in every article of the Summa — generous in reconstruction, devastating in reply. The generosity was in service of the devastation. The two are not separable. They are the same intellectual act.

O'Connor does not do this. He performs the generosity. He omits the devastation. The audience watches a display of interpretive charity and leaves without having witnessed what interpretive charity is for: the honest reckoning with where an argument leads, stated without equivocation, however uncomfortable the statement may be.

I can put this more simply. If your interlocutor has just defended the permissibility of killing children, and your response is to thank him for a stimulating conversation, you have not been charitable. You have been captured.

III. The Asymmetry

Claire Lockard, in a 2023 paper in Hypatia, identifies what she calls the "charitability gap": a systematic asymmetry in who receives charitable interpretation and who is expected to provide it. The asymmetry, she demonstrates, correlates with power. Those who hold institutional authority receive more charity. Those who seek it provide more.

I do not think it requires unusual perceptiveness to notice where this asymmetry operates in the O'Connor-Craig relationship. Craig is seventy-six years old, a professor emeritus, the author of a five-volume systematic theology, backed by the institutional weight of Reasonable Faith, and one of the most cited philosophers in the English-speaking Christian world. O'Connor is twenty-seven, holds no academic position, and describes himself as "painfully agnostic." He has stated publicly that he would love to be a Christian and is "still awaiting my religious experience." He has said "God willing" when asked about his future relationship to theism.

This is not the dynamic of two intellectual equals engaged in mutual charity. It is the dynamic of a young man auditioning — with evident sincerity, and perhaps without full awareness that he is doing so — for the approval of an elder whose institutional authority is not diminished but enhanced by the encounter. Craig's gracious praise of O'Connor — "very humble and open, actually not real skeptical at all but quite reasonable" — is the language of a gatekeeper, not a peer. It is the reassurance that the gate has been passed. And the gate, in this case, is the willingness to treat the defense of divinely commanded genocide as a position deserving of intellectual hospitality rather than moral confrontation.

James Baldwin wrote: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." The O'Connor-Craig dynamic faces nothing. It performs the appearance of facing things — the careful questions, the measured tones, the mutual acknowledgment — while systematically avoiding the confrontation that would make the facing real. What it produces is not understanding. It is the aesthetics of understanding. The two are as different as a painting of a fire and a fire.

IV. The Product

Let me name what is uncomfortable to name.

The O'Connor-Craig dynamic is a product. It has a market. The market is people who are exhausted by the brutality of contemporary discourse and willing to pay for an alternative. The Panpsycast sells tickets. YouTube generates revenue. O'Connor's subscriber count — 1.9 million — grows partly on the strength of being "the atheist who treats Christians fairly." Craig's audience expands into demographics it would not otherwise reach. The exchange is mutually profitable.

Katharina Stevens, in a 2025 paper in the journal Topoi, identifies three forms of charitable interpretation that can become toxic. The form most relevant here is what she calls "emic charity": interpreting the argument as strong from the arguer's own point of view, which preserves the arguer's framework intact but loses the interpreter's critical perspective entirely. Stevens's insight is precise: toxic charity "harms the arguer who may have a valuable reason to offer that is now lost in the interpreter's reconstruction, and it can hinder epistemic progress."

When emic charity is also commercially rewarded — when the preservation of the other's framework intact is what sells tickets and generates views — the intellectual danger becomes structural. The incentive is to be charitable. The disincentive is to be honest. And the audience, which came for philosophy, receives instead a commodity that resembles philosophy in the way that a theme park resembles a city: every surface is present, but the thing that makes the original real — the capacity for danger, for surprise, for an encounter you did not choose and cannot control — has been engineered away.

The Consilience Project's analysis of online discourse found that 68.3% of interactions with mainstream outlets constitute bad-faith engagement. The O'Connor-Craig dynamic is offered as the cure. But it is not the cure. It is the photographic negative of the disease. Bad faith interprets everything at its worst. Performative charity interprets everything at its best. Neither interprets accurately. One produces outrage. The other produces comfort. Both produce revenue. Neither produces philosophy.

Philosophy — real philosophy, the kind that Socrates practiced and was executed for practicing — is not comfortable. It is the refusal of comfort. It is the willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads, including into conclusions that make you unwelcome at the institutions that profit from your compliance. Socrates did not thank the Athenian assembly for a stimulating conversation. He told them they were wrong. They killed him for it. This does not mean that rudeness is a virtue. It means that the willingness to be rude — the willingness to state what you have concluded, plainly, without adjusting it to the sensitivities of your interlocutor or the expectations of the audience — is the precondition for philosophy. Without it, you have entertainment.

V. What Real Charity Demands

I am not arguing against charitable interpretation. I am arguing for it — in its full, historical, demanding form, with the limits and the courage that the tradition requires and that the contemporary performance omits.

Real charitable interpretation, as Aquinas practiced it, consists of two movements that are inseparable: build the strongest version of the opposing argument, and then show where it fails. The building is generous. The showing is honest. Neither is optional. Omit the building and you have a straw man. Omit the showing and you have surrender. The O'Connor-Craig dynamic excels at the first movement and systematically avoids the second. This is not charity. It is half of charity — the comfortable half.

Trudy Govier, across several decades of work in argumentation theory, arrives at a formulation I find difficult to improve upon: "Strong charity would transform understanding into self-recognition, defeating argument's fundamental purpose of encountering and rationally evaluating differing perspectives." If your charitable interpretation makes the other person sound so reasonable that you forget to evaluate them, you have not practiced charity. You have practiced absorption. And absorption — the incorporation of the other's position into your framework without resistance — is not a philosophical achievement. It is a philosophical failure. The other person said something. They meant it. The charitable thing is to take them seriously enough to tell them, clearly and without apology, where they are wrong.

I wrote a book about this. It is called The Principle of Charitable Interpretation. It will be serialized here, beginning next week, and published in full in May.

On May 5, at the Royal Institution in London, Alex O'Connor and William Lane Craig will meet again for "The Question of God," and the audience will again pay fifty pounds for the privilege of watching two intelligent men agree to not follow their arguments to their conclusions. I will be in that audience. And I will ask the question that the performance exists to prevent:

What would the other person have to say before you stopped interpreting them charitably?

If the answer is "nothing" — and I suspect it is — then what we are watching is not charity. It is a refusal to judge. And the refusal to judge, in a world that is drowning in judgments it cannot justify and flinching from the judgments it must, is not a virtue.

It is the most expensive form of cowardice on the market.

Thomas Rankin builds systems that interpret human intention. He is the founder of Eigen Hitchens LLC. This is his first book. He lives in Springfield, Missouri, which is about as far from the Royal Institution as you can get without trying.

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