Prooftext
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Prooftexting is the practice of using decontextualised quotations from a document (often, but not always, a book of the Bible) to establish a proposition. Critics of the technique note that often the document, when read as a whole, may not in fact support the proposition. It is, essentially, a type of quote mining.
Prooftexting is a technique associated – fairly or otherwise – with ministers and apologists affiliated with conservative Evangelical Protestant churches. Within Catholicism, mainstream Catholics have accused sedevacantists of adopting prooftexting methods when they have sought to prove their thesis that the Church hierarchy has become apostate by quoting from Church documents such as the Code of Canon Law.
Outside religious discourse, it has been claimed that prooftexting is widely used by Libertarians, and especially Objectivists, to demonstrate that certain historical personalities (usually the Founding Fathers of the United States) would have supported their philosophies and their religion. Aside from any questions of decontextualization, such methods of argumentation have been seen as a fallacious use of appeal to authority.
