During our family’s competition years, I had one son who was determined to tackle dark topics. His interps included a Biblical Thematic on the falls of Satan, an Open on “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” and a debate case on the gruesome state-sponsored organ harvesting system in China. God used all of these speeches and the debate case in powerful ways, but the hours he spent working with such dark material created a burden for him and, to some extent, for his audiences. That burden has to be taken seriously.
As a league, NCFCA wants competitors to speak about real-world issues, and some of those issues are hard to shoulder for both competitors and audiences. Additionally, a growing body of literature marketed to teens and young adults contains dark and disturbing material. For these reasons, we have an important speech rule (A.1.c) that requires a redemptive element for speeches with dark themes. It might seem like this means competitors are being asked to somehow make light of weighty material, but that’s not the goal.
If you’re a competitor who is considering a speech which is heavy and dark enough that you feel like you might need to work on figuring out how to add or fortify a redemptive element, it’s important to remember that taking on the burden is a choice. If you don’t delve into dark material, you don’t have to worry about this rule. If you do, you need to rise to a level of maturity and discernment that isn’t required for lighter material.
Part of the maturity you need to demonstrate is a willingness to humbly seek out and listen to adults who understand your passion for the topic and can offer wisdom regarding how to handle it in the context of NCFCA missional boundaries and speech time limits. Hopefully this article can help with those conversations. Let’s start with why the redemptive element rule is so important.
Honor for the Audience
The requirement for a redemptive element is grounded in NCFCA’s mission to equip ambassadors for Christ and in our commitment to honor those who listen to speeches given in our league.
When you accept the privilege of speaking in front of ANY audience, you accept responsibility for what that audience will hear during the duration of your speaking time. When you ask your audience to listen to content that is hard to hear and distressing to think about, you are using the privilege of their attention to put them through an emotional experience they may consider unpleasant, even if the topic is important. Audiences will generally endure difficult material because they have learned to expect that speakers will somehow make it worthwhile. This expectation is a deeply ingrained custom of civil interaction. If you fail to deliver on this reasonable expectation, you are betraying basic audience trust.
In the context of NCFCA, audience trust includes the whole community. The audience is not only placing trust in you as a speaker but also in our league. In every round, the people you speak to are adults who have agreed to sacrifice their time to listen. Yes, some of them are parents under compulsion, but many of them are members of the community, invited through the hard work of fellow tournament participants. They expect and even look forward to the fact that they will get to hear from some inexperienced and unskilled students, but they still expect that our league is making sure students are learning how to honor an audience. Community Judges are also aware of our Christ-centered mission even if they don’t fully embrace it. Christ never leads people through darkness without the light of hope and His ambassadors can’t either. That’s why, it’s not acceptable for competitors to deliver speeches that put audience members through an emotional wringer without any sort of redemptive element.
How do you know if you need to add a redemptive element?
If the speech you are considering would include telling your audience about evil, wickedness, suffering, or troubling outcomes–you’re into dark material. At a minimum, you probably need to give a disclaimer (A.1.b), and you should also check the whole rest of rule A.1. As part of that process, you will have to evaluate whether the scale or intensity of darkness is such that the overall theme could be considered dark, and if so, whether there is sufficient light to push back against that darkness.
As you evaluate your speech idea, take a hard look at where the material as a whole is pointing. Is it emphasizing a picture of gloom and despair? If so, does it point through the gloom to something that the darkness can’t overcome? Is everything leaning toward a picture that would make Satan smile? If so, are there also elements that would frustrate the avowed enemy of our souls?
You are the one that has to be able to explain the worth of your speech and what is redemptive about it. If you’re having trouble, it’s probably best to ask yourself why you want to speak about the chosen material. If your motivation is a sense that people need to be shocked or appalled into seeing how bad something really is, the emphasis might be too much on your own passion. Shock certainly makes an impression, but it’s a cheap impression, and it does not count as a redemptive element. If you want to cover dark material, you need to muster the maturity to push the heat of your own emotion onto the back burner and swing the focus to your audience. Consider how they can be blessed and challenged, not merely horrified, by hearing what you would say.
If shock is not a redemptive element, what is?
When we talk about redemption in the Christian context, our minds go straight to Jesus on the cross paying the price for the sins of mankind. However, the bar isn’t that high for the redemptive element rule in NCFCA. A better sense might be to say that a redemptive element compensates or atones for something by offsetting the bad effect or making it worthwhile. It is the element that pays an audience back for enduring any emotional or intellectual distress you subject them to with your words.
This doesn’t mean that you’re being asked to slap a happy sticker on a grave topic. It also doesn’t mean figuring out where to wedge in a Bible verse or tell people to take some vague action like telling others or calling a congressman or even praying. We all know we should do those things if we have any inclination to do them at all. Audiences don’t like oversimplified ways of lightening things up any more than you do.
Incorporating a redemptive element with excellence means planning for it and figuring out how it integrates with your speech in a natural and meaningful way. It requires you to find and include spots where rays of light force darkness to recede, at least a little. Let’s look at a couple of options.
Highlighting the ways that evil is deprived of satisfaction can constitute a redemptive element. It’s hard to imagine a darker setting or cast of characters than the one my son chose when he presented “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” by C.S. Lewis. It’s a fictional speech delivered in the darkness of hell to a college of demons. However, the redemptive element shines through the voice of Screwtape every time he expresses frustration over how the plans of tempters are being thwarted by people on earth. When the fictional Screwtape complains about how humans are messing up the work of demons, the audience is hearing a message of how evil is defeated. That’s a redemptive element, and it’s not forced or trite. However, had the literature been cut in a way that was too heavily focused on sections in which demons were happy instead of the sections expressing their disappointments, it would have been missing the redemptive element and would have been overwhelmingly dark. It would not have honored audiences or the original author, C.S. Lewis.
In a platform speech, the redemptive element is often introduced by showing the audience concrete ways (even if they are small) that the gloom is being (or can be) overcome. We all crave good evidence for solvency when we hear of great suffering and injustice! The key is that you don’t just present a tag-line glimpse of where good pushes back. Let the light have its chance to shine. Is there a story you can include about someone’s work to solve the problem? Are there moments of kindness in the suffering or accounts of rescue? Are there ways that thinking has been (or can be) transformed for the better? Are there efforts your audience can join that would truly make a difference? Slow down and let these spots have their moments in your speech.
What if a solid redemptive element seems impossible to fit?
If you feel like you have to force fit a ray of light into your speech, the redemptive element rule is probably not your biggest problem; it’s the time limit. We can all fit in a nice counterbalance to darkness if we don’t have a timer ticking down on a table full of judges and the next competitor waiting in the hall while we try to drive home the gravity of a serious problem or connect plot points in a heavy piece of literature! Doing it in ten minutes is the real challenge.
In order to avoid resorting to a cringe-worthy redemptive element, I would submit that you need to flip your mindset and plan the other direction. Start by deciding how you will solidly nail the redemptive element in a way that doesn’t seem overly simplistic. Determine how much of your speech time it will take to include a cut from the literature in which good undermines bad or deliver a meaningful account of where hope and grace can influence the problem in your platform speech. When you figure out how long it will take to honor the audience and your topic in this way, you will know how much time you have left for the dark part that will impress the gravity of the story or issue on them. The resulting speech will have more depth and emotional power than you could ever achieve through a sheer deluge of distressing content.
Most Importantly
If you have any doubts about how or whether you should handle dark material in a speech, let it be your signal to pause and pray more fervently. Competitors spend hours upon hours practicing and delivering speeches. That’s a lot of time spent on the dark thoughts of a dark speech or debate case. Is it really worth it?
It’s okay to decide that a speech is best not given, even if substantial work has gone into it. Better to sacrifice the time, and even a registration fee if necessary, than to deliver a speech that violates your own conscience or audience trust.
If you’re reading this as a competitor, I want to implore you to consider that the redemptive element is for you as much as it is for your audiences. It must truly resonate deeply enough in your own heart to outshine the touchpoints with darkness your speech will require.
Jesus said, “I have come as Light into the world, so that everyone who believes in Me will not remain in darkness” (John 12:46 NASB). Stick close to Jesus, and let His Word guide your worthy desire to shine light where there is darkness and your hope to encourage audiences to do the same.
Disclaimer: The information in this (or any other) blog article is intended for explanatory purposes and to promote good conversation and competition in our league. Blog articles are not intended to interpret, augment, or supersede our League Policies or Competition Event Rules.
