Why Christian and Conservative Debaters Are Leaving Princeton’s Debate Team

Elaine Gao
‘28

College competitive debate is not your classroom disagreements or high school suit-and-tie resume-building extracurricular. The Princeton Debate Panel (PDP), Princeton’s intercollegiate debate team, operates under the American Whig-Cliosophic Society (Whig-Clio). Competing with PDP involves weekend tournaments at other campuses, sometimes twice a month, late-night spars twice a week, and reading up on venture capital and other topics alien to a History major. It is time-consuming, nerdy, and fun, which makes it a hotspot for those who debate for the love of the game. Thus, on the surface, college competitive debate markets itself as a neutral ground for the free exchange of ideas and the training site for public speaking. But unfortunately, these principles can become susceptible to debaters’ pre-established views, and that is when the metric of good debating becomes a sliding scale: the more popular an argument is among judges and debaters, the less proof it needs, and the less popular it is, the more it must prove.

For the British Parliamentary (BP) format of debate, which is one of the formats PDP competes in, the 2026 Worlds University Debate Championship Manual states that judges should conceive themselves as an “ordinary intelligent voter.” Furthermore, “this ‘ordinary intelligent voter’ does not have preformed views on the topic of the debate and isn’t convinced by sophistry, deception, or logical fallacies.” Essentially, arguments for communism and capitalism, for conservatism and progressivism, for Kendrick Lamar and Drake must fulfill the same burden of proof. In training, varsity members would tell novices that the only common sense arguments that require no further warranting are claims like “The sky is blue.”

As I progressed from training to my first tournaments, encountering motions like “This House Regrets the rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America,” I started noticing debaters telling judges to “gut-check” the fact that Christians are radical, far-right, and homophobic. 

As a believer, I was deeply offended. As a debater, I found their assertion completely unsubstantiated even though there are some Christians who do fit this description and some non-Christians who likewise, fit the description. 

So I tried the same logic. I told the judge to gut-check the fact that Christians are charity-loving and altruistic. 

At the conclusion of the hour-long debate on the Latin America motion, I was incredulous to discover that the judge considered the opposition team’s gut-check valid and mine invalid. 

The same trend resurfaced in subsequent tournaments where some judges thought progressivism was intuitively good and conservatism intuitively bad. We were debating on the motion, “The House Prefers significantly fewer Americans going to college.” As expected, the opposition teams against the motion brought up the value of literacy, but then started to defend literacy as the bastion against Americans voting for a Republican Party candidate. At no point did they explain why a Republican vote was a harm worth preventing; the premise was treated as a given, and the judge let it stand.

Evidently, there were judges who fully abided by the spirit of the game, and I could easily rebut similar gut-checks with well-defined counterarguments or make the same argument with supporting reasons as opposed to a flippant “intuition pump,” which asks the judge to trust a feeling instead of an argument. 

But my personal political and religious beliefs aside, I was deeply concerned by an inherent norm-setting that was beginning to define what qualified as a good argument. If debate were truly supposed to be a forum where all ideas can be discussed, it cannot become an echo chamber that reinforces polarization, an echo chamber that disincentivizes people from giving the other side an opportunity to make their case. 

Taking that one step further, debate is designed not to credit assertions, even if they are widely held beliefs among the American college students. It is designed to credit unpopular arguments that are well-argued. After hearing a well-argued position with which one vehemently disagrees, one has more respect for the other side, knowing that they are not just radical ideologues. In fact, it is often through such processes that one further understands why they believe what they believe. On the other hand, when this norm is internalized beyond the make-up world of debate, the same sliding scale, like having no fixed price for the same product, risks training an entire generation to mistake their own political priors for self-evident truths. 

Sadly, I have already observed some of the implications of this norm-setting on Princeton’s debate community. Conservative, Christian members tend to become inactive after a semester or a year when they have been exposed to the implicit asymmetry in how they are judged in the activity. They are selecting themselves out of the activity because they often perceive an unspoken message: “You do not belong.”

I thought of quitting every time I witnessed this asymmetry. But because I believe in the potential of debate and I am heartened by the people who truly honor it, I stayed. This asymmetry will only become stronger if every debater believes in the same arguments. While I might need to fight an uphill battle from time to time when it comes to unpopular beliefs, and I frequently lose, I still get the valuable chance to reevaluate  my beliefs every time I have to debate the opposite position.  

When upheld to its fullest potential, college competitive debate is magical. It is one of the few spaces where college students can walk into a room holding a position they find genuinely wrong, and walk out having found the strongest version of said position. The teammates who quit were not wrong about what they felt. The asymmetry is real, and it has a cost, but the potential of the activity is not undermined just because some of its members have failed to live up to it. And it will grow as long as there are debaters and judges willing to hold the line on the rule that an argument earns its credibility by how well it is made, not by who is making it or which side already agrees.

Elaine Gao '28 is studying History, French, and Humanistic Studies. On campus, she is a member of Princeton Christian Fellowship, Princeton Debate Panel, and the vice president of Princeton Legal Journal. She is also a PFS writing fellow. She hails from Beijing, China.