Claim. A “half-right” message that is easy to adopt will spread while the perfect-but-demanding version stays “an unimportant cult language” nobody uses — a double-edged truth for evangelism.
Elaboration. Dick Gabriel’s “worst is better” thesis held that “it’s better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus.” C and Unix won not because they were good — Gabriel thought the software “was trash” — but because “trash spreads faster”: easy to port, able to run on “garbage hardware.” Bjarne Stroustrup made the same bet with C++, judging that the cleaner language he could have built “would have been an unimportant cult language.” The pastoral edge cuts both ways. A gospel pitched only to those already able to bear its full weight reaches no one; lowered thresholds spread (the populist instinct). Yet “do you want to be correct or do you want to win?” is exactly the question that can hollow out a message until what spreads is no longer the thing worth spreading.
See also. holding-conviction-when-the-worse-thing-wins · populist-church