Journalists long ago learned that people enjoy relating to other real characters. Character-development is fine for novels, but little of the Christian literature I read is great fiction. If everyman is everyman, then it may be that no man is no man. Indeed, these anecdotes lose their effectiveness if all we do is focus on persons and hear examples ad nauseam . This anecdotalization fits perfectly with philosophical relativism, one feature of which is that every particular is presumed to have built-in authenticity, and no one can argue against a single instantiation.
Relativism places all anecdotes on par.
Each is equally valid - even fabricated ones. Moreover, relativism argues that if certain things are true in one story, then those things must be true for all. This illogic, which is often undetected, is damaging. If all is relative, then perhaps all we can do is tell stories and hope for inspiration. But the truth is that not all anecdotes are equally valid.