Matter of Fact

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The most telling statement of the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday was, "You guys weren't going to fact-check."

Nothing these days says Republican like "We lie. The truth is not in us. And don't you dare hold us accountable."

Much of the church I have known and participated in all my life has enthusiastically said, "Yes, this is who we are!" I had thought that truth was a major tenet of my religion. I was wrong. Maybe truth is defined only as what one believes in spite of reality.

I may also be wrong about the mark of the new Republicans. What defines today's Republican Party could well be not falsehood but cruelty.

Day One

You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?  No, no, no. Other than Day One.

It's a clever response.

"Day one" is a means of expressing one's highest priority. Politicians like to say: On day one, I'll do this. On day one, I'll do that. Same here: top priority.

And yet, grammatically, the sentence means only for one day. The first day, mind you, but just that one.

Actually, the first paragraph above is Trump's rephrasing of the question and answer. The original question was, "You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?"

"Except for Day One."

Trump is being evasive, a particular skill of his. It ensures that he can avoid responsibility. You can't pin blame when there are multiple interpretations. Mafia dons talk this way. 

So let's not try to interpret exactly what he meant or how he meant it. Consider instead what happened on Day One, inauguration day, January 20, 2017.

It began with a promise to listen to the people: "Everyone is listening to you now." It ended with a refusal to listen to the people.

It began with raging about a minority in charge and a promise to return power to the people: "January 20th 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again." It ended with insisting that a majority vote of those people did not count.

Immediately after the inaugural speech, the lies escalated. The new president forced his press secretary to claim the largest crowd ever. This was clearly not true, and vanity was not the point. It was an assertion that this president could disregard any semblance of truth. By the end of his term, the number of documented falsehoods stood at 30,573. Self-proclaimed defenders of Truth swooned.

Authoritarians will look you in the eye and tell you something you and they know is not true. You are not in a position to contradict, so the lie stands and you are put in your place. The rules are established: I am more important than you. What I say is more important than truth. If anyone disagrees, there will be consequences.

If the main character on Day One in 2025 is the same as for inauguration day 2017, a new lie will set the tone. A flood of lies will follow. Revenge against anyone who disagrees with those lies will begin.

"Great America" will be a whopper. Fail to swallow it, and expect abuse of power as retribution. No one abandons their first priority after Day One.

Sheep's Clothing

Mike Johnson, the dapper, recently elected Speaker of the House, responded to a question about his views, "go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it—that’s my worldview."

I'm guessing that how he reads his Bible is different from how Bible translator David Bentley Hart does. In a recent interview, Hart said:

National conservatives—the people who think Jesus would have loved the Second Amendment and hated Mexicans—are simply not Christians. There’s nothing about their vision of reality and their relations to their fellow human beings that bears the slightest resemblance to who and what Christ was and what he taught. There’s not even a meaningful debate to be held on this: the Christian right is a movement whose ultimate ends are to extinguish real Christian convictions in society.

One can argue whether Hart or Johnson is more extreme. Both claim their political views are informed by the Bible. Hart is a Christian socialist. Johnson condemns socialism in all its forms and condemns anyone who disagrees with this.

Johnson's Bible apparently favors the rich. Hart's would favor the poor.

Hart is a member of Democratic Socialists of America. Johnson, having condemned all socialism, despises this organization and its members. But are we sure it's because it includes "socialists" in its name? Maybe its the "democratic" that he worries about.

Johnson has given up on democracy. He knows perfectly well who won the last presidential election, but he's willing and eager to lie about it. He would forfeit rule of the people, by the people, and for the people to protect his personal religious and political views.

The Great Deceiver

Young Earth Creationism is a belief that the world was made in six literal days and is less than 10,000 years old. Some versions of this belief apparently promote the notion that God created evidence of a universe that is 14 billion years old, of an Earth that is 4.5 billion years old, and of evolving life on this planet. But this was created purely for the reason of testing our ability to deny that evidence in favor of what this minority calls faith.

In The Language of God, Francis Collins addresses claims such as this patiently, though not without a hint of exasperation. He offers compelling evidence for the Big Bang, evolution, and God. He disputes this Creationist "image of God as a cosmic trickster." At least, he says, these Young Earth Creationists are now admitting the evidence. That's progress from a history of denying it. It is also, he says, perhaps "the ultimate admission of defeat for the Creationist perspective."*

This insistence that God must follow our own nostalgic perceptions of how a Creator behaves is somewhat baffling. I alternate between shrugging it off as another example of Christian nincompoopery and fuming over what it does to our collective witness. Presenting God as the prime deceiver seems blasphemous.

But this distorted view of God may help make sense of another source of bewilderment. I have lamented the church's penchant for lying. But if God deceives, then we, created in God's image, can (should?) embrace deceit. Endless deception can be viewed as evidence of godliness, not just a liability to be tolerated. If God deceives, so should we!

Does this explain how so many, in the name of truth, have embraced the lies? Might a Great Deceiver demand that we endorse "the country’s most accomplished trickster"** for the highest office in our land? 

Future of Democracy

There have been times and places when the will of the people has been crushed. Fascism on the right and communism on the left have managed to establish totalitarian states, where people's voices were controlled with an iron fist. But more recent forms of authoritarianism put a padded glove on the fist.

I vaguely recall a quote that I associate with a college literature course on the books of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived one of these states. It went something like this: "You can cover the world in concrete, but somewhere there is a seam, and a flower will grow up through the crack." Even the most extreme totalitarianism is less than total. (This could change, some think, with the advent of AI.)

The internet and social media have exploited and widened the cracks. It is now nearly impossible to stop some truth from seeping in. And truth has a corroding effect on the reinforcement grid of totalitarian regimes. So while the desire to control is as strong as ever, the means to achieve control has changed. Instead of covering the world in concrete, the new method is to cover it with a liquid toxic waste of disinformation.

Lying is not new. Authoritarians have always promoted lies and repeated them over and over. Along with the lies, authoritarians require a grievance. If we believe a system is rigged against us, we are inclined to believe all sorts of evils and identify with whoever promotes the conspiracy. Every grievance requires a bogeyman. Someone else is responsible for my fear.

And then you accuse the bogeyman of your own crime. This is what Hitler does in Mein Kampf, when he says Jews have an “unqualified capacity for falsehood.” It's what Goebbels does when he says of his enemy: 

The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

So, while disinformation is an old tactic, how it is disseminated is changing. Since you can no longer close an iron curtain to shut out the truth, you need to dilute truth to the point where it loses its effect.

A profusion of lies allows authoritarians to use free speech to confuse and sway people who might otherwise have demonstrated good judgment. This is the firehose strategy: a flood of lying mixed with unsubstantiated claims. The need to squelch the truth is compensated for by simply flooding accurate news streams with garbage and poison. And if a few made-up news items turn out to be true, all the better; it counteracts accusations of malevolent disinformation. It matters less what you lie about than that you lie constantly and prolifically. Typically there is a central lie that rises above all the others, but the firehose ensures that there is enough confusion to keep everyone guessing. 

Some focused squeezing of the more influential sources of truth can help switch the narrative. As confusion and frustration rise, people look for scapegoats, and the grievance narrative gains traction. Are you frustrated? Blame "them." More extreme measures include murdering those who investigate and then publicly denying responsibility (while sometimes using methods that make certain the victim's colleagues know who can come for them).

If enough people embrace an imagined superiority of certainty and the new freedom of blaming others, then the will of honest people who accept the reality of nuance is overcome. They simply cannot keep up with the torrents of disinformation and the fervor of those who accept the key lies. They give up.

It's a softer authoritarianism than was employed in the past, but it works in today's world. And it works where some thought it wouldn't. We thought Poland and Hungary, freed from the grasp of their giant neighbor, had embraced representative democracy. Only briefly. We thought Russia threw off a totalitarian state in favor of freedom. But the freedom was mostly given to the oligarchs, and the country's leader pines for the totalitarian past.

Surely, we have said, it won't happen here in the the US. We have traditions and laws that make it difficult for the would-be authoritarian. But the sanctity of democracy is being challenged. On January 6 an insurrection shocked us. Ah, I thought as I listened to sycophants suddenly express horror, this is the turning point. But within a few short days and weeks, virtually an entire party had decided it was no big deal, not worth investigating, while a majority of that party's elected representatives voted to not certify our votes.

Even good guys, such as Brad Raffensperger and Ed McBroom, who valiantly defended our election integrity, decided to advance the narrative that our elections need fixing, that targeted suppression (often mixed with more banal election changes) is in order, and that they could vote for the man who is still trying to reverse the election they protected. My congressional representative initially bucked his party's trend, but now pretends nothing serious happened and even said he too could support the man who won't stop lying about his election loss. Support for democracy has taken a second seat to extremism and party pragmatism.

An article in USA Today from shortly before the election, while noting Trump's dictatorial tendencies, took an optimistic outlook. Its conclusion: "What matters is that the 2020 results are respected." That optimism was misplaced: the results have not been respected, and vast numbers of Americans remain willing to vote for the ring-leader lying about those results.

Authoritarianism is coming. Likely it will come from the right, but perhaps it will be a reaction from the left. Some will protest loudly and pay a grim price. Some will wring their hands and wonder where we went wrong. Media that haven't chosen outright propaganda will push the envelope on what they can get away with, but will mostly back off when pressured lest they lose what voice they still have. Most of us will adjust and we'll ignore what's happening in exchange for protection against retaliation and the right to live our lives almost normally.

Some Americans will look at those of us who talk quietly and wistfully of our more democratic past and ask, Do you think this is new? Didn't you notice when the discrimination was focused on us? Or us? Or us? Or us?

And maybe we, who didn't, but now do share a loss of freedom, will begin to understand. And maybe then, together, we can try again to make it right. And maybe, sometime in the future, democracy's future will be better for it.

Maybe.

The Tortoise

“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”  - Charles Spurgeon

"Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”  - Jonathan Swift

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A recent MIT study found that false stories on Twitter spread six times faster than true stories. And it wasn't because of bots, it was us.

The appeal of lies has perhaps never been more obvious in America than it is now. The firehose approach to false information was adopted as presidential policy for four years. A pants-on-fire lie was fanned until it swept over our Capitol.

Few of us claim that a lie is never justified. Rahab lies to protect spies hidden on her roof. Corrie ten Boom lies to protect Jewish refugees hiding in her attic. In both of these cases the lies have immediate protective effect. But to extend the justification for lying to a "pursuit of liberty," for example, is questionable at best. Especially when liberty and its pursuit are defined only by the ones making the justification. The higher-cause rationale is the only reason I can think of for religious leaders who venerate truth repeating and defending foundation-free nonsense.

It would be a mistake to think that the lies come from one person or one group of people. Many of us jump to affirm a story that we want to be true before we confirm that it is. We spin a story to emphasize the point we hope to make. Only some of us are willing to set the record straight when we learn our story was wrong (if we bother to find out) and few of us do it regularly.

We are all wrong some of the time. That's not to say that we invent lies; more likely we spread a story that we believe or hope is true. Lies spread mostly through people who aren't really lying.

And the odds are discouraging: six times faster! A tortoise racing a hare or a toddler competing with an Olympic sprinter has no hope. Why bother? Hopelessness is the goal of the firehose strategy. It multiplies the natural speed of the lie by the number of lies told. It's impossible to keep up.

So we resign ourselves to losing races. Especially the short ones. But truth, they say, is eternal. We are in this for the long haul. In Aesop's fable, the hare disappears over the horizon. This is not a 50-yard dash.

It's tempting to look at each battle, each race, as the only one. It never is. There is always another and another. And when truth does eventually win, I believe it has more staying power. I say this cautiously, because examples to the contrary seem common. But slowly and with frequent setbacks, history makes a sporadic curve toward truth as well as justice.

In every interaction truthfulness is important, but when confronted with falsehood I can't always respond quickly. It's tempting to make up a few facts or embellishments of my own. And soon I am caught in my own stories, which in the pursuit of truth I must retract, thereby admitting another defeat.

Truth requires humility and honesty and hard work. It requires questions and research and doubting yourself yet speaking up. Truth takes time. For quick results, especially emotional ones, the lie too often wins.

But that's the wrong race.

Big Lie

The storming of the Capitol was not excusable, but it was understandable. If I believed that the election was stolen and if a man I trusted told me that, because it was stolen, I should be angry and stop the vote, I might have done the same. Damn the consequences, let me stand up for what is right!

But there is zero evidence that the election was stolen. Or perhaps I should say there is only fictional evidence. That man, it turns out, was not to be trusted.

Amid the insurrection were many "people of faith." I too am a believer. Some of the things I believe are not provable, and yet I do believe. You might ask why I hold religious beliefs without demonstrable proof. That is a legitimate question. My answer, I confess, is that nearly everyone has religious beliefs, and not having them is beyond my ability.

But this association of fervent Christian faith with an unfounded belief in a big fat lie is deeply disturbing. If someone believes in a crackpot conspiracy, it is hard not to assume that person is a crackpot.

My sister works with a man who believes the Earth is flat. A co-worker, probably hoping to be entertained by an outburst, asked him what he thought about those anti-vaxxers. The man replied, "Those people are nuts!" Which is a great story, because we expect the guy to fall for every cockamamie conspiracy theory.

If I believe an utterly unfounded theory that is easily disproved, anyone knowing this is likely to assume my other beliefs are equally absurd.

Free Speech

Germany supports freedom of speech, but you can get arrested for lying about the holocaust.

In the U.S., neo-Nazis can speak their mind. So can communists.

This wasn't always the case. President Woodrow Wilson thought that "any language disloyal to the government, the Constitution, the military, or the flag" was out of line in wartime and promoted the Sedition Act.

Perhaps the most consistent advocate of free speech in the US is the American Civil Liberties Union. In its first years, the ACLU didn't win many cases, but among its founders was Helen Keller, not easily deterred by obstacles and failures.

The ACLU's cases are often controversial. They have supported:

• NRA: in opposition to a gun registry
• Communist party, although during the cold war support faltered
• Unions
• Citizens United, though they argued for full transparency of donors
• Jehovah's Witnesses: in 1943, a couple thousand children were kicked out of West Virginia schools for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag. The ACLU defended their religious liberty.
• NAACP
• KKK: as early as 1923 the ACLU defended their right to hold meetings

Just about anyone can find an ACLU cause or client to be upset about. But the organization has consistently argued for freedom of expression. And, for the most part, Americans have supported this part of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

There are limits to free speech: threats, yelling "fire" in a crowded public place, slander, lying to Congress, perjury, lying to shareholders. But as a society we are pretty lax about what people can say. On balance, I think, that's a good thing, since the alternative can so easily be corrupted.

But I do wonder sometimes. And I am not alone. About half of the US may think it is time to amend the 1st amendment.

There is an aspect to freedom of speech that I find unnerving. We grew up saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." But we know this is often not the case. There is such a thing as verbal abuse, and it can be more harmful than a physical punch. So, if words have the power to harm, shouldn't serious attacks with them be taken as seriously as with fists?

The power of words is not a new concept. Plato thought music and other arts should be censored because they could corrupt the masses. "The tongue has no bones, but it can break bones" is an old Sicilian proverb, according to Eric Hoffer (a more romantic rendition says it can break a heart).

Nazi propaganda set the stage for the holocaust. Radio stations in Rwanda played a significant role in the genocide of Tutsis in 1994. Before people were aware of the effects, perhaps they said, Don't worry! It's just words.

The president of the US has exercised his freedom of speech by lying to the people 13,500 times in 1000 days in office. He further exercises his right of free speech by accusing media who expose his falsehoods of, you guessed it, lying. Not only does he abuse the right of freedom of expression, but he also uses his position to inhibit this right for others. This is (mostly) not illegal. It is pathetic.

And yet, if this president, who calls the press the enemy of the people, were allowed to shut down all who fail to adore him, the results would be worse than letting him spew lies upon lies. If he had his way and dictated what was good and acceptable, our society would be even more vulnerable to the lies.

Of course, US politics are not unique. In Britain, lies were the means to a pro-Brexit vote. Just one example: Boris Johnson held up a kippered herring and blamed the EU for excessive and expensive regulations on shipping and packing. Never mind that the regulations he protested are in fact fully British.

Hungary has restricted the press so that only things favorable to the government can be broadcast or published. On the books, the law is strong on freedom of expression, but the government favors media owned by president-friendly oligarchs and squeezes out any media outlet critical of them. You see how it works.

Facebook has decided to limit falsehoods in some cases, but not for politicians running for office. I don't understand why those seeking office as public servants are exempt from rules of civility that apply to the rest of us, but perhaps Facebook couldn't face the loss of revenue. Whatever the reason, the larger dilemma of what to allow on Facebook's platform illustrates changes in media that have us scrambling for new rules.

The problems of allowing free speech, despite abuse of this right, seem smaller than the problems of restricting it. So we allow a president to lie without ceasing and billionaires to use unlimited resources to mislead us to line their pockets.

How much abuse of a freedom will we tolerate to avoid the abuse of its restriction? After how much abuse will a right be taken away? What price will we pay for squandering our freedom of speech on lies? When one contractor defrauds his clients, 20 honest contractors submit to increased regulation; will the same hold for those entrusted with maintaining this country? Will we eventually respond to the worst offenders' abuse of free speech by restricting this right for all?

Given their history and their willingness to address it, the Germans' ban on holocaust denial seems a reasonable restriction. Perhaps here too we will impose some additional sensible limits. I don't think we will prohibit false advertising in political campaigns, despite a recent record setter. But maybe we'll at least require any PAC to publicize all their major donors' names. We may not pass a law to this effect, but it seems Facebook and television networks could set such a rule for any group paying for a political ad.  I don't know, what are your ideas? Shouldn't we do something?

When a Head of State uses freedom of speech to publicly lie to his nation an average of over 4,000 times per year, then that freedom is not worth much. When elected members of congress repeat those lies for political gain, free speech is cheap. When a nominee for the highest court in the land lies about his qualifications, freedom of expression is a joke. The abuse of freedom of speech by those in power is an insult to all who have protected this right.

People of the Lie

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Moral relativism, it seems, is only sometimes a problem.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that "Relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time." This, I think, many of us have been aware of. What we didn't know, and the article doesn't suggest, is that it is both reviled and popular by the same people.

I side with those who believe in absolutes. This perspective was born in my heritage, of white evangelical Protestantism. These absolutes can be difficult to pinpoint and quantify, but I do believe some absolute morals and truths cross all cultures and history.

Because this is my heritage, it is painful to watch white evangelicals leading the charge in favor of relativism. That they see their relativism as a crusade for absolute Truth is gag-worthy.

Our President's lying is denied, defended, or tolerated. His association with liars is accepted and promoted. Only when his cronies dare speak against him, do his supporters admit that his pals lie. When he spouts lies at his rallies, evangelicals cheer. Those who don't are labeled spineless morons.

One explanation is that, while his lying is bad, it is worth it because his policies and judge appointees might defend the unborn. This would seem a valid argument, despite Trump's personal record with abortions. After all, Rahab the harlot was "considered righteous" for lying to protect the spies she hosted. Why not defend the President's lies to protect himself as long as he also protects life? And yet, as I previously posted here and here, while condemning pro-choice political views, evangelicals resist policies that actually reduce abortion. Isn't this another form of dishonesty?

Another explanation is that they believe everything he says. OK, but then they are the ones guilty of lying—to themselves, for starters—because the evidence is irrefutable.

Denying evidence is another type of lie, and evangelicals are especially adept at it. We pretend to know more than climate scientists. We pretend to know more than biologists and paleontologists. We pretend to know more than historians. All, for a single reason: we don't want to believe them. We lie to ourselves, to our children, to our churches, to our country, because the evidence does not support a view of the world as we were taught. Worst of all, we lie in the name of the God of truth.

The would-be guardians of morality choose to associate themselves with an immoral liar to advance themselves and their own lies. Their choice will haunt the church for years to come.

I notice that I have referred to evangelicals as both "we" and "they." While it is a part of my story, I no longer call myself an evangelical. I am happy to be a messenger of good news, but the name is no longer true to the Jesus I read of in the gospels.

As people ask why Trump and his inner circle lie about nearly everything, it is conceivable that, rather than to hide some grim secret, they simply do it out of habit. Is this also the case for the church?