Witness

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I attended a Tigers ballgame and noticed some T-shirts with Bible verses. One said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Another was "I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me."

Evangelicals, one of whom I once did not hesitate to admit being, like to spread good news, and this is an attempt at doing so. I'm not sure how effective it is, since context is lacking, but it might incline someone to ask questions. Questions like Which way? and What truth? and Whose life? Or What things do you want to be empowered to do? and Which things ought you do?

But actions speak louder than T-shirts.

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.

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.

Dear Tony

Open letter to Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council.

24 November 2020

Dear Tony Perkins,

The first letter forwarded to my address after my Dad's passing was from your organization, asking him for money.

The letter alludes to an apocalypse, to weathering anxiety and chaos as God's remnant. I don't understand how your "remnant" could hold so many of the highest positions of power but still consider yourselves a lone Elijah, buffeted by "dangerous policies of the Left" as you "stand firm against a radical social agenda."

You promise to "seek and speak truth" but you have stood by a leader who has lied to more people more often than anyone in US history. Among the lies were many about the corona virus pandemic. (Consider reading "All the President’s Lies About the Coronavirus" last updated by The Atlantic on November 2.) Apparently, you are OK with these dangerous lies. 

I truly hope you will one day care about all families, not just those that hold to your skewed political agenda. If you were truly blind, you would have an excuse, but because you claim you can see, your guilt remains.

I cannot say whether my father would have been one of the ones spared had President Trump's administration made a reasonable attempt to curb the virus. I can say I am not proud of our nation's deplorable response. This letter from you praising the President, pretending to love truth, and begging for money from susceptible senior citizens was enough to prompt this written response of my own.

My father was ill for some time. COVID-19 only hastened his death. He will no longer be contributing to your organization. Please remove his name from your mailing list.

Sincerely,

Tim Slager
Grand Rapids, MI

Confession

It is reasonable to believe there is no god, that our universe is accidental. I believe I could believe that; many reasonable people do. But I would also have to give up other beliefs, beliefs that reasonable people who don’t believe in God still do believe in. Being reasonable, for example. In an accidental universe, being reasonable may be “nice” but it is not particularly rational. It is after all an accidental way of thinking, and by what standard is that way better than its opposite?

Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we devote ourselves to a higher cause to be happy. You don’t need to believe in God; you can believe in Life. But is belief in life any more rational than belief in God? I can’t see my way to that line of reasoning.

I can't seem to see how belief in life, goodness, or truth is any more rational than belief in a god who encompasses these good things, and more. (Why settle for less?) Of course life is more easily verified than a god, so that's something. But I don't think that's what Dennett means. If that were the case, I could believe in rocks. That's not a higher cause. I think he means that we should view life itself as a higher cause, worthy of our devotion. That is to say, make a god of life.

I may, I suppose, want to devote myself to the higher cause of death, the great equalizer, rather than life. It is just as prevalent. Is devotion to one more reasonable than to the other? Life is nicer than death, to be sure. But what makes niceness sacred?

My view could be considered utilitarian. I refuse to believe in no purpose other than accident, no ultimate value of truth over a lack of it, no kindness more sensible than cruelty. If, in the end, it is only so many chemicals interacting, then where is purpose or meaning? If goodness is nothing more than sentimental claptrap, then it's more than I can bear. I’m not strong enough to deal with this head on. I admit some admiration for the deadly honesty of Nietzsche and others who have accepted this view, but I am not among them.

Why is it irrational to believe in a God who provides meaning, defines goodness, and requires kindness but OK to believe in meaning for meaning’s sake, kindness for kindness’ sake, and goodness for goodness’ sake? That too is ridiculous. I choose to be the other sort of ridiculous, one who believes in a reason for these things and a purpose in pursuing them.

And yet Dennett is onto something. Believe in life. Believe in nature. Believe in the truth about these. Believe in goodness. Believe in kindness. These are honorable. They may well be more honorable in God’s eyes than many of our own misconstrued perceptions of God and Jesus if through our beliefs we deny truth, and life, and goodness. (If you take Richard Rohr’s view of Christ, belief in life or nature is belief in Jesus.) Very often (though not always) naturalism comes without the serious downside of sanctimonious dogmatism that would destroy life and truth and kindness in its extremism. Is it possible that many who do not believe in a god believe in God more truly than many who make that claim?

The very act of reacting against the narrow-minded meanness of a history of religious people strikes me as spiritual (and therefore religious). It is a credit to those who see hypocrisy among religious folks as worse than for people who don’t give a damn. You are right: we ought to know better and care more! Pretty much the only people Jesus is recorded to have roundly criticized are the pious religious folks who thanked God that they were more godly than other people. It's quite the opposite, Jesus says.

And this is a lesson for those of us who insist you believe as we do: we may have it backwards. Your criticism of my faith for its vast history of cruelty and denial is, ironically, evidence to me of God’s mark—sensus divinitatis, in the words of John Calvin. If I am honest (and I believe I am called to be) I will admit that you may well have been closer to God all along. And my religiosity kept me from seeing you as God’s child, one closer to God than I am.

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?

Faith and Reason

"People believe what they want to believe," I said.
"Yes," Malcolm replied. "Reason follows faith."

I wasn't sure that was what I meant. But it stayed with me.

I recently saw these two headlines next to each other in the Washington Post's Acts of Faith email feed.

The second article talks about two different kinds of truth. One kind of truth is scientific facts, and the second is, well, faith of some sort. But I couldn't quite figure out, as author Anna Katharine Mansfield apparently has, how people can know "in their bones" as true what quite clearly isn't. 

People have always believed what they wanted to believe. We don't have to look at others to see this; if we are honest, we see it regularly in ourselves. But there is a difference between being influenced by our worldview and denying everything that contradicts it. Sometimes we need to adjust our view.

No single group of people has a lock on believing without evidence. There are climate-change deniers and anti-vaxers, and I doubt these two groups overlap much. Some people believe that the US popular vote in the 2016 election went to the same one who won the electoral college. Other people believe GMOs are bad for you. The evidence is missing in either case.

At some point someone realized that the media was biased. Responsible news sources do not disagree, which is why they employ principles and practices to guard against letting their bias determine what they say. Complete objectivity, like perfection, cannot be achieved, but responsible media strive for it.

Less responsible media outlets have said, "All media is biased. Therefore, we can be as biased as we want." Some media of this latter type have gained huge followings among people of faith.

The first article shown above is about non-religious people getting together for the same sort of fellowship enjoyed by church-goers. These are people who avoid faith and God. They know "in their bones" that God does not exist.

It strikes me that non-religious people care about truth just as much as people of faith. For some, truth is what drives them; it is their god, if you will. On average, in my experience, they are at least as willing to accept evidence as people of faith.

Having been reared to believe that God is also Truth, I'm confused and frustrated by the devotion of many American Christians to blatant lies and liars. I don't believe that facts are all the truth there is, but they are significant. Yes, belief is another side of truth, and we believe things that cannot be scientifically proven. But that is not a license to believe any damn thing we want.

Evangelexit

When campus pastor Brandi Miller tweeted on the night of the election that she was serving her divorce papers to Evangelicalism, I could relate. It seemed the perfect metaphor.

I too was disgusted: white evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for someone with none of the qualities they had taught me were Christian. My gut reaction was to run away from them: Evangelexit! I was ready to renounce all association with evangelicalism and encourage people to leave their evangelical cliques and wake up to justice, truth, and mercy.

A lack of these three qualities and an overemphasis on dogmatic rules were the reason Jesus reamed out the religious leaders of his time (Matthew 23). Today, many evangelical leaders have traded mercy for a wall and truth for a passel of lies they want to believe. And a lot of people in their pews have followed.

My advice: Don't follow those religious leaders avoiding a victim dying in the ditch on the other side of the road to Jericho.

A main point in the parable of the good Samaritan is that a member of a religious group despised by many Jews is the one being a good neighbor. Jesus confronts religious prejudice. Today, the well-paid head of Samaritan's Purse encourages discrimination against the Samaritans of our day, even, and especially, those lying by the side of the road.

I suspect Franklin Graham considers himself a paragon of mercy. True, his organization helps many people in need. But he has embraced as public policy a rejection of the pleas of Syrian victims while promoting lies about the danger they pose.

Some in those evangelical pews do not embrace the lies and still see the church as an advocate for mercy to the most vulnerable. Should they walk out? I thought they should. I was ready to urge them all to leave their churches. Evangelexit!

I still would never fault them for leaving, but I recently realized I had it backwards. Embracing lies and spouting bigotry IS walking away from the good news. Those who willingly repeat lies without bothering to check whether they are true, who rush to label victims as dangerous, they are the ones who take another step away from the faith with every false repetition and every blanket condemnation.

If members in churches that encourage spreading ideological lies stay put and insist on truth and mercy, more power to them. They remain grounded in the faith. There may come a day when they are compelled to shake off the dust and move on, but if they stay and advocate for the good news, they are to be admired.

Maybe some day those marching through the wide gate down the broad road away from the gospel will return. But now they abandon truth and trample mercy. They are the ones making an Evangelexit.