There’s an old story that goes something like this: At the end of the age, billions of souls from across eternity are gathered at the Great-White-Throne-Judgment awaiting divine adjudication. At some point, the multitudes at the rear hear tumultuous hoorahs break out from the front of the line. They cry: “What’s happening?” Finally, the word reaches them: “Lying don’t count! Lying don’t count!”
Truth is, however, lying does count.
Bill Leonard
Consider this: “We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men (and women) in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error. Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies.”
That observation comes from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, a book completed in 1965 and published in 1968, the year the author, Trappist monk Thomas Merton, died. Five decades later, with a terrifying prescience for our own times, Merton echoes: “We have hated our need for compassion and have suppressed it as a ‘weakness,’ and our cruelty has far outstripped our sense of mercy.”
He added: “It is characteristic of pseudo-Christianity that, while claiming to be justified by God, by faith, or by the works of faith and love, it merely operates a machine for excusing sin instead of confessing and pardoning it — a machine for producing the feeling that one is right and that everyone else is wrong. If it becomes expedient to commit murder, whether by lynch law or by inquisitorial tyranny, then murder becomes an act of holy justice. To oppress and persecute others becomes an affirmation of one’s own religious freedom and courage before God, a mark of Christian strength.”
“These days, ‘alternative facts’ have morphed into ‘alternative truth,’ which, when all’s said and done, is simply lying.”
The United States is overwhelmed by a “tyranny of untruth,” bound up in rhetorical mendacities and political fabrications, dishonesties tragically associated with what Merton called a “characteristic of pseudo-Christianity.” These days, “alternative facts” have morphed into “alternative truth,” which, when all’s said and done, is simply lying.
In a 2019 essay, George Mason University professor James P. Pfiffner wrote: “All presidents lie. In fact, virtually all humans lie. This observation may lead some to a cynical conclusion of moral equivalence: all politicians lie, so they are all corrupt and deserving of contempt. But it is an abdication of moral and civic responsibility to refuse to distinguish justified, trivial, serious and egregious lies.”
Pfiffner insisted “the most significant … lies are egregious false statements that are demonstrably contrary to well-known facts. If there are no agreed-upon facts, then it becomes impossible for people to make judgments about their government. Political power rather than rational discourse then becomes the arbiter. Agreement on facts, of course, does not imply agreement on policies or politics.”
His essay, “The Lies of Donald Trump: A Taxonomy,” is included in the book Presidential Leadership and the Trump Presidency. My concern here, however, is less with the presidential candidate’s widely documented falsehoods than with the ways in which various Christian leaders co-opt and perpetuate his dishonesties, believing Trump’s re-election will increase the influence of their particular kind of Christianity on American government and culture.
These individuals, often understood to represent varying degrees of Christian nationalism, face a significant dilemma in their self-identity and faith-perspectives. On one hand, they often describe themselves as “Bible-believing Christians,” affirming the “total inerrancy” of both testaments and demanding that those “in fellowship” with their faith communities adhere to strict doctrinal, behavioral and confessional documents and teachings. They also seek to bring their moral and spiritual rigorism to bear on the larger American society, hence their engagement in the political realm, all of which they are constitutionally free to do, even as it undermines, even contradicts, the gospel they proclaim.
“Passing on a lie as if it is true can be as sinful as initiating the lie itself.”
For what happens to their religio-ethical exactitude when they engage in the perpetuation of falsehoods in order to accumulate political power, even in the name of God? If faithfulness to the biblical text is binding on biblical rigorists, then passing on a lie as if it is true can be as sinful as initiating the lie itself.
What happens when, while demanding conformity to a particular kind of biblical exactitude grounded in a scrupulously inerrant text, they refuse to apply it to the lives, actions and assignations of the political figure(s) they support? From a gospel perspective, they can’t have it both ways. Jesus said it with clarity: “You cannot serve two masters.”
Case in point, the “Stop the Steal Movement,” a lie that will not die. A Jan. 2 Washington Post story reported on a national poll conducted with the University of Maryland, noting: “Despite audits in multiple states and nationally televised congressional hearings in which state officials and aides to Trump confirmed there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, more Americans question Biden’s victory than they did two years ago. When The Post and UMD asked in December 2021 whether Biden was legitimately elected, 69% of Americans said he was. Now, that’s down to 62%.” The study also suggested only 39% of Republican voters, polled at the end of 2021, affirmed the legitimacy of Biden’s election. In late 2023, that number was down to 31%, with 67% of Republicans denying the truth of Biden’s election.
James Pfiffner cites recent analyses indicating that, “once ‘misinformation’ (lying) is initially encoded in a person’s mind, it is very difficult to change. … Once such misinformation is accepted, retractions are often ineffective in changing a person’s mind and may even reinforce the initial errors.”
Remember: Disseminating someone else’s misinformation is still lying.
“Post truth is pre-fascism.”
Pfiffner insists that “false statements about politics and policy strike at the very heart of democracy. If there are no agreed-upon facts, then it becomes impossible for people to make judgments about their government or hold it accountable.” Pfiffner references Timothy Snyder’s comment in the book On Tyranny: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.. … Post truth is pre-fascism.”
Those biblical inerrantists who perpetuate the “Stop the Steal” falsehood would do well to reexamine the biblical text itself. This includes the hard saying of Revelation 21:8: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”
At that “great getting-up morning,” apparently lying really does count!
Clearly we are living at a moment in American history when the future of democracy is at stake. But make no mistake about it: the nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ also is at stake. To be silent about that truth is to gamble that the silence may soon be enforced by governmental and ecclesiastical mandate alike.
What then shall we do: The late, great preacher/writer Frederick Buechner said it like this for clergy and laity alike: “To preach the gospel is not just to tell the truth but to tell the truth in love, and to tell the truth in love means to tell it with concern not only for the truth that is being told but with concern also for the people it is being told to.”
And that gospel is no lie, now and forever more. Amen!
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.