Back in the days of 50-cent-per-page copy shops and mail delivered by a postman, a certain form of fake news plagued Christian newspaper editors across America. For the entirety of my 21-year career in Baptist journalism, I received photocopied appeals to publish this hoax: Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s alleged plan to remove all Christian broadcasting from the airwaves.
O’Hair was described as “the most hated woman in America” after she successfully sued to stop state-sponsored prayer in public schools, a position upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963. As the outspoken and publicity-savvy founder of the group American Atheists, she became the boogeyman for all issues threatening Christian privilege for the next 30 years.
Thus it should not be surprising that fearful Christians easily believed the manufactured story that O’Hair was behind something called “RM-2493,” a proposed regulation before the Federal Communications Commission. One variation of the purported language said: “If her attempt is successful, all Sunday worship services being broadcast, either by radio or television, will stop.”
Mark Wingfield
The reality was that O’Hair never filed such a request and the real RM-2493 (which O’Hair was not involved with) was not about banning all religious broadcasting but was about another matter that was rejected by the FCC in 1974. Nevertheless, for decades to come, that truth did not matter. Between 1975 and 1995 alone, concerned Christians flooded the FCC with 30 million pieces of mail protesting this fake news as though it were real. Thirty million pieces of mail.
Christian newspaper editors got our fair share of these communications, although not likely 30 million pieces. The telltale sign of the hoax was the number of small black dots all over the printed appeals and petitions to share with others. The documents had been copied so many times that they had picked up ever-larger dust spots from copy machines. I cannot count the number of stories I wrote debunking this fake news, much less the number my colleagues at other publications wrote for the same reason. And with little effect. This became an urban legend that would not die.
This fake news was so pervasive that it carried on even after O’Hair’s murder in 1995. That put advocates in the awkward position of arguing that a dead woman was petitioning the FCC from the grave. The hoax also carried into the Internet age, with emails circulating as late as 2003 attributed to the Christian broadcaster James Dobson warning his listeners about RM-2493.
“If you think Christians getting caught up in fake news is a new phenomenon, think again.”
So if you think Christians getting caught up in fake news is a new phenomenon, think again.
There are other times, though, when Christians have been the victims of fake news rather than the perpetrators of it. Our Baptist forebears were branded as child abusers for refusing to baptize their infants.
In the 17th century, pamphlets were a popular form of written communication. One of the most humorously titled of all that era’s pamphlets published against Baptists was penned by Daniel Featley in 1642: “The Dippers Dipt, or the Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d Over Head and Eares.” Featley and others like him misrepresented the Baptists’ views on baptism to stir up fear of Anabaptists as nonconformists.
The very beginnings of Christianity also were assailed by fake news. Faced with a political and religious rebellion that could not be contained, those in authority denied the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Surely the body was stolen, or perhaps he didn’t really die. Could these dissident Jews be trusted to tell the truth? Surely not.
Do you see a theme here? Whether Christians are on the giving end or the receiving end of fake news, the false narratives emerge as a coping mechanism against losing face, losing power, losing privilege.
And so we should not be surprised in 2017 to find a large segment of the evangelical Christian community willing to set aside reality and embrace a new variety of fake news while labeling factual news as fake.
Southern Baptists lived through a version of this in the 1990s, when Paul Pressler and friends were organizing their takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention’s agencies and institutions. One of Pressler’s first targets was Baptist Press, the highly respected denominational news service. The Houston judge’s perpetual complaint was that Baptist Press wasn’t “balanced” and didn’t tell the conservative side of the story. What he really meant was that the denominational press contradicted his view of the world — the view that seminaries and institutions were filled with liberals who didn’t believe the Bible.
So evangelical Christians once again find themselves at the forefront of supporting, endorsing and spreading fake news by refusing to call the president to account for his tall tales and fiction-based fear-mongering.
Again, do you see a theme here?
Ironically, the Trump administration has managed to split Southern Baptists once again because the current head of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Council dared to point out that Donald Trump is a liar and does not represent the fundamental views of the Christian faith.
So evangelical Christians once again find themselves at the forefront of supporting, endorsing and spreading fake news by refusing to call the president to account for his tall tales and fiction-based fear-mongering.
Another irony: These same evangelicals, including many Baptists, were the ones declaring in the 1980s and ’90s that “absolute truth” mattered and that America was headed to hell in a rocket-ship handbasket because of “moral relativism.” Now, in 2017, neither absolute truth nor moral relativism seem to be of concern to American evangelicals.
Why does all this matter? Some say we’ve entered a post-truth era or that the Enlightenment has finally reached its end. But I’m not so willing to give up the ghost on truth just yet.
To give up on truth is to give up on Christianity itself. To deny that there are some things that actually are absolutely true and other things that are demonstrably false denigrates the Christian story to just one of many equally possible expressions of faith. Truth matters because the resurrection of Jesus from the dead matters. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul: If Christ has not been raised from the dead, our preaching and our faith are in vain.
Either Jesus was raised from the dead or he was not. Either this is a nice, comforting story that has become an urban legend or it is the gospel truth. Not only did Jesus teach that “the truth will set you free,” he declared that he himself is “the way, the truth and the life.” Christianity has been built upon and depends upon those statements not being labeled “fake news.”
When Christians buy into and become complicit with the demolition of truth, when Christians ignore and implicitly endorse bald-faced lies told nearly every day by an American president, we have no moral authority to declare, “Thus says the Lord” on anything else. We lose our voice; we lose our witness; we lose our gospel. And worst of all, we deny the Lord Jesus Christ.
We might as well be mailing photocopied petitions about a dead woman trying to take religious broadcasting off the air.