One of my favorite episodes of The West Wing involves a fictional practice known as Big Block of Cheese Day. Based on Andrew Jackson’s tradition of inviting anybody and everybody to the White House for conversation and to enjoy part of a giant wheel of cheese, the Bartlet administration admits interest groups who rarely get the chance to speak to those in the White House.
Press Secretary C.J. Cregg and Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman are assigned to listen to a group of scholars concerned about maps. The group is called the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality, and their complaint is that the familiar Mercator projection distorts the relative size of the world’s continents.
Tyler Tankersley
Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa, for instance, when Africa is actually about 14 times larger. The cartographers would like the government to consider a different projection — one that offers a more accurate representation of the world.
C.J. is incredulous. “Are you saying the map is wrong?”
“Oh, dear, yes,” the cartographers respond.
It’s a wonderful little exchange because it captures something we ordinarily take for granted: A map is supposed to tell the truth.
Not the whole truth, of course. No flat map can represent a spherical earth without distortion. Every projection involves choices. A map can privilege size, shape, distance, direction or some combination thereof. A map is never the world itself.
But that is precisely the point.
The purpose of a map is to help us see the world more truthfully — not to make the world conform to our preferred vision of it.
The United Nations General Assembly last week voted 164-1 to encourage countries to adopt the Equal Earth projection, which represents the relative size of continents more accurately than the Mercator projection. The resolution was sponsored by Togo and supported by African nations seeking, among other things, to correct a visual distortion that has made Africa look considerably smaller than it is.
“The purpose of a map is to help us see the world more truthfully.”
The one country to vote against it was the United States.
The reason? The Trump administration objected that the initiative was a “radical ideological project.”
The United States voted against a map because the map allegedly was ideologically motivated. This from an administration that has spent considerable energy changing maps because it doesn’t like what they say. The Gulf of Mexico is now, for purposes of the federal government, the Gulf of America. Denali has been restored to Mount McKinley. And, most recently, Lake Ontario has been renamed Lake America by executive order.
I grew up learning the Great Lakes with the mnemonic HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. I am now apparently expected to remember SHAME: Superior, Huron, America, Michigan, Erie.
The issue is not whether names can ever change. Of course they can. Places have been renamed throughout human history. Sometimes names are changed because old names perpetuate injustice. Sometimes they are restored because a colonial name displaced an older one. Sometimes people simply decide a name no longer fits.
The question is why we are changing the name.
Are we trying to tell the truth about a place? Or are we trying to tell a preferred story about ourselves? Those are very different things.
The late Walter Brueggemann’s The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith offers a useful theological lens here. For Brueggemann, land is not merely territory. It is a central category of biblical faith — simultaneously gift, promise, task, temptation and threat.
Land is a gift from God, but precisely because it is a gift, it can become an object of idolatry. We begin by receiving the land and end by believing the land exists for us. We stop asking what we owe the place and begin asking what the place owes us.
The biblical tradition is relentlessly suspicious of that move. “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it,” says Psalm 24:1. Not ours. God’s.
Contrasting some of the competing ideologies in the Bible, Brueggemann writes, “YHWH is the champion of land as inheritance; Baal is the sponsor of land as possession that leads, in turn, to commoditization.”
The land is never simply something we possess. It is something entrusted to us.
It requires humility. Because humility begins with acknowledging that reality exists independently of our preferences. Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland whether Donald Trump likes the Equal Earth projection or not. Lake Ontario does not become Lake America because an executive order tells federal employees to call it that. New Mexico does not become “New America” because someone puts the new name on a map. (That particular proposal surfaced just this week, along with maps depicting the proposed name.)
A map can lie.
An executive order can rename.
A government can command its agencies to change their terminology.
A technology company can change what appears on your screen. Apple and Google already have adopted “Lake America” for U.S. users, while Canadian and international users continue to see Lake Ontario (pro tip: start using MapQuest, which has refused to adhere to these ridiculous changes).
“A map tells us where we are. Power wants to tell us what the map means.”
Maps are powerful precisely because they sit at the intersection of truth and power.
A map tells us where we are. Power wants to tell us what the map means. And when power becomes sufficiently confident, it begins to imagine it can change the world by changing the map.
But Christians should know better.
We worship the one who said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
Notice what Jesus does not say: You will know the politically advantageous version of the truth. He says truth.
The Christian faith begins with the audacious conviction that reality does not belong to us. Creation precedes our interpretations of it. The world existed before our flags, borders, ideologies and presidents. God was here before there was a United States, before there was a Canada, before there was a Mexico, before anybody invented the Mercator projection.
Which means perhaps the most faithful thing we can do with a map is also the most countercultural: Look at it. And let it correct us.
In The West Wing, those cartographers were not asking C.J. to agree with their politics. They were asking her to look again.
Look at Greenland.
Now look at Africa.
Look again.
That is a good spiritual discipline, too.
Look again at the neighbor we have reduced to a caricature.
Look again at the land we have treated as property.
Look again at the immigrant whose story we never bothered to learn.
Look again at the history that makes our preferred national mythology less comfortable.
Look again at the world.
Because the Christian vocation is not to make reality flatter us. It is to become people humble enough to let reality tell the truth.
The earth is the Lord’s. We are only holding the map.
Tyler Tankersley serves as senior pastor of Ardmore Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., and is currently pursuing a doctor of ministry degree in leadership and spiritual formation from George Fox University.