“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Over the last week, in the wake of Renee Good’s murder by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, this quote from George Orwell has gained a lot of traction online, and for good reason.
ICE has been ravaging communities around the country for the last few months — bullying, detaining and kidnapping without accountability — triggering resistance by ordinary people seeking to stand with their neighbors.
While it is far from the first time ICE has been responsible for someone’s death, the video of an unarmed mother attempting to slowly drive away while being shot in the face by an agent of the state is horrifying and unambiguous.
Ryan Andrew Newson
And yet, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Kristi Noem have told people to disbelieve their eyes and ears. We are told Good was a domestic terrorist, was attempting to run over the officer, that the officer was struck by the vehicle — all straightforward lies.
Meanwhile, videos continue to surface of ICE agents referring to Good’s murder as a deterrent while they persist in harassing people trying to live their lives or do the right thing — objecting to unaccountable murder by agents of the state.
I have zero interest in entertaining such absurd claims or getting into a debate about what is “really” going on in the video or with ICE more generally. Some claims must be rejected outright, for to even engage in a debate over them is to grant them legitimacy.
But I am interested in trying to understand why such ludicrous claims gain traction with some people. What logics, practices, habits of thought and imaginative frameworks produce people who are susceptible to such lies? How could someone look at a video of someone being shot in the face — amid a chaotic scene full of contradictory orders issued by people with no authority to give them — and not believe what they see?
“Some claims must be rejected outright, for to even engage in a debate over them is to grant them legitimacy.”
This is certainly not a new phenomenon. This willful not seeing and renarration as relates to police violence has a long history, from the beating of Rodney King to George Floyd, whose murder happened not one mile away from where Good was killed.
There are many paths that produce such habits of not seeing, of course, but one struck me anew while teaching my theology and science class this past week. We were discussing the ways some Christians dismiss or reject evolution, where such patterns of thought come from and why they are discordant with major streams of the Christian tradition. Young earth creationists, I noted, claim the universe is 6.000 to 10,000 years old, a conclusion drawn from a profound misunderstanding of the Genesis creation stories.
The obvious question, of course, is how such people account for the abundant evidence for evolution and a much, much older earth. The answer, we discussed, is that such evidence is simply disbelieved, reframed, reinterpreted and (as a last resort) dismissed.
Appearances, we are told, can be deceiving. The earth may look old, sure, but that doesn’t mean it is old. The Great Flood (of Noah’s Ark fame) must have altered the world in key ways. God must have created light waves in transit, such that they have the appearance of being old but actually are not. Dinosaur bones are not old, although they may seem to be, and your faith is being tested to think otherwise. And so on.
If one approaches scientific inquiry in this way, with this particular relationship to knowledge and doubt, then there is a deeper problem than simply having an inaccurate view of biology or a confused conception of what it means to call God “Creator.” These thought patterns produce and reinforce an absurdist way of approaching reality.
For if one’s senses are not to be trusted or can be this misleading, then what can one trust? How do you know anything at all? Under such conditions, trust of authoritative figures provides a deeply alluring answer to such questions, maybe the only answer.
Some pastor, some theologian, some exegete, some text is to be believed. Anyone saying otherwise is participating, wittingly or not, in a conspiracy to secularize the world and destroy peoples’ faith.
To put it differently, a habit of seeing and imagining the world is produced that primes people precisely to disbelieve the evidence of their senses and rather to trust some authoritative figure to tell you what you see. This epistemology (which is precisely what it is — a way of knowing) is especially prevalent in evangelical circles, well beyond discussions of Young Earth Creationism.
Thus, it is not surprising to me when I see Christians of this variety accept claims that the Good video does not show what it shows. Such a renarration draws upon and activates habits of reasoning that have been practiced for a long time.
“To affirm that there are genuine mysteries in the world and mysteries of the faith is not the same thing as believing straightforward nonsense.”
I accept, of course, that Christianity has a complex relationship with the senses. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” says Hebrews 11:1. But to affirm that there are genuine mysteries in the world and mysteries of the faith is not the same thing as believing straightforward nonsense.
God cannot make a circle with four right angles. Appeals to mystery that serve to excuse straightforwardly contradictory or illogical claims should be rejected and interrogated. To quote philosopher Michael Ruse — an atheist writing against the so-called new atheists — “traditional Christian thinking is that faith cannot be unreasonable, in the sense of illogical. It might push you beyond reason, certainly beyond empirical evidence, but it cannot make you believe the contradictory.”
“I can only choose within the world I can see,” Iris Murdoch tells us. A profound truth, and one reason I continue to believe in the importance of good theology and good philosophy: because people who do not approach reality in this conspiratorial, absurdist way will be less likely to see a woman murdered on camera and disbelieve what they see.
Indeed, I worry about those patterns of thinking and imagining the world that make people ripe for manipulation — or worse, willful participants and supporters of practices that do great harm to our neighbors and fellow human beings made in the image of God.
This is not a necessary outcome of such an approach to the world, of course, and unfortunately there are many other avenues of entry into support for fascism. But it is one of them. In any case, in this historical moment it feels important to remember that to be a person of faith does not necessitate rejecting the evidence of your eyes and ears.
By my lights it is just the opposite: To be a person of faith is to look the horrors in the eye and still, somehow, believe the forces of evil and death will not prevail and, buoyed by such faith, storm the gates of hell, come what may.
Ryan Andrew Newson serves as associate professor of theology and ethics at Campbell University and is the author of several books on theology and ethics, most recently The End of Civility: Christ and Prophetic Division.