The Truth is the Truth Even When You Don't Agree With It
Embracing our own “truth” is embracing a lie
“If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly, if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
One thing about our approach to truth these days is that it isn’t boring. Robert Kennedy mentioned the old curse about living in interesting times, and our so-called “post-truth” society has certainly been interesting. I miss when things were less interesting, but that’s why he said it was a curse, after all.
“Post-truth” is a term that seems to convey the idea that we’ve grown beyond the need for absolute and fundamental truths that are broadly believed, and moved into a place where we can all embrace our own “truth”. Of course, the academics who coined the term were not broadly thinking of this as a benefit to society but rather a worrisome and vexing development. But many people have seemed to embrace the idea of being “post-truth” as if it were an enlightened state of being. In 2016 Kellyanne Conway famously defended false statements made by the White House about the size of an inauguration crowd as “alternative facts”. Many laughed at the idea of “alternative facts” at that time, but it seems a lot less funny now.
Right now, as I type this, a sizable portion of the American populace are arguing in earnest about whether or not Haitian migrants in a medium-sized community in Ohio are making a habit of nabbing and consuming cats, dogs and geese. I’m not going to give any time to arguing against these claims since they are not deserving of the energy required to type a coherent response. Often times even those high-profile figures who are repeating this narrative are not doing a good job of hiding the fact that they are aware it is not true. As one presidential running mate has put it, the truth shouldn’t have to stand in the way of “making up” a good story if it gets the media to pay attention to it.
We are all probably at least vaguely aware that if these were 15,000 migrants from say, Norway, we would never be having a serious discussion about any of them eating their neighbors cats or stealing geese from parks. The truth we are dancing around is about the kind of immigrants we will tolerate and the kind we won’t, but since we can’t be honest with ourselves about our true feelings about that, we make up stories like this one that clearly convey what we really mean without having to come out and say we’re upset by non-white people arriving in large numbers.
The thing is, is the story calling attention to the real problem? What kicked all this off was that the rapid influx of so many people into a moderately-sized community has stretched its resources and infrastructure and caused it’s housing market to explode to the point that most locals are priced out of apartments and homes. These are real problems that we could be working to fix, but instead we’re focused on cats and dogs and geese. If the point was to call attention to the problems of our current migration policies, which I am not suggesting are not in need of reform, it is doing little to call attention to those. It’s great for generating cat memes on Reddit or 4chan, but not so great for the people of Springfield who are desperately waiting for someone to step up and help them. Our enemy, the devil, has succeeded at turning our attention away from an opportunity for unity to address a challenge by leading us to a place of disunity over false allegations about cooking pets, all by convincing us to deny the truth.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
- John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962
I am sometimes challenged by what is true, especially when it contradicts what is convenient for me to believe because it seems to serve my interests to believe it. There are things I believe today that I will discover later are completely wrong. Some of the beliefs I hold that are in fact wrong I will continue to hold onto for the rest of my life. That’s a fact of being human. I’m never going to be perfectly aligned with the truth no matter how hard I try to be. New information is revealed all the time that shows that what we have believed for generations is groundless. It would be foolish indeed to reject evidence simply because it doesn’t square with what I already believe. But it would be equally foolish to embrace rumor, conjecture, or a false narrative simply because it fits neatly into what I want to believe.
The thing about the truth is that it is true whether I know about it or agree with it. Truth stands on its own. It can be interpreted and understood differently by different people but doesn’t cease to be true because one sees it one way and another some other way. We can claim to be “post-truth” but really that’s a way of saying we prefer to reject what is true and close our minds to anything that doesn’t fit what we already believe. It keeps us ensconced in our comfortable cocoon of our opinions and beliefs but doesn’t allow us to grow into more caring, more thoughtful, or more Christ-like people.
Often we want the truth to change to reflect our changing cultural attitudes. There are things that we collectively feel today should be considered acceptable that were not 20 years ago, and likewise things that were acceptable that we collectively feel should not be. Some of these shifts have brought us closer to the truth, such as attitudes that all people are created equal, but most have been shifting us farther from the truth. Yet what is true about what God considers about them has not changed, nor will it change.
Stephen Covey tells a story in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about serving on a battleship during a night with poor visibility when the lookout reported a light up ahead. The captain ordered the signalman to notify the other ship to change course. The other ship replied that the battleship should change course. The battleship captain insisted the other ship change course because they were a battleship, and finally the reply came back “I’m a lighthouse.” The battleship changed course. No matter how much we insist that God’s position change to accommodate our shifting attitudes, His truth doesn’t change to suit anyone.
Seeking the truth means being willing to accept what you discover to be true even if you don’t like it. It means being challenged and confronted by the truth in ways that are often very uncomfortable. Once I admitted to a church group meeting that I had said things that were racially insensitive. Why did I say those things? Because at the time at least some part of me believed them. What I believed was not true, and when they came out I was confronted by the ugliness of what I believed against the purity of the truth. It was very hard to talk about that openly and I still cringe thinking about it. But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have grown. Facing that truth exposed things about me that demanded change. I may not be where I want to be, but at least I’ve left where I was.
I’m not suggesting it is always easy to know what is true, nor am I disparaging those who believe in things I don’t agree with. Sometimes we are presented with something that seems believable and appears to come through a credible source of information, maybe some well-known figure in the political space, a leader, a news organization, a friend or family member. We’re faced with a decision on whether to believe this new thing or not. It is not always easy to get it right. I’ve learned the hard way that I cannot simply just take new information on faith no matter who is sharing it with me. Often I’m prompted by the Holy Spirit not to be too quick to believe something just because I like or trust the person sharing it with me. I don’t want to live in a state of perpetual distrust, but I do think Ronald Reagan had a point when he said, “Trust, but verify.”
In the end, I will discover that I was wrong about many things I believed. But so will everyone else. We’re all going to be surprised by the things we got wrong. But we will always have source of information we can be absolutely confident is true 100% of the time, and that is God. We can trust what He put into His Word to be absolutely true. It may frustrate us, or challenge our perceptions, or force us to confront our fears. It may say things that we don’t want to agree with, but it will never fail to speak truth to our hearts and minds.
No politician, president, congressperson, media organization, website, or celebrities’ tweet will ever be as reliable, or renewing, or life-giving, as God’s Word. It has been, and always will be, the truth, regardless of where we stand on that. I’m grateful to be able to place my feet on the solid rock of the Word and not have to stand instead on the shifting attitudes, beliefs and narratives that we are given by all other sources in our life. Placing my faith in those other things would be like trying to surf on a landslide. God alone can offer the safety and certainty that we need to know what is truth, and if we remain in Him, we will not be deceived. How glorious to have that to stand on!