Truth Matters

     “…if I really cared…,” the words stood out to me as if written in glowing crimson. In fact they refuse to leave me and in many ways seem emblematic of what ails our political discourse today. An acquaintance had posted something that, while factually correct, had been taken out of context to make a political point, to somehow paint their perceived opponent in a dark light. I had differed reminding them of the salient facts and how they had distorted them. They did not dispute this. They just did not care about the veracity of how they used them. They were willing to perpetuate a falsehood in order to buttress their political position. We must care.

     We must strengthen our mental discipline to care about facts and how we use them. We must take the time to check our facts before posting, or otherwise using, them in the public domain. This is the critical issue in this election cycle; indeed in any election cycle. We cannot become so intellectually flaccid as to not care about the truth. When a politician, public figure, or newspaper handles facts carelessly we must take the time to call them on it; to demand retraction when appropriate. We exist in a day where a variety of a-political organizations provide free public fact-checking. PolitiFact.com and Snopes.com are just two of the many sources available to help the public sort through the morass of political sound-bites. Without public vigilance politicians, and other public figures, will lapse into saying what they think we want to hear and hope of effective government diminishes and perhaps even disappears.

     If we relax our standards, allowing leaders, pundits, and those seeking public office to savage the truth, soon they will not consider truth important when making public statement. Discarding integrity as a critical and cherished trait will further erode public trust and confidence in the institutions on which we depend. And in so doing, we will leave our children and grandchildren a sorry mess; a non-functioning country. We must work to make integrity in public discourse the only acceptable standard. We cannot accept dangerous lapses in integrity. Sometimes, when pressed a person might say, “Well all politicians lie.” I am sure that I have let slip those words. We must guard against such a cynical dismissal of the importance of truth. While it is probably true that all politicians have lied at one time or another, it does not lesson the importance of truth. Pilate, the Roman leader charged with upholding justice in Palestine, took such a cynical attitude, saying, “What is truth?” when confronted with a challenging statement by Jesus. We must not let their casual insults on our integrity and intelligence go unnoticed and unchecked. We must push back against the rampant scorn of this age, which has led to such a casual disregard for the truth. Truth matters.

     We must also discipline how we personally handle facts. Knowingly posting or reposting a snarky meme that plays loose with the truth on the social-media platform of our choice is not acceptable for the Christian. We must take the time to verify and when something untrue or misleading slips past, we must quickly retract, admitting the mistake. Scoring political points in order to support our chosen candidate, party, or issue by misrepresentation or dissembling is not defensible for the Christian. We must retain our dedication to the truth.

     Truth matters. It matters so much that Jesus reminds us that He is the truth. If it mattered so much to Him, we ought to care for and handle the truth in a similar fashion. When we become so enamored with a party, platform, idea, or candidate that we manipulate, or even abandon, the truth we lose our moral compass. This level of commitment requires sacrifice. We must willingly commit to measuring our ideas and beliefs against the stringent, unforgiving, standard of the truth. Such commitment, and its attendant time requirement, challenges us. It does not fit well in our sound-bite every-hour-on-the-hour driven world. A commitment to the truth entails that we first ascertain, or apprehend, the facts and then use them in an appropriate fashion. It also requires that we give up basing our identity on a party or cultural set of biases; instead basing our identity on the truth.

     In an odd theological twist; which I believe to be more than a linguistic quirk, Jesus equates Himself to truth. Ultimately commitment or fidelity to the truth is a commitment to Jesus. More than “knowing” the truth we must also rightly handle the truth, II Timothy 2:15. We can, as my acquaintance did, present “true” facts in a fashion that distorts or deviates from the truth. We must not use facts to misdirect or deceive. To engage in such activity is deception, and incongruent with a lifetime commitment to adhere to the truth, and in this election season does not serve our nation or our Lord well at all.