Alternative facts! We now apparently can look at two photos that show how many people were present but we can claim that the photo showing less people actually shows there were more people present. How? We are simply reporting it as an alternative fact. In the old days this was called ‘lying’ or at least misrepresenting the truth. Yes, we have arrived at the era of post-truth. Maybe it is an inevitable move on from post-modernity… but I suspect we have gone a little further than a subtle shift.
In the simple days we could be very critical of dictators in a non-democratic situation who lied / presented alternative facts, and although we would be hard pressed to connect the two words ‘honest’ and ‘politics’ we were at least able to rest a little easy in the checks and balances that made our leaders accountable at some meaningful level. Yes we have had misrepresentation such as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and whole courses of action that we (or not really ‘us’ but many good people across Iraq, Syria and beyond) are still still suffering from. Post-those events at least such misrepresentations remain as marks on the landscape. They are not photoshoped out under the guise of ‘alternative facts’. What we are now beginning to witness is something far greater reaching and much more sinister.
For some years we have been praying for a new media and I have posted on that in the past. We need a media that is free and critical. But maybe there is a twist… I write as a follower of Christ and as one who gives credence to the responsibility that believers have for the world we live in. Indeed I have oft-suggested that the test for how well we are doing is the health of the world. If we see control rising and the silencing of the press, and the refusal to accept what can be evidently seen, could it be that something went wrong upstream? (By upstream I mean within what the body of Christ has released into the world?)
Have we simply wanted alternative facts? It is not always easy to know when we take a stand ‘the Bible says so, so I believe it’ and when we are simply endorsing some alternative facts. In the current climate perhaps one of the great challenges is not simply to believe what is true, but to discover afresh the belief that truth is more than a set of facts and is personified in Jesus… and should be in his followers.
There is a biblical thread that suggests the good guys can do less than good things because they are good. There is enough evidence of that thread in Scripture. Slavery, offering up daughters to be raped, genocide, imperial control etc. However, the Jesus ‘thread’ annuls that. We are in trouble when we uncritically let the good guys use control.
There are worrying (in the extreme – think 1920s and 30s) trends among the leaders that are gaining traction in the West. To accept this trend uncritically will only speed the train wreck. Against this backdrop surely therefore there has to be a stronger responsibility than ever before on the body of Christ to step away from ‘control at all costs’ and to re-examine what a Jesus-like God looks like and how that totally re-defines governance. If we can do that we will also gladly be able to think again about what a Jesus-like Christian might look like.