For the past two years I’ve been traveling the country asking people a simple, elemental question: What kind of person does the world need right now?
Regardless of their political affiliation and religious tradition, there’s been a great deal of commonality in their answers. People invariably use words like compassion, kindness, generosity, courage.
They also use the word honesty. When asked what kind of people the world needs in these days, people almost unanimously say they value truthfulness.
Many of them are lying.
Regardless of what they might say (or even think they believe), the truth is no longer of value to the people still supporting this President. Oh, it may be something they aspire to in theory but practically speaking it is irrelevant—so irrelevant that they have no use for it even when it comes to the very sovereignty of our nation or the integrity of our electoral process or the conduct of our elected leaders.
It doesn’t matter that their President is almost biologically incapable of honesty in even the most mundane of matters, that he takes credit for things he has no part in, that he manufactures crises that simply do not exists, that he creates scenarios regarding migrants or terrorists or Democratic opponents that have no basis in objective reality.
It doesn’t matter that his Press Secretary has confessed to falsehoods about moments of great national consequence, or that she daily manufactures lies that way other people involuntarily produce carbon dioxide.
It doesn’t matters that the Attorney General of this nation (a man charged with stewarding legality and Rule of Law), wouldn’t give them the full contents of one of the most important Presidential investigations in our lifetime—but a heavily redacted version of it that took weeks to construct.
Regardless of their lip service, the people who are on the side of this Administration don’t want honesty, they simply want to win (whatever that looks like in their minds), and everything yields and bows to that victory: facts, data, reality, truth—everything.
And though many of these professed truth-lovers call themselves Christians, they operate with a fundamentally edited theology that reflects their current conduct:
Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord—unless a Presidency or Supreme Court seat is involved. – Proverbs 12:22 MAGA Redacted Translation
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor—unless your neighbor is a Democrat, a CNN reporter, a migrant family, or a Special Counsel investigating GOP Presidential malfeasance. – Exodus 20:16 MAGA Redacted Translation
I hate and abhor falsehood, but I love your law (though falsehood will do in a pinch or if FoxNews is reporting it). – Psalm 119:163 MAGA Redacted Translation
Then you will know the (heavily redacted, partially disclosed, selectively revealed) truth—and the truth will set you free. – John 8:32 MAGA Redacted Translation
That’s the funny thing about the truth: it doesn’t require redaction, it has no need for censoring, it is not afraid of full disclosure. The truth is the truth, because it conceals nothing in the shadows—and the people who really have respect for it, don’t try to either. They also don’t make excuses or shrug their shoulders or gaslight you when lies surface.
We are not who we say we are in this life, we are what we do with this life. The values we confess aren’t actually valuable to us unless we incarnate those values when it is most difficult or when it confronts our preferences or when it elevates someone we disagree with. We can make every grand declaration and proffer the most virtuous responses with our lips regarding the traits we treasure, but at the end of the day our convictions are the sum total of our choices. If we claim to love the truth and daily aid and abet people who traffic in lies—we’ve made our decision.
With their votes and their allegiances and their head-turning, a good number of people are telling us what they value right now—and it isn’t what they say it is.
I’ll keep asking those I meet what kind of people the world needs right now, but if they say they value honesty, while offering no opposition to these violent attacks on the truth by their President—I’ll know they are lying to me.
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