'A nation that lies to itself'
"There is now a whole range of issues where people have a fixed belief in falsehoods and are impervious to the truth."
Knowing the truth is a moral activity
In the Bible, knowing (or not knowing) the truth is never just a mental activity. It is always a moral choice too. So when Psalm 14 verse 1 says:
- the fools in question are not just stupid people, as we understand it today, but morally defective and deficient people. They have willfully chosen to be ignorant. So the very next phrase says:
On the other hand, true wisdom is never just a matter of being 'smart'. Rather, it begins with the fear (or reverence) of God. (See for example: Psalm 111 verse 10, Proverbs 1 verse 7, Proverbs 9 verse 10, and Proverbs 15 verse 33)
We find the same pattern in the New Testament: Jesus said that people loved the darkness more than than light because their actions were evil. (John's Gospel chapter 3 verse 19-20). In other words, they did not want to know the truth, because the truth made moral demands on them.
So it is possible for people to know the truth about God - even without the Bible, there is enough evidence in the creation itself. But people deliberately choose not to know the truth - to 'push the truth away from themselves' as Paul says in Romans chapter 1 verse 18-20.
Question Time: Tracey Emin and Melanie Phillips clash on BBC TV
A recent encounter between the artist Tracey Emin and columnist Melanie Phillips on BBC TV's 'Question Time' illustrates this rejection of the truth: The debate revolved round the relative merits of marriage and cohabitation. Phillips argued that cohabitation is not as stable as marriage, as an environment for raising children. (See also our review of Patricia Morgan's book 'Marriage Lite' for more on this.) Andrew Carey reviewed the program afterwards in Church of England Newspaper. When Emin was faced with the evidence that marriage is more stable, Carey says that she:
Carey went on to say that
'A nation that lies to itself'
Reflecting on this encounter afterwards, Phillips published an article in the Daily Mail on May 27th 2002, called 'A nation that lies to itself'. Here are some of the other ways she identifies that people today choose lies rather than truth:
- people choose to believe that drug abuse is not harmful, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
- People choose to believe that our prisons are choked with people jailed for cannabis possession (simply not true).
- people choose to believe in global warming. But, says Phillips: 'A growing body of rigorous scientific evidence is showing that many of the claims made to support the most apocalyptic scenarios are demonstrably false'
- people choose to believe that domestic violence is always perpetrated by men against women, and that one in every 3 or 4 women has experienced it. Neither of these 'facts' is true.
Phillips concludes that:
She goes on to say that:
This is an alarming
picture of people in contemporary society choosing darkness rather than
light.
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The roots of the problem
Phillips blames this loss of ability to think straight about truth on
For example, she says that
Phillips traces this retreat from knowledge to what she calls a 'seismic shift' in thinking which goes back centuries and has accelerated in the past few decades. She looks back to Hume in the 18th century, to Nietzsche in the 19th (who said, 'There are no truths, only interpretations'), and to Isaiah Berlin in the 20th century who taught that the totalitarian slaughters of Nazism and Communism resulted from ideologues who believed they knew the truth.
Phillips then argues that this process reached its peak with the French postmodernists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. She says:
Phillips quotes approvingly from Allan Bloom, in 'The Closing of the American Mind':
Up to a point, she is right, both as to the historical analysis, and
as to the effect of changes in our education system. However, the Bible
references with which we started suggests that there is a more fundamental
reason why people have connived in the death of truth: a preference
for darkness rather than light, as a moral choice. We do not
want to know the truth - it demands too much of us.
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Implications for society and the individual
The Bible paints an alarming picture of the implications for the individual or the nation that wildly chooses darkness rather than light, ignorance rather than knowledge, and falsehood rather than truth:
In Romans chapter 1 verses 24 to 32, Paul says three times, of those who 'push the truth away from themselves' that
In 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 verses 10-12, he talks about the destiny of those who refuse to believe the truth that would save them, and says that
The dreadful reality
is that if someone chooses falsehood rather than truth, if they want
ignorance rather than knowledge, eventually, God will give them what
they want. Whether (as C S Lewis says), they will want what they get
is a different matter.
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Implications for the Church
Phillips asks why Britain has become 'a nation that lies to itself', and argues that the key is the collapse of the moral authority and self-confidence of the Church:
Here she is both right and wrong: right in that the Church has failed to stand up confidently for truth and morality; wrong in that this is not the main cause of our problems. There has been a loss of confidence in institutions generally - the police, government, education, and the media, as well as the Church. It is a mistake to blame all our problems on the shortcomings of the Church.
But there is a vital lesson for the Church to learn: we need to recapture a concern for truth - and for defending the truth. Too often, we have been superficial to the point of banality. Too often the church has lost the battle by default, and retreated into a kind of pietism, rather than fighting for the truth. We have failed to give enough attention to the task of apologetics - of defending the truth against the claims of non-Christians. We have seen apologetics as too 'difficult' or too 'intellectual' for the ordinary follower of Christ, and therefore as a task reserved for the specialist. This has immeasurably weakened the credibility of our witness to Christ. It also flies in the face of the Bible's command: 'If you are asked about your Christian hope, always be ready to explain it.' (1 Peter chapter 3 verse 15)
It is time for us to recapture our confidence that the Good News is true, and that any thinking follower of Christ can reasonably defend his or her beliefs. Only then can we expect thinking non-believers to take the Good News seriously as an option in today's world. As Phillips says:
And she concludes:
'A nation that lies to itself' - read the full article