When I returned, we took a trip to Mexico to visit an orphanage where my husband’s brother worked. While there my brother-in-law told us that he had been told that I had ran off with another man. A very big lie!
I finally traced that lie to a sister in-law- who had called the day before I left. I told her I was taking a trip with a friend and would be gone for slightly over a week. Sometimes when you are trying to live for Christ those who are not will jump at the chance to make your life colorful in a bad way. Thankfully that lie did not go far.
Timothy Snyder in his introduction to chapter 10 of On Tyranny, writes about holding on to truth. He writes:
Believe in Truth:
“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true , then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”
Snyder goes on to give four descriptions of the death of truth in four modes. He writes that he is using the observers of totalitarians, naming one observer, Victor Klemperer. (P.66)
The first is “open hostility to verifiable reality.” Yes he does use Trump and his many lies here. The second is “shamanistic incantation.” And Snyder refers to Klemperer’s note that “the fascist style depends on ‘endless repetition.’ Snyder gives as one example the constant reference to the “Big Lie” about the stealing of the election as well as the constant reference to various people giving them degrading names. And repeating those names over and over. He writes “The Big Lie created its own world, where anyone who pointed to simple truths was the enemy.”
The third mode is, “magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.” Snyder gives several examples. One is, “Liberating the wealthy from taxes will not increase the national debt.” The fourth mode is, “misplaced faith.” That is placing faith in a person who insists they are worthy of that faith. Snyder gives several examples here, but I am thinking of the video Trump placed on Truth Social yesterday where he was implying that he would save Gaza and had multiple images of himself including a huge gold statue that reminds one of the huge statue that Nebuchadnezzar placed on the plain of Dura insisting that all should worship it.
For a Christian misplaced faith is idolatry because there is only One to place faith in and He, Jesus, is ultimate Truth. But every time we accept untruth, even small lies, we are growing toward that idolatry—we are becoming creatures who are walking in a foggy unreality, losing our foothold.
C.S. Lewis wrote of those who were becoming splendors like gods and goddesses or becoming like monsters of nightmares. Truth or untruths under girds such transformations. Tonight, these weeks, a nation, Ukraine is being hurt by the lies told about them and their leader. The monsters have told the lies and others are agreeing because of the fears that lying can cause.
Rise in splendor Church, stand in truth.