An article in the Observer last Sunday, 26 January 2025, by David Smith woke me up to what I need to write about this week. It is an analysis of Trump’s lies. Smith notes that Trump made his first “factually dubious claim” less than fifteen minutes after being sworn in as president. Smith categorises Trump as a habitual and strategic liar, “America’s liar in chief”. Trump will continue to do what he did in his first term and did throughout his election campaign: he’s going to get away with lying and deceiving people by lying and undermining trust in institutions and credible sources of information and we are watching this mass delusion happen right before our eyes. Trump continues to fire off misleading assertions and blatant lies including the big lie that he won the 2020 presidential election. Right-wing influencers are eager to amplify his falsehoods in what has become a fragmented media ecosystem dominated by the leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and X who all attended his inauguration. We live in a world where you can just make up your own facts and truth is however you decide to bend it.
Donald Trump continues to pursue his ruthless, reckless freedom with truth and facts in a way not yet equalled by other political leaders around the world. In doing so he sows seeds of doubt everywhere. Which social networks and media outlets do we now trust to report events truthfully and accurately?
Artificial intelligence
At the same time we find ourselves in a world where the computing power of artificial intelligence is multiplying at a fearsome rate, creating new video, audio and text which are effectively indistinguishable from reality. How do we tell the difference between truth and lies? Fake news can now spread unchecked, instantaneously, through multiple channels. Our capacity to distinguish between truth and fiction is being slowly undermined by the relentless freedom to publish lies and invent fictions adopted by increasing numbers of people. I note than I am becoming more defensive of my preferred sources of news and information, wanting them to be trustworthy when they are attacked as being as corrupt and untrustworthy as every other news source.
Christian Truth
The Christian faith and Christian churches are not immune from the corrupting effect of fake news and rampant lying. From adolescence onwards, I have lived with a questioning mind about the ‘truth’ of the faith into which I was born. I both accept the essence of truth in my Christian faith and have also questioned the details of its truth all through my life. I have done this of necessity as a gay man, having been provoked by my sexuality into questioning the truth and authority of homophobic Christian narratives and homophobic interpretations of the Bible. As a result the whole of Scripture became open to my questing, challenging, doubting mind.
The material on which my faith is based found in the Holy Bible is, as I learnt bit by bit from open-minded, adventurous priests, subject to interpretation. And not only that – each book (and subsections of books) is subject to varying degrees of authority and is valued and interpreted in different ways. The material has been edited and translated and re-translated and interpreted and misused and abused throughout the Christian era. Different categories are found in different books and sometimes within each book – myth, history, poetry, imaginative re-tellings, non-historical records, and many more categories. In church, passages from each book are read without attention being paid to context or to the category of literature to which they belong. We continue to read them because they have the power to inspire us; they can tell the deepest truths about human life, the universe, God and existence.
How do we tell the difference?
I have lived through an era when the proof texts used as “evidence” that God finds homosexual activity so abhorrent that he decreed mass murder against those who broke these powerful Biblical taboos and is disgusted by any same sex sexual intimacy between people. Proof texts have been used and are still being used to authorise fake ideas about human sexuality and gender, with primary abhorrence and disgust reserved for homosexuality. How do people tell the difference between those who use Biblical proof texts to condemn homosexuality and those who argue that God is not prejudiced against any person because of their sexuality or gender or intimate expressions of love? Most people, I suspect, do not have sufficient knowledge of the complexity of the Biblical text to enable them to decide for themselves – they rely on preachers and teachings they trust and on their own common sense, intuition and experience. The result is a deeply divided Church, a division the Living in Love and Faith process is attempting to bridge or resolve, between those for and those against the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people (for whom equal marriage is a natural development of Christian teaching). I fear that those holding to a fundamentalist, literal belief in Biblical texts and passages will increase in number thanks to fake news and the Trump effect and prejudice, abuse, homophobia, transphobia and discrimination against categories of people will increase, as indeed, evidence shows that it is.
How do Christians tell the difference?
I am arguing that those of us who are deeply involved with the Church of England as lay people, priests, bishops, Archbishops and members of organisations working within the Church are called to develop a level of discernment about the elements of our faith that can distinguish between fake news and truth, between un-Christian, unhealthy teachings and deeply Christ-like, healthy, creative teachings. The Church needs to acquire confidence and competence in our core understanding of what it is to be a Christian. I argue for this in the context of the endless inability of the Church to agree whether current teaching and practice in relation to women and LGBTQIA+ people, gender and sexuality is in essence Biblical, Jesus-centred, and unconditionally loving and is free from prejudice, abuse and discrimination. I have learnt that there are the vital differences between a Christ-like culture and vision on the one hand and an unhealthy, abusive, addictive culture on the other.
I look to Christianity and the Church to be a vital space in our society where a healthy spiritual, social, relational culture of justice and truth is maintained. The Church of England is unable do this now. It is deeply, systemically conflicted. I recognise that at the local gras roots level, many parishes and congregations are often providing quite remarkable resources to maintain social health and family well-being. They do this within the context of a hierarchy and institutional systems represented by the General Synod, the House of Bishops, the Archbishops’ Council, the culture of Lambeth Palace and the leadership at Church House, all of which are proving themselves unable to guide the Church in a healthy direction.
How do we begin to change direction?
We need a movement in the Church, a movement of desire and vision, energy and confidence as much as an organised movement of people (though that would be of great benefit), a movement bringing enough noise, voices, passion and conviction to challenge our present complacency.
We need a conscious, deliberate process of discernment, distinguishing between fundamentally healthy and unhealthy, true and false, open and prejudiced modes of thinking.
We need to review the primary qualities we wish to develop in church: love, goodness, wisdom, truth and justice, nurturing and affirming these Christ-like qualities as the essence of Christian living and practice.
We need to ensure that we value our bodies and our minds equally, developing a consciousness of our emotional, mental, spiritual and psychic health as well as our physical and energetic health. Christianity, despite the centrality of bodily resurrection in some strands of its teaching and of contemplative life and prayer in other strands, fails abysmally to attend to the physical and spiritual health of us as individuals and as members of a congregation, the body of Christ.
We need this because global leaders like Trump, “America’s liar in chief” spread disinformation alongside artificial intelligence, creating material that is effectively indistinguishable from reality, while humankind becomes addicted to the online media metaverse where fake news can spread unchecked. How do we confidently, consciously, attentively develop our ability to tell the difference between truth and lies, in Church as well as in society?
Conclusion
I’m offering ideas in this blog that will be manna to some, anathema to others, and difficult to process for others. I will expand these ideas in subsequent blogs. My ideas and thought processes develop every day. I insist on ninety minutes of silence, reflection, deep presence and meditation every morning and into the silence and stillness, unbidden, ideas flow. I offer these ideas to you knowing they may take time to process – weeks and years and possibly decades. I’m dreaming of a huge change in where our attention is focused as Christians.