Lies and Damn Lies

LIVING IN THE United States in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency often feels surreal, disorienting, and overwhelming, including to some people in positions of considerable responsibility and influence.

There are, of course, many reasons for this, and those who regularly read my columns can no doubt list many of the things that most perturb and anger me about this administration. Many of us are focused on our solidarity and support for those who are most vulnerable in the face of the new political realities. We have lifted up the Matthew 25 Pledge movement aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants threatened with deportation, African Americans and other people of color threatened with racialized policing, and Muslims threatened with xenophobic hatred and discrimination.

But a unifying theme of all of Trump’s outrages and threats is his brazen assault on the very concept of truth and objective, knowable facts. Amid everything that’s going on, consuming and interpreting the news each day is considerably more exhausting than it should be because it has never been more difficult to sort fact from fiction. While this isn’t entirely Trump’s doing, his almost daily falsehoods have the large platform and weight of the presidency to prop them up and pound the American people with persistent and pervasive lying.

This spring, the news cycle was thrown into turmoil for more than a month by Trump’s evidence-free allegations that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had illegally wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. The president lied, accusing his predecessor of a serious crime with no justification or evidence. Rather than retracting it and apologizing, Trump has tasked his administration and the intelligence community with finding any shred of evidence to retroactively justify his lie.

It is also worth remembering the context in which Trump emerged as a political figure. Though already famous due to his real estate deals and reality TV show, he perversely gained much of his credibility with the GOP primary base by feeding their hatred of the country’s first African-American president with racist lies about Obama’s birthplace that clearly sought to delegitimize him.

Trump’s presidential campaign was also largely built on lies, including the claim that Mexico is going to pay for his “big, beautiful wall.” David Leonhardt, in a New York Times op-ed, argued that Trump “lies in ways that no American politician ever has before,” on subjects including (among many other things) “John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud, and his groping of women.”

The volume and brazenness of Trump’s lies has metastasized outward from him and infected much of his administration, many of the Republicans in Congress, and a distressing number of white Christians who both voted for and continue to support him. The moral compromises on the part of Christians to justify supporting Trump were already immense before the election, but the unwillingness of so many to stand up for truth now further corrupts their witness.

Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Throughout the scriptures, there is a clear prohibition on lying and dishonesty. It does not reflect well on loyalty to God to defend a lying earthly ruler instead of defending the truth. And the consequences are hardly abstract.

What will happen to a nation’s freedom when its people don’t know the truth anymore? What happens when the political leader of the nation lies day after day? Under Trump, has repetitive lying become normalized? What will the effect be on our children when even they can see that the president regularly lies? Will that make it harder for parents to tell them to always tell the truth? How does it affect a nation’s credibility when the president’s supporters say that nobody should take what he says “literally”? What does it do to the nation’s moral fabric when intelligence and justice officers tell us that there is no proof behind the president’s numerous claims? And what does it mean when the president refuses to accept any responsibility for his mountain of deceptions?

The perpetual and seemingly pathological lying of the president is now more than a political issue, and certainly more than a partisan one; it is a moral and a religious crisis. And it is time for the faith community to defend the truth. Pastors should preach truth from the pulpit. Teachers and parents should clearly point out when the president is lying, and teach children what the truth is. We can all use social media to confront Trump’s lies with facts. The truth will indeed set us free, but the unwillingness of the faith community to speak truth to power could push us toward political bondage.