Surpassing Truth Theory, Part 3: The Shift
If you’re new to this series, please be sure to catch up by reading the Prelude, Part One, and Part Two.
You’ve surely noticed my subtitle by this point, and may well be wondering when I’ll get to unpacking the theory itself that is motivating this series. I’ve slow walked there on purpose, because it’s critically important that I set up the problem before I describe a theory that (I believe) will explain the problem.
The problem, in short, is the current relationship of American Evangelicalism and its public rhetoric with truthfulness and factuality. If you have spent any time around Evangelicalism, its practitioners, and its institutions, you know there is, at least, a strong stated emphasis on truth—knowing the truth, possessing the truth, proclaiming the truth, confronting culture with truth. One would certainly walk away, based simply on the American Evangelical self-image that allegiance to the idea of truth is a core value of American Evangelicalism as a movement.
The problem arises, then, because American Evangelicalism seems to align itself with positions, movements, and figures who seem to those outside of Evangelicalism to be not only false, but demonstrably non-factual. It is one thing, of course, to disagree about an issue, or even to disagree on a matter of fact. But it would be the general expectation of most that when a position has been demonstrated to be false that an honest person would alter their positions correspondingly.
I avoid discussion of President Trump in this space whenever discussion of the topic at hand can reasonably avoid it, but he is certainly germane to this discussion. A March 2020 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that 69% of American Evangelicals believe the word “honest” describes President Trump either “very well” or “fairly well”. Roughly 9 months later, in January 2021, the Washington Post updated it’s total of President Trump’s statements while in office evaluated by its fact checkers as either false or misleading to 30,573. This database of claims contains, for each, documentation demonstrating why it was evaluated as false or misleading. This would seem to be a contradiction.
The simple—and simplistic, in my opinion—explanation for this and other apparent examples of disregard for demonstrable truth, would be that American Evangelical concern for truth is a sham. And that is a common conclusion.
As I was growing up in American Evangelicalism, there was a particular pride in its relationship to factuality and absolute truth. “Absolute Truth”—a belief in its existence and importance was a buzzword. Respect for “Absolute Truth” was talked about as a distinguishing characteristic of us Evangelicals from all the “thems”: liberals, post-moderns, unbelievers, etc. It was a backlash against post-modernism as we understood it. Post-modernism was misunderstood as a denial of the existence of absolute truth, while Biblical Evangelicalism dug in deep to its modernist assurance that, with the right epistemology and the right Biblical hermeneutics, anything other than God Himself (and including Him to the extent that He has revealed himself) can be studied, known, and understood with certainty.
Perhaps it was naive ever to buy into the notion of this relationship between American Evangelicalism and concerns with factuality. Either way, this perceived relationship appears to be observably shifting.
I began observing this anecdotally well-prior to the 2016 Presidential Election. I remember sitting in my Colorado apartment in 2009. A good friend of mine described President Obama as being enthusiastically in favor of the killing of babies. I responded that this is demonstrably false, which it is, citing multiple public statements. My friend replied, and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember his exact words, that sometimes you have to say things that aren’t precisely true in order to proclaim a bigger truth.
Here’s how I interpret that: the real point my friend was making was that President Obama acted to promote access to abortion, a superlative evil. It was really not of great importance whether those actions were taken enthusiastically, callously, or reluctantly. Superlative evil was being perpetrated regardless. Stopping that evil was imperative. And if a more effective rhetoric towards that end can be constructed by mischaracterizing Obama, than that’s what the moment calls for. Fighting access to abortion, in his view, was a Red Button Issue.
I am not, in this moment, arguing for or against that conclusion. Rather, for the moment, this anecdote is simply to illustrate the shift in American Evangelicalism’s perceived relationship to factuality. As champions of Absolute Truth, in my youth, it was my understanding that this shaky relationship with non-factual claims would never be considered acceptable.
In Part 4, I would like to sketch out my theory on the nature of this shift, and in the remainder of this series, continue extrapolating that theory.