On Lies as Truth

 

On Lies as Truth

November 21, 2022

 

I have said many times that we live in a post-fact world. Donald Trump is the best example. Essentially every statement he makes is filled with lies. Yet millions of people believe his statements to be true. If the Trumpists’ Dear Leader says something, anything really, his deluded followers take it as true though there is no evidence to support it and lots of evidence that contradicts it. Trump’s Big Lie is the best example of this phenomenon. Trump says that his electoral victory in 2020 was stolen from him by a corrupt, left-leaning political establishment. There is no evidence that that claim is true and an enormous amount of evidence that it is a lie. Yet the absence in Trump’s lie of facts supported by actual evidence matters to his followers not at all. They take the statement as true just because Trump said it. Because Trump spoke the lie, that lie functions for them as truth.

I find it surprising and important that the same dynamic prevailed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) said that the Soviet Union was democratic and its people were free. The facts undeniably prove that claim to be false. The CPSU said that workers in the Soviet Union were better off than workers in the capitalist West. Because the Party issued that lie it functioned as the truth though all of the available evidence showed it to be false. The CPSU said the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put down a counterrevolutionary uprising fomented and financed by the CIA. All of the facts show that claim to be false, but in the Soviet Union it functioned as the truth because the Party said it. Soviet domestic propaganda often used the phrase “vsem izvestno,” which means “everyone knows,” some alleged fact. In fact, no one knew the supposed fact, but that non-fact functioned as the truth because the Party said it was true.

This dynamic from the old Soviet Union is the same as a foundational dynamic of Trumpism, or at least the Trump dynamic is very similar to the Soviet dynamic about the truth. The CPSU issued lie after lie and made their lies function as the truth. Donald Trump issues lie after lie, and his lies function as the truth for his deluded followers. In neither case did (or does) the total absence of facts to support the lie make any difference to those who are either forced to take it as the truth as in the Soviet Union or to those who choose to take it as the truth in our country today.

There is one significant difference between the way lies functioned in the Soviet Union and the way they function with Trump’s supporters that we must point out. In the Soviet Union publicly calling the CPSU on its lies very probably led to your arrest and punishment. So, hardly anyone said anything publicly against the Party line. The failure of Soviet citizens to speak up for the truth can, I think, be excused. They had no access to the actual facts of any matter of public concern. They knew that it was legally, politically, socially, and economically unsafe to contradict the Party’s lies in public. There were a few brave souls who did speak up for the truth. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov are good examples. The Soviet government threw Solzhenitsyn out of the country and put Sakharov in isolation in the city of Nizhnyi Novgorod as punishment for their speaking the truth, but at least they spoke it. The vast majority of Soviet citizens did not. They could not and/or had valid reasons for not doing so.

The way our contemporary Trumpists take Trump’s lies to be the truth is much less excusable. Although Donald Trump would very much like to head an authoritarian government that could punish people who criticize him and call him on his lies, we don’t have such an authoritarian government. Though the Trumpists would probably like to repeal all of the Bill of Rights except the Second Amendment, we still have as much freedom as anyone in the world to call everyone, up to and including the president, on their lies. We have legally unfettered access to the actual facts of any situation we are in. We can call a Trump lie a lie and not be arrested or lose a promotion at work or lose our job altogether the way Soviet people did for speaking the truth. We can speak the truth and not have the power of the state come to shut us up and punish us.

Because we can call a lie a lie, we should, indeed we must, call lies in the public arena lies regardless of who has asserted them as true. We must do so if our democracy is to survive. One important role of the media is to speak the truth when our politicians do not. And no, Mr. Trump, those media are not the “enemy of the people” (a phrase from Stalin’s reign of terror in the worst years of Soviet life) that you say they are, or at least most of them aren’t. They don’t always, or perhaps ever, get everything perfectly right. Some media outlets are even prone to repeat Trumpist lies as though they were the truth. Fox News and Breitbart are good examples. That unfortunate reality to the contrary notwithstanding, our media, at their best, are both suppliers of truth and a forum for the free discussion of public issues. A democracy must have such media. The Soviet Union did not. Today Russia under Putin and China do not. Tyranny of any sort cannot survive when people have access to the truth, when people are free to determine the facts of any matter themselves.

The parallels  between the dynamics around truth of the USSR and our contemporary Trumpists are troubling at best. We must rid ourselves of the Trumpian notion that lies are just “alternate facts.” We must somehow get people to stop calling the truth “fake news” the way Trump so often does. If our democracy is to survive, and it is far from certain that it will, we must restore a culture in which statements of an alleged truth in our public arena must be supported by actual facts. A post-factual world is a world built in lies. No system built on lies can last for long, but such a system can cause immense damage while they exist. We must not let Trump’s lies damage our country the way the CPSU’s lies damaged Russia. Trump may find Russia a model to be followed. It isn’t, and those of us who know that it isn’t must not keep silent.

Making a Joyful Noise

 This is the little meditation I gave today to close out a weekend retreat by the choir of First Congregational Church of Bellevue, United Church of Christ, in which I sing. It was well received by the choir members who heard it.

Making a Joyful Noise

First Congregational Church of Bellevue United Church of Christ

Choir Retreat

November 13, 2022

 

Scripture: Palm 98:4-6

 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

 

I know of course that I don’t have sell any of you on the value of sacred music. We all sing in or direct a church choir, and most if not all of you are better musicians than I am. I have, however, had a kind of experience with sacred music that, as far as I know, none of you have had. That’s the experience of being a church pastor who plans worship services, sings in the church choir, and is the music director’s supervisor. I thought maybe sharing with you some of my experiences in the church I served the longest might be worthwhile this morning.

The church I served the longest in my career as a church pastor was Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington. That church has been around since 1905. Like so many UCC churches, especially small UCC churches, it was significantly smaller when it called me as pastor in 2002 than it had been decades earlier. I served that church for nearly 13 years, and my wife Jane (who some of you may remember from the time years ago when she served here briefly as a bridge pastor) was first on staff with me and then succeeded me as the church’s pastor when I resigned. She’s still there.

When I started my service at the church in 2002, the church had a Music Director who’d been there for a year or so before I showed up. He was actually on the search committee that selected me as their candidate for the call to the church as pastor. His name is Keith, and he’s still there, working now with my wife as his supervisor. Keith is no Stephen O’Bent and no Dennis Coleman (but then who is?), but he is a good choir director and a good organist and pianist. I understand that he’s particularly good at accompanying solo singers. I joined the Monroe church’s choir as soon as I started there as pastor in March, 2002. That little church had, and has, some remarkably good singers as members of the congregation. There are two particularly gifted sopranos. The choir never numbered more than about 12 while I was there, and it was often smaller than that. Yet somehow Keith got us to sound pretty good given the talent he had to work with.

Now, I found that I could mostly leave the selection of the choir music up to Keith, but occasionally I had to step in and say no. There were two problems I occasionally had to deal with. One was the theology of some of the choral pieces Keith chose. He chooses choir pieces that are very good musically but not always so good theologically. See, I’ve been preaching and writing against something called substitutionary sacrificial atonement theology for a very long time. That’s the theology that says that Jesus suffered and died in our place to pay the price that had to be paid to God so that God would forgive human sin. Ah, No! Ask me later if you want to know what’s wrong with it, for I know that most people think it is what Christianity is. In any event, Keith would sometimes give the choir a piece of music that was perfectly acceptable musically but had bad theology in it. I’d have to say to him, No, Keith. We’re not going to sing that. The theology is all wrong. Sometimes the problem went the other way. I remember one year I was planning an upbeat, joyous service for Easter Sunday. Keith gave the choir an Easter anthem that was theologically OK but that was slow, pensive, in a minor key. It might have been beautiful. I guess in its way it was. But I said, No, Keith. That doesn’t fit the service I’m planning. Mercifully, Keith always accepted my decisions gracefully.

I tell this story only to make a point. Psalm 98 calls us to “make a joyful noise to the Lord.” It calls us to “break forth into joyous song and sing praises.” Doing that authentically and well isn’t as easy as Psalm 98 makes it sound. At least, it’s not that easy for those of us who know something about both music and theology and take them seriously. What we sing has to be solid theologically. It’s tone and mood have to fit the worship service in which we sing it. Stephen of course knows all that, and I suppose all of you do. Still, I hope you appreciate the work that has to go into making not just a joyful noise but an appropriate one as well. Under Stephen’s direction, you all do that better than any church choir I’ve ever been in, or ever heard for that matter. When people ask me about Bellevue First Congregational the first thing I say is, Every Sunday you will hear world class music. We sing it in a sanctuary that has perfectly awful acoustics for the spoken voice but magnificent acoustics for music. That the congregation tolerates those acoustics speaks, I think, to how important sacred music is to the people of our church. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate that importance.

That’s because sacred music can convey the meaning of our faith more powerfully than the spoken word ever can. Yes, I preached nearly every Sunday for close to sixteen years. Good preaching is important, but music has a power that mere speaking never can have. They say the person who sings prays twice, once with the words and once with the music. Now, Psalm 98 don’t say make a joyful noise on the trombone. I suppose there were no trombones in ancient Israel. And, frankly, I never thought of the trombone as an instrument for sacred music until I started attending Bellevue First. But when our choir gets singing some joyous anthem with Stephen and his friends on the trombone and other brass instruments, what we produce is indeed the most powerful, moving, joyous noise to God I’ve ever heard.

Now, most if not all of you are better musicians and singers than I am. But here’s what I hope for you. And, to be honest, I’m saying this as much to myself as I am to you. Don’t get so caught up in the mechanics of singing that you miss the meaning of the music. Sometimes the music is joyful. Sometimes it is quiet and contemplative. Sometimes it’s about justice. Sometimes its about prayer. Music can express an endless variety of meanings and moods and do it far better than the best preacher ever can. Worship without good music is, for me, hardly worship at all. So I want to say thank you to all of you. You make worship at Bellevue First truly special. I hope you know how unusual a church choir you are. And I hope our music moves you and strengthens your faith as much as I’m sure it does for those who hear us out there in the congregation. May it be so. Amen.