I have a friend who was raised in an atheist home surrounded by her atheist family, friends, and community. When she was in high school, she did a semester abroad and ended up on the other side of the Atlantic – in a CHRISTIAN home!
My friend recalls how as time went on and the host family shared the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ, her whole atheistic worldview came crashing down. But as much as Christianity was making sense, and as much as she wanted to accept it as truth, she had one major obstacle: accepting Christianity as ultimate truth would mean that everything she had been told, everything she had read (and she was a voracious reader and owned MANY heady books proving the validity of atheism), and every person she had always trusted, were actually wrong.
To fully accept Christianity, my friend had to first acknowledge she had been misled and the very people she desperately wanted to believe (including loving parents!), she really couldn’t anymore. It was a big leap for a teenager, but she did it and was then able to accept Jesus as her Lord and Savior.
On the flip side, one of the most heralded evangelical Christian authors of our day, Philip Yancey, recently gifted the world with his memoir, Where the Light Fell, where he portrays life growing up in a fundamentalist southern Baptist church in the 60’s. Even though his parents were missionaries and raised Philip in the church, he now describes his upbringing as “toxic.” Yancey says it wasn’t until he became a young adult that he came to understand just how racist, hypocritical, verbally abusive, and unloving his upbringing had been. Yancey describes needing to completely dismantle the Christianity of his childhood in order to truly fall in love with Jesus and accept him as his loving, forgiving, and inclusive Savior.
What he always thought was right was actually wrong.
Both conversion accounts – my friend’s and Philip Yancey’s – are SO compelling and pertinent for our day and age. It seems that today, more than ever, deception is rampant and the great deceiver has figured out how to lead us into destruction by confusing the heck out of us when it comes to which figures in authority we should be listening to.
And one thing we ALL KNOW is true: God is never the author of confusion.
In our very divided nation, some of us who believe we are trusting the right voices and are absorbing truth are most certainly listening to deception (which has to be true because we can’t ALL be right). Somehow, some of us have chosen to trust people and voices that we shouldn’t and have shut out the voices we need.
But here’s the thing – that word TRUST is what’s biting us in the butt.
Whether we’ll admit it or not, we are all trusting someone or something. And it’s so important that we step back and analyze the voices we’ve put our trust in. If we say we don’t trust the CDC, NIH, or the AMA, we’re then saying we DO trust the online doctors and social media stories that contradict those medical entities. Whether the recipient of our trust is our school boards, my friend on Facebook, black/white people, immigrants, police officers, evangelicals, Muslims, atheists, Democrats, Republicans, Tucker Carlson, Don Lemmon, my grandmother, your neighbor, ZDogg or Zindaya – if we are listening to ONE person/group and saying, “Yes, I trust you and what you are saying,” we are inevitably choosing to NOT believe in the counter-narrative.
Are the voices we’re listening to SO trustworthy that we’re willing to risk our well-being, our character, our health (or our kids’), relationships, our children’s futures, our nation or our democracy on what they’re telling us?
Let’s be extremely careful before we answer that question with an emphatic “yes.”
Yet many of us will insist this conversation is unnecessary because God alone is to be trusted. And, as is often posited subconsciously by well-meaning Christians, by trusting God alone we’re exempt from deception (we trust God will lead us to the TRUE news sources, the TRUE medical experts, the TRUTH about history, the morality of and intentions of leaders, the values of a political party, etc., etc.). Oh man, what a dangerous, deadly belief!!! Of course, God alone can be fully trusted, but as fallen humans living in this sinful place, we cannot escape deception! It’s Satan’s favorite (and really, his ONLY tool) and he can, and does, target Christians (maybe, even more so). Because we live and breathe and walk on this planet and must interact with other humans every single day, we have no choice but to choose who we will trust and who we will not. There’s no way around it.
As evidenced by several of his previous book titles, Where is God When It Hurts?,or What’s So Amazing About Grace? or Church, Why Bother? or The Question That Never Goes Away: WHY? Philip Yancey reveals something Christians are afraid to admit: it’s NOT a sin to ask questions! We owe it to ourselves and the world to research the sources of our information and ask a LOT of questions. We owe it to ourselves and the world to check references and credentials. We owe it to ourselves and the world to ask if we’ve been stuck in an echo chamber or if we’re really listening to all points of a debate before deciding our position.
Maybe we need to be asking more questions.
If you haven’t seen the film The Social Dilemma yet, I highly recommend it. This poignant film describes how we (internet users) are all recipients of a very carefully curated feed finely tuned to our specific interests, fears, and beliefs. In other words, “they” know what we want to hear and “they” pummel us with it. “They” know exactly what it takes to lead us down the proverbial bunny trail and are experts as doing it. If you’ve ever wondered why THE WHOLE WORLD isn’t up in arms about XYZ because it seems it’s everywhere and evil and going to destroy us, there’s a good chance that you are being fed a whole lot more of XYZ than everyone else. You may have clicked a time or two too many that initiated the bunny trail, but soon, “they” had you pegged for the exact kind of person who will get all fired up about XYZ so “they” pummeled you with it. Your sources are amplifying the thing and making it appear so much bigger, so much worse, so much more dire. It’s no wonder many Americans feel the sky is falling. “They” told us it was.
Who will we trust?
Maybe the voices we’ve been listening to that we’ve been SO VERY SURE we could trust (as with the case of my friend’s family and with Yancey’s parents) are not trusted voices.
Maybe we’ve been so caught up in a political quagmire that we’re not even able to see up from down. Right from wrong. Good from bad.
Maybe we need a healthy purging of our internet feed and instead drive to the border ourselves and ask a bunch of questions. Maybe we need to invite a local epidemiologist, or a school board member, or a law school professor, or a homeless person over for dinner and be the LISTENER, not the speaker. If we’re white, maybe we need to attend a black church for a while and make some new friends. And vice-versa. Maybe we need to ask our long-time family pediatrician what we should do in this current public health crisis. Maybe we need to really concentrate on the reputation of our news sources by asking all kinds of questions about where they get funding, who’s their target audience and why, and what political motivation they might have to bend the news. Maybe we need to study media bias charts (here) and ask ourselves if we’re getting skewed or biased news reporting.
Maybe – MAYBE MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE – we need to step back and say, “How important is it that I have a STRONG opinion on XYZ and then try to convince others my viewpoint is correct? What if I refocused that energy and instead just try to love others as I would want to be loved?”
What kind of a world would that be?
I don’t know. It’s been too long for me to remember.
