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I opened up YouTube yesterday, and was recommended a video titled, “Ed Sheeran—I Believe (Official Video) A Powerful Gospel Song.” I was intrigued to hear someone with the following of Ed Sheeran perform a song testifying to gospel faith, so I played the video and listened carefully to the lyrics. The chorus is powerful:
I believe in the power of Your name,
In the cross where You took my shame.
I believe in the hope that You restore,
You are King, now and evermore.
The comments are filled with Hallelujahs and Amens from excited Christians. But you have to read the fine print in the description to learn that the video was created using A.I. and didn’t involve Ed Sheeran at all. A clever deception tries to combine the popularity of a pop singer with some gospel lyrics to “spread the message of faith and hope to everyone.” But this well-intentioned trick raises a deeper issue—if something feels true and inspires hope, does it really matter whether it’s real?
Fake news has changed us in ways that we may not have noticed. I’d like to explore 3 symptoms of our post-truth world and what we can do about them.
1. We like to listen to what reinforces our beliefs whether it’s true or not
Once upon a time, everybody in town read the same newspaper and had a shared understanding of reality. Now, an endless supply of information and outlets are competing for our attention, so they feed us what the analytics tell them we want to hear. That can take the form of deliberate deception or just providing one side of an argument to make it appear more convincing than it is.
Paul warned of a time when people “having itching ears … will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). He was talking specifically about truth related to God and His will, but the same is true for other information as well.
We need to acknowledge our tendency to just listen to what we want to hear, and we have to resist it. I wanted to believe that Ed Sheeran had released a worship song, and that made me vulnerable to deception. We need to beware of “too good to be true” and check our sources and read the fine print.
We also need to listen to opposing voices. Proverbs 18:17 says, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” Charles Spurgeon once said, “A lie will go around the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” A post-truth world requires that we approach what we hear with more caution and do the work of verifying whether it’s true.
2. We don’t fully trust anyone, so lies don’t shock us anymore
One of the goals of propaganda is to spread so much disinformation that people mistrust everything they hear. We’re seeing that more and more in our day. Try to present facts that conflict with what a person believes, and they’ll tell you that there’s so much misinformation that you can’t believe what you hear. It makes it difficult to talk to each other or trust one another. And along the way, deception has become normalized. It’s nothing for people to be caught in a lie anymore because—we tell ourselves—everyone lies. But everyone doesn’t lie, and surely the people of God are to be passionate about the truth (not just about our positions).
Proverbs 12:22 says, “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.” In Ephesians 4:25, Paul put it like this, “Having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor.” If Christians demonstrated a singular commitment to truth and to people who are careful not to lie, we would stand out as incredibly counter-cultural at this moment. Unfortunately, that’s not happening. Instead, we’re spreading videos labelled, “Ed Sheeran—I Believe.”
3. We feed the algorithm and need to decide what we’ll tolerate
It would be easy to blame other people for the post-truth world in which we live. But we determine what we’re exposed to online every time we click and like what we see. Through our engagement or lack of it, we could teach the algorithm that we aren’t willing to listen to lies and misinformation. But that requires that we exercise discernment.
The Bible urges that we practice just that kind of discernment. Colossians 2:8 says, for example, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” We can’t just blindly absorb the “empty deceit” that’s so prevalent today. Instead, we’re called to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).
Dr. Martin Camacho gives us this challenge: “Consumers have the last word, they are free people who can decide to re-establish the value of truth. This means avoiding lies, your own and those of others, and avoiding becoming accustomed to living in circumstances in which falsehood is usual. Rejecting any lack of truth in any way possible, however subtle it may be.”
Let’s rebuild a world where truth matters, and we see lies are seen as the abomination that God calls them.
In awe of Him,
Paul
