The recent furore in the press concerning President Biden’s continuing retreat from lucidity highlights a danger faced by our society at large, including Christians.

It was widely known, and presented on social media, that President Biden was prone to making gaffes. We had seen him wandering around as in a daze, having to be led off the stage at rallies, losing track in the middle of a sentence. Outside the mainstream media it was generally accepted that the most powerful man in the Western world had cognitive problems.

They must have known

The mainstream media, however, urged us not to believe the evidence of our eyes. We were assured by prestigious newspapers like the New York Times that President Biden was on top form and that he was the victim of vicious, lying Republican ‘misinformation’ and ‘misleading imagery’. It was claimed that video clips or ‘cheap fakes’ were carefully edited to make him appear senile and then spread on the internet, all in an attempt to create a false narrative about Biden’s decline.

 Outside the mainstream media it was generally accepted that the most powerful man in the Western world had cognitive problems.

When, after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, it became undeniable that their standard-bearer was losing ground mentally, the media which had previously supported Biden began to report his decline. They acknowledged, with apparent surprise, what was already common knowledge, that their hero was in actual fact an old man who should not be put through what must be a difficult and confusing time for him.

One of the defining aspects of the cultural and political scene today is that so many of the institutions of the West, especially the media, have lost credibility in the eyes of the public. We have become aware that they have lied, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unconsciously, and especially that they have lied by omission and suppressed important information that would have contradicted the preferred narrative of the powerful.

Despite their supposedly shocked surprise, these press and television reporters must have known what was going on in the White House, yet they continued to deny reality. It would be impossible to be in close contact with the White House operation without being aware of the multiple instances of mental decline. Yet they continued the cover-up until it became undeniable.

We believe what we want to believe

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, because they shared the political stance of the Democrat party and Joe Biden was the standard-bearer of the progressive cause which they shared. The media proprietors and staff genuinely thought that if Biden fell and Trump regained power it would be an existential crisis for the USA. To criticise Biden would be to ‘give aid and comfort to the enemy’. Defending Biden became more important than journalistic ethics.

To criticise Biden would be to ‘give aid and comfort to the enemy’. Defending Biden became more important than journalistic ethics.

Secondly, they were also victims of a human trait to which Christians are as susceptible as anyone else: they saw what they wanted to see. They were able to dismiss the clear signs as blips which could happen to anyone, even falling upstairs. We can convince ourselves that we are not seeing what is plain before us if it challenges the core beliefs we cherish and which help us to make sense of a sometimes confusing world. There is something inherent in us which makes us seek the safety of our own bubble, where we interact only with those with whom we agree and ignore our adversaries. Without being aware of it. we can become wilfully blind and genuinely fail to see the obvious.

This not only sows mistrust, it creates enmities. In culture war terms, the left are so stuck to their viewpoint, and so unable to see outside their own bubble, that they regard disagreement as aggression, which makes you a Bad Person if you oppose them. They think, in all honesty, that if you don’t want your primary school son to be told that he could become a girl, it is because you belligerently reject what everyone else accepts. Here in the UK we have seen schools propagandising transgender ideology from Stonewall and deceiving parents about what they are doing, all the while utterly certain they are the Good Guys doing the right thing. And so the divisions grow.

The lies we tell ourselves

Rod Dreher wrote Live Not By Lies as a timely warning to help Christians resist the lies of the soft totalitarianism under which we increasingly live. The title arises from something Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote on the day of his arrest in 1974 urging Soviet citizens to resist the lies of the regime and reclaim their humanity. He was expelled from the USSR the following day.

 We cannot truly know what we ourselves affirm and what we reject unless we know the arguments brought against us.

The lies the powerful tell us are dangerous; much more dangerous are the lies we tell ourselves. Christians need to be willing to see our Christian culture, including our proudest achievements, through the eyes of our most relentless critics. We too easily fall into the temptation of dismissing the ideas of our critics as being motivated by prejudice or personal animosity because we don’t want to admit that they may have a point. Whatever Christian tradition we belong to, we fool only ourselves if we think that we have the final answer.

It is no credit to us if we succeed in stifling the ideas of our opponents without first attempting to understand them. We cannot truly know what we ourselves affirm and what we reject unless we know the arguments brought against us. To truly refine and defend our arguments we must know what criticism might be mounted in opposition.

We cannot afford to be like the mass media and unthinkingly support our position simply because ‘that’s what Christians believe’. If we do we will be in greater danger of being swept away than the person who holds the same position but who has faced up to the arguments against and has arrived at that conclusion for himself.

To truly live not by lies in the coming difficult times for Christians, we must do so on a foundation of being relentlessly honest with ourselves.

The Rev. Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister; now a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Check out his many incisive articles on his blog, A Grain of Sand.