This Two Ways News episode is the last weekly collaboration between Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen. The newsletter and podcast, on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today, will continue with Phillip collaborating with someone else in the future (subscribe at twoways.news).
This final episode for 2024 was recorded on November 5—a momentous day in world affairs when the USA settled a presidential race. It is a discussion of the nature of words and truth, especially in our politics and public discourse—because the US election campaign exhibited a seeming inability of both candidates to tell the unvarnished, straightforward truth. And Australian politics is much the same.
Our political life is full of half truths, false promises, broken oaths and outright lies. The kingdom of God promises (and fulfils!) a very different way of speaking..
The previous episode is Submission.
THE TRUTH FACTOR
Why telling the truth and keeping promises should be at the heart of public life, but it isn’t.
Tony Payne: Today—November 5th—would be a good day to talk about truth and promises in politics, because whether we’re thinking about the American presidential election or the Australian election, which is coming up early next year, there’s a fairly universal sense that we can’t trust what politicians say. Words and truth are a devalued currency in political discourse, and there’s a significant decline in trust in our politicians.
Phillip Jensen: It’s worse than that because we’ve found in research that since COVID, public trust has declined generally—and that’s in institutions and authorities, not just politicians. And social capital is built out of trust. Without trust, society can’t function and there is great concern about it. But trust and truth go together. It’s like how faith and truth are the same kinds of words in Hebrew and in English.
TP: Yes, it’s about being able to depend on what someone says and that it not only correlates in some way with reality, but actually is what the person is meaning to say to you.
PJ: We want to trust that what they’re saying is reliable because they are reliable.
TP: Yes, it’s connected with their character and their disposition.
PJ: God is the God of truth, and that’s why we can trust him, which shows that the kind of truth we’re talking about is relational reliability.
TP: When we think of politicians and words, we normally think of truth and lies. But it’s more complex than that, because the way that politicians speak to us often has a loose connection with truth but it isn’t always a flat out lie. Sometimes it’s just not the truth, or more than the truth, or half the truth, or a story or a picture that leads us away from the truth.
PJ: It’s a bit like fiction. By definition, fiction is not the truth; it’s made up. But there is more truth than just scientific truth, and fiction does carry truth with it. In fact, you will find some truths about life in fiction that would be hard to express in scientific knowledge.
TP: Quite so. You might almost say that a parable could convey a truth without being a representation of anything that has ever happened in the world.
PJ: Yes, a proverb can do that too, and a poem can do it.
TP: The truth is more than just “Am I making a blatantly and demonstrably false statement at this point in time?” It’s got to do with whether the words you’re speaking fit with reality and seek to lead you in line with reality, being faithful to what really is, rather than distorting in some way what reality is. That’s why you were saying that faithfulness and truth are so similar in their semantic range.
PJ: And a good example is Trump’s use of language. It is very distinctive.
TP: Indeed. I was listening to a particular commentator the other day who made a fascinating point about Trump and his rhetoric. He suggested that many of the mainstream media in America and his Democrat opponents get Mr Trump wrong because they try to assess his language and his statements and his stories and his speeches according to a strict truth or lie criterion. But the way Trump speaks and uses language is not like that. He’s a salesman. He tells stories and puts out vague, loose, impressionistic, inaccurate kind of statements that give you the vibe of what he’s trying to sell you, to motivate you to buy the thing he’s selling. Trying to evaluate him as a speaker of strict facts of truth or lies is misunderstanding what he’s doing, and it often plays right into his hands.
Trump doesn’t really care whether it’s a truth or a lie. He just wants to tell you whatever will persuade you of his point of view. There are several ways of describing that kind of language. An old word for it is ‘humbug’, the kind of person who’s a ‘huckster’ who’s trying to sell you things. Pretty much all advertising is like this as well, and it has a long tradition in politics. Bill Clinton was like this. He would tell you things that you knew were exaggerated and fantastical, and he knew that you knew that they were fantastical, but somehow it was part of the discourse and the convention of of his persona and his politics, and you just accepted it as part of the bargain of who Bill Clinton was.
PJ: It’s kind of like a comedian, isn’t it? Because you know the comedian is not telling you what is really the case, but the comedian can say things that are more truthful than could be said in a factual fashion.
TP: By making the absurd statement and putting the two absurd things together, you suddenly laugh and see the comedy.
PJ: And you see the truth. It’s a different way of seeing the truth, isn’t it? It’s like a cartoon caricature of somebody.
TP: And so this commentator was suggesting that one way to understand Trump is not as Hitler, but as PT Barnum, who was the great originator of the American huckster, circus entertainment industry—the showman, the teller of tall tales, the exaggerator, the travelling medicine show. And that’s the best way to understand what Trump is doing. He’s a real estate salesman selling you a bill of goods, selling you a line, telling you a story that has the loosest association with what’s actually true, but which impressionistically conveys the thing he wants to persuade you of.
PJ: And if you share in that myth and are willing to listen to him and hear him, your mind can be shaped and changed without buying that false information.
TP: Without thinking that everything he says is literally true.
PJ: Yes, it’s the problem of literalism, isn’t it? Does the politician have to be a literalist? No. And it’s like the old line, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. If you give every detail, you nearly always lose the point of the story. You have to omit (or even change) the details that are irrelevant in order to be able to tell the story well.
TP: We’re talking about mediums of communication that use impressionistic language, metaphorical language, the use of extreme contrasts and vivid, unrealistic pictures that convey something–like a log being taken out of your eye as opposed to a speck. Preaching is often one of those forms of language, isn’t it?
PJ: Yes, preachers often use hyperbole and stories and rhetoric to make their point, to force people to stop and think because I’m not just saying what you’re expecting. For example, Jesus says unless you hate your father, mother, brother, sister, you cannot be my disciple. So here’s Jesus who says you’ve got to love your enemy as yourself, saying that you’ve got to hate your family. So he’s forcing you, by overstatement, to stop and think about what is actually being said.
TP: There are some contexts, then, where we accept a loose connection with literal, factual, scientific truth, because the kind of thing we’re trying to convey requires language that’s metaphorical, that paints a picture.
PJ: Movies are the same. You only have two hours to make a point, so you can’t be faithful to all the facts.
TP: But I guess the key question is: Is politics one of those areas where loose impressionistic storytelling is appropriate?
PJ: No, it’s not.
TP: I agree. But you can see that in the trajectory of politics over the last many decades, that’s the way it has gone (and it’s the same here in Australia). The world of advertising and marketing with how it uses language and the way it tells stories is now the means by which we decide elections–which personality manages to market themselves to the public in the best way, who most tells the people what they want to hear (according to the focus group research). It’s about what image they want to project, what story or emotion they want to evoke. This has become the currency of elections in our world.
PJ: And the mainstream media contributes to that by putting up nice photographs for the candidates they like and nasty ones for the candidates they don’t like. And the moment the candidate fails in some way, suddenly all the photographs are nasty. So they choose which photographs will give you the impression that they have of that person and wish to convey. And unless you’re watching carefully, you buy into what’s being conveyed.
TP: And so we’ve seen the victory of impressionistic, marketing-oriented, sales-oriented kind of speech in our political life as opposed to politics being a place where you debate the character of the person or the policies that they want to implement. Instead of talking together about facts and issues and debating those, it becomes a game of who can market themselves best. And you can see the rise and success of someone like Donald Trump as being someone who’s figured out how to beat a lot of the existing players at their own game by taking it to a new level.
PJ: In modern democracy, you are under an illusion if you think it’s about policies and it’s about character, because it’s manifestly not.
Let me give you the Australian left-wing example. We had the King come and visit us of recent times, and when he was in Parliament at Canberra, someone from the extreme left end of politics, an indigenous woman who is a senator in our upper house, Lydia Thorpe, made an impassioned verbal attack upon the King. She was escorted from the hall by two or three security guards as she yelled abuse at the King, declaring that he was not her King and he had no right to be here because of the the British destruction of indigenous rights here in Australia and saying how he’s got no treaty with us and so on. Her impassioned plea has had terribly negative media. Everybody’s dumped on her, and I think unfairly, because she’s making a point that the mainstream media actually censors. The only way she can get the point across is by making a scene. Well, she made a scene. She’s good at making scenes. And this was a big one that went around the world as you don’t often see the King of England being abused personally. But the complaints have been about her manner of demonstration, the rudeness to the King, the vulgar language, the pointless dummy spit. They’ve hardly ever discussed the point that she is making. They’re just saying if you want to make your point, you’ve got to do it in a polite way. But the polite way is never going to be heard.
TP: If you believe that Britain, as a colonial power, invaded and took away the land of your people by force, perpetrating genocide as they did so, and illegally and illegitimately took possession of your land without treaty and agreement, and that therefore you as a king are completely illegitimate as a person to be standing in this place, and that the whole system is built on this lie and invasion, then what else would you do but want to stand up and shout when the whole of Australia is fawning over their King?
PJ: Yes, don’t ask me to be polite. And of course, the newspapers give life and promotion to the ones who do make a scene. They always cover violent or outrageous demonstrations, even if they also tut tut over them. By doing what she did, Lydia Thorpe is all over the news, and her point now exists, even if we’re not going to discuss it with her. And so the media actually fuels violence and division while complaining about violence and division, because it doesn’t give room and space for alternative viewpoints to be discussed and to be openly aired.
TP: So did you think she did the right thing?
PJ: No, absolutely wrong, but not because of the manner in which she did it, rather it’s because she had taken an oath. Jesus talks about oaths in the sermon of the Mount when he quotes the Old Testament in Leviticus and Numbers of people who took oaths but did not keep their word. If you give your word and take an oath in the name of the Lord, then you must keep your word. That’s the point of having the oath. And Jesus says, better just to let you yes be yes and no be no, than taking oaths in the name of the Lord and failing to keep your word. But it also does not mean that oaths are wrong because later in the New Testament we find out that God takes an oath and swears by himself, as seen in Psalm 110 and Hebrew 6-7 where it talks about how God swears an oath by himself because he has no one greater to swear by than himself. So it is not wrong to take an oath. You take an oath so that your hearer knows of a certainty that you mean to keep your promise.
TP: I’m binding myself to this word that I will perform the word that I have spoken. In this serious and solemn matter, I am soberly promising that my yes will indeed be yes. And so to fail to carry it out is a very serious thing.
PJ: Yes, it’s a moral failure of great order. Lydia Thorpe had to make an oath when she became a senator. I will read it out to you: “I Lydia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors, according to law.” She did this during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and to her credit, she tried to change the oath when it was being done, and the head of the Senate said, no, you can’t change the words. So against her better instincts, she used the words that were there and then signed the book, which declared it. There’s been some discussion about the way she pronounced heirs to sound like ‘hairs’, but the phrase ‘heirs and successors’ has no ambiguity at all. She promised to be faithful and bear true allegiance to the monarch of Australia, the monarch of England, who now happens to be King Charles the Third. Now, you might be a Republican. You might be a Monarchist. That’s not the point. This promise is that you will be faithful and bear true allegiance to this person, which means you cannot really then stand up and say, “You are not my King. You are not the king. You are not the king here in Australia.” That’s the exact reverse of the oath, which she swore.
She did the wrong thing because she broke her oath. And that is a very serious thing. That’s kind of like perjury in court, isn’t it? You swear an oath as a witness that if you don’t keep your word, if you are found to be actually telling lies under oath, you can be put in jail for that, because that’s so serious.
TP: Because the point of describing something as an oath and using these these solemn affirmatory form of words is to indicate that the promise I’m making now is deadly serious and sincere. It’s not like the casual things we say in life like ‘oh, we must get together for dinner’. Or, ‘I’ll call you later’. This is different. I’m promising solemnly that this is what I will do. And it’s why in law, to break an oath normally has legal consequences. And so the choice for her, I guess you’re saying, was to keep her oath and show loyalty to King Charles in Parliament, or if you’re going to scream at him, “you are not my king” then she either shouldn’t have taken the oath, or resign because she can no longer sustain the oath.
PJ: Yes, but that won’t happen because our politicians have broken trust with us. To call upon her to resign now will make her a martyr and give her more political clout and make her demonstration more effective. So the politically wise thing to do is say nothing and let it just slide. Which is what they’ve done.
TP: Just don’t give the whole thing oxygen, as we say, and everyone will have forgotten about it in a few weeks. We don’t want her to be a continuing thorn in our side. So yes, forget it. Just paper over it. Move on.
PJ: But the consequence of that, of course, is that the next time someone is giving an oath, it doesn’t mean anything because you can say the exact reverse of what the oath says and have no consequence. So what we’re doing is playing a game when we’re making oaths. It’s now nonsense. And this is what politicians have been doing for a long time in different circumstances.
That’s what they’ve done with marriage when they brought in the Family Law Act in 1975. My promise to live with my wife, for better, for worse, richer and poorer, til death do us part, now just means: I’ll live with you, and I won’t live with anybody else as my husband or wife, until I’ve left you for 12 months. It’s a nonsense. So the wedding service is now a charade.
TP: It’s one of the only contracts in Australian law and life where the contract really means very little—that both parties enter into a contract and sign it and sign a certificate of marriage, both knowing and acknowledging at the time that it’s not binding in any sense.
PJ: Well, my wife and I don’t acknowledge it at the time that it’s not binding, but the government does because they want no fault divorce. So trust is at the heart of marriage, but trust has been undermined by our politicians. And if they do not take any action against Lydia Thorpe, trust in the Senate’s oaths is being shown to be of no consequence. Now, people have raised the issue, and apparently according to newspaper reports, the parliamentary people involved in the discussion have said we cannot judge the sincerity of the person when they’re making the oath, and because we cannot judge the sincerity of the person, we can’t complain that it turns out that she wasn’t sincere. We can’t take action. But if you applied that same thing to witnesses, there’s no perjury.
TP: Or to contracts, because then there are no contracts. I wasn’t sincere when I signed it. I didn’t mean it.
PJ: So at this point, language has been seriously undermined.
TP: Trump does this in one way, but this is a different way and just as serious. It shows what Jesus is getting at in the Sermon on the Mount, that in the new life of the Kingdom, he’s bringing a different order of righteousness than that which is practised in our world. In the case of the Sermon on the Mount, he was referring to the Pharisees and scribes, but in general the form of language and promises in the world is duplicitous, promising one thing but not ever meaning to fulfill it, or feeling quite free to change one’s mind later on and not fulfill it.
PJ: Democracy encourages political short-term thinking to do anything to get power for the next three to four years. But this undermines long-term culture because long-term culture is built on truth and trustworthiness. Language is done differently in different contexts, but oath-taking is a particular form, and when we’ve undermined oath-taking, we really have undermined trust.
TP: It’s a good diagnosis of where our culture is heading, and as Christians as we’ve read in Romans 12, we are to be people who are not to be conformed to that culture, to that way of thinking. It must not be like that in our churches and families. We mustn’t fall into either of these errors—either failing to keep our promises, or using language as a way of marketing and impressionistically selling people things as opposed to the open statement of the truth.
PJ: Yes, just as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, I’ve renounced underhanded methods, and that’s not how we preach the gospel. It’s the open statement of the truth that we must be involved in.
