Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Is truth-telling irrelevant?
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
August, 2003Super Bowl Sunday never was the time of “the highest incidence” of domestic violence. It is not even a time of a particularly high rate of violence.
When pressed, the women’s magazine that claimed this baseless untruth a few years ago defended itself by saying that, even though this was in fact a lie, it made what the editors considered to be an important point.
Recently, when a newspaper reporter was exposed as a plagiarist and liar, journalists investigating the story met a stone wall: the publisher and editors of the nation’s paper of record repeatedly refused to speak to the press about their employee’s behavior and the policies that protected him.
The irony was delicious, the hypocrisy profound.
Anyone deposed in legal proceedings may encounter questioners who can distort a situation by the “yes or no” questions they ask, ripping events or facts out of the context that gives them their meaning.
How people who deceive for a living and give their honorable profession a bad name can sleep at night puzzles me; it must be all the money.
We are being treated to self-righteous arguments on strictly party lines again in Washington, about who was telling what truth about Iraq, and are apparently expected to ignore the fact that both sides know an election is coming.
Truth is too important to be defined by politicians or the press. A politician has the mission of maintaining power and a newspaper is in the business of selling papers —neither is motivated to take the unsensational, complicated, or embarrassing path that the whole truth usually involves.
Truth suffers when the teller stands to lose money or clout.
Truth disappears when “facts” are assembled to distort or distract, when an advocate’s commitment to zealous representation becomes an exercise in misdirection and deception.
My own non-profit area of effort is not particularly better off. What sells in religion today is the easy answer, not the complex question, and some prominent Church officials have not been particularly forthcoming about uncomfortable facts in recent years. The aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy exposed America’s best-known secular charity deceiving the public about how contributions were being used.
From magazines to archbishops, essentially dishonest behavior has been defended by a deceptive appeal to principle or a piece of irrelevant data that only makes the original lie worse. I nearly choked when an archbishop claimed that priests were independent contractors not under his control. How stupid do the powerful think you and I are?
Because we live in the age of spin, the age of the misleading sound bite, the age where perception is valued more than accuracy, it is perhaps no wonder that young people increasingly find discussion of truth-telling irrelevant or hopelessly antiquated.
Whether one is Christian on not, there is something to be learned from Jesus’ claim in John’s gospel, “I am the truth.” Beyond mere questions of getting data right, how one assembles and uses information is ultimately tested by the relationships among people.
Jesus later claims that knowing him was to know the truth that sets free. Data and “factoids” assembled to manipulate, evade, or alienate are not truth, because they defile human relationships. They may be legal, but they are certainly immoral.
On the other hand, when we accurately report things that are difficult, complex, and perhaps unexciting, in a way that builds relationships and emphasizes the value of human beings, we are telling truth. When we report what is wrong in order to make it right, we are telling truth.
My cousins the Lutherans used to teach their children that part of truth-telling is to “put the best construction on everything.” Here is religion at its most dangerous: if we all did that, business would suffer for more than a few in our culture. Of course, humanity might thrive, so it’s worth looking into.
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