Have you noticed that the way the government and media often talk about climate change and lockdowns is almost religious? Here I look at the similarities between Christianity, lockdowns, and climate change.
As I discussed in my previous post, this is a new foray into vlogging… if you’re into YouTube, pop on over and subscribe to my channel to get videos there.
A couple of days ago, the organisation ThirtyOne:Eight released their review into what happened at Emmanuel Church Wimbledon and Jonathan Fletcher (see the report from the Independent Advisory Group for a shorter summary). This follows hard on the heels of the full report about Ravi Zacharias which was only released just over a month ago.
Naturally, people have been talking a lot about these things. How could this happen? How can we ensure it never happens again?
One of the things which came up with Jonathan Fletcher was “Fletcher Culture”. The problem with both Jonathan Fletcher and Ravi Zacharias was not with them alone but with the culture they created. Unfortunately in the case of Jonathan Fletcher, because his influence was extensive, that culture has managed to extend pretty widely into the conservative evangelical world.
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about safeguarding, and I’d like to share a few brief thoughts.
The first thing is, the reason safeguarding is necessary is because sin exists: if sin didn’t exist, there would be no need for safeguarding.
Sin is a falling away from God’s standards. It is both actively doing what is wrong, as well as failing to do what is right. (This means that most sin falls within the second category – none of us love as we should.) Sin includes abusing power and authority as well as sexual immorality. Sin also includes failing to act when it’s in our power to do something about abuse. In other words, sin includes the specific wrongs done by an abuser as well as the culture which enables it.
Now, of course, the church is made up of sinners. People don’t stop being sinners when they come to Christ! In fact, it’s almost the opposite: when people come to Christ, they realise how deep their sinfulness is. I’ve had several new Christians say to me that they thought they were doing OK before becoming Christians, but now they had only just begun to realise how bad they were.
But – thanks be to God – there is good news!
There is a remedy for sin! In Jesus Christ, God offers us not only forgiveness of sins – a complete cleansing – but the power of the Holy Spirit. We can bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22-24), not by our own strength but as the Holy Spirit works in us.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that sin instantly disappears when we come to Christ. But it does mean that it has lost its power – we have a new master. Over time, as we walk in step with the Spirit, we are transformed day by day into the likeness of Christ.
And because we are a church, we confess our sins to each other, pray for each other, and walk with each other. God doesn’t simply call us to run an individual race, but work together as a team. We encourage and help each other across the finish line, so to speak. In other words, as the Spirit works in our lives, he also creates a Christian community or culture. We grow in holiness not simply as individuals but as a church.
The fundamental point I’m trying to make here is this: if the church is working properly, safeguarding should not be necessary. Safeguarding is something that should not be needed in the church full of people walking in step with the Spirit.
Before anyone says anything – the fact that something shouldn’t be needed doesn’t mean it’s not needed. I’m not arguing here we should abolish all safeguarding officers and safeguarding best practices. That’s not the point I’m making here. Please bear with me…
I think you have to seriously question whether someone who is living in a pattern of unrepentant sin is actually a Christian. Sin is a powerful thing, and we can’t escape it on our own. But with Holy Spirit to convict us of our sin and help us to change, progress is possible. So, a Christian may have a battle over a sin like pornography, for example – but if the Holy Spirit was at work I would hope (even expect) to see that battle being won as time went by.
I’ve seen a few people making the point over the last few weeks that we’re all sinners: any of us could have done what JF or RZ did. In a sense this is true. All of us are only what we are by the grace of God. At the same time, I think this is also doing a massive disservice to the Holy Spirit. Someone does not become a serial abuser without intent – no genuine repentance, no growth in holiness.
Christians can and do sin in serious ways. There are many examples of Biblical characters who sin in pretty big ways. King David, for example, committed adultery with Bathsheba, but more than that – covered it up by having her husband killed! Having an affair is sadly not unknown for Christians, even Christian leaders. When it happens, repentance and reconciliation is possible but it takes time to heal. But if someone had many affairs, continually, over almost their entire adult life, it’s a different matter. That’s not sinning and repenting – that’s brazen disobedience. That’s the kind of behaviour that Hebrews 10 is talking about:
If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God … How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?
Hebrews 10:26-27, 29
And that’s the issue with RZ and JF. They weren’t leaders who had a moral failure. They seemed to actively pursue what was wrong, again and again. They preached the gospel, but I’m not sure whether they really understood and believed the gospel.
And this leads me on to the worst thing of all.
I would hope that a Christian organisation or network would be the kind of place where safeguarding happened naturally. If people were genuinely walking with the Spirit, in fellowship and prayer, then if someone was a bit ‘off’ I think it would show. It’s possible to preach an orthodox, Biblical sermon without being a believer – but it’s a lot harder to deceive people who know you well.
If the whole church was truly growing in Christ and growing in holiness, than someone who wasn’t would stand out like a sore thumb. Except that… Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher apparently didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. And that’s worrying: if Jonathan and Ravi were not walking in step with the Spirit, what does that say about the culture they were part of? (And the culture I am part of, to an extent?)
What does it say about the conservative evangelical world that Jonathan Fletcher helped to create?
What happened with Jonathan Fletcher and Ravi Zacharias is just the tip of the iceberg. It seems to me that we don’t need more safeguarding (as important as safeguarding is!). We need a much deeper spiritual reformation of the church. This is an issue which is not something which those people over there need to deal with (e.g. Emmanuel Church Wimbledon, or RZIM, or conservative evangelical churches). This is something that we, the church, need to deal with – in our own hearts and in our own churches.
Mike Ovey, late principal of the college where I trained for ordination, used to say that he was hoping and prayer for a new reformation. I’m more convinced by the day that he was right. We need nothing less in the church. I’ve talked about this a few times on the blog before (e.g. my previous post on Ravi Zacharias).
We need to get on our knees and earnestly seek the Lord in prayer to renew and reform us.
Over the last 12 months during the pandemic, government guidance has prevented many churches from singing. Why has God allowed this to happen? In this short video we look at Psalm 95 to help us understand.
In the video I take a very brief look at Psalm 95.
I’ve been thinking a lot about our response to Sarah Everard. One thing which really worries me is the way it pits men and women against one another. For once, I’ve actually tried to do a vlog about this rather than a written post. Over the last few months I’ve begun to feel it’s easier to say something that way. I don’t know whether I’ll try it again – there are pros and cons.
If it doesn’t work well, I’ll probably never do another one! But I thought I’d see how it goes.
After my last couple of articles about Experts (this one and this one), the good chaps over at the Irreverend Podcast invited me to chat with them. We had a really good discussion – it’s quite long (about 90 minutes), but I think we covered some really interesting ground. It was a helpful conversation for me, anyway. It’s called “The End of Experts, the Rejection of Woke and the Rise of the Working Classes”.
You can listen here, or via YouTube:
Thanks to Jamie and Tom for having me on!
“How could a book written 50 years ago so accurately make sense of what’s happening today?” Those were my thoughts as I read Francis Schaeffer’s book The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century. I’ve mentioned Francis Schaeffer a few times lately – I’ve discovered his writings over the last couple of years, and they have been immensely helpful to me. (I wrote a post on Understand the Bible about why you should read True Spirituality which you might also like.)
A few weeks ago, I read a post over on the Gospel Coalition, Francis Schaeffer Warned Us About 2020. I decided to read the book on the strength of that review, and it was well worth it. I’d like to add my own thoughts here, because I think Schaeffer really hits the nail on the head when it comes to our current cultural moment. Even though he was writing 50 years ago, I think he saw things happening in society which have grown and come to fruition.
The first step is to diagnose the problem. Schaeffer saw that the problem lies ultimately in a society rejecting God. Everything wrong about society flows from that one single thing. In the first chapter of the book, he outlines briefly his thesis (which is developed in more detail in The God Who is There and Escape From Reason, both of which are part of the Trilogy).
This is what he says:
If we do not begin with a personal Creator, eventually we are left (no matter how we string it out semantically) with the impersonal plus time plus chance. We must explain everything in the mannishness of man and we must understand all of the complexity of the universe on the basis of time plus chance.
What he means by “the mannishness of man” is man made in the Image of God. That is, Christians believe that human beings are not random products of evolution, but made in God’s image to love and worship him. We are more than simply biological machines! But, if a society removes a personal Creator, you end up with having to explain everything in terms of biology or physics (etc). It is all, as he says, “time plus chance”. If you remove God, there can be no other explanation.
But why do we still hold onto some Christian values?
They keep thinking in the old way as a memory of the time before the Christian base was lost in this post-Christian world. However, the majority in the middle class have no real basis whatsoever for their values since they have given up on the Christian viewpoint. They just function on the ‘memory’.
Christian values still hang around – but we’ve ditched the thing that gave then any basis. Once you ditch Christianity, there’s no real reason that Christian values should stick around. The key point for Schaeffer is that Western society has abandoned God, and whatever still remains of Christianity is a simply a memory.
Western society has abandoned God, and whatever still remains of Christianity is a simply a memory
So what happens to a society when you abandon God? Here’s where it starts to get interesting with respect to what’s happening at the moment. Here Schaeffer refers to John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The New Industrial State:
Culture has lost its way and we should now have somebody new to direct it. Who should direct it? Galbraith’s answer was and is: the academic and especially the scientific elite, plus the state. To those who know Plato, it all sounds very familiar. The philosopher kings are to be reinstated.
Once God is taken out of the picture, society needs roots – it needs direction. Schaeffer senses that the direction is going to come from a new elite made up of experts. The scientists and the academics are going to be in charge, with the power of the state. And it will need to be the power of the state:
If we have an academic, scientific, state elite without any controls upon them, without any outside universal to guide them, it will undoubtedly lead in the direction of an Establishment totalitarianism.
If an elite are in charge without any controls – an ‘outside universal’ (i.e. God), then there can be no moral absolutes. They will do whatever they think is best, even if that means imposing restrictions on a whole population under the threat of prison.
So, if a group of scientists decide that the best way of saving lives is to lock 67 million people in their homes for a year, then that is what they will do.
Another man who understood this and saw this coming was C.S. Lewis – see this post by Graham Shearer.
Schaeffer also saw the rise of the New Left. He doesn’t really go into detail about the values of the New Left, but he does say “Here is the complete opposite to the Free Speech movement – a few hundred tell many thousands they must be still”. It’s a movement which is opposed to the free expression of ideas – certain ideas are ‘correct’, and others are forbidden.
This, too, is a totalitarianism:
Some have quit the New Left because it has dawned on them that they are building a new fascist regime, a new fascism in the sense that an elite without any controls upon it, with no universals to impose upon it, is telling everyone else to shut up and listen to them alone.
I find this absolutely fascinating looking at what has happened over the last few years with ‘woke’ ideology, which I’ve talked about before e.g. about Cancel Culture. The ‘woke’ like to call other people fascists, but the reality is they behave like fascists themselves: they do not tolerate any other opinions, they want to prevent people being able to express their ideas in the public square. This has happened because – again – they have “no universals” (i.e. God). There is no absolute right and wrong.
We are left with a choice between which kind of totalitarianism we want: the New Left or an Establishment elite:
This, then, is the situation. Whether it is a Left Wing elite or an Establishment elite, the result is exactly the same. There are no real absolutes controlling either. In both cases one is left with only arbitrary absolutes set by a totalitarian society or state with all the modern means of manipulation under its control.
When you free yourself from the control of a universal – i.e. God – Schaeffer foresaw exactly what would happen. You end up with a small group of people trying to demand ideological conformity (the New Left), or you end up with rule by experts.
Most of us are not part of the Establishment Elite or the New Left. So what happens to everyone else – the Silent Majority? Unfortunately, the Silent Majority – unless they are Christians “standing in the stream of historic Christianity”, who have absolutes – do not fair well:
the Silent Majority are living on the memory of the practical advantages that Christian culture gave but who themselves have no base for these advantages. Their values are affluence (they are practical materialists) and personal peace at any price. Having no base, no absolutes, most of them will compromise liberty any time that they are finally forced to choose between their affluence and personal peace on the one hand and the giving up of a piece of liberty on the other.
So the Silent Majority, at least those who do not hold to any absolutes, only have the values of affluence and personal peace. When these things are threatened they will give up their liberties. This is how totalitarianism comes in: when people’s core values are threatened, they will accept the state taking power upon itself to resolve it. Totalitarianism always comes in on the back of rapturous applause, because people believe it is going to sort out the issues which need to be sorted out. Unfortunately, it never ends well.
So if the silent majority opt for totalitarianism, what about evangelicals?
The danger is that the evangelical, being so committed to middle-class norms and often even elevating these norms to an equal place with God’s absolutes, will slide without thought into accepting the Establishment elite.
Schaeffer saw that the church 50 years ago had become very middle-class. If that was the case then, how much more so today? I think part of the problem over the last twelve months has been the connection of the church with the establishment. Going along with lockdowns has been seen to be the ‘correct’ thing to do which all right-thinking people agree with. (You could say something similar about other ideas, such as “Brexit is a terrible thing”). Challenging lockdowns is a costly business, personally and professionally.
Why is it that the church – nationally at least – has done little over the last twelve months apart from repeating government mantras about keeping everybody safe? One could be forgiven for thinking that the church doesn’t really believe in the resurrection, or that God is sovereign over all things and protects his people. Is it because the church has simply become another arm of the establishment? Perhaps the church wishes to keep its middle-class respectability and status rather than be obedient to Christ.
The final thing which I want to touch on is how everything, including science, is about manipulation rather than truth. This flows directly from taking God out of the equation: once there is no absolute, there is no absolute truth. Schaeffer gives the example of a scientist who did not believe in a particular theory of evolution, not because of evidence but because he wanted not to be racist. He goes on:
This is a non-objective, sociological science. Conclusions are determined by the way a scientist wants the results to turn out sociologically. It is a science which will manipulate society by the manipulation of scientific ‘fact’ … Beware, therefore, of the movement to give the scientific community the right to rule. They are not neutral in the old concept of scientific objectivity. Objectivity is a myth that will not hold, simply because these men have no basis for it.
This is exactly where we’ve come to in society now. The whole notion of truth, even scientific truth, is out of date. I have talked about this a couple of times recently – about political truth and covid.
It’s no surprise that science should be wielded as a political tool. At every point over the last twelve months, our government have said they are “following the science”. But so much of the time, as I have tried to make clear in other posts, science has been given as a pretext to justify a particular political course of action.
Science has been co-opted to serve a political agenda, because we are not dealing with absolute truth any more. This flows directly from our society’s rejection of God.
Schaeffer outlines three ways that Christians need to respond:
Firstly, recognise that co-belligerents are not allies. Too often I think Christians equate a particular political perspective with the Kingdom of Heaven. Schaeffer cautions us that, even if we may have the same aims as a political movement, there is a difference between being co-belligerents and allies. We must stand up for what is right wherever that may be – e.g. on the political right or left. We are not of this world. Schaeffer says we should think like this:
I stand alone with God, the God who has spoken in the Scripture, the God who is the infinite personal God, and neither of your two sides are my side. And if I seem to be saying the same thing at some one point, understand that I am a co-belligerent at this particular place, but I am not an ally.
Secondly, we need to take truth seriously. In a generation where there are no absolutes, where even science has become manipulative, we need to take our stand on the truth. Schaeffer says:
We must practise the truth even when it is costly… this is a time to show to a generation who think that the concept of truth is unthinkable that we do take truth seriously.
I have talked about this before in my post on truth, so I will direct you to there for a more detailed discussion.
Thirdly and finally, we need to practise true Christian community. Schaeffer says:
With an orthodoxy of doctrine there must equally be an orthodoxy of community. Our Christian organisations must be communities in which others see what God has revealed in the teaching of his Word.
In other words, we need to practice what we preach. We need to be a community where the truth is not only honoured, but shown in the relationships we have with each other. We need to live by the truth, not just profess it with our mouths.
Ultimately, this is the way to win back a generation that has wandered away from God: showing the world – not just proclaiming – what it means to walk with God. If we only talk about God but don’t walk with him, nothing will change. But real change can happen when we actually show to the world what kind of a difference God makes.
Over the last week or two, I’ve started tracking the covid cases in Essex. I’ve actually created a little data tracker where you can track cases and deaths across every region in Essex. (The data is taken from official ONS data and uses the most up-to-date data available). I created it because I was curious about the number of cases in Essex, and especially the region of Tendring (where I live). All through the autumn, our rates of covid in Tendring were pretty low – but they shot up during December.
This is the graph of cases, starting from when the ONS data goes back to – 13th March.
As you can see, for about the first seven months the line remains pretty flat – it doesn’t really move very much even during the height of the pandemic. This is because mass testing wasn’t available at that point. The numbers stay fairly low through til late September. Then there’s a steep rise in early December, until it peaks on 4th January. It looks like the numbers are beginning to drop off again.
The figures certainly look worrying, don’t they? It definitely explains why Essex council wanted to put us into Tier 4!
However, where it gets interesting to me is when you start breaking down the cases by region.
When you break it down by region, you see pretty much the same shape.
You can see that every region in Essex more or less follows the same pattern. What I find really interesting is when you start digging into the spike in December.
This is the same graph, but with the date range zoomed in from 1st Dec until 12th Jan.
Does anything strike you about the graph?
What strikes me is how remarkably similar the lines are. If you look at the rising and falling of the lines, the curves seem to match each other. They all (with the exception of Basildon) seem to start rising at about the same time, and then seem to start falling at about the same time.
Let me show you one more graph before we move on – this is looking at the raw numbers, not the 7-day average. (The 7-day average ‘smooths out’ the graph and means that extreme highs or lows don’t affect it so much).
You can see, for example, on 25th December there is a marked dip in new cases. Clearly not many people were doing covid swabs on Christmas Day! But there are many other places where the data seem to tally as well, e.g. Monday 21st and Tuesday 29th December, and Monday 4th January. I imagine this would be the ‘weekend effect’ in action – more people will send swabs on a Monday then on a weekend.
But it does prove that there is a high correlation between the number of cases and the number of tests run.
Unfortunately the ONS don’t seem to have the data about the number of tests by area, so I can’t compare this to the number of tests that were being run in this region. But for now let’s move on.
The graph on the left shows you how many residents are in each region of Essex, by percentage of population. The graph in the middle shows you the percentage of cases for that region out of the total. And the graph on the right shows you the percentage of deaths for that region out of the total.
Again, does anything strike you about this data?
What strikes me is that the cases and deaths seem to roughly follow how big the area is. So, for example, Basildon and Thurrock are two of the biggest areas in Essex. They have the most number of cases, and they also have a relatively high number of deaths. So the percentage of cases more or less seems to tally with the size of the area.
As we saw, there seems to be a high correlation between the number of tests being run and the number of cases being found. It would be helpful to know how many tests were being run, as we would be able to compare it with the graph to see if it matched up. Unfortunately we don’t have that data. The ONS don’t seem to provide it.
It looks like the average positivity rate for a PCR test is around 7% – so for every seven positive tests, there would have been 93 negative. If we apply that to the numbers above, at the very peak across Essex on 29th December, 3666 cases, that would mean about 48,000 tests would have had to be run.
What I find bizarre about these graphs is that it doesn’t really seem to be tracking a virus moving across an area. If it did, I would expect to see more regional variations. Why is it that across the entire region of Essex – that’s 1.8 million people – the case numbers start to rise on pretty much the same day, then peak all at the same time, then seem to decline all at the same time?
If we were looking at actual cases of covid moving across an area, I would expect to see the cases start to rise and fall at different times across all the regions as it moved through. But that’s not the case.
No, this looks to me like something to do with testing. Imagine that you had a testing laboratory where every test had a 5% chance of coming back positive. Then multiply that by the number of tests and the number of people in an area. You would end up with a graph which looked very similar to the graph I showed above.
The big question in my mind is, why did the numbers seem to all go up at the start of December (and then come down in January)? Did they change something with testing? Did they start running more tests in Essex? Did they change something in the laboratory? What happened?
I find it entirely implausible that this is anything to do with the number of people across Essex who have had covid. If it were, there would almost certainly be far more variance in the data. To end up with the data that we have seems, to my mind at least, beyond anything we could reasonably consider a coincidence.
The website PCR Claims was started to the problems with mass PCR testing. Earlier on someone sent me the video with the pathologist Dr Clare Craig. (I can’t link directly to the video – as I write it’s the top-middle video from that page).
PCR Tests were never designed to be used to mass test asymptomatic people. Add to that the fact that there have been serious problems in UK test centres, and you have a recipe for just this kind of thing. Will we ever find the answers? I don’t know. What worries me is that no-one in government seems interested in actually getting to the bottom of it.
It wouldn’t be such a problem if the government weren’t basing so much of their policy at the moment on the number of “cases”. We should be looking far more at the number of excess deaths and where things are with hospitals, rather than relying on testing to tell us everything.
If we carry on relying on PCR tests, I think we’re never going to get anywhere.
You can check out my Essex covid data tracker for yourself if you like. Please bear in mind that it was just developed out of interest, not to be used by the general public, and it is more than a bit rough and ready.
In my previous post I looked at the Biblical principles of safety. In this post we’re going to look at another principle which is very relevant to the current situation: truth. I want to outline a few Biblical principles for truth, and then if there’s space at the end talk a little about how we’re doing with the current situation.
I’ve just been reading the Francis Schaeffer Trilogy. In the first book, “The God who is there”, Schaeffer basically says that the whole concept of truth depends on God’s existence. If God doesn’t exist, anything goes: we can’t trust our senses, we can’t trust our intellects – eliminating God ultimately undermines any basis we have for rationality. On the other hand, if God does exist, that is the God of the Bible, then truth exists: he created the universe in this way and not that way. He gave us minds and he wants us to use them. The ultimate foundation of all truth in the universe is God.
As a side note – I wrote a post on Understand the Bible last week: Why you should read Schaeffer – True Spirituality. If you’ve never read his writings, they’re well worth reading.
The whole scientific method ultimately depends on God’s existence. This is why science flourished in a Western, Christian society – and many of the early scientists were Christians. Science requires a belief that there is a world out there and that we can discover something true about it. Only God, the Christian God, can provide the foundation of that belief. (If you’d like to know more about that, check out Part One of the session I posted last week about Genesis and Science).
The fundamental, take-away point here is that (to borrow from the X-Files) the truth is out there. It’s never pointless to try to find out the truth. The truth is not political, or determined by those who have the most power. It’s out there, and we can discover it. And, what’s more, it is the truth whether or not people believe it or not. My daughters like to listen to an artist called Colin Buchanan, and his song Truth is still true says truth is still true even if you don’t believe it. This is fundamental to science.
God is not just the fount of truth, he is also truthful. That means he is truthful in what he says. You can see this many places in the Bible. For example, Titus 1:2 talks about God “who does not lie”. One of the conditions for testing whether a prophet was truly from God or not was whether what they prophesied came true or not (Deuteronomy 18:22). The Psalms often associate God with truth, e.g. his laws are true (Psalm 119:142).
Jesus himself said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). Jesus claimed to be the truth (John 14:6), and that anyone who followed him would be living in the truth which brings freedom.
So God is not just the foundation stone of truth, but he speaks truth to us. When we listen to God, we listen to the truth. In particular, this means that the Bible is true and trustworthy: when we listen to the Bible, we are listening to God’s words – words which are true.
“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
John 8:44
If God is the foundation of truth and always truthful, by contrast Satan is the Father of lies. It is, in fact, his “native language”. You can see that from the beginning – when he deceived Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (Genesis chapter 3).
God is truth, anything less than the truth does not come from him but from the evil one. I think it’s important to make the point that there are forces of evil out there who are seeking to lie and suppress the truth. Romans 1:18 says we human beings “suppress the truth” – we don’t want to know the truth about God, so we suppress it. We exchange the truth about God for a lie (Romans 1:25).
Whenever truth is honoured in a society, God is honoured, because God is truth. Jesus said “Everyone on the side of truth listens to me” (John 18:37). Whenever truth is not honoured in a society, it is not God who is honoured but Satan.
Because God is truthful, Christians should also be concerned with the truth. I like to read a Psalm every day, and recently I’ve been struck by how many of them speak of our truthfulness. For example, Psalm 52:3 says of wicked people: “You love evil rather than good, falsehood rather than speaking the truth.” By contrast, Psalm 15 says that God loves someone of integrity, who “speaks the truth from their heart”.
When God rebukes the people of Israel through Jeremiah, he says “Friend deceives friend, and no one speaks the truth. They have taught their tongues to lie; they weary themselves with sinning.” (Jeremiah 9:5). The people routinely lying to each other was evidence of how depraved they had become. The people of God are to be different – Ephesians 4:15 says we should speak the truth in love to one another.
The ninth commandment forbids us from bearing false witness against our neighbour. This is how the Heidelberg Catechism interprets it:
I must not give false testimony against anyone, twist no one’s words, not gossip or slander, nor condemn or join in condemning anyone rashly and unheard. Rather, I must avoid all lying and deceit as the devil’s own works, under penalty of God’s heavy wrath. In court and everywhere else, I must love the truth, speak and confess it honestly, and do what I can to defend and promote my neighbour’s honour and reputation.
If you’re interested in learning more, you might enjoy the Understand the Bible session on Commandment #9 here.
Those who fear the Lord, who know that what he says is truth, should be concerned about truth – not just the Bible, but all truth. All truth is God’s truth. There is no sacred / secular divide when it comes to truth – if something is true, then it is God’s truth. We should stand up for and defend the truth wherever it is necessary.
The final point I want to make is that truth is not always welcome. As Jesus said in John 8:45, “Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!” Because truth is godly, there will always be ungodly people who want to lie or distort the truth. The truth can be hard for us to hear.
This is why Proverbs 27:6 says, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” The path of wisdom is recognising that sometimes telling the truth wounds us – yet it is good for us. This is why we should trust and appreciate friends who love us enough to tell us the truth. People who want to manipulate us will never tell us the truth. They will only ever want to tell us what we want to hear. The people who love us enough to tell the truth should be prized.
This doesn’t mean we should seek to be offensive in telling the truth! It’s possible to tell the truth in a nasty way. The film The Invention of Lying is interesting about that – just because something is true doesn’t mean you have to just come out with it! If the truth is going to be offensive, we might as well try to make sure that it’s the truth causing the offence, not the way that we say it.
One of the interesting things about the covid-19 situation is the way that truth has become politicised in the extreme. I wrote a little about this in my previous post about political truth. Let me expand on that a little.
Whenever I post up something on Facebook which is from a more ‘lockdown sceptical’ perspective (the whole fact that there are sides to begin with is a bad sign), it usually gets jumped on. The thing is, most of the time people don’t respond to the actual scientific or logical points being made. Instead, people often focus on the people. (In football speak, the play the man – not the ball).
For example, a few weeks ago in a discussion someone pointed me to this piece on the Byline Times. It largely focusses on the politics of people who question the science of lockdowns. There are very few facts or logical arguments. So, for example, Carl Heneghan and the Oxford University Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine come under fire because it receives money from a close Trump supporter. Karol Sikora, who has been outspoken about the lockdowns, comes under fire not because of science but because he has campaigned for conservative political issues.
Social media “fact-checkers” have got in on the act. For example, Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson’s piece (they are both from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine) has been labelled as “false information”. Even though I don’t find any false information in it! And scientists who question the lockdown have received some horrendous abuse online, for example Sunetra Gupta (one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration).
It is as if truth no longer matters – the only thing that matters is agreeing with the establishment.
A recent editorial in the BMJ (the British Medical Journal – a prestigious medical journal) said: “When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die”. This is why the truth matters, especially with covid. The stakes are too high – it is literally people’s lives. But not just people who are dying from covid, but all the other factors e.g. the mental health cost of lockdown as well as the people who have died (or will die) due to not receiving the treatment the need. I talked about this in my post about the risk of lockdown.
The stakes are high for any course of action we take. Which is why it is so important that we base our decisions on the truth. The truth IS out there when it comes to covid. Christians especially have a duty to expose and live by the truth, even when it is swimming against the tide in our society.
Proclaiming Christ the truth must mean that we are concerned with truth everywhere – not just ‘gospel’ truth or Biblical truth but truth in the world as well. And, if we seek the truth, perhaps people will listen:
“the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
John 18:37
I didn’t want to go into too much detail in my post about issues around the truth and covid. It’s easy to get bogged down. My problem is that there is so little truth in this whole situation. Let me give a few pointers, you could just go on and on about this. I suggest Toby Young’s website Lockdown Sceptics for a starting point.
Why is so much of the government’s response reliant on PCR tests? We know there are problems with the tests – for example, there is a false positive rate. There are also problems with tests being run by people with very little training. See, for example, the recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme about covid testing. In other words, when a test comes back positive, if the person in question has no symptoms, how do we know it’s a “case”? Dr John Lee wrote about this back in October. Here’s a good video from Dr Clare Craig talking about the problem with testing:
How can we be confident that the number of covid deaths is accurate? A covid death is currently defined as someone dying within 28 days of a positive test. Regardless of whether the cause of death was actually covid or not. I have personally heard of two stories from people I know (clergy) who have done funerals recently: one died of a heart attack, one of a road traffic accident. Both of these were listed as covid deaths – even though covid had nothing to do with the cause of death. From what I hear on social media, this kind of thing is happening enough to get noticed. Why are we not actually looking at people who are actually ill? The ZOE app from Kings College London, for example, tracks people with actual symptoms rather than just test results. That tells a somewhat different story.
Why are the official statistics unclear? Just this morning I read an interesting thread about excess non-covid deaths. Why are these not being picked up on? And why do the government rarely ever put deaths in context, e.g. comparing the number of actual deaths against the number we usually expect at this time of year?
Do lockdowns have any positive effect at all? There are lots of scientific studies on lockdowns now, and they show that lockdowns make little (if any) difference to mortality, and they have huge harmful effects. Ivor Cummins has a summary on his website. (Check out the rest of his YouTube channel for lots of analysis of the data).
You could carry on and on. So much of what most people seem to believe about covid is scientifically disputable, or at least, more complicated than what we are led to believe.
Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not trying to say the very existence of all these opinions makes them right. However, as I said, the stakes here are too high. Why are these things not being discussed or addressed by the government? Why does the establishment narrative not get questioned with the rigor it deserves? As the BMJ said, when truth is suppressed, when it becomes political, then people die. I want to seek the truth wherever it lies, not whatever is politically convenient.
Have you ever got exactly what you wanted, only to find that it wasn’t actually what you wanted? That’s a bit like how I’ve been feeling recently. It seems to me like covid has, in a funny kind of way, actually given us what we wanted. Only we found out we don’t actually want it after all.
Let me explain:
One of the trends that’s been happening over the last few years is people looking at their phones instead of talking to each other. It’s now common for two people to be sitting next to each other on their phones, rather than talking to each other. We now interact with each other far less than we used to, largely because of the smartphone.
In fact, it’s actually getting to be a problem – a study back in 2018 showed that young people feel lonelier than any other age group. More recently, back in September research suggested that those aged 18-30 were most likely to feel lonely. Why should this be the case? I think social media and smartphones have to play a part. In fact, we’ve known about this for some time, as I mentioned in my review of the Social Dilemma.
So I find it interesting that over the last few months, we’ve been forced to see each other over a screen rather than face-to-face. It’s ironic, isn’t it? The past few years we’ve spent interacting more and more online – and now we’ve been forced to interact online like never before. Earlier this week I was chatting to a university student, who was telling me all her courses are now online – she hasn’t actually met any of the other students on her course physically yet. Even in church, we have Zoom meetings. It’s got to the point where Zoom Fatigue is a real phenomenon!
People have been worrying about high street shops for a long time now. Over the last few years in my own town, quite a few shops have closed. A couple of years ago, Marks & Spencer closed down its store here. Back then there were 15 commercial retail properties for sale – I hate to think how many it is now. Several companies have announced during the lockdown they are closing – the latest one is Debenhams.
In that particular case, Debenhams has been in administration for over a year. The lockdown has probably finished off many companies which were struggling anyway.
By contrast, one company which has done very well out of the lockdown is Amazon – their shares reached a record high. Again, this is a trend which began well before the lockdown, but the lockdown has simply brought forward. I wonder if this will spell the end to the traditional high street.
One thing which I notice about my own generation (“millenials”), as well as younger people, is that everything is the government’s fault. Whatever the problem is in society, it’s because the government haven’t done enough. They’re not providing enough benefits, or health care, or counselling support, or community services… whatever the problem is, we blame the government.
We seem to look to the government to solve all our problems: climate change – needs the government to solve it. Inequality in society – need the government to solve it. And so on. I think it’s got to the point where the default position of anyone of a certain age is to see a problem in society and think that the government should do something about it.
Well, in covid we’ve certainly got a government who want to solve the problem. To the point that we have – by law – been restricted from seeing our family and friends, restricted as to where we can go and what we can do. I believe that the lockdown introduced the strictest measures ever put in place during peacetime.
But here’s the thing: this is exactly what we wanted. The government have got the message – they need to solve everything. So, covid becomes a problem they’re going to solve, even if lockdown causes more problems than it solves.
I don’t think any of this is a coincidence. As a Christian, I believe that God lets things happen for a reason. I believe that these things have happened in order that good may come from it. I am hopeful that we may learn the lessons that we need to learn. Let me suggest three.
Sometimes you don’t appreciate something until it’s taken away from you. In this case, I don’t think I really appreciated the importance of face-to-face contact until it was taken away. I mean, if you asked me I would probably have said it was important. But I didn’t really know from experience how important it was.
Spending the last few months doing meetings via Zoom and church services via YouTube have convinced me that face-to-face cannot be replaced by technology. There is a place for technology – it has some advantages. For example, I know a few people who are housebound who have been able to join in with our services when they wouldn’t have been able to get to church. I think that’s brilliant. And technology is better than not seeing people at all.
But – you can’t really hug someone via Zoom. You can talk to someone, but it does still feel a bit like talking to a screen. It’s just not the same as a face-to-face conversation. And I think face-to-face interaction is especially important for children – I’ve noticed how our little Zoe (age 3) doesn’t really engage with the screen. Since she started at nursery, it’s like she’s a different girl! It’s been so good for her. Children need physical contact for their development.
So, the first lesson I want to learn in a post-covid world is, face-to-face, physical interaction is vitally important.
Over the last few years I’ve been guilty of ordering something from Amazon just because it’s convenient. I’ve thought it was better than popping down to the shops. Well, it seems like a lot of other people have thought that, and look what’s happened.
I don’t know what the future of the high street will be. All I know is that I think physical shops are important, not just because it gets you out to see people (see Lesson #1!). It’s easy to live your life online because it’s convenient: to shop online, to chat online, etc.
But – at the same time – when we do that, we are losing something important. I want to resolve to become better at doing things in real, physical life – not online.
That doesn’t mean never shopping online, but I hope there will be a place in my life (and for all of us in society) to support local shops.
If we’ve learned anything over these last few months, it’s that the government really do have limited power. They haven’t been able to “control the virus” – in fact, no government in history has ever tried to control a virus in quite this way. And, it seems to me, everything they’ve done seems to have made everything worse. The cure has been worse than the disease!
Whatever your perspective on the lockdowns, I think everyone is agreed that the government have not handled things well over the last few months. They haven’t seemed to be competent for just about anything related to the pandemic!
The important lesson here is to put a bit less faith in the government to sort out our problems. As I mentioned in a previous post, there is only one governer who is able to bear the weight of responsibility to fix everything. His name is Jesus. As it says in Isaiah 9:6, a passage which is often read at Christmas time:
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
I hope this is a lesson that we can re-learn as a society. At the end of the day, the government is not on Boris’ shoulders, or Matt Hancock, or Chris Whitty, or anyone else. They have been given a particular responsibility by God, but their power is limited.
The only one who can actually sort out the problems in our society is the one who can sort us out.
It is said that a newspaper sent out to various authors, asking them to answer the question “What is wrong with the world today?” G.K. Chesterton wrote a short reply: “Dear Sir, I am.” The greatest problems we have as a society are not problems with everyone else which can be solved by government, but problems with the human heart. The traditional world is sin. That’s a problem which can only be solved by Jesus – who can forgive us our sin, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So the final and most important lesson I want to remember is, the government cannot solve our every problem – only Jesus can do that.
I had another one of my epiphanies yesterday. As I was chatting to my wife, something became clear to me which I hadn’t really seen clearly before. That is: there are now two kinds of truth in the world – political truth and actual truth. They’re not the same thing at all. To some extent there’s always been political truth, but it’s been getting worse over the last few years and covid has put it into overdrive.
Let’s start by thinking about what political truth is.
The first mark of political truth is that it is general held by the establishment. I think ‘the establishment’ is quite a hard thing to define, so let me try to give a few examples:
The establishment are the people who are generally the movers and shakers in a society: they’re the people who run the country, manage companies, and so on. The fact that it’s difficult to define precisely doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!
Political truth has got a love/hate relationship with the facts. It loves facts which support it; it tends to gloss over facts which contradict it. In general, political truth only looks at a subset of the facts and evidence available – it cherry picks.
Political truth is narrative – a story which is constructed from facts and evidence, but is more than that. It’s the ‘bigger picture’. But the problem is that the bigger picture does not necessarily reflect the actual data. The bigger picture in fact has been chosen for political reasons, rather than because it relates to the data.
Political truth cannot be questioned. Not seriously, anyway. If you dare to question political truth, you could end up being cancelled or losing your job. At the very least, no-one will really take you seriously if you question it. We’ll look at a few examples of this in the next section.
The point is that the establishment see it as their job to police conformity to political truth. If a member of the establishment questions political truth, they risk losing their place as part of the establishment.
This doesn’t just apply in government or the mainstream media – I think it trickles down into society as well. There are certain opinions which are difficult to question on social media – mainly those opinions which question political truth.
One of the most interesting things I’ve found with political truth is that people who question is will be cast as outsiders. Sometimes they’ll be called “far-right”. Sometimes their academic credentials will be called into question. In general, someone who questions political truth will be labelled as a terrible person, beyond the pale. Their arguments won’t be considered – it will just be a character assassination.
So – political truth will be defended by labelling anyone who questions it as with an unfair association.
The final thing to say about political truth is that it’s a view which is held primarily by the establishment. The working classes generally hold a view which is closer to actual truth.
One of George Orwell’s most famous books is his dystopian novel, 1984. The book is about a future where the government control what truth is, through the Ministry of Truth. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
As well as administering “truth”, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, “truth” is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it creates/manufactures “truth” in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show a government-approved version of events.
The government manufactures and determines the truth. In Orwell’s novel this was a dystopian future – but it looks a bit like what is happening now!
I’m going to look at three brief examples. These are all things which I’ve written about on this blog before.
One thing which the establishment seems to believe at the moment is that men can become women and women can become men. Even to the point of changing your birth certificate. Don’t believe me? The UK Government guidance explains, “you will also be able to obtain a new birth certificate showing your recognised legal gender.”
So the UK Government believe that it is actually possible to change your sex, to the point where they will issue you a new birth certificate. This has been the case since 2004, when the Gender Recognition Act came into being. Over the last few years it’s become contested as more and more young people are being encouraged to transition. I wrote about this four years ago, and things haven’t changed much since then.
I believe we can see all five elements of political truth at play when it comes to transgender ideology:
Now, fortunately I think actual truth is beginning to reassert itself. Some high profile people have begun to question the narrative. But there is still a long way to go.
I don’t want to open a can of worms here! This isn’t about trying to take a side on Brexit. But it is fairly obvious to me that there is an establishment view of Brexit. It goes something like this: “Brexit is a disaster. It was only voted for because low-information idiots saw a misleading slogan on the side of a bus. And it was only voted for by racists. Any right-thinking person should support the EU.”
I wrote about this also back in 2016. It’s not about the rights and wrongs of leaving the EU – it’s about the narrative which is constructed about Brexiteers.
And again, I think we can see all five elements of political truth with the establishment’s position on Brexit. Things are changing a little: since the Conservatives won a comprehensive majority a year ago on the promise “let’s get Brexit done”, I think attitudes have changed a little. But, again, there’s still a long way to go.
A few years ago I wrote a piece about Islam. There I lamented the fact that most politicians know virtually nothing about religion. They just think all religions are basically the same.
This has a massive impact – for example, just a few months ago I wrote about Dr Ella Hill, a grooming gang survivor. She, and many other young women, found the police overlooked rape and other horrible things because they didn’t want to appear racist. The police would prefer to observe political truth rather than deal with actual truth.
Just a few weeks ago, a French teacher was beheaded by an Islamist extremist. Has there been much of an outcry about this from the establishment? No. It doesn’t fit with political truth, so it’s sidelined and forgotten.
One of the things I’ve found striking about the coronavirus situation is the fact that it does seem to hit all the marks of political truth.
Of course! The government and most of the mainstream media (especially the BBC) have portrayed covid-19 in a particular light. There is an established line on the coronavirus, which goes something like this: it’s a disease which is so dangerous that, if we let it run wild, it will overload our health system and cause thousands of deaths.
There’s a lot of disagreement about the truth when it comes to covid-19. But you wouldn’t know that by listening to most of the establishment voices! They’re so keen to promote a particular view that even the UK Office for Statistics Regulation had to give them a slap on the wrist for the graph presented a few weeks ago.
Neil Ferguson’s original model (which the government based their decision to lockdown on back in March) has been shown to have many flaws and is “fundamentally unreliable”. Various scientific studies have shown little-to-no benefits of lockdown. There are many scientists who question the lockdown strategy, for example supporters of the Great Barrington Declaration.
The fact that there are voices contrary to the establishment view doesn’t mean that they are correct. But it does seem to me that upholders of political truth have an agenda which is not to find the actual truth, but rather to punish those who question political truth.
How many MPs have spoken out against the lockdown? How many pieces have you read in the mainstream media which bring up the some of the points I mentioned above? On my own personal Facebook page, whenever I post up anything about the lockdown there is always some kind of backlash.
Fortunately I think there are a number of papers who are questioning the establishment view. Things are beginning to change.
If you do question the lockdown, you will be labelled. It might be as a “lockdown denier” or “covid denier”, or maybe “granny killer”. Earlier on today I read an article on UnHerd, The trouble with ‘Covid denialism’. What’s interesting about this piece is that it explicitly sets up Michael Yeadon as a ‘denier’, before going on to set him straight.
This is how it always works: “No, you’re wrong. Let me give you the proper facts.” I can’t really comment on the actual points made – that would take someone who knows more of the data than I do. I’d like to see them talk it out and debate these points. To my mind the problem is more the whole framing of the debate as “us vs them”: we are the reasonable people, you are the denier. It’s not intending to get to the truth, it’s intending to set someone straight.
It’s actually a kind of heresy hunting, like the inquisition.
Polls show consistently that people approve of the lockdown measures. I don’t know where the pollsters are finding these people, because the people I talk to often have a different view. (Maybe part of the problem is the questions you ask – as Yes Prime Minister explains!) I think a lot of people, even those who are concerned about covid, just want to get back to some kind of normality. A lot of people want to get back to jobs, families and friends, doing the things we used to do.
“Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.“
John 18:37
Christians should have a commitment to the truth. The ninth commandment forbids us from bearing false testimony against our neighbour. Titus 1:2 states that God “cannot lie”. Jesus said that he himself is the truth (John 14:6), and that anyone on the side of truth should listen to him. By contrast, the world “suppresses the truth” (Romans 1:18).
I believe it is the duty of every Christian to stand up for the truth – the actual truth, not political truth. We should not simply be content to stand by and let political truth go unchecked. I believe we should challenge where necessary.
This doesn’t mean that we should simply be contrarians – contradicting the establishment view just for the sake of it! But, in a world where truth is not valued as it should be, I believe it is our duty to stand up for it.
Where the world does not value truth, we should value it. Even if it costs us personally. We should seek it – because when we are seeking the truth, we are seeking God. Our God is a God of truth, and the Spirit of truth lives in us. Let’s pray for God’s wisdom in challenging political truth and telling the actual truth.