What is truth? Philosophers, theologians, pastoral leaders, the pastorally led, and those of a less divine inclination have wrestled with this question for a long time. However, modern, living, breathing citizens of the United States of America have come up with a definitive answer. Truth is whatever you want it to be. And there is absolutely no reason to make sure that truth has any bearing on reality.

Actually, it is getting harder and harder to know what ordinary people really think and say. This is because corporate and social media don’t focus on the ordinary, but are always on the prowl for the outrageous, inflammatory, violent, or the obscene. Qanon, MAGA, Bill Maher, the View, the Daily Show all magnify the lunatic fringe, and people like Marjorie Taylor Greene who repeatedly say awful things just for the attention, make it difficult to know what mainstream folks actually think and feel. Internet moguls film hours of interviews with opposing viewpoints just to edit out a five-minute glimpse of the craziest of the crazies. All the messaging is shaped; all that is left is interpretation.

Look at the Trump trial for inappropriate use of campaign funds. What in God’s name did sordid details of the adultery, the size of the crowds in the streets, the number of times Trump dozed or farted, have to do with the determination of illegal use of funds? Yet, that is what we got.

I have been rereading The 1619 Project and looking at the supporters and opponents of the project. This is a very easy book to fact check. But facts are not at issue. The interpretation of the facts is the point. The incredible violation of human rights, human agency, human dignity, and the crassness of greed, bigotry, and power abuse are all ignored by people venting their own opinions about why what happened happened the way it did. And intention. How can historians ever ascribe intention to events hundreds of years after they occurred? All history is interpretation once the facts are known. From an objective point of view, the book The 1619 Project is uneven, is not scholarly in every essay, offers as much opinion and interpretation as presentation of factual information and historical data, and contains a few easily verifiable errors. In other words, it is a history book. Part of my research and fact checking has been to look at many of the issues raised in the book and how they are treated in public education textbooks nation-wide. Well, guess what. I have yet to find an unbiased, non-nuanced, and essentially revisionist presentation of slavery in America. I also note that the majority of critics of the work are not historians, but English professors, anthropologists, economists, Heritage Foundation hirelings, and an electrical engineer. I know when I want to get the most reliable answer to a question, I always turn to a source that has nothing to do with what I am looking for.

This is not to say that people don’t have a right to interpret. We all do it all the time. We are hardwired to make sense of what is going on around us. But when we pretend that our personal and biased interpretation is truth, and that our opinion is the only right and valid opinion, and consequently, people who think differently are somehow inferior, stupid, or defective, we have crossed a very dangerous line. To top it off, we make such people into celebrities, and we swallow whatever they tell us as truth. We cannot, must not, be this ignorant.

Name five pieces of legislation that our current congress has passed that benefit the majority of Americans. Name the five areas of the planet that are currently devastated by natural disasters. Identify the two or three top priorities of our presidential candidates. Mostly, we cannot do these things, because these are not the things being talked about. Name calling in the House of Representatives, personal attacks and insults about the presidential candidates, obsessive focus only on what happens in the U.S. entertain us while fueling our obliviousness. We have collectively confused our cultural reality with a poorly conceived reality show. The cliche is that we don’t know what we don’t know, but the sadder fact is that we don’t know much of anything anymore. We feel much more than we think, and our emotions lead our misinterpretation of truth.

The church is doing the same thing. Our General Conference was a painful wakeup call to what we actually did through schism and separation. We wasted so much time, energy, money, and witness over our divisions that we sacrificed the incredible good we were doing through global missions, social justice, ministerial education, program and resource development, and theological integrity. And as emotions eclipsed our best thinking, we managed to lose most of our credibility.

Take time to cut through to why. Why was there a trial in New York about use of campaign funds? Why is it important to focus on character in our political representatives? Why do we need to explore many aspects and dimensions of our past? Why do we desire relationship with a higher power? When you take the time to remember why things that are important are important it reveals just how outrageous our focus and interpretation is at the moment. Apparently, we don’t really care what is right; we merely care about being right.