I Think the Apple’s Rotten Right to the Core

Even in the Church and Politics, You Cannot Lie Your Way to the Truth

When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance. Lots of those contrasts were fair game—that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though—Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.

The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.

Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, “J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.”

The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, “I was only joking!” (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, “Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.”

If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, “I can see Russia from my house.” Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.

The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.

In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the “Workers of the world, unite!” sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media “to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories” so as to “turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.”

Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as “civil death,” meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, “Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.”

This does not have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors—especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that “He’s a Marxist” or “He’s a liberal” are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth—so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.

On the geopolitical level, the metaphor of “civil death” is appropriate—even when it doesn’t work—because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44, ESV throughout).

The first lie recorded in Scripture is that of the Serpent saying to the woman, “You will not surely die,” telling her the forbidden tree would grant her godlike powers (Gen. 3:4–5). This deception severed her first from the Word of God and thus from the Tree of Life (v. 24).

I suppose a (literal) devil’s advocate could try to say that the Serpent’s lie was for a good goal. After all, does not God, ultimately, want human beings to be able to discern good from evil (Heb. 5:14)? Even those too scared to give such justifications to the Devil’s lies are often able to make similar arguments for their own. This is why the apostle Paul denounces the one who might say, “But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?” (Rom. 3:7–8).

Jesus is not just the one telling us the truth; he is the truth (John 14:6). To distort the truth into a half-truth or a quarter-truth to advance a lie is a personal assault not just on the person you are lying about, or the issue you claim to support, but on Jesus Christ himself.

The problem, then, is not just what that does to whoever you’re lying about; the problem is what the lying does to you. Outside the gates of the kingdom, John tells us, are “everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15). The grace of God is amazing, and can redeem into truth those who lie, but it doesn’t do so by leaving liars to their lies. Those who would tell us that evil can be overcome by evil are not just lying to you but to themselves (Rom. 12:21; 1 John 1:8).

In a politically idolatrous age, simply refusing to lie about one’s opponents will be viewed as an act of betrayal. It will make you vulnerable to suspicion that you are not really “one of us,” whoever “us” is defined to be. Lying, then, is easy. It fits with the pattern of the world, and it will protect you from the mob. Sometimes, the pressure is even stronger where the church takes a welcoming and affirming posture toward liars, as long as they lie about the right people.

But what if God is telling us the truth that there’s a judgment seat? In that case, it becomes far more consequential to stand on the other side of it and ask, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). After all, we already know the answer from the voice—once on the dock, now on the throne. His answer is what it always was: “I Am.”

Wendell Berry’s 90th Birthday

The Library of America asked a group of us to contribute tributes to Wendell Berry on his 90th birthday. I wrote this:

Many people have had moments of humiliation, but I can testify that I had a smartphone alarm go off while sitting at the kitchen table with Wendell Berry. I was already nervous to be there on that Henry County farm with the man who, perhaps more than any living person, had shaped and reshaped my view of the world, with his poems and novels and essays, since I was a teenager. I suppose it could have been worse, but only if I had pulled up on a tractor. Since my ringtone was the sound of crickets chirping, I momentarily considered pleading my case that it was the sound of the peace of wild things, but I stopped, looking at the floor, blushing. “Well,” Mr. Berry said, with a shrug and a smile. “We’re all sinners.”

I’m a Baptist preacher and was, at the time, the dean of the Southern Baptist seminary down the highway from Port Royal in Louisville. Berry is a Baptist too, but, he would confess, not a very good one. He, like Jayber Crow, could describe himself as “maybe the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road,” for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. I guess a Berryite with a smartphone could be called an “unorganized” one too.

As I left the house, I realized that Berry had just reinforced up close what he had taught me from afar. My problem, though, was not so much that I got caught with a machine as that too often I think I am one.

You can read the whole thing here.

Back from Biloxi, Onward to Wednesdays

Maria and two of our sons and are back from some time away in our hometown, for our fix of family, nostalgia, and shrimp po’boys with Barq’s in the bottle. Jonah and Taylor did lots of fishing in my mom’s pond while Samuel manned the homeplace and took care of our dog, Willie Nelson, who is not only not quite as old as his namesake but also not quite as enthusiastic about being on the road.

So I am counting this first full week of August kind of like a Return to School, with this newsletter now starting what I consider to be its Volume Three … the new iteration of it that now moves from Thursdays (where it’s been since I started it at the beginning of COVID) to Wednesdays. It might take a while for me to get used to the new rhythm, but I will, and you can look for this now every Wednesday in your inbox.

What Watergate Can Teach Us

I had my colleague Daniel Silliman on the podcast this week, and I told a friend afterward that it must be one of the most enjoyable episodes for me that I’ve ever recorded. Silliman’s new book, One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation (Eerdmans), is out this week. I said in my blurb that the book broke into my mind like a locked door at the Watergate hotel—and this conversation did too.

One really fun part of it that I have never heard or seen anyone address before is the way Nixon planned worship services at the White House. Silliman analyzes notes and records showing why Nixon included certain people and excluded others (including kids). The whole thing is a parable on the dangers of an instrumental use of religion. He also engages the question of why clergy remained silent in the face of some major ethical problems in the Nixon era, and what made the difference with those who decided to speak out.

You can listen to our conversation here, and you can order Daniel’s book here, for yourself or as a gift for the person in your life who loves history.

Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Mitch Webb, who is executive director of the Huntington City Mission in Huntington, West Virginia. Here’s his list:

“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan
“These Days” by Jackson Browne
“Souvenirs” by John Prine
“Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel
“Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Secret O’ Life” by James Taylor
“A Day in the Life” by The Beatles
“Yesterday” by The Beatles
“Shine on You Crazy Diamonds” by Pink Floyd
“A Man Needs a Maid” by Neil Young
“Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell
“Silver Wings” by Merle Haggard

Thank you, Mitch!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.

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Onward,
Russell Moore