What is truth?

Originally I was going to have this post as part of an odds and ends post, but as I collected items and ideas I decided it needed to stand alone, as did a couple of the other pieces initially deemed an odd or end. I just need to write some longer pieces anyway and devote a little more space to them.

As you probably know, I enjoy reading Erick Erickson’s commentary when he combines religion and politics. A recent piece is a case in point.

Over the last several years, great harm has been done to the truth by President Trump, but also by a media that made everything about him and by partisans on both sides. It is not a one way street. It is the collapse of post-modern America into tribalism where all sides are more interested in narratives than facts or truth.

That collapse of truth has allowed conspiracists to fester and created a dangerous time for the church as both pastor and congregants leave the truth of Christ for the lies of the world. Gnosticism is on the rise wherein people believe if you read certain websites or listen to certain voices, you can get an insight into the world and a deeper knowledge of its surrounding than others. This is where Q comes from — a gnostic heresy whose adherents believe they have the inside scoop or a deeper knowledge. Churches need to focus on the Word and the gospel, not politics. Pastors who think Donald Trump will be President after tomorrow need to repent and probably need to leave their pulpits. Congregants who think this need to repent and leave politics and the news and spend time in the Word.

“Some Things Some of You Need to Hear,” Erick Erickson, January 20, 2021.

I have listened to a few of these preachers because their sermons were shared by various people I knew, and to a man they were certain that Donald Trump would somehow remain as President, with the congregation lapping these proclamations up. And while I believed there was a slim possibility the states would revisit their Electoral College results and toss out the fraudulent mail-in ballots, I also knew that opportunity withered away and dried out as the days of December dwindled and the Kraken remained bottled up. I still don’t believe Joe Biden won in a legitimate fashion, but unfortunately there’s no way to conclusively prove that since a lot of the evidence was destroyed.

But more importantly to this post, I believe Erickson has described the Qanon phenomenon to a T. On its surface, given our longstanding mistrust of politicians and the press, the whole preteen human trafficking angle they’ve pushed upon is somewhat believable. Every so often we hear about children freed from a human trafficking ring (here’s one case in point) and that feeds the narrative given our previous conditioning to believe all politicians on the opposing side are corrupt. Throw in the whole Jeffrey Epstein case and it fuels the fire.

When I first heard about Qanon, the story was it was a select few patriots in government who opposed the Deep State that came to Donald Trump as their chosen candidate to clean up the mess, so they engineered his election in 2016. (Which begs the question: why not 2012 when he considered running? Did they have someone else in mind at the time?) Speaking in cryptic riddles and open-ended questions, Qanon became a cottage industry for a select few pundits who purported to have their inside information for a rapt audience who thought they were smarter than the rest of us, I guess. To be quite honest, it was right on the edge of belief, like something that sounded crazy but that I couldn’t put past the powers that be.

But then the Qanon folks got sort of greedy. One story I heard was that this effort traced back to the days of JFK, which led me to ask myself just how this could have been kept from the public for a half-century until Donald Trump came along. Heck, Watergate got out and so did Monica’s blue dress so I don’t think a secret like that would be safe that long inside the Beltway. More importantly, though, everything they predicted never came to pass. We were supposed to have the Insurrection Act, followed by media blackouts, martial law, and mass arrests on a global scale, leading to the revelation of the “true” election results and Donald Trump sworn in for a second term. Guess what? None of that occurred – well, except for the media blackout, which I suppose falls into the blind squirrel category. (I’m sure the real hardcore Qanon believers blame Donald Trump for the cold feet when all this was supposed to occur.)

Yet millions of people believed it, including a lot of men of the cloth. That’s the part that bothers me, too, when you think about it. Let’s review what Erickson said:

Pastors who think Donald Trump will be President after tomorrow need to repent and probably need to leave their pulpits. Congregants who think this need to repent and leave politics and the news and spend time in the Word.

“Some Things Some of You Need to Hear,” Erick Erickson, January 20, 2021.

I will grant that there are some questions regarding religious freedom under Joe Biden. (Someone just happened to write on that for The Patriot Post, oddly enough.) But come tomorrow their church will still be open, congregants will still be coming in, and certain pastors will have some ‘splainin to do.

Donald Trump was (and may well be again in 2025) a very good president – I’d rank him second behind Reagan in my lifetime. But he should have never become a cult leader.