Recently, Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Mr. Vance was referring to the lie, which he perpetuated, that Haitian migrants in Ohio are eating cats and dogs. This lie went viral, playing into a racist trope and endangering the lives of actual people.
During the recent vice presidential debate, when a moderator corrected Mr. Vance’s mischaracterization of the Haitian immigrants as “illegal,” he protested, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check.” His smooth delivery of recklessly false content is perhaps why many responses to the V.P. debate included some version of “Vance won, but he lied incessantly to do it.” (Others praised the “civil” tone of the debate. But it is unclear to me what the meaning of winning or civility might be when disaffiliated from truth.)
If we zoom out, we can see a pattern by Donald J. Trump and his MAGA movement of lying for the sake of political power—including the “big lie” that the election of 2020 was stolen, which led to political violence seeking to disrupt the fair democratic process. (Mr. Vance sought to rewrite history during his debate, downplaying the violence on Jan. 6 and claiming “Donald Trump…peacefully gave over power on January the 20th” in 2021.) Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance and others continue to sow distrust in our democratic systems, laying the groundwork for denying the results of the 2024 election, though all evidence suggests that our election systems are secure, and miscounts and illegally cast votes are so rare as to have no impact on the outcomes of national and statewide elections.
If there is anything Christians should agree on, it is a commitment to upholding the truth. “I am the way, the truth and the life,” Jesus tells us. Certainly, lying runs rampant in the political sphere, and it would be naïve to suggest that only the right is implicated. But when a political movement utilizes the nonstop perpetuation of lies (or, euphemistically, “alternative facts”), and when it villainizes those who point out its lies, that is a danger fundamentally different in scope.
Lying is an assertion of a nonexistent reality that chips away at what really is. When lies are weaponized against particular people or groups (Haitians, for example) or used to deny the will of a people (such as through voter suppression or the refusal to accept election results), it is a form of erasure and control. And it is evil.
I use that word cautiously, knowing that labeling people and actions as evil can lead to religious extremism, or to its own kind of political violence. But St. Augustine defined evil as the negation of good, going so far as to say that when something has become so corrupt that all goodness has been removed from it, it ceases to exist altogether. The consequences of evil are ongoing, of course, but they are deleterious—evil is destructive.
In the aftermath of World War II, the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt asked an important question: “If the modern political lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture—the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack, or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their own original context—what prevents these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality?” For her, undermining the fabric of shared reality was one of the most brutal and insidious tactics of authoritarian regimes.
Indeed, Arendt reminds us, in language similar to Augustine’s, “All these lies…harbor an element of violence; organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate.” We see this unfolding today in Springfield, Ohio, and in election denialism, and in the myriad ways the MAGA movement has undermined scientific expertise and the nonpartisan work of government agencies (particularly sinister in light of the devastation of Hurricane Helene). Christians have a moral responsibility to stand against lies that attempt to manipulate our systems to project a reality at odds with what really is. As Arendt notes, “not even the most autocratic ruler or tyrant could ever rise to power, let alone keep it, without the support of those who are like-minded.”
For Arendt, factual truth matters even more than ideological truth in the political sphere because the way we build our lives together depends on our understanding of our collective circumstances. Whatever our broader sense of absolute truth, then, we cannot join the “like-minded” when it comes to lies that erase the existence, experience and participation of our neighbors. A resolute counter-response that refuses to capitulate to a movement that traffics in lies and disinformation is necessary if we wish to foster peace in our nation, where the fabric of shared reality is being torn apart at the seams by those seeking power, propped up through partisan media outlets and social media disinformation campaigns.
The truth will set us free. In this moment of political upheaval, when one party is rapidly undermining our democratic institutions and civic trust for the sake of power, I believe it is necessary for Christians to speak out. This is not the time for the “white moderate” of Dr. King’s moral critique, “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” To paraphrase the author and historian Jemar Tisby, “Sometimes talking across the divide simply means telling the truth.”
There are many resources available in support of this effort: the Faith in Elections Playbook; the Sojourners’ Faiths United to Save Democracy Toolkit; the explainer “How to Spot Disinformation”; and the University of Central Oklahoma’s Media Bias Trackers. You can also read and sign thestatement on “Christian Faith and Democracy,” an ecumenical statement signed by thousands of faith leaders, scholars and other Christians meant to reclaim and reimagine the relationship of Christianity to multiracial democracy through truth-telling and nonviolence. (The statement was organized by the Center on Faith and Justice at Georgetown University, where I work.)
Our reality is Christ—truth itself—in whom “all things hold together.” And the word religion comes from the Latin religare, which means to re-link, or re-bind. The love of God, the reality that invites all that is to be, calls us to self-giving democratic engagement. Authentic truth and love always foster flourishing and participation.
Arendt’s Augustinian definition of love is helpful here: “I will that you be.” Love counters the falsehood of evil by inviting the other toward being instead of negation. Only by responding to lies and evil with truth and love can we bear witness to the good news of Jesus and facilitate wholeness and healing.
