The truth about history sets us free; lying about it locks us out

Anyone who attends our church will, at some point, hear the rector reference Thomas Merton or Richard Rohr. If our associate rector is speaking, he might weave a quote from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” Chance the Rapper or Lin-Manuel Miranda into his homily.

I too have sources of deeply resonant wisdom where I turn in times of reflection, and from one of the sages I consistently revisit come these words:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Find out what it means to me: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

What or whom we respect matters in our relationship with them. It’s not a finite, qualified category. Subjects and objects can drop in or out for all sorts of reasons. Some, however, are constants.

Among them, for me, is the truth. I suspect it’s one of the reasons I have been drawn professionally to journalism and to faith-based work. Both should lift up the truth although they sometimes fall short.

Growing up, I thought the word liar was an expletive because the act inherent to it was so offensive. There were few worse accusations that could be leveled against someone.

I have since realized that I can respect the truth and its corollaries — honesty and integrity — while acknowledging we all occasionally mess up, whether selfishly or with cause, by omission or commission.

For years, I warned our sons off the dark chocolate in their Halloween haul, telling my ninjas and Harry Potter characters that the tiny bars tasted terrible. More altruistically, there is no need to tell the sweet lady at the community potluck that no one actually likes her chicken salad casserole, and that all would be delighted if she only brought herself next time.

Under more serious circumstances, I understand the desire to protect someone when the truth would be a cruelty. Dishonesty to shield others from hurt or harm is different than what my younger self equated with an obscenity.

But most lies are wrong, including those told to elevate oneself or to accumulate power. Particularly despicable are those used to lock others up or out and to sustain systems of oppression and injustice.

We have reached a place at the highest levels of government where lying is the baseline, a feature not a bug. Where, as I’ve heard it described, there are people who would rather climb a tree to tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. No topic is too insignificant to have its communication complicated by accuracy. Basic definitions have become so fluid I worry that they will never fully form again.

As a rule, if the only way to get your point across is to lie about it, maybe the point is a problem. But the truth is what suffers.

Then, when a big, life-altering, panic-inducing crisis occurs, as it inevitably does, the confidence needed to marshal a response is lacking.

Our ongoing experience with a national narrative that is more fable than fact comes at an interesting juncture. Increasingly we are witness to a public struggle over a version of history that has been skewed, sugar-coated and misconstrued — lied about. The effort to introduce truth into the conversation has not been universally well-received, but there are signs it is happening, from the fall of Silent Sam to the rise of a monument honoring enslaved laborers at the University of Virginia.

It would seem unlikely that an accurate re-telling of our past would outpace the honest conduct of our present, although the present is rapidly losing ground. Perhaps rather than normalizing our mistakes, we can learn from them, and respect one another enough to demand the truth.

This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 12:00 AM.