A Country Pastor

False Witness: The Power of a Lie When It Gets a Head Start
By A Country Pastor

Who stops to check a story before passing it along? Who goes back to correct it once the truth comes out? This past weekend a story raced across the country claiming that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Texas, had been hidden away in a mental health facility in Ohio while his campaign told the public he had the flu. Influencers posted a recorded phone call, called it a bombshell, and set deadlines of their own making for him to answer. By Sunday night the facility itself, the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, said plainly that Talarico had never received treatment there, and Talarico said he had never even been to Ohio. The dates they offered fell apart on their own, because the man they said was being discharged from an Ohio hospital had already been seen back among the people in Austin. Yet the story had already done the work it was built to do. It had already settled into group chats, kitchen tables, and Facebook feeds, where it will keep living long after the correction has been forgotten.

There is an old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling on its boots. Country people have long told a story about a man who spread gossip about his neighbor and later came to his pastor wanting to make it right. The pastor handed him a feather pillow and told him to cut it open on a windy hilltop, and the man did it gladly, thinking it an easy penance. Then the pastor told him to go gather every feather back into the pillow. The man looked out over the fields and the fence rows and the creek bottoms and understood what he had done. Words work the same way, and the people who start a lie like this one understand it better than anyone. They know the correction will travel slower and shorter than the accusation. They know that a denial from a hospital in Ohio will reach a fraction of the people who saw the first breathless post. They are counting on the wind.

Scripture saw this coming a very long time ago. "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor" (Exodus 20:16) sits right there among the ten words God gave Moses, alongside the commands against murder and theft, because a lie about a neighbor is its own kind of theft. It steals a name, and a name is hard to get back. Proverbs counts among the things God hates "a false witness who testifies lies, and one who sows discord in a family" (Proverbs 6:19), and it describes the pull of gossip with uncomfortable honesty: "The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body" (Proverbs 26:22). We swallow these stories because they taste good to us, because they confirm what we already wanted to believe about the other side. James warned that the tongue is a small thing that does enormous damage, writing, "How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!" (James 3:5). And when the powerful wanted Jesus gone, they went looking for the very same tool. "Now the chief priests and the whole council were looking for false testimony against Jesus so that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward" (Matthew 26:59-60). The council never needed the truth. They only needed enough noise.

There is another wound hidden inside this lie, and it should break our hearts. Somewhere tonight a mother is driving her son to a treatment center, and somewhere a veteran is working up the courage to ask for help, wondering whether anyone will think less of him if he admits he is struggling. When a hospital stay for mental health is used as a weapon to disqualify a man from public life, every one of those people hears the message. They learn that seeking help is something to hide, something an enemy can use against them, something that marks a person as unfit. Jesus walked straight toward the troubled and the tormented. When he met the man among the tombs in the country of the Gerasenes, the one everyone else had chained and avoided, he healed him, and the townspeople found him "sitting there, clothed and in his right mind" (Mark 5:15). Jesus treated that man's healing as good news. A movement that claims his name has turned the very idea of healing into an insult, and we should grieve what that teaches the people in our own families who are quietly hurting.

None of this happened in a vacuum. For years Donald Trump has shown a whole political movement how this works. He announces deals before the other side has agreed to them, and partner nations come out afterward describing something much smaller or entirely different. He declares numbers that grow larger every time he repeats them. He told the country the 2020 election was stolen, and he kept telling it after courts across the nation, his own attorney general, and election officials from his own party found no such thing. The pattern is always the same, and he follows it because he has learned that it works. Say it first, say it loudest, and let the world react, because by the time the facts arrive, the reaction has already hardened into belief. That is the Kingdom of Man at work, where the goal is to win the moment and the truth is treated as something to be managed. What happened to James Talarico this weekend is simply that same lesson being practiced by those who learned it well.

The same playbook shows up in the words they reach for. Few labels get thrown around more freely right now than "communist," hung on teachers and pastors and nearly anyone who speaks up for the poor or asks for health care for a neighbor. The word is chosen because it does the thinking for the listener, and once it lands, the conversation is over before it starts. Yet the man leading this movement has spent years speaking warmly of the very strongmen it claims to fear. He stood beside Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the Soviet KGB, in Helsinki and sided with him over America's own intelligence agencies. He told a rally crowd that he and Kim Jong Un, who rules North Korea under one of the last hardline communist regimes on earth, "fell in love" over their letters. He has spoken admiringly of Xi Jinping, who leads the Chinese Communist Party with an iron hand. Jesus asked a question that fits this moment exactly: "Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3). The label gets pinned on the neighbor who wants children fed, while the warm words go to men who jail their critics and silence people of faith. A gotcha word keeps our eyes fixed on the speck so we never have to look at the log.

Before we point only at them, though, we ought to look honestly at ourselves. How many times have we shared something about a politician we dislike without stopping to see whether it was true? How many of us felt that little jolt of satisfaction when a story confirmed everything we already believed, and hit share before the second paragraph? Proverbs speaks right to that impulse: "The one who first states a case seems right, until the other comes and cross-examines" (Proverbs 18:17). The temptation to spread a lie that helps our side lives in every heart, on every side of every aisle, and those of us who care about the truth have to hold ourselves to the same standard we ask of others. If we only love the truth when it wounds our opponents, then what we really love is winning.

So what does God's way look like in a moment like this? Paul wrote to people living in a world full of rumor and division, "So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another" (Ephesians 4:25). Being members of one another means a lie about a neighbor tears at the whole body, because his name and our name are bound up together, and the dignity we deny him we eventually lose ourselves. Jesus promise...