Navigating a Post-Truth Culture

The Objective Nature of Truth Effects Everything

I’ve made the case elsewhere that truth, goodness, and beauty are objective features of the world — things that we discover and recognize, not things we create. So, I won’t repeat those arguments here. But please don’t think that each of these is just an esoteric triviality. They’re not. We are living in a post-truth culture. It’s a place where the objective nature of truth, goodness, and beauty are deeply relevant. Our view of objective truth affects everything about how we live our lives. It’s the antidote to moral relativism, and therefore also an antidote to chaos.

Truth matters. And understanding the profundity of that simple fact will revolutionize the way you interact with our world. Here’s why.

The Assumptions of the Culture

Consider these three topics. And think about how you’re used to hearing about them:

Truth -- “That may be true for you, but it’s not for me.”

Goodness -- “Don’t impose your morality on me!”

Beauty -- “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Despite thousands of years of human knowledge and experience, our contemporary culture has made every one of these subjective. Suddenly, they’ve each become things we decide for ourselves. In fact, if you were to express the notion that any one of these is not subjective, you would be considered arrogant. Oppressive. A Neanderthal who wants to impose your personal values on the rest of the world. Who are you to to do that?!

The World Turned Upside Down

This is cultural relativism. The idea that everyone’s opinion about every topic is equally valid. It creates a world where truth isn’t something to be discovered, it’s something you create. It’s the kind of thing Oprah’s referring to when she encourages her audience to “Live your truth!”

That pesky definition of truth as “correspondence to reality” is suddenly out the window. The new normal tells us that our highest calling is to “be true to ourselves.” But what does that mean, exactly?

Follow Your Heart

When your standard for truth and virtue is the person you see in the bathroom mirror, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what’s coming. Feelings rule. You are encouraged to “follow your heart.” And following your heart means you evaluate reality based on emotion instead of reason and logic. If it feels good, you do it.

“If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad ...”

~ Sheryl Crow

Conforming to reality becomes passé. An archaic inconvenience. But there is a problem with that. And the problem is that the “persistent belief in something that does not conform to reality” is called a delusion.

Our culture has elevated delusion to an art form.

That’s why the Bible doesn’t tell us to follow our hearts. Instead it warns us to guard them (Proverbs 4:23) because they are “deceitful above all else” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Philosophy Is About The Real World

It turns out that the whole discussion of truth, goodness, and beauty is more than the hobby of navel-gazing philosophers. These things have real-world consequences. Ideas always do. Good or bad, we live in a world where those ideas will play themselves out.

We see the consequences of bad thinking in our politics and in the family and community relationships on which our politics depend. We read about them in the news — and in the “fake news” generated at both ends of the political spectrum. We suffer the repercussions of denying reality in our economics. And our children and grandchildren will — quite literally — pay the price for those willful delusions.

Most of all, we see it in the glorification of sexual autonomy that has infiltrated every corner of our culture. Denying the reality that human beings are create in God’s image for the purpose of filling the world and worshipping him is at the core of issues like abortion, sexual libertinism, transgenderism, and same-sex behavior. Defending each of these corruptions of human nature is nothing but a persistent delusion trying to ensconce itself in the law.

Faith Communities Are Not Immune

It’s bad enough that the culture thinks this way. But when the same kind of thinking slithers its way into the church, we have a massive problem on our hands.

The Church is most certainly not immune to the corrosive acid of bad thinking. The vacuous nonsense you can find in the Word-Faith Movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, Universalism, and so-called “Progressive” Christianity is proof enough of that. It turns out every societal ill listed above has also found its way into the church.

Recently, the Pope himself even applied this kind of thinking to the faith he’s supposed to represent to the world. Here’s what he said:

“[Religions] are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God.” … “If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].”

~ Pope Francis, September 13, 2024

Never mind that each of these religions contradict each other. Never mind that it’s those differences that matter, not their similarities. And never mind Jesus’ proclamation that “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Apparently, Jesus forgot to run that one by the Pope.

Testify to the Truth

When you boil it all down, the problems we see in our culture are nothing new. In fact, they’re as old as mankind. The denial of truth, goodness, and beauty started soon after we came on the scene. The Fall of Man was simply the first instance where human beings made the free-will decision to exchange the truth of God for a lie.

Since then we’ve only pushed the limits of that futile exercise even further. The good news is that the antidote to bad thinking has always been the same: Seek truth in all its forms, then align your life with it.

The Church should never be a safe space for bad ideas to flourish. It must be a place where people are treated with gentleness and respect, but also a place where corrupted thinking goes to die.