Who Can We Believe?

There’s a spin doctor around every corner today. There seems to be one behind every bush.

They appear on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, Facebook, Twitter, emails, and other social media platforms. Everybody is spinning a narrative of what the world is like and what must be done to fix it.

I spin, you spin, we all spin and are spun by the masters of spin.

The problem of course is whose spin should we trust? Who has the better grasp on our national or global situation? Who has a firmer grasp of the big picture and who doesn’t?

Can we trust one news network over all others? Should we? Can we trust the professional spin doctors who are so good at weaving believable narratives? Do these spin doctors really believe what they are spinning for mass consumption?

Who can we trust? Who can we believe? Is there a limit to our naiveté? 

We make our choice of who to believe each time we dial up our favorite cable news network. We trust either Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, Lou Hobbs or Lawrence O’Donnel or Wolf Blitzer.

Really, isn't all this spin simply entertainment? Are these talking heads reporting facts or are they spinning the facts to fit a narrative they are paid to deliver? Is this the real world in which we live? Are they shooting straight with us? How can we separate the truth from the spin?

America is a conflicted nation. We are conflicted mostly due to the professional spin doctors that come into our living rooms each night on our HD color flatscreen televisions. They offer up a well rehearsed narrative, smooth as silk and quite believable in fact.

For Christians this should be especially troubling.  

It should be troubling because we Christians have inherited a far superior narrative that should shape us in the way we think, and the way we live.

Franciscan Richard Rohr offers some interesting insight. Says Rohr:

Paul believes that corporate evil can only be overcome or confronted with corporate good. He uses primitive yet powerful words for the negative side of corporations, institutions, and nations: he calls them “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” (Colossians 1:16). These are not “bad angels” as much as collective attitudes that are almost impossible to break. Because they are so widely shared as mass consciousness—the way we’re programmed to think—they no longer look like evil and are hard to resist. Murder is bad, but war is good; greedy people are bad, but capitalism is going to save the world; ambition and pride are supposedly major sins, but not in the good ol’ USA. Do you see the problem? 

In Paul’s thinking, those big cultural blind spots can only be overcome by a group of people living and affirming and supporting one another in an alternative lifestyle. Smaller groups like the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, and some Catholic religious orders were able to create actual alternative cultures.

For Paul, community is the living organism that communicates the Gospel message. Paul, like Jesus, wants to change culture here, not just send people away to a far-off heaven later! If Christ’s cosmic message doesn’t take form in a concrete group of people, then, as far as Paul is concerned, it is an unbelievable message. An autonomous Christian is as impossible as an independent arm or leg. Arms and legs exist only as parts. No single one of us is the whole Christ, and “the eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you” (I Corinthians 12:21). Believers exist as parts of the whole, the Body of Christ.

Is Paul on to something here? Is this a narrative we can trust?

I believe it is. 

What do you think?