Towards the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there is a final showdown between Frodo and Smeagol. Smeagol tries to regain possession of “My Precious”, and when Frodo resists, Smeagol tries to strangle him. One scene in this part shows Frodo shocked that Smeagol has broken his promise and, though on the brink of death, sees fit to plead for honour: “But you swore,” he says, “You swore a promise by what you call the Precious!”
A good number of years after seeing the film, I am still struck by one thing: that despite the obvious differences between the good and bad characters, both sides seemed to share an intrinsic value, a common currency: integrity. Even the wicked operated according to what they’d promised. Otherwise their honour, their worth, was at stake.
When honour is lost
Since the pandemic, it has seemed easier than ever for us to forget what honour means, because we have seen so many examples of the opposite. A woman ended up with a criminal record after saying on Facebook Live that the modular intensive care unit in Piatra-Neamţ was empty, even though there were 25 patients in the ICU that day. A young man from Sibiu who died of COVID had earlier shown the doctors a false vaccination certificate.
Unfortunately, this degradation of honour can also be observed among the religious population, in whose midst a special category of disseminators of false information has emerged. When we indiscriminately adopt popular but untrue slogans, our position sends a false message about the world and its condition. And when what we say about the world is wrong, there are consequences.
The consequences of lying: a distorted reality
One of the consequences is that we contribute to a toxic social climate. When people become fearful of everything around them, when they live in the belief that they are going through “hell on earth”, the dark side of life takes over their perceptions and they become unable to see that the world is not all black, that it’s not all suffering, that some things still work and work very well. In essence, they lose their ability to see the outline of God’s guiding hand in the world. They acquire a perspective impairment that distorts their reality.
There is a word to describe the mismatch between fact and reality: it’s “lie”. And there is another word to describe a lie told about a person: “slander”. The spread of fake news is not simply a mistake caused by poor information hygiene. Rather, by distorting people’s view of God’s involvement in the world, the spread of fake news is slander against God.
Conspiracy: four indicators that expose it
The danger of this kind of assessment is that even conspiracists agree in principle with the above, and from this we can deduce the futility of these ideas. This is not the case if we move on to a more practical level. How can you tell if you are among those who dishonour God, even though they think they are doing good? How can you tell if you are prone to conspiracy theories without taking a course in fake news? Here are four indicators to look out for:
- Do you pray for situations that you fear? Or do you take comfort in the simple fact that you know some supposed “behind the scenes” information and no longer feel the need to turn to God?
- When you talk to others to warn them of the danger they are in, what do you talk about first? Current threats? Or about Jesus and His power to protect, save, and transform circumstances? It is so easy to give the appearance of godliness when we criticise! It is much easier to see what is wrong in the world than to reveal Christ to the suffering, and to do so lovingly.
- If criticising political/church leaders takes up more of your time than thanking and praising God, you may not realise it, but it could mean that your priority is to create the perfect church, not to preach Christ. And that is not the mission we Christians have been given.
- Good intentions do not absolve you from the responsibility of regularly checking your interpretations. On the contrary! The more my intention is to seek the truth rather than to defend the ideas I have developed so far, the less tempted I will be to cling to my conclusions. We are not talking about principles here, but about how we apply them. Good intentions do not take the place of truth for us, any more than they did for the angels whom Satan deceived at the fall.
A mission that brings hope
Our behaviour reflects a picture of God, of the way He governs the world. We can fool ourselves into thinking that our solemn warnings are God’s work on earth, but when God was literally on earth, He affirmed a very different mission:
Isaiah 61:1-3—“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.”
How do we talk about the positive in a hurting world?
How do we show the glory of God to a world blinded by its own suffering? How do we speak of the positive aspects of the present to someone for whom the present is anything but positive? Is it naïve to focus on the things that are still working? Or perhaps even an insult, a mockery of the real, deep pain that so many others around us are experiencing, just as we are doing well?
Ann Voskamp, author of the best-selling book One Thousand Gifts, answered these questions in a way that is as eloquent as it is rare in religious discourse today. For the author, the need to focus on the positive is a spiritual responsibility and a form of integrity.
Voskamp confessed that although she has “lived pain, and [her] life can tell”, every time she forgets to thank God for nature’s gifts—such as “early light dappled through leaves” or “the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July”—she inadvertently contributes to deepening the wound of the world. “Why would the world need more anger, more outrage?” Voskamp asked, insisting that rejecting unabashed joy does not bring relief; on the contrary, “it is joy that saves us”. She argued that rejecting joy under the pretext of solidarity with suffering does not comfort the sufferer, but only exacerbates the state of pain.
Describing those she called agents of change, Voskamp said that “the brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents”. She argued that these people bring fullest Light to all the world, demonstrating that an attitude of gratitude can transform reality.
All of this culminated in her demonstration of the transformative power of grace: when we “lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace” and when joy is allowed to “penetrate our cracked and dry places”, profound change occurs. Voskamp concluded that when joy “soaks into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows,” demonstrating that personal transformation can lead to the regeneration of the world.
Beyond conspiracy: how to see God’s guiding hand
If I were to meet a conspiracist with the purest of intentions, I would imagine him to be overwhelmed by the urgency of the Second Coming and the desire to save. In such a moment, I shouldn’t tell him not to worry because there is no urgency, but I would broaden his perspective: to include the fact that Christ, who lived with a greater urgency than ours, had time to go to a wedding, to sit at the table with the poor and the infamous among the religious, to comfort children. Christ, who knew that His mother’s heart would be pierced by a sword (“And a sword will pierce your own soul too” Luke 2:35), did not live in fear of His mother’s future suffering. Why? Because He knew God. He knew that even when things seemed out of control, they were under His control. That’s the honourable thing to say about God. That is the Christian code of honour.
