Isn’t It Time We Change Our Stories?

“Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it!” Those words, sung decades ago about a man apparently caught in a lie by his girlfriend is something we’ve all said at one time or another. That’s because sticking to our story is part of the human experience according to Jerome Bruner, a pioneer in the study of human cognition. Our brains are hardwired for Story, to organize everything we experience and understand through this filter called “Our Story” so that we can “make sense” of the world around us.

Upon my retirement over three years ago, I fulfilled a promise I had made to my dad some years earlier. We went on a “memory” trip, back to the Midwest to visit old friends and relatives as well as familiar places of his youth. Every part of the trip was enjoyable and exceedingly memorable. We saw familiar faces and reconnected with long-lost friends. We visited the farmland of Wisconsin where dad spent his summers. We visited the hospital in Chippewa Falls, a memorial of God’s grace where mom and dad barely escaped death by legionnaires disease.

Storytellers R Us
Several of the renewed friendships continue to flourish, bonded through common interests and kindred spirits. Through these friendships, I was introduced to Bruner and Jonathan Gottschall who, in his book “The Storytelling Animal,” observes that we humans are wired for story, with a deep hunger for story hearing and story creating arising from an innate and universal part of our nature. Through stories we better navigate life’s complex social problems, as they prepare us for real events, like a flight simulator for a pilot learning to fly. Our “storytelling mind,” according to Gottschall, is “a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.”

I introduced my friends to Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow whose research revealed the shortcuts our brain must use to mentally survive each day. The alternative – to carefully think through everything – just takes too much time and energy. Those shortcuts work by taking literally any available information and creating a compelling but simplified story. The quality or quantity of the information isn’t relevant as the measure of how “good” a story is—how confident we are in its accuracy—is not a function of data quality, but of the coherence of the story.

Its all about coherence but that cannot be achieved without cost. We make predictable errors in judgement which are very difficult to anticipate and overcome. We adopt a what-you-see-is-all-there-is (WYSIATI) mindset which leads us to choose intuition over external knowledge. We routinely employ confirmation bias, picking and choosing to support our preconceived beliefs. And we even make up data (lie!) so that we can impute causality with impunity, just so long as our stories remain coherent and consistent. And all of this is unknown, done outside of our consciousness.

Sowing the Lie, Reaping the Whirlwind
Last Wednesday, insurrectionists built gallows in front of the Capitol. They kicked in the doors and broke the windows of this most sacred home of our democracy. Many were people with a plan, replete with zip-ties, flash-bangs, radios, earpieces, guns, and pipe bombs. Cries of “burn it down,” “Pence is a Traitor,” and “Hang Mike Pence” echoed those hallowed halls while they spread out and hunted for targets, the capitol’s first hostile breach since 1814 by the British. A police officer was dragged down steps, facedown, and beaten with an American flag. Another officer was killed. Confederate flags violated those halls while an American flag was torn down in an effort to replace it with a Trump-adorned flag. Halls were garnished with smeared feces to complete democracy’s desecration.

Not everyone in the crowd came to revolt and I’m sure the majority were peace-loving. But what began as a diverse group of people with differing motives, evolved into a flat-out insurrection, led by the faction with premediated violence in mind.

Many Trump supporters have objected to being lumped with the insurrectionists, wanting nothing to do with this chaos. Yet those premeditated actors could not have succeeded without the presence and partial support of the crowd. And the crowd could not have given cover to the storming of the capitol without the moral support from 75% of the 74 million Trump voters who continue to assert the post-election lies.

In The Grip of a Lie
This week David French said: “The problem is that all too many Christians are in the grips of two sets of lies. We call them enabling lies and the activating lies.” Activating lies are those most easily visible: lies such as Pizzagate, that Biden is a pedophile, and 2020 election fraud. Enabling lies reside in the background and are ideological in nature. To wit: Democrats are evil, the main street media (MSM) is all about fake news, and if Biden is elected, America will become godless, Marxist, and destroyed as a country.

However, its these enabling lies that ultimately matter, tilling the ground for the activating lies. French again: “They poison hearts. They poison minds. They fill you with rage and hate, until comes the activating lie, the dangerous falsehood that pushes a person towards true radicalism.” And until you deal with the enabling lies, the activating lies will continue like a whack-a-mole, constantly bringing harm to our nation.

Deja Vu
These past two months have shown the enduring power of the activating lie, canceling (for most Republicans) the truthful testimony of multiple and diverse local election officials, state leaders, Trump’s Attorney General and 62 court opinions involving over 90 judges of whom a third were appointed by Trump. We’ve seen the malignant power of this activating lie where the more those claims are debunked, the more the true believers double down on their assertions, diving even further into the rabbit hole of the lie’s alternative reality.

Just minutes into the capitol breach another activating lie was hatched. Franklin Graham, Newsmax, Fox News and others suggested “antifa” was there, a “story” that became easily and quickly believed. The Washington Times found the smoking gun when they published supposed facial recognition “proof” of Antifa involvement. Then like a wind-blown wildfire, the Antifa story spread throughout right wing media resulting in 68% of Republicans believing Antifa was “very much” or “somewhat” to blame for inciting the violence despite contrary findings by a number of fact checkers and the FBI and even a retraction by the Washington Times.

Now here’s the interesting part. Despite the widespread adherence to the Antifa lie narrative, polls also show 45% of Republicans approving of the capitol storming. Some invoke both-siderism as a justification to their support, holding up this summer’s protests [of an unjustifiable killing of a black man] as a defense of a protest turned insurrection against the nation’s capitol [based on an easily provable lie]. Many, however, approve in silence while keeping a firm hand firm on the tiller, as they sustain their attacks against the “real” enemy, the Democrats.

Enabling Lies, Destructive Stories
Now that’s one of the enabling lies that make all of this happen. As I’ve previously said, populism’s tremendous influence comes by creating a binary worldview where “we the good” comes against “they the enemy” creates a highly divisive lens through which those outside of our group are seen, judged and convicted. It opens the door to the lies of conspiracy theories and amplifies people’s fears.

Another enabling lie is the fear-inducing apocalyptic lie such as that said by Eric Metaxas about the election: “It’s like stealing the heart and soul of America.” “This is trying to kill the American people.” “It’s like somebody has been raped or murdered. … This is like that times a thousand.” To believe otherwise, according to Eric, is to listen to “the voice of the Devil” “It’s like holding a rusty knife to the throat of Lady Liberty,” Eric says, of the election.”

Just stop and ponder that. An Evangelical leader says that Donald Trump’s election loss is a thousand times worse than rape and murder. If you don’t believe this lie, then you are in cahoots with the Devil. Conversely, if you do believe the lie, shouldn’t that be a call to action?

A third enabling lie invokes a negative version of Kahneman’s Halo Effect where we take one data point, just one piece of information from “they the enemy,” and then extrapolate it to the group as a whole. It’s an extreme and pervasive form a confirmation bias and commonly shapes our understandings of truth, picking away at truth’s institutional guardrails while establishing the echo chambers in our lives.

Our mind yearns for coherence, coherence, and coherence. Such coherence not only helps us to understand the world, but it allows us to function efficiently and effectively in the midst of a complex world. Yet truth too often bows before coherence as lies become useful shortcuts to coherent stories.

That’s why echo chambers are coherence’s best friend. By filtering out alternative facts, we hop on the tractor beam of coherence which takes us into the mothership of belief perseverance. This is the final destination of confirmation bias as we will now cling to those beliefs even when receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms the basis of them.

This past week we saw how destructive just one activating lie can inflict on the nation, a destruction that took a village through a widespread adherence to a set of tribally-based enabling lies that first built the superstructure for this chaos and then made it happen. For when you demonize your political opponent, connecting their success to the end of the world, when you ramp up people’s fear through repeated assertions of godless Marxism, and when you remove truth’s guardrails allowing people to plummet into the abyss of echo chambers, you can’t really be surprised when the sowing of these lies yields the reaping of last week’s whirlwind.

Isn’t it Time We Change Our Stories?
Isn’t it time as Christ-followers, to go back to the basics and the question Rick Warren asked in his book “The Purpose Driven Life:” What on earth am I here for?

I like the theologian Stanley Grenz’s response: “at the heart of the biblical narrative is the story of God bringing humankind to be the imago dei, that is, to be the reflection of the divine character, love, where we show the world what our God is like.” The Westminster Shorter Catechism also rings true – that our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.

Shouldn’t our stories mirror that purpose and isn’t that purpose incompatible with the enabling lies that undergird our tribally-created partisan stories? Then isn’t it time to heed Haggai 1:7’s admonition to first “consider our ways” and then to repent of any stories that aren’t glorifying to Him?

Shouldn’t then our stories be inclusive, absent of partisan or ethnic division where there is neither Jew nor Greek, nor slave or free, nor male or female?

Shouldn’t then our stories refuse any involvement with tribal echo chambers as we affirm our calling to be agents of reconciliation, being “Christ’s Ambassadors as we become peacemakers, living out the gospel through our words, actions, and attitudes?

Shouldn’t then our stories be faithful to Micah 6:8 which is to do justly, love mercy and to walk humbly with our God?

And shouldn’t then our stories be centered on Jesus, the beginning and end of our faith where “we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit?

Yes! And then let the coherence, coherence, and coherence begin.