Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Pilate’s question is still the question today–what is truth? We have charges of fake media, fake virus, fake crisis, every idea has someone that will deny it or endorse it. There is nothing so strange as someone will not believe it, and nothing is so prosaic that someone will not deny it. Science is used as an arbiter of truth by some, even while being denied in other areas by the same people. And as our country has become increasingly polarized, we are not debating values, we are arguing over basic facts. When we’re getting to the point that large minorities of the population cannot or will not accept basic factual propositions, we are in dangerous territory. Let’s illustrate with the two most contentious issues today: the election results and the vaccine.

I’ve talked personally with people who are convinced that Mr. Trump will be the president, that he’ll pull it off, because of “all the fraud.” Now I don’t doubt there was fraud, abundant history and evidence shows there are always shenanigans going on, and I think we have reasonable evidence of some of it. The question has always been, is there any evidence of fraud on a scale that would lead to the overturning of the result. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have not provided evidence of that magnitude in court, even while press conferences and tweets argue otherwise. The point for me is not was there fraud, but how do you or I know? None of us are in the position of actually knowing and seeing fraud on that scale. When someone asserts it, there should be a large burden of proof that there is fraud, not that we just “know it.” This is no different than Hillary Clinton’s assertion that the Russians cost her the 2016 election. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump obviously are not impartial observers (is there such a thing?) to claim that the election results that went against them were rigged. And this is not to deny that they were not–but you must prove this, not simply assert this. I would love nothing better than the discovery of 20,000 fraudulent Biden votes in AZ, and so forth in other close states, or finding of thousands of absentee ballots for Trump. But where are they? Where are the actual votes that would lead to the change in the result? Why was this evidence not produced by the Trump Team lawyers in any of their court cases?

Similarly we have the vaccine. We have had people on the left, including our current President-elect and his VP, suggest at various times that the vaccine is suspect because it was developed and “rushed” under the Trump administration. As if Mad Scientist Donald Trump is sneaking down into the lab and slipping some Clorox into the vaccine! This is the one of the most dangerous, absurd things one can imagine. Yet many people are now distrusting the vaccine because of this idea that it was “rushed,” when no steps were skipped that I’m aware of. Doesn’t mean you should take the vaccine–maybe in your circumstance you shouldn’t. But the decision calculus should not be because it was rushed, without specific evidence that actual steps in the usual vaccine testing protocol were skipped. And then we have the vaccine causes Autism crowd, when the one study that suggested this was totally discredited years ago, and there is zero solid evidence and only post-hoc fallacy anecdotes (child gets vaccinated, then subsequently displays autism). There may be reasons not to get the vaccine, but let’s make these on reasoned evidence of objective facts as best we can.

I was discussing some of the ongoings with a younger man the other day, and he was glad that people are free to believe discordant ideas, and that crazy ideas were actually a good thing. I countered that it is good that we have the freedom to hold other ideas, since many new ideas “are crazy until they aren’t!” But these crazy ideas should be vigorously contested because truth matters. There are life-and-death consequences to false truth claims. Further, our God is a god of truth, so much that He claims that He is “the way, the truth and the life.” In our fallen state, we’re bound to make mistakes in our assessment of the truth of some situations, but we should test all things and hold fast to that which is true. And we should give grace to those that think differently than we do, even while vigorously contesting for the truth. This seems to me to be the first principle of Christian Political Economy.