Living Through the Politics of the Lie

By Craig G. Bartholomew

As I noted in a previous article, the Ten Commandments have evocatively been described as the ethos of the good neighbourhood. They are certainly for individuals, but we make a mistake if we limit them to that – this is what we call the danger of individualism. The immediate application of the ninth commandment, “You shall not bear false witness,” was to the lawcourts of Israel’s day. No neighbourhood will be healthy if deceit and lies are allowed and welcomed in the lawcourts because this signals the end of justice. But there are myriad ways in which we can bear false witness and one area is politics. Alas, there are many countries today that embody the politics of the lie, and they are not restricted to authoritarian nations.

As we live through the ongoing war in Ukraine, what the ICJ called a plausible case for genocide in Gaza, and many, many other conflicts, we witness on a daily basis a veritable taxonomy of lies. I have found myself turning to history to see how people have responded to such challenges in the past.

The first thing to realise is that we are not the first to encounter a politics of the lie. Here in Europe, we have many countries who were previously part of the Soviet empire, and they know from firsthand experience just how visceral and dangerous can be a politics of the lie. In the opening of his book Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), James Pontuso describes this well:

Imagine that you woke up one morning and found that almost everyone around you was lying. Government leaders, the police, judges, and journalists lied all the time. Many ordinary people seemed to believe the lies, and those who did not kept to themselves. The lies were so obvious that you only had to use the evidence of your senses to know that what people were saying was untrue. (1)

The second thing to realise is that Christians are not exempt from embodying the politics of the lie. Years ago, a kind friend alerted me to Scott Peck’s seminal book, People of the Lie. As I recall, it was while researching this book that Peck was converted. His major insight in this book is that evil is most attracted to religion because there it can most easily masquerade as the light. As we learnt during apartheid in South Africa, it was all too possible to be a born-again, Bible-believing Christian, deeply and genuinely committed to mission and evangelism while being a racist and silent about or supportive of apartheid. We need to be consciously self-critical about our own possible complicity in the politics of the lie.

The third thing to realise is that we are never powerless in the face of the politics of the lie. I think for example of the National Initiative for Reconciliation (NIR) led by the Evangelical Michael Cassidy during the height of apartheid in South Africa. NIR publications included things that Christians could do today to make a difference. This document encourages churches to “create concrete opportunities for meaningful worship, fellowship and discussion with people of differing social and cultural groups; to help remove ignorance of events in South Africa … [and] to share the South African reality of suffering by extending and accepting invitations to experience the life of fellow Christians in the townships.” They organised a day of national prayer and repentance that they called churches to observe, encouraging Christian employers to give it as a day off so that their employees could observe it too. 

And here I return to Václav Haval (1936-2011). Haval stands out as a courageous teller of truth amidst the politics of the lie. Amidst the predominance of “social realism,” the preferred style of literature during Stalin’s reign, Haval spoke out against it when he had the opportunity at the Writers’ Union. As a playwright, he wrote and directed plays to help his fellow citizens see what they were living amidst. Not surprisingly they were banned. He moved into the country and invited friends. “They talked, conspired, and freed themselves from the oppression, if only in their minds. He cooked, although he never used the same recipe twice in protest to the standardized menus in Czech restaurants.” (Pontuso, 5-6). He was repeatedly imprisoned. Haval helped form the famous Charter 77, a human rights group.

Amidst the challenges of our day, it is easy to dismiss the role of the intellectual. Evangelicals seem particularly prone to this disease. It is worth noting, therefore, that at a time when the (Polish) Solidarity movement, which played a key role in ushering in the Revolutions of 1989 and thus democracy, was about to give up they received Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless.” It is eighty pages long and you can read it here. Bujak, a member of the Polish Solidarity movement, wrote: “Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up … When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfilment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay” (Pontuso, 6).

We are not powerless against the politics of the lie. This is our Father’s world and the lie will never have the final say. There is work to be done. We need to pray, produce good art, write novels and children’s books, compose anthems and hymns, host intense discussions, collaborate, write academic reflections, all in the service of the truth. January 2027 will be the 50^th anniversary of the launch of Charter 77. Perhaps we could aim to prepare by then to launch a smorgasbord of creative ways of telling the truth.