THE CRISIS OF FAITH

Who should we trust? Which media outlets provide us with the unvarnished truth? Unfortunately, we have learned to distrust the media, the politician, and the university. Everything seems to have become politicized. Nevertheless, we remain somewhat confident in our own go-to sources of information, even though they all engage in unbalanced reporting, which is far harder to expose than outright lies and often far more effective in molding public opinion.

This situation has created hostile divisions. Our favored information sources have created armed camps with oppositional “truths.” We are sure that we are right and the other person is not only wrong but is also a sub-human liar who intends to take control of our lives using their narrative as a battle-axe. It is a time of division and even pathological distrust.

Sociologist/ historian Rodney Stark has written about the conflict between narratives and the minds they have captured. Here is just one example:

• In 1902 the English economist J. A. Hobson published Imperialism, a book in which he charged that the industrial European nations looted their colonies by forcing them to sell their raw materials too cheaply and to buy manufactured goods at too high a price. In 1915 V. I. Lenin, soon to lead the Russian Revolution, essentially plagiarized Hobson’s book (including his statistics) for a book he titled Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Ever since, it has been an article of faith on the extreme Left that Western nations stole their wealth from the non-Western nations and, in doing so, prevented them from modernizing. This line has, of course, been popular in the less-developed nations. It tells them that their lack of progress is not their fault but is imposed upon them by the developed world.

While “the West is best” narrative has been adopted by MAGA adherents, the “America was never great” narrative has been adopted by the Left, the universities, Hollywood, and the mainstream media. Each narrative finds support in its own selected facts. However, Stark believes that the ills of Western colonization have been grossly distorted:

• The Oxford economic historian Patrick O’Brien...demonstrated that the advanced nations could not have extracted their wealth from the poor nations because the volume of trade between them was trivial. The error of [the Leftist] world-systems analysts, beginning with Hobson, is that they have focused on the obvious facts that some Europeans made fortunes from trade with the non-Western world and that some port cities also prospered, and from these points they generalized to the national economies. But this wealth was too little to have had a significant impact on national economies. Indeed, it is clear that during the Age of Imperialism European nations as a whole lost money on their colonies.

Who to believe? We are narrative-constructing beings, desperate to construct worldviews in this climate of polarization and contention.

How then do we resist the temptation to hate the opposition? If our hope is a temporal one, then our safety and we’ll-being can be easily threatened. If instead, our hope is eternally guaranteed, then we need not be threatened by any earthly upheavals. This is why Jesus warned:

• “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21 ASV)

When our heart is invested in this uncertain world, we build our foundation on shifting sand.