On December 4, 2016 a 28 year old man, Edward Welch, loaded up his AR-15 and headed from North Carolina to Washington DC. His mission was to rescue a group of children—held against their will, being used for the unthinkable. They were being held in mysterious tunnels underneath a busy street in DC—in particular Welch was going to investigate and to rescue these children from a particularly nefarious pizza shop.
Welch had been reading about the uncovering of this child-trafficking ring online. The whole thing was apparently uncovered during the Hilary Clinton email scandals. They had discovered several code words and the theory was developed that what was really going on was that Hilary Clinton and her campaign chief were behind the whole thing. One report from Conservative Daily Post even said that the FBI had confirmed this story to be true.
Knowing that the government was covering this up and that mainstream media was silent, Welch did what any hero would do. He went to Washington to check it all out himself and to rescue these children.
The problem, though, as Welch would soon discover is that there was no underground tunnels, no hidden children, no evidence of a child-trafficking ring run by the failed Democratic candidate for president of the United States, or by her campaign chief, or by the owner of the pizza place. The pizza joint didn’t even have a basement.
The whole thing has been debunked. The people who started the story confessed that it was all foolishness. But like so many of these fake news stories it gained a ton of traction. Or as the old Proverb goes: A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on. Now how in the world does this happen? How can a reasonable 28-year old man find himself in the slammer for shooting up an innocent pizza joint because of what he read on the internet?
By the way, fake news is bi-partisan. And it spreads like wildfire because of two things “implicit bias” and “confirmation bias”. What that means is this, if you happen to read an article exposing someone who is on a different side of the aisle than you then you will naturally agree with it. Of course that dirty scoundrel did that thing. But if that same article where put out there about the candidate of your choice—the one on your team—then you will more readily dismiss it. That’s just those dirty scoundrels trying to spread vicious lies—check your facts.
This is how fake news spreads. Because it’s confirming a bias that we’ve already got. And it doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you are on. We don’t need to do a ton of fact checking because we know the general character of these people. And so we share an article. We like something on Facebook. And we store it away. And we keep doing this over and over again and before you know we’ve constructed a whole reality built on falsehood. Never once checking the most basic facts.
But none of this gets a foothold if we aren’t a deeply divided nation. Factionalism drives the bus when it comes to fake news.
Factionalism permeated the church culture in Corinth. And it caused them to do ridiculous things. If they had social media you can almost guarantee it would have been filled with fake news. You would have had team Apollos sharing juicy details about team Cephas whether it was true or not. Whatever it took to get team Apollos on top.
Thankfully we aren’t left without help. God, through the Apostle Paul, outlines for us in 1 Corinthians the solution to fake news. You’ve got to kill it at its root. If factionalism ends then malicious fake news will end with it. This is exactly what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 1:10-31. Here Paul shows the Corinthians that Jesus alone is a fitting measuring stick—He is the center.
The Corinthians had moved the stick. They were measuring things by team Apollos, or team Paul, or team Cephas. But only Jesus is worth boasting in. Only Jesus is our aim. He is our standard. If Christ is our boast then we will measure all things by Him. The problem with fake news is that it makes our own tribe the measuring stick. We sift claims through our particular causes before we sift them through the Word of God. In fact, if we aren’t careful we’ll even begin to sift God’s Word through our partisan filters.
When you focus on your team then truth takes the back seat. Christian share fake news, get wrapped up in politics, and the truth gets thrown out the window. In these instances something other than the gospel is driving the bus. So if you want to see an end to fake news, online vitriol, etc. it happens when the gospel becomes central again. And you’ll know this is happening when we start calling out our own camps. Until then, brace yourself. When someone other than Jesus drives the bus you never know where you’ll end up.
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The science building at our college was set on a hill with a giant wall on the side. Meaning that one section of the wall you could jump over and the drop would be no more than a foot—while further on down the wall the drop would be upwards of 30 feet. While in the middle of a riveting game of campus-wide freeze tag I propelled myself over the wall. I thought I was at a safe foot or two drop. I wasn’t. I knew I was in trouble when I actually had a thought as I was falling. It’s disconcerting when you think to yourself, “Hmm, I haven’t landed yet, this is going to hurt…hmpfff”.