Let your Yea be Yea

1893 Google

Above all, my brothers and sisters, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. All you need to say is a simple “Yes” or “No.” Otherwise you will be condemned. (James 5:12)

Imagine this. In a country far away, the language is such that every utterance includes a syllable at the end that signals whether it’s true or not true. In that country, if the judge asks the accused, “Did you steal Jacob’s cow-truth?”

The answer might be, “No, I did not-lie.”

“Since you have lied and said you did not steal the cow, then the truth must me that you did steal Jacob’s cow-truth. Next case-truth.”

Every observant parent knows that we have a rudimentary system like this; when we suspect that a child is fibbing, we order the child to repeat it while looking directly at us, and there in their eyes is the signal that what’s claimed is true . . . or not.” The guilty/honest look.

(The principal is the same as that behind lie-detectors; lying may introduce an increased stress level, the pupils of our eyes dilate under stress; galvanic skin response increases under stress and the lie-detector needle jumps. Understanding the principle alerts us to the possibility that our readings of lying/truthing may produce any number of false positives: stress can obviously be initiated by many factors other than lying.)

We live in an age where social media and our penchant for browsing quickly through reams of “information” has made it more and more difficult to do lie-detection/truth detection. The informal media are full of what’s now being called “fake news,” stories and articles that look polished and reliable but might well be concocted by young pranksters in a basement in Macedonia. (Hillary Clinton running a child prostitution business out of a pizza restaurant, for instance.) The tragedy is that although we want to know what’s really happening, we have very little to go on most of the time; we are so bombarded with rumour and unsubstantiated or fake information that separating the truth from falsehood really takes a great deal of effort.

 

Heaven help us when partisan forces in our world legitimize lying as a strategy to sway our behaviour, the most cynical application of “the end justifies the means” philosophy. Figure out what people are willing to hear, then say it over and over. Undermine their confidence in their democratic institutions and replace knowledge with conspiracy theories. Paint every perceived hardship as a consequence of the actions of real or concocted enemies acting in secret. Power can be gained through the lying approach; witness the last US presidential election.

 

What does all this mean to Christians who take seriously James’ admonition to be honest? To those who ponder his meaning when he says, “Above all . . . don’t swear an oath?” Not only is James quoting Jesus in this regard, he clearly recognizes that in the very swearing of oaths, we admit to the possibility of lying. If truthfulness is confidently assumed, what purpose, after all, would an oath serve?

 

James is obviously writing to the community of believers; his admonition places them as a community in contrast to the Roman Empire-governed environment in which they are seeking to prosper and grow. His “Above all . . .” clearly signals that if we forego the assumption of honesty among us, . . . “[we] will be condemned.”

 

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13)

None of this helps us very much as Christians trying to sort out the truth/untruth of the information/misinformation jungle that is our daily fare. We are in danger, though, of allowing our personal opinions to be shaped by choosing one stream of information as our only source (conventional mainstream news, alternative news sources, conservative websites, progressive websites, bloggers we like/don’t like, etc., etc.) At the very least, our Jamesian marriage to truth ought to alert us to the folly of embracing uncritically a particular viewpoint, say, on environmental issues—as an example. 

Maybe our insistence on good scholarship, the telling of truth can at least add some saltiness to the mashed . . . whatever that our whole world is being encouraged to feed on these days.