When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him together with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance. Lots of those contrasts were fair game—that of a former highschool coach versus a Yale enterprise capitalist, as an example. Some people framed the contrast this fashion, though—Walz is a standard guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.
The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I might write. Here’s one other: J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. I feel the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing in any way to do with that belief.
Some might stop me at this point to notice that everyone knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, began when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, nevertheless, that the majority people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just begin to think, “J. D. Vance is type of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.”
The Vance couch meme-posters can have it each ways. They can type of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor after which say, “I used to be only joking!” (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they will say, “Well, after all, Vance didn’t literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is type of weird; the couch just makes the purpose.”
If this were just this momentary meme, it might be omitted and forgotten. But it happens on a regular basis. Sarah Palin never actually said, “I can see Russia from my house.” Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, in any case, most individuals don’t really consider the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.
The problem for many who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is while you begin to think your lies can serve the reality so long as the vibes feel right and the consequence is what you wish.
In her latest book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes comparable to that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the facility of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, comparable to Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (consider his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to place the “Workers of the world, unite!” join in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media “to spread false rumors and conspiracy theories” in order to “turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.”
Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this sort of propaganda pressure as “civil death,” meant to sever those that don’t lie the best way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies in order that even their friends and families begin to think, “Well, there should be something to a few of this, since these controversies are all the time there.”
This doesn’t should occur in matters of massive life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it occur to countless pastors—especially those that dare to evangelise what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that “He’s a Marxist” or “He’s a liberal” are absurd charges. The game is simply to say them long enough that the individuals who know they’re lies get uninterested in the reality—in order that they’ll, if not embrace the lie, at the least fear the liars enough to get quiet.
On the geopolitical level, the metaphor of “civil death” is suitable—even when it doesn’t work—since the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: “He was a murderer from the start, and doesn’t stand in the reality, because there is no such thing as a truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he’s a liar and the daddy of lies” (John 8:44, ESV throughout).
The first lie recorded in Scripture is that of the Serpent saying to the lady, “You won’t surely die,” telling her the forbidden tree would grant her godlike powers (Gen. 3:4–5). This deception severed her first from the Word of God and thus from the Tree of Life (v. 24).
I suppose a (literal) devil’s advocate could attempt to say that the Serpent’s lie was for goal. After all, doesn’t God, ultimately, want human beings to have the ability to discern good from evil (Heb. 5:14)? Even those too scared to present such justifications to the Devil’s lies are sometimes capable of make similar arguments for their very own. This is why the apostle Paul denounces the one who might say, “But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?” (Rom. 3:7–8).
Jesus is just not just the one telling us the reality; he is the reality (John 14:6). To distort the reality right into a half-truth or a quarter-truth to advance a lie is a private assault not only on the person you’re lying about, or the problem you claim to support, but on Jesus Christ himself.
The problem, then, is just not just what that does to whoever you’re lying about; the issue is what the lying does to you. Outside the gates of the dominion, John tells us, are “everyone who loves and practices falsehood” (Rev. 22:15). The grace of God is amazing, and may redeem into truth those that lie, however it doesn’t achieve this by leaving liars to their lies. Those who would tell us that evil may be overcome by evil aren’t just lying to you but to themselves (Rom. 12:21; 1 John 1:8).
In a politically idolatrous age, simply refusing to lie about one’s opponents will probably be viewed as an act of betrayal. It will make you vulnerable to suspicion that you just aren’t really “one in all us,” whoever “us” is defined to be. Lying, then, is simple. It matches with the pattern of the world, and it’ll protect you from the mob. Sometimes, the pressure is even stronger where the church takes a welcoming and affirming posture toward liars, so long as they lie about the appropriate people.
But what if God is telling us the reality that there’s a judgment seat? In that case, it becomes much more consequential to face on the opposite side of it and ask, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). After all, we already know the reply from the voice—once on the dock, now on the throne. His answer is what it all the time was: “I Am.”
