Do you ever have things given to you, sent to you, forwarded to you that are clearly inaccurate and even dishonest? Do you let the person who sent it to you know?
When I was a pastor of an evangelical church this would happen with considerable frequency. I should include the note here that I really did like being a pastor at an evangelical church and I really did love the people who made up the congregation. My life is blessed to have known them and my family was treated with kindness in the years that we were part of the church. That does not mean, however, that I agreed with people all of the time. I am quite sure that people often disagreed with me. It was a regular occurrence that someone would send me something that they saw online. Maybe it was something that “Billy Graham said” or something that a non-Christian or person of a different faith supposedly did. Often, with a very brief check, I found out that what was being sent to me was inaccurate or entirely untrue. I suppose that it was sent to me because it bolstered some political or cultural or religious view of the person sending it, but they had either not confirmed its veracity or had found out that it was untrue and did not seem to care.
There were multiple occasions on which I contacted the person who passed along the material to me and asked if they knew that it was untrue. This was always somewhat of a delicate thing to do. I would try to refrain from commenting on the issue at hand in the material, but would say that whatever the issue is, we know that we are not to bear false witness, that our word should be able to be trusted. My assumption was that if the person who sent it found out that it was not true they would stop forwarding it or would even contact the people to whom they sent it indicating that they had since found out that it was inaccurate. I am not sure how often this happened. I was aware that many of the people who passed along untrue information were (in other contexts, I suppose) keen to complain about the neglect of the 10 Commandments, one of which is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness”.
I bring this up because today I am participating in an interview with someone who has had some terrible things said and written and passed along about him. I first saw Michael Coren on television when he was still a right wing prognosticator in Canadian media. He was one of the loudest and most insistent voices against same sex marriage. He had his own television show for a time and he wrote in many Canadian newspapers, journals and magazines. Michael Coren’s view on same sex marriage completely changed, according to him, because of his Christian faith, not in spite of it. He says that he could not square the love of Jesus for all the world, with the kind of vitriol and fear that he saw directed (including by him) over what the Christian church and the Bible supposedly have to say about homosexuality and abortion.
Michael Coren still writes and is still interviewed in the media, but he is now an ordained Anglican minister. In his book, Epiphany, he tells the story of how and why he changed his view and about what happened to his career when he did. He was attacked, lied about, threatened and abandoned by people with whom he previously shared work and faith (not by all).
On June 29th of this year Michael Coren had a column in the Globe and Mail. The article asks and addresses the question of what the Bible says about abortion. He speaks to the texts that supposedly address the topic and mentions that the evangelical church was not always against abortion. Suffice it to say that Christian scripture does not clearly equate the life of a fetus with that of someone who has been born. Did you know that? Were you told that? If you have been told that the Bible is absolutely clear on this then you may want to look into it yourself. I am actually not taking a position on the matter in this article. I am simply saying that we should be able to be honest. Find out the history of how and why abortion became a litmus test issue for evangelicals and find out what the Bible actually says and does not say.
We are often too eager to simply pass things along. At times we fail to check the veracity of what we are being told. We owe one another and we owe those who are not Christian much more than this.
Simply checking on the truthfulness of what we are being told is one of the most important things we can do. If more people did this on a regular basis, the world would be a more loving and peaceful place. Thank you for expressing this so eloquently.