Living in a Post-Truth World

Transcript:

Ah definitely, we’re in a post-truth culture and it’s a really weird space. So it’s the word for 2016 both in the UK and in the States and this sense that everything’s up for grabs, everything’s relative and there is no absolute truth, and I think there’s a couple of things we can say to that.

One is that we actually understand this well, and the second is that we have a better story to tell. So when I say we understand this well, we’ve been talking about post-modernism for a while in the church and we’ve been warning about this thing if you say ‘hey, X has got their truth and Y has got their truth’ and nobody decides between it, that just doesn’t go anywhere in the end; the language loses meaning; there’s a breakdown in trust; we can’t actually have a conversation anymore. And we’re seeing that in this alternative fact world how many people showed up at the inauguration, you know, we cant even have a conversation about it because nobody’s agreed what’s a fact anymore, so we’ve warned about that, we’ve said that’s a problem.

The big thing then is to shift to say we have a better story to tell so in this point of confusion and when people really aren’t sure, we want to articulate a better narrative, talk about yes the change that Jesus is, but also how he’s changed that in the lives of our community, and us as individuals, around all sorts of areas like sex and relationships, we can say we want to tell a better story. So following the sexual revolution, people are now having less sex. That’s weird, lets talk about that story and then say we have a better frame for understanding relationships in the context of marriage and family, and keep repeating that across a whole series of areas.

So I think we understand this culture well, not in an arrogant way, but we’ve been talking about it for a while – the dangers of post-modernism and truth losing any value. It’s not a new idea, Jesus and Pilate had this great interchange when Pilate said to Jesus: “what is truth?”. Pilate – Tom Wright calls him the first great post-modernist in a sense, like he just didn’t know what it was, it was all around power for him and so we’re saying we understand that, we have a different approach to that, we believe we follow the person that is truth, but also we want to tell a great story. This has changed the world, this has changed our lives, this has changed our community.