In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells those who believe, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” But will it?

In a nation where it seems at least half the population has become severely truth-avoidant, and the king of lies is about to reclaim the throne, can we believe the biblical truths about…the truth?

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world, via Fox News, of course, that he will no longer allow fact-checking on Facebook. I’m not sure how many of us rely on Facebook for any kind of “facts” these days, but the announcement points to a more insidious problem.

We are living in an era of blatant truth-rejection for the sake of greed, power and political favor. It feels like truth is always on the losing side.

In his new book, “Beyond the Big Lie,” journalism professor Bill Adair draws from his years of experience as the founder of Politifact to provide a detailed account of how and why politicians lie. His haunting conclusion is basically (spoiler alert!): Because lying works. The ends, they believe, justify the means.

What Adair admits he was afraid to say before writing this book, for fear it would bring about accusations of partisan bias against Politifact, is that one party assumes this “ends justify the means” mentality far more frequently than the other. Can you guess which one?

With Trump about to re-assume the most powerful political position in the world, their strategy appears to be working.

In the midst of the chaos we know we can expect with the incoming Trump administration and with sycophants like Zuckerberg and Musk dutifully falling in line, what many of us are feeling is more nuanced than fear of the unknown. It is a familiar dread that looks more like anticipatory grief. This takes the form of deep anxiety of what we know is to come, intertwined with the dis-ease of not knowing the specifics of how it will unfold.

For those of us concerned with justice, we know a second Trump administration will be bad, but we don’t know how bad.

We know the horrific things he has promised, including becoming a dictator on day one, mass deportations, gutting public education, and undoing the Biden administration’s green energy policies. And, as of last week, we can now add absurdities like annexing Canada and Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

We don’t know which promises he will keep, which cruelties will become his priorities, or which absurdities he’ll attempt to sneak through legislation with a party that refuses to stand up to him. What we do know is that something dreadful is coming.

In the anxiety of such anticipation and the inability to see exactly how such events will play out, we can easily feel isolated or choose to remove ourselves from the clamor of the chaos in hopes we can ignore it until it all goes away.

But our faith compels us to choose another path. Christian Scripture reminds us that anticipatory grief is nothing new for followers of Christ.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, when the dread of what lay ahead was heavy upon Jesus and his disciples, Jesus said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me” (Matthew 26:38).

There may be no fact checkers keeping watch on Facebook anymore. There may be very few of them keeping watch in Washington these days. But our faith compels us to “stay here and keep watch.”

When truth appears to be in short supply, an entire political party would rather serve at the pleasure of the Liar-in-Chief than uphold the values of democracy. It also seems the majority of Americans would rather pull the wool over their own eyes in hopes that hatred and harmful policies will somehow bring down the cost of their grocery bill. In light of all this, it is imperative that followers of the Prince of Peace “stay here and keep watch.”

A Christian ethic for such a time as this calls us to stay awake to whatever atrocities might lie ahead in the coming weeks, months and years. It calls us to turn our anticipatory grief into communal grief through prayer vigils and public protests. It calls us to transform our communal grief into social activism that holds authorities at all levels accountable for the wellbeing of all peoples and all of God’s sacred creation.

We’ve been here before. We know what the next four years will hold. 

There is and will be much to grieve. But there is also a community of resistance to be built.

“Stay here and keep watch.” And pray.

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