So-teer-ee--ology

He was a professor of history - and a good one! I took one of his classes in college. It had been several years since we had seen each other. Enough years such that I had completely changed career paths, gone off to seminary, gotten a Master of Divinity degree (a rather arrogant title for a degree in a subject area with humility as one of its core tenets!), and was serving as a pastor. Seeing Prof. M. and his wife at my door was an unexpected and welcome surprise. I invited them in to my study. And I HAD been studying, putting a paper together that was required for ordination. It was lying on the coffee table. The Prof. picked it up and paged through it. He paused, looked up at me, then glanced quickly at the paper, back at me again and asked: "What is 'soteriology'?" (Correct pronunciation in the title.)

Ah, the prideful pleasure of being able to teach the Prof. a thing or two. "The study of the doctrine of salvation," I explained confidently, and not humbly.

Being "educated" often means having fancy words to refer to rather commonplace realities - "commonplace" in that at some level, pretty much everyone has a sense of the truth the fancy word refers to. They just would never call it that.

Take this sentence from a recent article written by conservative columnist David Brooks: 

"We live in a country in epistemological crisis ... " 

If you can nod your head - if not in agreement, then at least in comprehension of the meaning of the sentence - you probably went to college. Mr. Brooks could just as easily have written: "Our country doesn't know what it believes anymore." Or - "Americans don't agree anymore on what is 'true'."

Brooks comes down hard on Republicans and then expands the horizons of shared confusion to nations around the globe. Misinformation is much like a virus: it spreads and the more concentrated it is by way of social media, radio talk shows, presidential pronouncements on Twitter, the more adherents it claims.

Let's think about two things. First, Mr. Brooks looks at the power of the story to explain our pain and fear and insecurity. It raises the question: To what extent does what we believe arise out of our experience? If your income has remained flat or your job went to Mexico or your town has emptied out with businesses, churches, schools shrinking or closing altogether, it is not unreasonable to feel hopeless. If you are working hard, praying hard, struggling and still there is no respite from economic malaise, that might affect your soteriology - your sense of who or what is going to save you! Old promises won't ring true anymore.

Someone comes along - a real "outsider" - and says he knows how to make it all great again. More than saying how he is going to do it, he spells out whose fault it is that industries have collapsed and communities have faltered. I doubt any one of us hasn't succumbed to the temptation of believing our circumstances can't possibly be our own fault. Middle America - many Americans - have been struggling for several decades and the established governing processes haven't come through. Newt Gingrich realized the basic need for a new contract, a new way of doing things - a way that was not only "new" but that took the old ways out at the knees.

The messaging was so effective that it didn't need to be true; it just needed to be believable. It needed to offer an explanation that was initially plausible. What is scary is how the "plausible" goes to "improbable" and then to "impossible."

David Brooks quotes a recent Monmouth University survey which revealed that "77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud." Mr. Trump touted this message in 2016 when he lost the popular vote, saying the only way that could possibly be true was if there was massive voter fraud. Fraud is possible, but not all mistakes in counting votes is fraud. And once the votes are counted, then recounted, the truth is in the math.

Mr. Brooks' column is a lament over how impotent the truth seems to be anymore. And the troubling question is this: Are we unwilling to accept the truth? Or have we become incapable of accepting it? Thus - the epistemological crisis - the gap between what we believe, what we claim to know, and the way things actually are.

And that is the second thing we need to ponder. Will we as a nation create stories to explain and support our prejudice? Or will we do the hard work - all of us - the hard work of facing the truth. Mr. Trump lost this election; many Republicans won. The virus is real. And any one human being who claims to have the power to make us great again, to save us - is not to be trusted because such a claim is simply not true.