The Reality of Falsehoods

Religion, History and Myths

Trump’s Bible goes for $59.99

Politics has always assumed exaggerations in rhetoric. Claimed successes and alleged depredations are the standard fare of campaigns. Vast sums of money are raised and spent to circulate the professed truth or at least some semblance of it.

What is different about 2024 is that the candidate of the Republican Party, supported, apparently, by tens of millions of potential voters in November’s presidential election — possibly a majority — contend that the 2020 election was “stolen” or “fixed,” and that the loser was in fact the winner.

That is completely false.

How can that be? How is that so many Americans, people with families, mortgages, jobs, hobbies, and favorite sports teams can accept as reality something this profoundly important that is a fabrication, or at best a cynical distortion?

I am not any sort of expert on this phenomenon, so I checked in with scholars and journalists who I thought might be, but I did not get clarity on what is, after all, just a proposition. So I settled instead on my own explanation.

Our lives, which are shaped by religion, history, and myths, condition us to accept as gospel what are in fact myths, legends, and outright fabrications.

Religion is based on fantastical versions of what happened in the ancient and defining past. There are those who accept the Bible as the direct word of God — the literal origin of human experience. Adam and Eve. Noah’s Ark. The parting of the Red Sea.

The great religions accept the primacy of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and Moses in setting the path for how lives should unfold and which religious practices we should follow. No one outside those beliefs is qualified to challenge their sincerity.

But if you are accepting of the versions of events put forward by organized religion, does that make you susceptible to more contemporary falsehoods and conspiracy scenarios? If Donald Trump is casting himself in messianic terms at rallies and selling a Bible that he endorses, can it be said (by those of us who are appalled) that something has caused a mass suspension of disbelief?

The statistical percentage of Americans who consider themselves religious is not as great as it once was, according to most surveys, but it remains a core aspect in the identity of much, if not the majority, of the population. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote about how he imagined what American religion would look like in 2050: “Clearly the old order of Protestant denominationalism, Methodists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians clustering around the city green, no longer defines our religious life. In its place, what alignments are taking shape?” He goes on to describe “liturgical and doctrinally conservative Christians, with a Roman Catholic core orbited by some Reformation factions, Calvinists especially, as well as some Eastern Orthodox churches, small but flush with converts.”

That is Christianity.  There are millions of American Muslims whose religious affiliation has become enmeshed in the political clashes of the twenty-first century. And American Jews are being reminded — if they ever had really forgotten — that being Jewish is historically more complicated than your religious background. East and South Asians, whose dynamism in American life is, on the whole, less associated with religious identity have an increasing impact in our society.

Every one of these groups has people in it who have accepted the falsehoods that are so prevalent in our social and political discourse and that so disruptive to the normal functioning of our democracy.

Journalism is invariably described as “the first rough draft” of history, so mistakes and misrepresentations are expected — subject to revision based on the facts which emerge. But the choice of those facts can determine how history is understood.

Barton Swaim’s recent and critical appraisal in the Wall Street Journal of the book A Great Disorder by Richard Slotkin (published by Harvard University Press’s Belknap Press) had this helpful summary of American historical myths and how they can be adapted to make the case for our ideological judgments:

“First, the Myth of the Frontier…as the outcome of white settlers rescuing the continent from nonwhite savages and turning it into a great civilization (a bad myth in Mr. Slotkin’s view). Second, the Myth of the Founding manifests itself sometimes as a revolutionary assertion of equality (good) and at other times as an insistence that Americans remain white, male-dominated and Christian (bad).

“The myth of the Civil War, third, can emerge either as a ratification of the Declaration’s promise of equality, as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. saw it (good), or as a yearning for the Lost Cause of the Confederacy (bad). Finally, the Myth of the Good War — World War II — recalls a consolidated and multiracial nation engaged in a noble cause (good).”

America was founded on the belief that choosing a religion is an expression of free will, and that remains the case.

But history is facts assembled for a purpose by those who bring them together, which tends to reflect the portrayal they provide.

So, fantastical and conflicting renditions of the past are what we are exposed to at home, at school, and at our places of worship. But Donald Trump has elevated his reality to a wholly different and very dangerous realm. And whatever may be the reasons that so many people accept his falsehoods, it is still essential to refute them, forcefully and ultimately decisively.