In the Philippines, my home country, fake news spreads quickly, not only through social media, but also through word of mouth spread by “Marites,” a Tagalog word for a person who gossips.
It is a word composed of Maremeaning “godmother”, as well as neighborhood groups of friends, and the English word last. Indeed, it means “Mare, what is the last one?” » So gossip travels very quickly, especially in poor and densely populated urban communities.
Technology has accelerated and expanded the spread of misinformation beyond what networks of gossipy friends could ever do. This happens in the United States and the West as a whole, as well as in countries where the government influences or restricts the media.
Analysts say part of the reason Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his allies returned to power is the way they were able to heavily use social media to revise narratives of our experience of authoritarianism under the rule of his father.
Christians around the world have rightly lamented the spread of fake news in their communities, the prevalence of conspiracy theories and skepticism about knowing the truth. Those of us who live in the majority world are also sensitive to another dimension of this phenomenon: we are more likely to see the spiritual reality behind it.
We sense how the demonic might lodge and take root in media technologies – our contemporary version of what Paul calls the “prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2:2 (ESV).
Paul’s language of “thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers” in Colossians 1:16 (NKJV) suggests that the demonic manifests itself not only in personalities, but also in subhuman forces – structures and structures. institutions – which enslave or oppress people.
Lying is usually accompanied by oppression, says the prophet Jeremiah. When the truth comes into the open, “oppression upon oppression, deception upon deception” grows (Jer. 9:6, ESV). Those who bend their tongues to tell lies go from evil to evil.
The state and other powerful institutions have the power to deceive masses of people through the media and social networks. It is no coincidence that the first thing despots do to consolidate their power is to muzzle the press.
In an age of massive misinformation, Christians must fight for the truth. We engage the “prince of the power of the air,” convincingly articulating God’s standards for society in the public square.
Building a “hermeneutical community”
Participation in the political and social life of a country does not simply mean putting Christians in power or seizing positions of power in order to advance our values and agenda like the religious right in America. This means creating a social and intellectual environment that upholds the strength of Christian values and frames behavior in public life.
As the writer TS Eliot says:
What the leaders believed would be less important than the beliefs they would be forced to conform to. And a skeptical or indifferent statesman, working within a Christian framework, might be more effective than a devout Christian statesman forced to conform to a secular framework. … It is not primarily the Christianity of statesmen that counts, but their confinement, by the traditions and mood of the people they lead, to a Christian framework within which to realize their ambitions.
How can we create such an environment?
First, we intentionally build what I call a “hermeneutic community,” composed of those who, like the tribe of Issachar (1 Chron. 12:32), can discern the times and give advice on how to influence and to have an effective impact on society. .
Witness, in the Pauline sense, consists of “taking every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Unfortunately, this missionary mandate has been sidelined by the massive energy put into superficial evangelical proclamations that pass for what we call “evangelism.” We train believers to use the Bible on issues such as how to be saved, but not on how all of God’s counsel can be applied to the many problems we face every day.
Certainly, the kind of support that allows people to address issues in the public square requires focused attention on those with relevant professional gifts and expertise, thereby opening their minds to the relevance of the gospel for all of life . It is time that we place at the center of our church life and witness artists and scientists, those who possess gifts capable of communicating creatively with the outside world.
The importance of such a hermeneutic community was impressed upon me during the height of the struggle against the authoritarian regime of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. Some evangelical leaders in the Philippines have consistently criticized my organization, the Institute for Asian Church and Cultural Studies (ISACC), for its participation in the wave of resistance against the continuation of the Marcos regime.
ISACC is a small community of social scientists, development practitioners, writers, artists, and a handful of pastors and theologians. We were convinced that the results of the 1986 snap elections, which declared Marcos the winner, were fraudulent. He no longer had the right to lead our country.
We organized a demonstration with other movements. Evangelical leaders then called this a “rebellion” and continued to reference Romans 13:1-7, which speaks of being subject to governing authorities.
But our reading at the time was very different. Our discernment was that the relevant text at the time was not Romans 13, as most evangelicals thought, but Revelation 13. There are times when the state ceases to be a servant and instead takes the proportions of a beast (Rev. 13:5-8) and must therefore be resisted.
Our reading of the times and the relevant text prevailed.
After the People Power Revolution of 1986, some church leaders began to ask: How is it that ISACC seems to have the pulse of where our people are, but we haven’t figured it out?
In order not to miss our historical benchmarks, we must assemble a critical mass of young thought leaders who can read the signs of the times accurately and apply Scripture creatively to analyze and confront the burning issues of our time.
Disciple Nations
Second, we are asked to form nations, not just individuals. We must create new life-affirming systems within our cultures.
This is done not primarily by building alternative structures that we call “Christian,” like “Christian” media or a “Christian” school, but by penetrating our existing cultures and institutions. We affirm or criticize our customs and traditions and turn them toward Christ and kingdom values.
The outcry we raised against Marcos may have happened 37 years ago, but we continue to battle equally sinister beasts of our time.
For example, we are seeing a resurgence of authoritarianism in many countries where democracy was supposed to have been restored. The cult of caudilloor the mythical strongman, persists.
This is partly due to the lack of congruence between the culture’s operational values and established governance structures. As Guatemalan sociologist Bernardo Arevalo says: “We have the hardware of democracy, but the software of authoritarianism.”
Change needs a “software” of values that will support the “hardware” of the structures and institutions we put in place.
Creating supportive cultural models that will make our systems work requires training an entire nation. The process begins but does not end with the internal transformation of individuals. Such change is meant to result in the “good works which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10), which then radiate out into society at large.
The missiologist-historian Andrew Wallsby tracing the passage of Christianity from Judaism to inculturation in Greek forms of thought, explains how the Bible engages cultures and transforms the social fabric of nations:
The Word must pass through all these distinctive modes of thought, these networks of kinship, these particular ways of doing things, which give a nation its common character, its coherence, its identity. (The Word) must travel through the shared mental and moral processes of a community.
By bringing the Word into the public square, we free people from what Paul calls the “strongholds” of the mind (2 Cor. 10:4, ESV). Strongholds, as Paul uses it, are not primarily territories of spiritual powers, but the web of lies in our minds that shape the consciousness of a society and keep our cultures in bondage.
Witness involves the destruction of intellectual barriers to belief in Christ. This means spreading the Word and taking “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5, ESV).
Unfortunately, we have reduced our witness to prepackaged evangelical formulations that we believe will work across cultures and that do not truly engage the hearts and minds of our people. It is also unfortunate that those of us who receive Western-developed theologies tend to gloss over the cultural and embodied nature of our witness.
A transformative work
Today, massive poverty has caused the erosion of the values of the Filipino people. Economic pressure pushes our bureaucrats to abandon their integrity and our foreign workers to become smugglers and drug couriers in remote locations. We call it kapit sa patalim in Tagalog, referring to the way people grab the blade of a sharp knife, even if it cuts their hands, just to seize opportunities to survive.
But change can occur and spread through the structures that organize our common life, much like the way the early Church, through its practice and witness in the face of persecution, broke down barriers of class, race and of sex to ultimately tear apart the social fabric of Greece. Roman society, a civilization carried on the backs of slaves.
The battle for the soul of a people begins with the spirit. People follow the “prince of the power of the air” until the Word breaks through. And as the Gospel penetrates and transforms our mental models of how the world works, communities are able to evolve into new cultural models.
Melba Padilla Maggay is a writer and social anthropologist. She is president of Micah Global and was previously president of the Institute for Asian Church and Cultural Studies.
Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the views of the publication.
