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"Speak the truth to one another;render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace."
Zechariah 8:16, ESV

This solid piece of advice from the Old Testament prophet seems like an ethical commonplace. "Tell the truth" is one of the first moral principles we learn as children. Be fair. Resolve conflicts in honest conversation. Every adult who participated in our upbringing probably gave us some version of these teachings.

But following them can be difficult and complicated in new ways for this generation of Americans, Christians, speakers of English—the language that dominates global discourse—and consumers of mass media. That difficulty makes it urgent that we learn new strategies of truth-telling in the interests of waging peace and delivering the good news that is bigger than the bad news—indeed, in the interests of survival.

It is hard to tell the truth these days, because the varieties of untruth are so many, so pervasive, and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecisions, socially acceptable slippages, hyperboles posing as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda.

How often I've heard that this spring's new colors are wardrobe "essentials"; that a particular school is noteworthy for its dedication to undefined "excellence"; that the youth group's summer trip was "awesome." Or, more consequentially, exploitive industry practices described as "cost-effective," though the term fails to count the costs in human health and dignity; or the violent deaths of innocent civilians described as "collateral damage."

These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in a media-saturated culture, that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O'Connor's much-quoted line, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd," increases in prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth—from slick PR to advertising claims to political propaganda masquerading as news. In an environment permeated with large-scale, well-funded deceptions, the business of telling the truth, and caring for the words we need for that purpose, is more challenging than ever before.

Not every one of us is called to public speaking, writing, political activism in streets and on telephones, or investigative journalism, but all of us are called to seek truth and follow after it, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. Caring for the words we speak and testing the words we hear are indispensable dimensions of that vocation.

Recently I helped a committee review some publicity material for a local organization. I raised an objection to the clichés and vapid abstractions that seemed to bury the main points (such as they were) in wet cotton. It seemed that said organization was "forward-looking" and sought to "enrich" the cultural life of the surrounding community, "deepen" its commitment to supporting the arts, and "broaden the horizons" of all it could reach. There's nothing wrong with such terms, but they have no bones; they can't stand for anything substantial without definitions that link them to specific practices and competencies. But my objection met with polite dismissal.

"This is what works," was the reply. "This is what PR writing looks like. It reassures people." Imprecision had become acceptable in the interests of generalized good feeling—and perhaps in the interests of forestalling some critical scrutiny.

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September 2009, Vol. 53, No. 9