A few years ago my husband and I (having left our GPS charger at home) got lost in Montana -- which is a thing not to do. The miles are much longer there and the spaces between towns take hours to cross. We knew we’d gone wrong somewhere because the Rockies, which should have been on our left, were straight ahead, looming ever closer and closer. The first town we came to was a ghost town, which provided a Twilight Zone flavor to the whole adventure. Eventually we found a real town with real people who could tell us where we were –- our map had left us clueless. After our correction miles, we had added over 100 Montana miles to our trip. How did that happen?

We hadn’t noticed when the road started to bend to the left ever so gradually – it was straight up noon and the mountains too far off to register. We should have veered right, but we missed the opportunity.

I think of this incident because I’m feeling the same unsettling unease about this country.  What?! How in the world did we get to this Rod Serling place where drag queens are reading to our children in our libraries? How, in a rational universe, did four ignorant, left-wing, lunatic women attain breathtaking power in less than a year? When did sex trafficking become such a huge crisis? How is it that facts and evidence and law have no pull at all anymore?

We find ourselves, apparently all of a sudden, in a place where telling bald-faced lies about anyone we want to slander is acceptable behavior, where billions of dollars of government money is unaccountably missing and no one seems really upset by that malfeasance, where pedophilia is working its way into appropriate behavior. We’re hurtling toward an impossible mountain range and turning around -- the logical thing to do -- creates vicious hysteria amongst those in the front seat, who can only scream obscenities and grab for the wheel as they try to keep us from curing our mistake.

We could trace this fiasco all the way back to the serpent and the forbidden fruit, or to John Dewey and his bending the public school trajectory to the left, or to Charles Darwin and his inevitable negative influence on the church. That, and the science community’s willingness to push that narrative, does carry a lot of the blame here because somewhere along the way humanity lost track of truth.

“There is no such thing as absolute truth!!!” my student declared, pounding on her desk, syllable by syllable, as if her emphasis gave her statement solidity. The self-contradictory nature of the sentence escaped her -- no doubt it was another instructor who had assured her of the absolute truth of the idea, for she was very confident.

I tell this story today as a joke, but it is at the heart of what is ailing America today. If nothing is always, forever, and thoroughly true then nothing can be temporarily true either, and if nothing is even relatively true, we can trust nothing. A society sans trust is as impossible as reaching Oregon by driving east over the Rockies.   

The idea of absolute truth is repulsive to many people, largely because truth is limiting -- if the truth of the matter is that Harry was born with both X and Y chromosomes then his desire to be a woman will be circumvented by that truth, no matter what hormones he takes or what parts of his anatomy he parts with.

The implications of truth are bothersome as well. The buck stops there -– no wiggle room, and more disturbing than that is the obvious necessity of a truth-giver. That idea of absolute truth came from somewhere; how could mere humans come up with a concept so far above our pay grade? Something deep in our inner core, however, either demands it or rails against it -- we either want God or we most decidedly don’t.

Truth and God are indivisible, so if we lose one, we lose the other -- which puts us in a scary place. We have lost track of the truth in many essential areas:

• Science is no longer an objective hunt for the truths of this universe. It is driven by grant money and by peer pressure -- malicious, career-ending pressure. Science can no longer tell us the truth about origins, about climate, about pollution, mental or physical health, or gender issues. How many times in the last few decades have scientists had to reverse themselves?
  • We’re going into an ice age! Panic, panic. Oh no -- sorry, we’re going into a meltdown. No, let’s call it a change -- that’ll cover everything. 
  • Cholesterol is horrible stuff! It will kill you -- here, take this pill. Oh. Sorry, the pill will do you in. Never mind.

​​​​I could go on and on. We revere those white jackets, but frankly, I’m not sure most of them know what they’re doing.

• History -- an area where we really need to know the truth so that we can make reasonable decisions about problem solving, is 1) based on the bad science of Darwinism and 2) built out of such small scraps of potshards and steles that it’s more imagination and supposition than ancient reality.  And now with the advent of anti-American textbooks (I’m thinking Howard Zinn here.), the already questionable history has been made downright dangerous.
• As a result, politics keeps getting uglier and uglier. It appears that half the population is not at all concerned about what really happened with the whole Russia-collusion mess. Some are doing a yeoman’s job of searching for the truth here, but few in the press are interested.  It’s the narrative that matters, not the truth.  It doesn’t seem to bother most folks that in many ways the integrity of our election process is lacking in any affinity for the truth, and little of that has anything to do with Russia. How can a responsible citizen even know how to vote when the lies are so well camouflaged?
• And if the 4^th estate isn’t at all interested in the truth, then who is watching the henhouse? Evidently, during the last administration no one was. Somewhere along the line journalists have gotten the idea that their job is to save the world from whatever evil is currently in vogue. Such an idea is not only arrogant, but shows a complete misunderstanding of the press’s place in our republic. Their job is to deliver to us the truth -- unvarnished and straight up. Study the map and tell us where we’re going – not whether or not we should go there.
• Lastly, but really firstly, this anti-truth movement has put a huge dent in the church, in theology, in the nation’s ability to connect with God, with the truth. If our theologians merely go with whatever new idea is trendy -- endorsing the LGBT agenda, weaving New Age ideas into Christian doctrine, or going all ecumenical and welcoming Muslim worship into the church -- then we’ve lost God and with Him goes truth.  Is it any wonder that we have young people so confused and miserable and angry that they’ll storm into a mall and start shooting? We have given them no hope, no stability, no realization of the reality of a loving and almighty God.

Without truth there can be no trust and without trust no functional society, let alone freedom. Free speech is irrelevant if no one speaks the truth. I’m really tired of trying to figure out who is giving me the real story.  Is the meme about Sandy O saying something ridiculous true? Hard to tell -- she’s always ridiculous.  Is the latest dietary information worth paying attention to, or will it be obsolete in two weeks?  Whose statistics are real? Was that really something Abraham Lincoln said? I feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone. Perhaps in a dictatorship it doesn’t matter whether the truth is alive and well, because the people have no say anyway, but in a republic we have to know what’s true and if we don’t, we’ll soon be living in a dictatorship. 

Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.