It was not long ago—at least when I was in school and afterwards when I started teaching at university—that relativism and atheism were the dominant cultural attitudes. The new atheists were on the rise, while it was widely proclaimed that “I have my truth and you have yours,” and never shall the two meet.
Now Richard Dawkins admits to being a “cultural Christian,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali has converted to Christianity, and truth claims have re-emerged with a vengeance—so much so that if one transgresses the dominant cultural attitude around race, gender or sexuality, one can be “cancelled.”
Yet, truth is not just a battleground in the culture wars. Truth claims took on a life-and-death quality during the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. This continues in contemporary conflicts—in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, for example—and with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
Yet, as truth claims again take centre stage, conspiracies and ideologies abound. It seems extraordinary that, in the “age of reason” and at a time of unprecedented levels of education, people seem willing to believe all kinds of strange and complicated things.
Belief, too, is making a resurgence. Or more accurately, belief, like truth, was always there and is now just revealing itself to the light. As GK Chesterton is attributed with saying: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”
We can, then, recognise the goods that humans are grappling with in this current moment—belief, truth, goodness. There is some consolation for Catholics and those of a religious tradition in recognising this, because we naturally swim in the waters of belief and truth.
There are good people out there who are searching for truth and goodness, like us. Even in the midst of rapid change, we can recognise our own journey, for any mature spirituality must be able to go deeper and wider into the human experience of God and life, and not become stagnant or stuck.
Yet, there is a real danger when belief, truth and goodness are not properly oriented and integrated, as we are seeing in more extreme online behaviour, cultural and religious movements, acts of terrorism and intractable international conflicts.
As St Augustine argued, evil is not a thing in itself, but rather a privation or distortion of the good. When good is distorted or disoriented, it becomes something that exploits, excludes, wounds, even kills. Thus, truth can be distorted into conspiracy and lies; goodness into virtue-signalling and mob behaviour; and belief into violence and idolatry. As the Social Justice Statement outlines, such a situation of “post-truth” hardens individual egos and social relations into a poisonousness self-righteousness and self-aggrandisement, leading to mistrust, polarisation, populism, authoritarianism and conflict:
“All of this points to a crisis of truth which creates in turn the crisis of trust lying at the heart of the world’s current convulsions; because without trust there can be no peace and certainly not the reconciliation which lies a step beyond peace.
“The grammar underlying this statement is that truth creates trust and trust creates peace. We say: speak truth to build trust and build trust to make peace. To speak the truth is already the beginning of peace-making.”
Underlying the proliferation of “post-truth” belief systems and conflict, we must recognise a social and existential problem with which we are grappling: about who we are—as persons in community—and about what we believe about ourselves and our lives. There are many ideologies and conspiracies that want to fill the void, and they do so with the allure of powerful messages and social bonds.
These messages invariably are rivalistic—they create enemies by casting our demons onto others, and so, build identity and community over against the “bad guys.” This is the false peace that humans have manufactured since the beginning of culture, according to the cultural anthropologist and philosopher René Girard. It is based on a lie about themselves and about a vengeful God, built on the bodies of scapegoated victims.
What fundamentally drives this false peace and distorted construction of identity and community, according to Girard, is the distortion of human desire. According to Girard, human desire is uniquely mimetic and metaphysical, that is, it is socially-formed and fundamentally unrestricted. Humans are powerfully drawn to each other in patterns of social desire, yet these patterns do not satisfy them. Human desire ultimately searches for infinite satisfaction but cannot find it only in material things and social groups.
Thus, humans search for ever-new ways of satisfying their desire for the infinite—which mass capitalism powerfully exploits—but they only end up creating new idols in the process. The fruits of modernity do not recommend these idols: exploitative consumerism, rampant addiction, mental health crises, family and communal breakdown, widespread pornographic use, political and cultural polarisation, and more.
The construction of identity over against others results in a particular type of attitude in modernity that drives the negative outcomes named above. It is what the US author David Brooks calls “autonomy-based liberalism” in which the individual becomes sovereign and must protect itself from the threat of the other and genuine relationship. According to Brooks, it “starts with one core conviction: I possess myself. My life is a project that I am creating, and nobody else has the right to tell me how to build or dispose of my one and only life.”
This attitude leads to a radical turn inward that blocks genuine relationship with God and others. The only relationships in this mode of living are alliances where I protect my individualism with other like-minded individualists from perceived external threats. The result of this attitude is increasing social isolation and fanaticism—reflected in the growth of suicide rates, mental health problems, mistrust, and extremism in modernity.
Thus, the problem of belief and truth is ultimately a problem of desire searching for the infinite. Peace will only come if such a desire—called by the Catholic tradition “the natural desire for God”—can be properly recognised and oriented to the infinite. Peace is not just a matter of negotiated agreements or of just social relations but the restlessness of the human heart. Truth and justice will only be realised by answering the call of the human heart. The Social Justice Statement has some excellent suggestions for action that will help in this endeavour. I highly recommend them.
In order for them to be effective, though, let me humbly suggest that we all need a change in attitude away from an autonomy-based individualism or liberalism. Instead, we need to cultivate what Brooks calls a “gifts-based liberalism. It starts with a different core conviction: I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself.”
Perhaps the most misleading lie that we can tell ourselves is that that no one cares for us and that we are unworthy of the unconditional love that God offers us.
Yet, if we give up on this lie, we may be able to recognise the loving God coming towards us with so many good gifts. The theologian James Alison suggests an imaginative exercise: “Imagine what it is like to be approached by your forgiving victim.” Not a victim we suppress or ignore or a God who comes to condemn or judge us, but a divine person on the Cross seeking us out at our worst moment to love and forgive us. It’s in that encounter, where the ego starts to be undone, that peace truly emerges.
Associate Professor Joel Hodge is National Head of ACU’s School of Theology.