Thomas Kleinert
A couple of months ago, I talked with a mom whose daughter was attending a Catholic school in their county near the Alabama border. She wasn’t a happy mom, because many of the teachers were nuns who, bless their hearts, should have retired many years ago, but apparently there was a shortage of teachers. I asked why she didn’t sign up her daughter at the public middle school, and she looked at me like I had suggested she sell her child to the traveling circus.
“Public school? And have her use the bathroom with furries who do their business in litter boxes?”
I had heard of furries, but litter boxes?
“Are you telling me there are public schools where they have litter boxes in student bathrooms, for students to use?”
“Yes, it’s been all over the internet, it’s for those kids who identify as cats.”
I bridled my tongue. “That is insane.”
“I know,” she said.
I’m not the kind of guy who grabs his phone, opens Snopes, and holds it under other people’s noses; so we just talked about horses instead.
According to Education Week, “it’s unclear exactly where the litter box hoax came from. In December 2021, a community member shared the rumor during the public comment section of a Midland Public School Board meeting in Michigan that was later debunked by the school district.” But debunking it didn’t stop the story from being shared on social media, and being broadcast by Joe Rogan, and being used by candidates running for public office, including the U.S. Senate, in New Hampshire and Colorado.[1] Well, you’ve heard the saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” It’s often attributed to Mark Twain, but it’s not actually by him. Which is delightfully ironic. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,”[2] and even then it had probably been part of oral tradition for generations.
And it’s not just a matter of speed. Back in 2018, when Twitter was still called Twitter, a team at MIT published a study analyzing “every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years.” The study found that “by every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter. … Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.”[3] Wider. Deeper. Faster. Sounds like a slogan for the information Olympics, and the truth is not among the medal contenders. “A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does,” writes Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic.
And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best. Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods.[4]
The tongue is a fire, says James. What we still call social media, despite its profoundly anti-social effects, seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of the truth, and no one knows how to reverse that trend. Alarmed by the study, a group of political scientists and legal scholars asked, sounding rather helplessly, “How can we create a news ecosystem … that values and promotes truth?”[5] That was a very good question six years ago, when the people talking about AI were limited to some venture capitalists and engineers on the west coast, and the pope in a puffer jacket was a happy deep fake still five years away.[6]
The tongue is a fire, and a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. We used to play three truths and a lie for fun, and most of us cared about differentiating fact from fiction, reality from illusion, but now our “news ecosystem” is threatened by collapse due to what’s called “the illusory truth effect.” It is the human tendency to believe a false or misleading statement is true after hearing it repeated multiple times. This can happen even when the statement contradicts prior knowledge or is implausible. Something sticks, simply because of repetition, and “evidence suggests that global politics have already been strongly influenced by online … campaigns, run by bad actors who understand that all they need to do to help a lie gain traction is to repeat it again and again.”[7] It is like the lies have the power not just to blatantly contradict and unravel the fabric of a shared reality, but to create a parallel universe where the liar spoke again and again, and it was so. The tongue is a fire, says James.
The first gift distinctive to humans, according to Genesis, is the power to name, the power to create language, and by naming and speaking to participate in God’s dominion for the flourishing of life. Moment by moment, all that is and is to be, comes forth from God’s creative speech, and moment by moment, all that is and is to be, is reshaped and given meaning by human language, in praise and science and poetry and campaign speeches.[8] To speak is to play with fire, either way, whether we speak in response to and in sync with God’s creative speech and spirit, or out of sync, out of tune. Holy fire or destructive fire. “Whether we mean to or not, we construct worlds with speech,” says Barbara Brown Taylor.
Describing the world we see, we mistake it for the whole world. Making meaning of what we see, we conflate this with God’s meaning. Then we behave according to the world we have constructed with our speech, even when that causes us to dismiss or harm those who construe the world differently.[9]
The tongue is a fire, says James, and much of today’s passage is about speech, about being careful what we say and how we say it. James remembers and reiterates Jesus’ teaching,
I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.[10]
Sometimes I bridle my tongue. Sometimes I bite it. And often I regret what I said or how I said it. There’s a lot of good advice available, from James and others.
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: “Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”
This bit of wisdom has been attributed to Socrates, Buddha, and the Amish, but don’t tell your friend Jesus said it, just because you half-remember hearing it in church. It’s great advice, if you remember it, and when you don’t, well, perhaps you can delete that ugly text before the person you sent it to has read it. Or make good use of the “undo send” feature in your email — mine is set to 30 seconds. Thirty seconds to “undo send” and attach the file I meant to attach. Thirty seconds to “undo send” and take out that unnecessary paragraph and the snarky bit at the end.
James lived and taught in a world without “undo send” buttons and emojis; his was an oral culture where written text wasn’t in daily use, and so his teaching is not about technical solutions, or the wisdom of having editors, but about the wise use of God’s awesome gift to humans, speech — about speaking and listening faithfully.
Others describe the world they see, in their own language, from their own unique perspective, making meaning of what they see — just like we do. And rather than dismissing them for construing the world differently, what if we were, as James teaches, quick to listen, eager to discover how their rendering of the world might open a window in our bubble and add dimension to our shared reality? What if we were slow to speak for the sake of fully hearing their story of the world? I know it’s hard. Sometimes you just bite your tongue and change the subject from bathrooms to horses. Because the universe of lies won’t be brought down by fact checkers alone, but by good timing and by kindness.
James can sound rather pessimistic.
Every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.
To speak is to play with fire, either way, whether I speak faithfully in response to and in sync with God’s creative speech and spirit, or out of sync, out of tune. My tongue. My choice. My responsibility. I may not be able to tame my tongue, but I sure have a great deal more control over mine than over anyone else’s. So I practice being careful with what I’m about to say. Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? And I practice being careful with what I watch, read, and listen to: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
A fig tree won’t yield olives, nor a grapevine figs. Only double-minded humans are capable of pouring fresh and brackish water from the same opening, blessing God from our heart with our lips, and cursing with our lips, from the depths of our heart, another human being made in the likeness of God. We may not be able to tame our tongues because we don’t know our own hearts. But James isn’t teaching us to give in to despair, but to welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save our souls.[11] We may yet discover that by becoming discerning listeners, our hearts and lips receive all the taming God wants for us.
Now that we have allowed James to have us consider that the tongue is a fire and a restless evil, I don’t think he would object to my closing with words from Psalm 19. Listen to this beautiful poetry, spoken and sung in our mother tongue, the native language of all creation, praise:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
May our hearts hear what the heavens are telling, and what day and night declare, and in all our hearing, may we welcome the word that has the power to save our souls.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/litter-boxes-in-schools-how-a-disruptive-and-demeaning-hoax-frustrated-school-leaders/2022/11
[2] https://freakonomics.com/2011/04/quotes-uncovered-how-lies-travel/
[3] Robinson Meyer https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/largest-study-ever-fake-news-mit-twitter/555104/
[4] See full reference in note 3.
[5] Cited by Robinson Meyer; see full reference in note 3.
[6] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/not-real-photo-pope-in-puffy-coat/
[7] https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/illusory-truth-effect
[8] L. T. Johnson, James, NIB, 205.
[9] Feasting, Year B, Vol. 4, 67; my italics.
[10] Matthew 12:36-37
[11] James 1:21