When Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate this week, some people took to social media to contrast him with his Republican counterpart, J. D. Vance.
Lots of those contrasts were fair game - that of a former high school coach versus a Yale venture capitalist, for instance. Some people framed the contrast this way, though - Walz is a normal guy, while Vance is a weirdo who has sex with couches.
The past several years have required sentences I never imagined I would write. Here’s another: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. I believe the proposition I just wrote to be true, and my opinion of the politics or personality of the Republican vice-presidential nominee has nothing whatsoever to do with that belief.
Some might stop me at this point to note that everybody knows that J. D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. It’s a joke; a social media meme, started when someone posted a parody, allegedly from Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy. These people know, however, that most people don’t follow the genealogy of memes back to their origins. Many people just start to think, 'J. D. Vance is sort of a freak; people say he did something with a couch one time.'
The Vance couch meme-posters can have it both ways. They can kind of do what the Bible describes as deceiving one’s neighbor and then say, 'I was only joking!' (Prov. 26:19). Beyond that, they can say, 'Well, of course, Vance did not literally have sex with a couch. The point is that Vance is kind of weird; the couch just makes the point.'
If this were just this momentary meme, it could be passed over and forgotten. But it happens all the time. Sarah Palin never actually said, 'I can see Russia from my house.' Barack Obama never advocated for death panels for grandma. That’s what happens in politics, especially in a social media era. And, after all, most people don’t really believe the Vance couch memes; it just helps with morale. It won’t actually hurt Vance.
The problem for those who belong to Christ, though, is when the fallenness of a fallen world starts to feel normal. The problem is when you start to think your lies can serve the truth as long as the vibes feel right and the outcome is what you want.
In her new book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum discusses the tactics employed by authoritarian regimes such as that of the Chinese Communist Party. These regimes have learned, Applebaum argues, the power of pro-freedom dissidents of the past, such as Václav Havel, who refused to symbolically lie (think of his famous example of the greengrocer who refuses to put the 'Workers of the world, unite!' sign up in his store). To undermine such truth-telling, they employ social media 'to spread false rumours and conspiracy theories' so as to 'turn the language of human rights, freedom and democracy into evidence of treason and betrayal.'
Applebaum cites Freedom House’s description of this kind of propaganda pressure as 'civil death,' meant to sever those who do not lie the way the party commands from their communities, to inundate them with lies so that even their friends and families start to think, 'Well, there must be something to some of this, since these controversies are always there.'
This does not just have to happen in matters of big life-and-death political dissent and repression. I’ve seen it happen to countless pastors - especially those who dare to preach what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. It doesn’t matter that 'He’s a Marxist' or 'He’s a liberal' are absurd charges. The game is just to say them long enough that the people who know they are lies get tired of the truth - so that they will, if not embrace the lie, at least fear the liars enough to get quiet.
On the geo-political level, the metaphor of 'civil death' is appropriate - even when it doesn’t work - because the Bible ties lying so closely to murder. Of the devil, Jesus said: 'He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.' (John 8:44).
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