America is facing a trust deficit. Trust in the media has reached a near-record low . Establishment media organizations face defamation l...
America is facing a trust deficit.
Trust in the media has reached a near-record low. Establishment media organizations face defamation lawsuits for purposely misreporting on innocent people to push a political agenda.
Americans don’t trust health professionals, political leaders, law enforcement or social media, either.
Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t trust the COVID-19 vaccine when it was being developed under the Trump administration. Today, Republicans tend to be more unwilling to be vaccinated. People won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine even though they’ve gotten every other vaccine because they don’t trust scientists linking up with politicians.
Leftists led the effort to defund the police because they didn’t trust law enforcement. Now, with crime skyrocketing, people don’t trust the leaders who defunded the police. It’s not clear that any of this has improved race relations in America.
Send your children off to school, and you can’t trust that they won’t be indoctrinated with leftist ideals. School board officials claimed critical race theory wasn’t being taught in K-12 schools when parents knew that wasn’t true.
The right doesn’t trust the most recent presidential election results. The left decries any attempt at election reform as a return to the Jim Crow era.
On any given day, there is a Twitter mob railing against a corporation whose politics they don’t like. This comes from both sides.
Speaking of social media, we don’t trust the fact-checkers to be, well, fact-checkers. It’s clear they have a partisan agenda as well.
Congress is trying to tell us that bills with massive spending won’t cost taxpayers any money. The bills are stuffed so full of special interest gifts they hardly reflect their original purpose.
Institutions aren’t honest, we don’t trust each other and we’re losing our basic ability to function as a country.
How do we find our way back? Whom can we trust?
Jeremiah says, “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” (Jeremiah 17:7-8)
Christ brings us stability in an unstable world. Christ brings reconciliation in a broken world. Christ brings truth in an untruthful world.
More than that, Christ requires that his followers be truthful people. In Ephesians, Paul writes, “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.” (Ephesians 4:25)
What a powerful line. We are members one of another.
The truth is that the breakdown of trust in our society mirrors our rejection of God. Our society is losing a lot as we become more godless. We’re losing civility, we’re losing patience, we’re losing kindness, we’re losing self-control, we’re losing trust.
Want to rebuild trust in our world? Put God back at the center. He is Truth and he redeems us to be truthful people. I think we can all agree that our culture needs more truthful people.
Our culture will follow our faith. Politics will follow our culture.
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