Disinformation
What was going on? The situation seemed pretty dire. Exploitation and oppression proved rampant. Government officials worked to suppress any messages which would expose such failures and which worked against the government’s purposes. Yet said officials were perfectly fine with jingoistic celebrations of their favored status and exceptionalism. Unsurprisingly, most of the people gave heed to messages which fit the way they had always seen themselves and their world.
Does this sound like America in the 21st century? It is a description of Judah and Jerusalem in the days leading up to their destruction and devastation at the hands of the Babylonians as recorded by Jeremiah and other prophets.
Christians often wonder why the Israelites never seemed to listen to the prophets. In truth, the Israelites did listen to the prophets–the false prophets. But why would the Israelites give ear to the false prophets and resist the message of the faithful prophets?
The engagement between Jeremiah and Hananiah in Jeremiah 27:1-28:17 can prove instructive for us. YHWH charged Jeremiah to make a wooden yoke and go around proclaiming to the Judahites as well as the envoys from the surrounding nations how YHWH has given power and authority to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and they should all submit to his yoke (Jeremiah 27:1-22). Hananiah then stood up in the Temple and resisted Jeremiah’s message, instead proclaiming YHWH said He would break the power of Nebuchadnezzar, and everyone and everything which Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of Jerusalem would return within two years (Jeremiah 28:1-4).
If you were a Judahite in Jerusalem in 593 BCE, who would you believe? Which of the two prophets provided material aid to the enemy? Which of the two prophets affirmed YHWH as the God of Israel who would defeat the enemies of Israel? Who was proclaiming a message of defeat and doom which seemed unimaginable, and who seemed to proclaim the more theologically “orthodox” message?
Thus the people would have had every reason to believe Hananiah, and so they would. Yet Jeremiah’s message was the one truly from YHWH; what YHWH said through Jeremiah took place. YHWH had not spoken to Hananiah at this moment. But what motivated Hananiah to speak as if He had?
It is possible Hananiah was deceived by some demonic voice. Yet, as a prophet of YHWH, one would imagine Hananiah would have been able to use some discernment in regard to these matters. Hananiah quite likely felt compelled to resist and stand up against the treasonous words and premise of Jeremiah. What Jeremiah was suggesting stood against everything the Judahites believed about themselves and their God. It made much better theological, and national, sense for YHWH to break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar than to expect all nations to submit to Nebuchadnezzar’s yoke. And so Hananiah stood up against Jeremiah. The people were reinforced in their misguided, misplaced confidence that YHWH would never abandon Zion to the enemies of God’s people.
We may no longer speak of proclamations regarding the current state of affairs in terms of prophecy and false prophecy, yet the same tempting, deceptive forces remain as active today as they did over 2600 years ago. Today we speak of it as disinformation.
Disinformation involves false information disseminated with a desire to deceive. Disinformation is also misinformation, but misinformation can also describe inaccurate information which may have been sent out without any attempt to deceive.
Disinformation is a challenge as old as humanity; the serpent in the Garden of Eden was the first purveyor of disinformation (Genesis 3:1-5), and people and powers have been active in its promotion ever since.
One great contrivance of disinformation has taken place in the Western world over the past century in which people convinced themselves they were hearing “objective” and “unbiased” news reports from trusted media and governmental sources. The quest for “objectivity” over the past 250 years in Enlightenment thought may have its noble and praiseworthy ideals, but no human being can ever be truly “objective,” and bias pervades any sort of information distribution. To believe one’s viewpoint is “objective” and “neutral” is a great delusion and lie; the same is true for any other source of information.
Sometimes disinformation is manifest and obvious, both in its substance and motivation. Governments, corporations, and other organizations (yes, even religious organizations) will put out disinformation attempting to hide fault or weakness and projecting strength and confidence. Partisans have motivation to see the worst in their opponents and to suppress anything less than ideal about their own side; therefore, they often put out disinformation maligning their opponents and attempting to silence or suppress unflattering information about their own side.
Yet the most effective disinformation is very much like what the serpent told Eve in the Garden: not entirely accurate and intended to deceive, but sufficiently consistent enough with the truth and the situation the way the person wants to see it as to be easily accepted and believed. The most effective propaganda will trumpet good, positive, and noteworthy things, and perhaps make everything look a little prettier than it really is. Sometimes disinformation is present not by what is said but what is neglected: when some parts of the truth are made known, but others are ignored or suppressed, the presentation becomes warped and distorted, and the overall portrayal proves deceptive.
Disinformation works at its best when those who would receive it express little critical engagement with information or have been actively conditioned to lose trust in any and all sources of information. Such is why the people most active in promoting disinformation tend to project the promotion of disinformation on their ideological opponents or anyone who would critique them: they are always the one pushing the “fake news,” and what is left unstated is the unsubstantiated, and often ridiculously false, claim that they themselves are not promoting “fake news.” We are also seeing a lot more pushing of obvious and manifest disinformation which is never meant to persuade: it is instead an attempt to get people so confused and disoriented as to not know who to trust and to despair of finding any trustworthy source. When someone will not trust anyone, they end up falling for just about anything; note well how often those who claim to be “independent” in their thinking and who resist “trusting anyone” end up believing in a lot of conspiracy theories and difficult to substantiate medical, political, social, and religious claims.
Disinformation is promoted because it “works.” Many have profited handsomely from spreading disinformation. Agents of disinformation have gained significant amounts of cultural, political, and social power, and maintain and reinforce that power by the promotion of disinformation. It is hard not to see the hand of the powers and principalities over this present darkness at work behind the scenes of disinformation, and it certainly is part of the worldly, demonic wisdom at variance against the wisdom from above from God in Christ (cf. James 3:13-18).
Most well-meaning people do not intend to believe or promote disinformation, yet we all find ourselves awash in disinformation. So what can we do?
First and foremost, we cannot imagine we could not fall prey to disinformation; in various ways, we all likely have. We may not have intended to, and we might profess a strong commitment to the truth, but we all have our biases as human beings. We have a natural tendency to want to see the best in what we believe to be good, right, and true, and regarding those with whom we affiliate in that regard. We have a natural tendency to prove more critical of those with whom we believe we maintain strong disagreements.
As with all kinds of faults, we are all far better at seeing the “speck” of how others fall prey to disinformation rather than the “log” of how we might fall prey to it (Matthew 7:3-4). When we see someone else promote or share disinformation, we are strongly tempted to resist it and to marshal evidence and facts in refutation. There might well be good and effective times to promote what is good, right, and true; nevertheless, most people have not reasoned themselves into the viewpoints which are motivating them to share such disinformation, and it will therefore prove challenging to reason them out of it.
Instead, if we are truly concerned about disinformation, we need to prove most wary regarding ourselves and those institutions and people with whom we feel significant alignment and association. After all, as with the Judahites in 593 BCE, so with us: we have frameworks of belief and ideas about the way things are and should be, and we are much more likely to accept information which aligns with those frameworks and ideas than information which complicates or upsets them. We are tempted to see the best in “us” and the worst in “them”; we are more prone to believe whatever makes “us” look good and whatever makes “them” look bad, and have a hard time grappling with things which make “us” look bad and “them” look good.
Thus disinformation works best on us when it aligns with what we already want to believe. Disinformation works well when it highlights what we want to highlight even as it ignores or suppresses anything which would compromise our confidence. Disinformation always wants to focus and highlight on them and their problems and never wants to consider where we might prove deficient. Disinformation will rarely be self-critical.
No human being is able to fully escape their biases; we are all embodied, finite creatures, and we all have our perspectives based upon our education and experiences. But we all can seek to learn from other people to broaden and expand our horizons and alleviate some of the natural limitations of our perspectives. We should be able to prove as critical regarding the claims made which align with our ideas and work to our advantage as we are regarding claims which work against us.
Disinformation works until it no longer does. Jeremiah was vindicated by events which took place seven years after Hananiah’s disinformation. Some “apocalyptic” day, a day of revealing of hearts and minds, will invariably expose people and their disinformation. Unfortunately, purveyors of disinformation know how to continue to distort and twist things so people will continue to believe them. God will expose all such things and people on the day of judgment. We do well, therefore, to resist falling prey to disinformation, and certainly should strive to never promote or share disinformation. We must remember our limitations and focus far more significantly on the kinds of disinformation which we would want to believe rather than the disinformation which continues to entangle those we deem our opponents in their delusions. May we hold firm to Jesus who is the Truth in all things, and obtain the resurrection of life in Him!
Ethan R. Longhenry
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