“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” Jesus promised.

I have been reflecting on that instruction and invitation from John 8:32 more than ever after these last four years, thinking about what Jesus is saying and, perhaps just as importantly, isn’t saying. He did not say to tell the truth in order to make us right and righteous, and them wrong and unrighteous — or to show some of us to be good and others to be evil. Jesus didn’t say to tell the truth by creating our own “facts” and weaponizing them against others. The issues around the truth, says Jesus, are deeper; they are about freedom and bondage — our own.

To lose the truth is to lose our freedom. As historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine, “Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president.” That is where we were headed, and that danger has not yet passed. When it comes to facts and the truth, we still live in a world of parallel universes, with allegations of “fake news” and affirmations of “alternative facts” — one nation with totally different experiences and realities.

And the only thing that can help us become — for the first time in our nation’s history — a genuinely multi-racial democracy is the truth: to seek it, find it, and act upon it.

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