Editors note: This is part three of an eight-part series exploring the eight Jesus questions all of us must face, highlighted in Jim Wallis's new book Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus (HarperOne), available now. These next eight weeks will help us go deeper than the headlines, to find our way back to Jesus in the midst of this intensive and exhausting news cycle. 

Want to hear this in an audio format instead? We just launched an eight-episode podcast series called Reclaiming Jesus Now that features Allison Trowbridge and William Matthews speaking with Jim Wallis about these questions and their relevance today.

Jesus directly links “truth” with “freedom.” And Jesus’ commentary on truth and freedom is the most important one for this moment’s and this week’s crisis for democracy in the United States of America.

“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” says Jesus (John 8:32).

The impeachment inquiry happening now is not really about different interpretations of what are “high crimes and misdemeanors” or interpretations of facts; but the denial and cover up of the truth itself —what happened on Trump’s phone calls to foreign leaders to ask for help with his reelection and the attempt to hide those appalling and unprecedented facts.

As I wrote in Christ in Crisis: Why We Need To Reclaim Jesus, what’s going on with this administration’s assault on the truth is far deeper than simply all the presidential lies — which have accumulated at an unprecedented pace, with the Washington Post estimating that Trump has lied more than 13,000 times in just under 1,000 days as president — more than 13 lies every single day. Trump’s practice and pattern of constant lies is, I believe, a systematic strategy to undermine the idea of there even being such a thing as objective truth. Trump insists that every fact and piece of careful reporting that undermines his pathological lying is just “fake news” from the media who are “the enemy of the people.”No, the press is not the enemy of the people. Rather, Donald Trump is the enemy of the truth. The president of the United States has become the enemy of freedom.

Learn more about Jim Wallis' book here. 

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