A good warning from xkcd about the hazards of references in the online world:

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A little while ago I was filmed for version 2 of Glad You Asked, a DVD-based series of 8 sessions exploring the big questions of life, produced by the excellent Innovista. The first version was excellent, so I was delighted to be involved in version 2. It will be on sale very soon, but samples of the videos are available on the Glad You Asked, as well as on the Innovista YouTube channel.

Glad You Asked tackles hard spiritual questions with intelligence, passion and respect. It uses enquiry to help people explore their own beliefs, and invites them to engage minds and hearts with answers offered in the 8 DVD sessions. Glad You Asked does not just tell people what to think. It helps them to think for themselves, starting right where they are with their questions.

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A conversation this morning made me realise I’d never posted this article here, which is why it’s appearing some time after the film. This article was first published on Culturewatch.

Beware: spoilers ahoy!

One of the many changes which the Internet has brought into our lives is that it is remarkably easy to masquerade as something we’re not. It’s always been possible, of course. Pretence is an element in some of the earliest human stories. According to the Bible, deception became part of human experience back in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent persuaded Eve that he had her best interests at heart. He was the first in a long, long line of tricksters, impostors and con artists. Yet until we started spending significant amounts of time in the online world, it generally required perpetrators to be quite daring since it usually involved face-to-face encounters. In a world of social networking profiles and cyber-relationships, however, it is the work of moments to invent for ourselves an identity that may have little or no basis in reality.

Catfish is the story of a relationship which began online, and which turned out to be built on a web of lies and fabrications. It’s a familiar story from the online world, but it’s rare that it is documented in this way. This one was captured on film because it centres on Yaniv ‘Nev’ Shulman, a photographer from New York who also makes films with his brother Ariel and a friend, Henry Joost. Nev claims that they are always filming each other doing mundane things, which is how this particular story came to be filmed in such detail from very early on.

Nev had one of his pictures of a dancer published in the New York Sun in August 2007. Three months later, he received a painting of the photograph in the post, apparently the work of an eight-year-old called Abby. As a result, a friendship developed via email and then Facebook. Nev would send one of his photographs and Abby would send her painting of it. Given her prodigious talent, it was natural for Ariel and Henry to take an interest in documenting something of this from Nev’s end. After a time, they felt that it would be worth making a film of what was happening.

At the very start of the film, Nev claims that Abby should be the sole subject of the documentary, and he shouldn’t be part of it at all. ‘I don’t think I’m that interesting,’ he protests. Does he really mean this, given that he and his friends are always filming trivial aspects of each other’s lives? Or is this a classic example of misdirection, designed to make us think that he is a reluctant participant in what unfolds? The problem with this story is that it is presented as a documentary, and yet it all seems so unlikely that it’s difficult to ignore the possibility that it may all be staged. This possibility is reinforced by a comment made by Abby’s father, Vince, at the very end of the film. He describes how live cod were transported from Alaska to China in large vats. But by the time they arrived, ‘the flesh was mush and tasteless’. Someone came up with the idea of putting some catfish into the vats to keep the cod agile. Vince reflects:

There are those people who are catfish in life and they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh. And I thank God for the catfish, because we’d be droll, boring and dull if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.

The question is, who is the real catfish in this film: is it Abby’s family or is it the people making the film?

The online friendship with Abby pulls in other members of her family almost immediately. Nev is rightly insistent that their communication should take place with the full knowledge of Abby’s parents. Before long, Nev is also communicating regularly with Abby’s mother, Angela Wesselman, and increasingly with older sister Megan. They appear to be a tight-knit and talented family, and Nev forms the impression that Angela is a great mother. ‘She must be awesome,’ he reasons, ‘because the kids are pretty awesome – at least from Facebook.’ Abby seems to be something of a celebrity in her home town in Michingan. Although packages of Abby’s paintings arrive every few weeks, Angela tells Nev that many are sold to local collectors and that they plan to open a gallery just for her work.

An online romance develops between Nev and Megan who, judging by her Facebook profile, is intelligent, creative and beautiful. Nev is smitten with her:

She works as a vet so she likes animals a lot. I like animals. I’m not a crazy animal lover, but I do like animals. She’s also a musician. I think she plays the cello. Maybe also the guitar, and she sings. I’m not really a musician, but I guess you could say we have a similarity there, as I . . . whatever. She’s a dancer; she takes ballet . . . she does belly dancing. Again, not that I do either of those, but dance is a big part of my life. I mean, yeah I guess I don’t know that much about her. Yet.

Megan and Angela start recording songs for Nev, with the help of Megan’s brother Alex. Nev and Rel wonder if one track is a cover version or an original composition, so they search online and quickly find another version. ‘You can’t hold it against her,’ argues Rel. ‘She didn’t say, “Hey, I wrote this song.”‘ Nev agrees: ‘It doesn’t matter; she’s still young.’ But then they find the ‘exact same recording’ and the first seed of suspicion begins to take root. Nev is disturbed that Angela ‘responded to a number of compliments that I gave her about the song and how much I liked it, and it’s not even her singing. It’s just a recording of someone else’s.’ More googling soon turns up a Youtube video which is clearly the very same recording of another song which Megan and Angela had claimed was theirs. Now Nev is getting worried: ‘They are complete psychopaths. I’ve probably been chatting with a guy this whole time.’

In their ensuing discussions, Henry is adamant that they should try to get to the bottom of what’s going on, while Nev insists that he doesn’t want any more to do with the family. Again, Nev’s reluctance may simply be a device to make us trust him and his perspectives more than we otherwise would, to make us believe that these young film-makers are telling us the truth. Other questions now, finally, become obvious to the trio: Why has Nev never spoken to Abby herself? Why has no one heard of her if she is such a gifted eight-year-old who is selling paintings and opening a gallery? Nev and Rel search online for the gallery and soon find the building that appeared in one of Angela’s photos on a real estate agent’s site. It’s still for sale. Nev finally wonders how he could have been so gullible. Significantly, the music playing at this point is fromThe Truman Show.

They eventually decide to drive to Michigan to pay the family a surprise visit and drive past the farm which Megan supposedly owns in the early hours of morning. They look in the mailbox and find postcards which Nev had sent to Megan. Nev remarks, ‘What surprises me the most is that, to go to the trouble to lie as elaborately as they have, for her not to just drive here and pick up the mail seems crazy doesn’t it?’ He wonders how Megan could be so lazy, but Rel points out that Megan’s family are ‘so lazy they fooled you for eight months. That’s pretty good.’ ‘They didn’t fool me,’ Nev retorts. ‘They just told me things and I never cared to question it.’

In the morning they find Angela’s house and introduce themselves. She is nothing like they expected, and nor is her family. Megan is mysteriously absent; Abby can’t even remember what she looks like. And Abby herself is not quite the prodigy Nev had believed. While we as viewers have expected the Wesselmans to be somewhat different from the photographs Nev has seen online, it is still uncomfortable to discover how significant the discrepancy is. The question facing the three men now is, how should they respond to this new situation? Henry doesn’t want to embarrass Angela or her family. ‘It’s not malicious. It’s just sad,’ he says. Nev agrees, saying, ‘We’re not here to hurt, we’re here to help.’ Rel just wants to ‘shake the truth out of her’.

The question of whether or not this is a genuine documentary or something which masquerades as one is itself part of the issue which the film explores. The point is that we simply cannot know whether what we are being told is true or a complete fabrication. While many of us restrict our Facebook friends to those people we really know, there are plenty of people who become ‘friends’ with people they’ve only met online. Some other social networking sites, such a Twitter, are much more open and we don’t really have much of a clue about the true identity of someone whose tweets we’re following.

Trust is one side of the equation, and if we’re not sure who to trust then we need to exercise due caution. The other side of the equation is what drives people to invent a new identity. Nev finally gently confronts Angela with his conclusions, and discusses the relationship with her. He reflects that, ‘It was an amazing correspondence . . . a real friendship that I was also looking for myself.’ Angela confesses, ‘I didn’t want to lose the friendship, and there were times when I felt I was really overstepping and I tried to pull it back,’ but it was giving her something she was lacking in her life. The trouble is, a friendship built on lies is not a real friendship, but Angela could convince herself that it meant something. She talks about the relationship with Nev opening up other parts of life to her, and admits that she always wanted to be a professional dancer, but was too concerned with having a good time. ‘A lot of the personalities that came out were just fragments of myself,’ she observes. ‘Fragments of things I used to be, wanted to be, never could be. You know, when I met [Vince's severely disabled sons from a previous marriage], I knew I was making a sacrifice with my life, but I didn’t count the cost of things that I was gonna be giving up and sort of resigning for the rest of my life. And this year when I resigned my career, I don’t know, it’s like I gave up a lot of myself. And I don’t know most days who I am.’

This is the core of the problem. She has an identity crisis. Angela’s life has taken turns which have brought regrets and difficulties, and left her feeling that her life amounts to nothing. She is so discontented with her true identity and situation that she has wantonly manufactured new ones. While the rational part of her brain clearly knew that this invention really meant nothing, the emotional part of her brain was getting the attention and affirmation that she craved. Every positive communication from Nev gave her an emotional hit: made her feel like she was somebody, that she mattered. She simply wanted to keep hold of that feeling rather than be plunged back into the frustration and tedium of an unremarkable life and the challenges of caring for the two boys.

It is clearly quite possible to have meaningful communication with someone online, and even to form genuine friendships, at some level, with people we’ve only met virtually. But such communication and friendships are only part of what we need. God created human beings in his image; we reflect something of his nature. Part of this is that we are profoundly relational beings; without meaningful relationships we wither away to a shadow of what we should be. Loneliness is one of the worst blights of the modern technological society. But because we are constantly bombarded by media representations of what the good life should be, many of us bear a profound sense of inadequacy. The world is apparently full of beautiful people, but we’re not. The world is apparently full of people who are feted because of their talent, but ours is mediocre. The world is apparently full of life-enhancing possibilities, yet ours is so constrained, so full of pain and frustration and missed oportunities. We find ourselves longing to be something that we’re not.

The trouble is that if we try to build our lives and relationships on foundations which are not true, we are setting ourselves up for even greater disappointment. Another aspect of being made in God’s image is that, ultimately, we need things to be true. Like Nev, Rel and Henry, we know that there is something deeply wrong with being deceived. So how can we reconcile the longing for significance with the need for our identity to be genuine and honest? How can we be content with the limitations of life as it is? As long as our society keeps defining value in such external terms, we will have problems. We need to discover that our true value comes from being made in God’s image. Our deepest satisfaction can only come from knowing him, but we will also discover genuine satisfaction when we learn to invest wholeheartedly in relationships with the real people who are around us, rather than pretending to be something we’re not.

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At Above Bar Church, Southampton, we’re doing something a little different for the next few weeks on Sunday evenings. The congregation is splitting for the teaching part of the service. Andrew Page is teaching a series on Hosea, while John Risbridger is doing a Bible overview and I’m teaching a short series on apologetics. This is the first of six sessions, and it’s a very general introduction. I’m grateful to Marcus Honeysett for suggesting the great opening discussion question. Those of you who have read William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics may recognise some of his influence on me here.

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Angels and Demons, directed by Ron Howard (Sony Pictures, 2009)

This article was first published on Culturewatch, and is republished here by permission. © Tony Watkins, 2009

Harvard symbologist Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is back in action deciphering ancient codes as he races around cathedrals, crypts and catacombs, as well as the world’s most secretive vault. After his success with cracking the ‘Da Vinci Code’ and rescuing the Priory of Sion from having its great secret exposed, he was not exactly popular with the Catholic Church. However, his reputation is such that the Vatican sends one of its police officers to ask for his help when it is sent a curious symbol: an ambigram of the word ‘Illuminati’ which looks identical when it turned the other way up. Langdon is astonished to see it: the secret ambigram was ‘supposed to only be revealed when the Illuminati had gathered enough power to resurface.’ The Illuminati, we discover, are old enemies of the church, scientists who objected to the Church’s persecution of them. It appears that they have risen again for a final confrontation. The Pope has recently died, and the cardinals are about to go into conclave to elect his successor. But four of them have been kidnapped and the message that came with the ambigram states that they will be killed at one-hour intervals, leading up to midnight when the Vatican will be destroyed by anti-matter which has been stolen from CERN, the particle physics laboratory underground near Geneva.

This unlikely plot was Dan Brown’s first story about Robert Langdon, Angels and Demons, which was published in 2000, three years before his runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code. However, because director Ron Howard filmed the latter book first, he treats the film of Angels and Demons as the sequel. It matters little, since both stories stand on their own. Brown’s success comes not from the quality of his writing, but from his ability as a storyteller. He combines three key elements in his stories, which make them, compelling to many readers. First, he is very good at maintaining pace and tension through cliffhangers. This wasn’t realised very successfully in Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, but it is a key factor in making Angels and Demons a more enjoyable film. Second, he is good at weaving puzzles, codes and mysteries into his stories. In Angels and Demons, Langdon, aided by beautiful CERN physicist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), must find and decode clues to the Illuminati’s ancient ‘path of illumination’ in the hope of locating the anti-matter bomb. Brown’s third important element is conspiracy theories, which provide motivation for the stories’ bad guys. Here, we have the notion of the Church’s long-established opposition to science, and the willingness of some within the Church to do whatever it takes to halt scientific progress, coupled with the idea of a secret society of scientists who have sworn revenge for the way Galileo and others were treated. Whether or not these ideas have any validity – and they have very little – they make for an entertaining confrontation and a sense that secret forces are being unveiled.

Ron Howard and his screenwriters, David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, have significantly toned down much of the controversial material in Dan Brown’s novel (such as avoiding having a character who is the test-tube baby of the Pope and a nun), but the central theme of a clash between science and religion is still at its heart. The story Robert Langdon tells is one of persecution – a ‘brutal massacre’, in fact. When Vatican police head Ernesto Olivetti (Pierfrancesco Favino) declares that his men will hunt down and kill the Illuminati, Langdon tells him:

The Illuminati did not become violent until the seventeenth Century. Their name means ‘The Enlightened Ones’. They were physicists, mathematicians, astronomers. In the 1500s they started meeting in secret, because they were concerned about the church’s inaccurate teachings. They were dedicated to scientific truth. And the Vatican didn’t like that. So the church began to, how did you say it? Oh, hunt them down and kill them.

Langdon refers specifically to an event he refers to as ‘La Purga’. When Swiss Guard Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgård) doesn’t understand what Langdon means, the symbologist is frustrated. ‘Geez,’ he sighs, ‘you guys don’t even read your own history, do you? 1668: the church kidnapped four Illuminati scientists and branded each one of them on the chest with the symbol of the cross, to purge them of their sins. And they executed them, threw their bodies in the street as a warning to others to stop questioning church ruling on scientific matters. They radicalized them. The ‘Purga’ created a darker, more violent Illuminati, one bent on retribution.’

This is all complete invention on Brown’s part, but because he is so specific, many people will believe that what is stated is true. ‘La Purga’ never happened. The Illuminati were not primarily scientists, but free-thinkers who were interested in politics, not science. As in The Da Vinci Code, he claims that his story is based on solid historical fact, but in reality he bases it on pseudo-history which has no connection with hard evidence. According to Langdon, early members of the Illuminati included Copernicus, Galileo and Bernini. All of them had been dead for many years before the historical Illuminati was formed in Bavaria, rather than Rome, in 1776 (Bernini died in 1680, Galileo in 1642 and Copernicus in 1543). It has ceased to exist within twenty years. Copernicus had not been persecuted (let alone killed, which Brown claims in the novel) by the Church. He was supported by the church, dedicated his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres to Pope Paul III, and died quietly in bed after a stroke. Bernini was not a scientist and seems to have been quite content working closely with the Vatican. And the Galileo affair has been misrepresented often in popular culture, but rarely as grossly as by Dan Brown (for a well-researched, historically accurate account, see Ernan McMullin’s ‘The Galileo Affair’).

Brown repeatedly claims to have thoroughly researched the history, the science and the architecture, but his writing is so riddled with errors, baseless speculation or blatant untruth that it becomes hard to believe anything. For example, central to the plot is the possibility of producing huge amounts of energy from antimatter. But CERN states categorically on its website that the ‘Angels and Demons scenario is pure fiction.’

The lack of any solid foundation for the story is clearly no problem for Dan Brown or for Ron Howard, and it probably won’t be something that many viewers of the film will even pause to consider. Yet they will take away from it, and even more so from the book, the idea that the church has historically opposed science, and that it continues to do so at an institutional level, even if there are individuals within it who see no conflict between them. This is a serious misunderstanding, though there are areas of tension (in particular on ethical issues) and there have been times when the church has not acted as it should. What is more significant is tension between Christian faith and those who equate science with atheism, such as Richard Dawkins and other ‘New Atheists’. The fact that many reputable scientists are also committed Christians shows that this simplistic equation is not valid.

However, a positive theme, however badly Dan Brown does with it, is the need to follow the evidence to discover the truth. Within the fictional world, that is what Robert Langdon is intent on doing. It is a goal which should be shared by anyone who doesn’t want to base their thinking and values on a lie. There is strong evidence for the truth of the Christian good news which bears examination. Since the heart of Christianity is that our eternal destiny turns on how we respond to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, it is something that we cannot afford to dismiss without serious consideration. But it is important to note that the failings of the church, and of individual Christians is not evidence against the truth of the ideas, but rather are the inevitable consequences of fallen human nature. As Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) says to Langdon at the end of the film, ‘Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. All men, including this one.’ Religion is merely than the systems and practices through which people organise their worship and church structures. Of course it’s flawed. But Christian faith is about a personal relationship with God, based on the truth of what God has revealed of himself. When they first meet, Cardinal Strauss asks if Langdon believes in God. After hesitating to explain his beliefs about what he sees as the human origins of religion, Langdon says, ‘I am an academic. My mind tells me I will never understand God.’ ‘And your mind?’ presses the cardinal. ‘Tells me that I’m not meant to. Faith is a gift I am yet to receive,’ Langdon replies. Maybe Robert Langdon, the supposedly great investigator of evidence and pursuer of truth, should actually investigate the evidence for the truth of something he glibly dismisses, yet which has changed the lives of billions of people down through history.

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This article was first published on Damaris’s Culturewatch website, and is used with permission. © Copyright Tony Watkins, 2009

In many ways, State of Play is an old-fashioned journalistic drama in which a shabby, hard-bitten journalist risks the wrath of his demanding editor to unearth the truth. But it is much more than this. It is also a gripping political thriller, full of twists, turns and tension. It does have many familiar elements in it – clichés even – but it’s so well put together that this doesn’t spoil the ride. It’s well written, tightly directed by Kevin Macdonald, and with strong performances from all the leads.

Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck in State of Play (Universal Pictures, 2009)

Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) is covering the story of an apparently random shooting in Washington DC for his paper, the Washington Globe, when he sees an old friend of his on the news. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is a rising star in Congress. He’s handsome, bright and ambitious, and is chairing a committee investigating defence spending. What catches McCaffrey’s attention is that Collins’s attractive young research assistant, Sonia Baker, has died – and Collins is clearly very cut up about it. McAffrey is irritated when a very junior colleague, the Globe’s political blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), comes to ask if Collins was having an affair with Sonia. McAffrey rebuffs her enquiries, but before long their demanding editor, Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) has them working together on the story. It’s a story of deceit, corruption and murder. Apparently unrelated events turn out to be connected, and nothing is quite as it first seems.

State of Play is based on the outstanding BBC mini-series from 2003. The series was written by Paul Abbott, who was very wary about his work being adapted for the big screen. His original was six hours of taut drama, and he was understandably concerned about how it could be condensed down to the length of a feature film. The choice of Kevin Macdonald to direct was critical. He had only made one feature film previously, though The Last King of Scotland was an extremely impressive debut. But his background is as an acclaimed documentary maker and so the theme of digging for the truth of a story resonated very strongly with him. He too was concerned about the problem of distilling the essence of Abbott’s work into two hours. The solution was to change it radically. ‘Although the basic story is the same,’ he explains, ‘there’s a lot that’s very different about it. You realise you can’t make another version of something that was good. You have to reinvent, and that’s what we’ve tried to do.’

Cal McAffrey is untidy, single and doggedly determined to expose the truth. McAffrey may fit the stereotype of an old-school journalist, but he is far from being a two-dimensional character. His friendship with Stephen Collins is complex. Having been room-mates at college, they go back a long way, but it is clear that there has been significant tension between them in the past (for reasons that become clear as the film progresses). However, once all the news media start falling over themselves to speculate on an affair between Collins and Sonia, it is McAffrey to whom Collins turns. They have not been talking about the situation for long before McAffrey’s nose for a story makes him suspect that what appears to be a tragic accident may well be much more sinister. Collins’s work on the defence spending committee is bringing him into sharp conflict with private security firms on which the Government is spending vast sums in the Middle East. Could it be that these commercial interests want Collins out of the picture?

While McAffrey follows up his leads, checks out his sources and (sometimes) files his stories in time for the presses to roll, Della Frye is driven by the need to publish something online as fast as possible. In the blogging world she can’t afford to be second. As far as McAffrey is concerned, she is part of the new breed of upstarts who hardly deserve to be called journalists. The tension between print and online journalism, and the decline in newspapers is an interesting and timely subtheme in the film. R.B. Brenner, Metro editor for the Washington Post remarks, ‘In the old world if a story happened at noon, I’m thinking, “OK, we have ten hours until the deadline and the paper’s going to roll.” Now I need to think, “We have two minutes” because readers are going to start coming to our website and want to know the story right now.” As editor, Cam Lynne is feeling the pressure created by the changing face of journalism. They can no longer afford to sit on a story for a day or two while they establish all the facts, confident that competitor papers are a few steps behind, because the story will already be playing out online, whether accurately or not. Now, she insists, they should go to press with a story even if it’s wrong. Then over subsequent days, they can print revised versions, all of which helps sell the paper. McAffrey, naturally, is something of a rebel and keeps stalling with filing the story. He’s sure there’s more to find out. Cam thinks that McAffrey is paranoid when he suggests that there is a conspiracy. But once he finds an indisputable link between the shooting he’s reporting on and the Collins affair, it is clear that the story is ‘as big and as connected as they get’.

Cal McAffrey is concerned above all else with what is true. Collins accuses his friend of turning him into a story, rather than helping him, but the journalist is convinced that the way to do that is by exposing the corrupt corporate forces at play behind the scenes. ‘We’re going to fight back with our own facts,’ he says. Cam is also unhappy at McAffrey investigating a story involving an old friend: ‘Good reporters don’t have friends,’ she says. ‘Only sources.’ When it comes down to it, McAffrey thinks the same. He will do whatever it takes to get to the truth, whether that means compromising his friendships or acting in dubious ways. ‘Did we just break the law?’ asks Della at one point. ‘No,’ replies her colleague, ‘that’s what you call damn fine reporting.’ This exposes an important tension within Cal McAffrey. On the one hand, he is passionately concerned about truth. And yet, while he demands that people have integrity, his own is sometimes compromised. He would argue that he transgresses the boundaries for the sake of a higher good, the truth of the story, but he is as prepared to do so with the apparently minor stories as well as the obviously major ones.

Despite these compromises, McAffrey’s commitment to truth comes through very strongly. He is not remotely relativist: what is true is really true, no matter how someone else sees it or spins it. ‘This is a real story,’ he says to Della. ‘It’s not open for interpretation and it does not require opinion.’ Kevin Macdonald describes Della as ‘easy with her opinions and not so hard on the facts.’ But once she gets stuck into the story, she too becomes concerned to unearth the truth. At a time when journalism has come to be viewed with suspicion, even cynicism, it’s good to be reminded that truth is still important in the public sphere. McAffrey insists very strongly that people still care about the truth; the public still wants it and deserves to be told it. He’s right: people do still want to know what is really true. The reason both journalists and politicians are viewed so negatively is because we have come to expect that they are spinning a story for us, telling us what we want to hear or making up sleazy allegations in order to discredit someone. ‘There’s a crisis of credibility in journalism,’ says Russell Crowe. ‘Newspapers can taint people to a massive degree and some people never recover from how they’ve been tainted.’ In a recent UK survey, only 3% of those questioned admitted to trusting journalists, and only 1% said they trusted politicians. But this lack of trust is something that matters to us; we wish we could trust these professions. The reality, of course, is that many politicians and journalists are people of integrity; it’s just that we only notice when people get it wrong.

A key question is why we have reached this point where truth seldom seems to matter to politicians and journalists. Part of the answer is that people who are ambitious to get to the top will often become ruthless and put expediency above integrity: anything is justified in the scramble to climb up. Another part of the answer is that the public has developed an apparently insatiable hunger for sensation. We will lap up whatever sleaze and scandal we can find – and thanks to the Internet we can find plenty of it – whether or not it is true. We are guilty of double standards, though. We accuse journalists of playing fast and loose with the truth, yet we are titillated by the salacious stories they give us. It raises the question of how concerned we are with truth and integrity in our own lives. How often do we play fast and loose with the facts, disparage or even slander people behind their backs, and spin stories to cast us in a good light? How ready are we to believe the office gossip rather than take time to establish the facts? We believe in the idea of a Cal McAffrey-like thorough investigation into the facts, yet our day-to-day experience is often much more like Della’s first blog on Collins: quick to point the finger of blame regardless of what the truth is.

The tension between integrity and sleaze is in all of us to some extent. We know that we are moral failures, that we will do all sorts of things in order to put ourselves at the centre – expressions of our rebellion against God – and yet we admire integrity and goodness and, deep down at least, we value truth – the side of human nature which reveals something of the image of God within us. We wish the latter dominated, but we know how easily the former overwhelms us. This is the fundamental problem in journalism, politics and society because the corruption within our hearts is the fundamental problem facing each one of us. Society needs transforming, but transformation happens one person at a time. And the only thing that can really transform us within is the good news of God, in the person of Jesus Christ, taking on himself the punishment we deserve for our rebellion against him, rising from death and sending his Holy Spirit to live and work in those who trust in him. This message, which at times has had a radical impact on public life, is often treated with derision in our society. It is dismissed out of hand, derided and misrepresented. And this is most often by people who have never investigated the facts, never dug and dug to find the truth, but who make snap judgments or simply go along with the crowd, as noted journalist A.N. Wilson has recently admitted to doing when he abandoned Christian faith twenty years ago. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the biggest news there has ever been, and the evidence is there to be examined by anyone who, like Cal McAffrey, is prepared to investigate it thoroughly.

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