The President of America stands at the podium and begins rehearsing a speech to the nation. He practices a variety of tones and emphasis because what he is about to say is important – his forces have won a great victory and total victory is close. This is the opening of the film Civil War and it turns out that everything he said was propaganda, a fiction, a lie. But he means for the public to believe him, but the people reporting on the war know it’s not true. They know different.
As the film progresses we follow the jaded and cynical journalists wanting a final interview with the President in these final days. As they head towards the capital they come across a town which seems to have avoided the conflict: “With what we’re seeing on the news it just seems for the best to stay out of it.”
Whatever Civil War is about it is not about politics. But perhaps as Brad East says it is a film about the press and more specifically about how we know what we know. Do the words we read, the pictures we see have any impact on us at all? Can we trust them? Is a picture really worth a 1000 words or does it tell a 1000 stories?
Which is why, other than having one of the most genuinely edge of your seat moments in cinema, Civil War is a more important film than most of us realise, because it is a parable for the fact that we no longer know who to trust to tell us the truth about the world.
It is clear that whenever someone mentions ‘legacy media’ they for sure as heck don’t trust them. We live in a world of disinformation, misinformation, full of fake news from a fake media. The days of the fact checker are over. We’re in trouble when everyone has their own facts and operates from alternate informational realities. We’re in much greater trouble when governments do.
That there might be cracks in our informational world about places and situations far from us is not all that surprising. The fog of war was supposed to be about the struggle to know what your enemies were planning while simultaneously hiding what you were planning. Now it seems to cover not knowing anything for sure about what is really going on in China or Russia, for example. Our information crisis is so deep that people living in the same town cannot agree about the things happening in their own neighbourhood and can no longer trust their own local officials.
America is absolutely riddled by this informational fault lines. In a Christianity Today story about the aftermath of a train crash and toxic chemical spill in the unfortunately named town of East Palestine, Ohio (perhaps Donald trump could relocate the population of Gaza there?)
Community conflict was the first thing anyone brought up with me about the derailment. In a local store, one woman told me bluntly that anyone still anxious about the crash could just move. Some residents didn’t want to be interviewed for fear of being seen as on one side (“Everything is fine”) or the other (“Our town is ruined”) of the social divide. Conflict spilled into—or perhaps was encouraged by—comments on social media. When a news story appeared on Facebook announcing that testing for a particular chemical was no longer necessary, someone posted, “Everybody can be totally hooray for this good news!” Someone else responded, “Bulls—.”
How can people who occupy utterly unintelligible polarizations figure out even locally agreed solutions to local problems? They go on to ask,
If a knowledge crisis could devastate relationships in a close-knit community like East Palestine, the kind of place where locals can reel off the name of every business owner in town, what could it do elsewhere in the United States?
Christianity Today calls it a knowledge crisis but that’s wrong, or at least partially so. Because the people on either side do not think they are lacking in knowledge, they are convinced they have the information they need. They are also convinced the other side has it completely wrong. It is not a knowledge crisis, nor even as I have previously called it a truth crisis. It is instead a trust crisis.
Many western countries are now divided into what is crudely described as ‘left and right’. In one sense that’s nothing new. The problem today is that those on the left are basing their views and opinions of the world on entirely different sources of news & opinion than the ones used by those on the ‘right’. Algorithms only feed and reinforce the echo chamber or knowledge bubble or whatever it is that most of us inhabit these days.
The question then, is when you want to know how things really are, who would you trust to tell you? And what makes you sure they are telling you the truth?
Time was when everyone would trust their national broadcaster such as the BBC. In plenty of countries organisations are just mouthpieces for governments and that can be OK when everyone knows they are just mouthpieces for the government. But that’s not our situation. In the divided west many believe national broadcasters are mouthpieces for an ideology but they also believe the broadcaster themselves either are blind to this or wilfully deceitful about it. They know, everyone they know knows, that this news outlet is so ignorant of their captivity to a harmful ideology (and here you can pick your poison) and hates people like us so much that they would never admit anyway.
That’s not a knowledge or truth crisis. That’s a trust crisis.
Christians have always put a premium on truth because we believe in the one who said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” That won’t tell you who to trust about the war in Ukraine or whether to get your child vaccinated. But it does mean that followers of Jesus are called to be the kind of people who neither deceive nor are easily deceived; who build communities marked by honesty and free from tribal suspicions; who take seriously the slow and unglamorous work of being trustworthy. That may just be one of the most counter-cultural things the church can do right now.
Further Reading
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