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Letter from America

When truth is no stranger to fiction

The New York Times does not always tell the truth. This may not come as a surprise to the critically minded. But the extent to which one New York Times journalist managed to foist fiction as fact is a shock. His stories not only stretched the truth, they were entirely made up. One particularly harrowing piece for evangelicals was about a so-called (and fictional) evangelical group engaging in some rather weird and wonderful worship practices.

Evangelicals have crowed over the exposure of these New York Times articles. Many feel that The New York Times is a bastion of biased atheistic liberalism. And so some have said, 'Look what happens when you hire postmodernists! What do you expect? If you hire people who don't believe in the truth, why be surprised when they don't tell the truth?'

Not alone

Trouble is, The New York Times is not alone. There are other venerable, and less liberal, organisations whose truth-telling capacities are being questioned. While the jury is still out concerning the (will we soon be able to say 'so-called') Weapons Of Mass Destruction, the spectre of Tony Blair and George Bush praying together about their decision to go to war is unnerving in the context of the growing public sense that all may not have been as it appeared. Dr. Kelly's funeral gets some air play over here. Tony Blair is still admired as an orator and ally. But both he and George Bush, even now to some extent, find that their motivation for the recent war is increasingly being called into question by a growing number of people.

Not all good news

Who knows, maybe WMD will come to stand for 'Weapons of Mass Deceit'? (Still I, for one, find it harder to believe that Saddam Hussein was telling the truth).
Some things we do know. And not all of them are good news for evangelicals' reputation for truth telling. We now know that those Christian blockbusters, apparently written by well-known authors, are sometimes not. While the final dust cover of the book will claim a famous author, the real writer may be a ghost writer. The manuscript was actually written by a professional writer, not the claimed Great Christian Leader. The problem is not with those works that make the most of other people's talents for authoring books and give due accreditation to the real author(s). The problem is that sometimes the ghost writer is not accredited at all, or in a way not concordant with the amount of text that he or she has written.

An example

For instance, take the now well-known Prayer Of Jabez. This is a book I thought was written by Bruce Wilkinson because his name appears on the front cover. Actually, I am reliably informed, The Prayer of Jabez was written by David Kopp.
In a way I find this quite comforting - perhaps that explains some of the dodgy theology. But you can't get around the figure of eight or nine million copies of The Prayer Of Jabez which did not credit the ghost writer at all.

It's almost a joke to those in the know. I've heard of a Christian college professor telling his students strictly that they must not plagiarise on their home assignments. And then, with a twinkle, that there will be plenty of time for plagiarising later when they become a famous pastor.

I suppose an argument could be made for saying this is not all bad. I can't think of one.

Now, of course, we all use sources. We develop ideas in conversation with others. We read a book and it stimulates our mental juices. I've heard it said that C.S. Lewis's Narnia books were inspired by informal conversations with Tolkein about Middle Earth and his later The Lord of the Rings epic. Is this plagiarism? No, it's friendly collaboration. But Tolkein didn't write Narnia.

If Christians are to give joy to the author of their faith, Jesus Christ, they will need to walk in truth. This is, at least in part, what John means when he writes: 'I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth' (3 John 4).

Josh Moody,
Connecticut