'What would activism for Truth look like?' Photo: Joel de Vriend / Unsplash.
‘If we have a testimony to Truth, and if testimony is faith in action, how clear is our witness?’
John Lampen calls for a reinvigoration of the Truth Testimony
In the latter days of the Soviet Union my hostess in Belarus told me how she made a trip to the West when she was a teenager. ‘It was the most shattering experience of my life,’ she told me. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I discovered that everything I had been told was untrue.’
When people live in a regime founded on and buttressed by lies, they often speak of Truth as a dynamic spiritual force. Václav Havel wrote in communist Czechoslovakia: ‘Under the orderly surface of the life of lies… there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth… The effective range of this special power [of truth] cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings’ repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realisation of their real social and political interests.’
In a different time and situation, the early Quakers knew they were surrounded by religious and social falsehood. They too thought of Truth as an independent and objective force which opposed the spirit of the times. In 1657, after the James Nayler controversy, Richard Hubberthorn wrote of Truth in this way: ‘It’s over, and Truth stands a-top of it, and the beauty of Truth appears through it all, and Truth is more lovely when it is proved and purged.’
Quakers today tend to have a more relative view of what truth is. We do not claim that there is one Truth, so vast and complex that none of us can see it all. Instead we speak and write as if everyone has their own truth and each religion has its share (conveniently forgetting the horrors of Aztec human sacrifice and the childhoods blighted by Calvinism). We quote George Fox’s question ‘What canst thou say?’ misleadingly – he is not saying ‘Anything goes’! The traditional Quaker testimony that we are ‘Publishers of Truth’ is devalued.
This matters, because there are many signs that we are living in an age of lies. Dishonesty is almost habitual in much advertising and commerce, financial dealing, the doublespeak and concealments of ‘security’, and other areas of public life. We see an obsession with ‘image’, the hidden manipulation of opinion through social media, and attempts by government to restrict political discourse (a specific concern of our Yearly Meeting at the moment). In this context, perhaps the outlines of what we mean by Truth can become clear once again.
If we have a testimony to Truth, and if testimony is faith in action, how clear is our witness? What would activism for Truth look like? I know I fall short myself, not convincingly challenging the lies around me. But surely there is a way. As a Yearly Meeting we have found actions to show that we are indeed Friends of a sustainable planet, and Friends of a peaceful world. I would like us to show just as powerfully that, as in our earliest days, we are also Friends of Truth.
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