PARISH BULLETIN: MORAL ISSUES
Lying & the Obligation to Get the Story Right

by James F. Keenan

Truthfulness even—perhaps especially—in details is essential to the trust in which relationships are built.

On August 13, 2004, the American chef of French cuisine, Julia Child, died. The next day National Public Radio rebroadcast a 2003 interview with her.

The interview was, not surprisingly, interesting, engaging, and witty. In the middle of it, Child commented, “I never dropped a chicken." The reference was to a very comical, nearly mythic narrative that eventually appeared as a skit on Saturday Night Live. The story went like this: while preparing a dinner on television from her legendary kitchen, Child dropped a partially cooked chicken on the floor, dusted it off, tossed it back into the pan, and commented, "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen, and no one can see you."

During the interview she tried rectifying the account: It was a simple potato pancake that fell onto the work table when she tried to flip it. She put it back in the pan, pressed it back into shape, and said, "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen, and no one can see you."

A few days after she died, I was sitting at breakfast with a 75-year- old Jesuit who commented on the death of Julia Child and added, "You know whenever I think of Julia Child, I think of the time she dropped the chicken…” After breakfast, I went online to Google, “Julia Child dropped chicken.” Astonishingly, I found 1750 citations. No matter her efforts, most people, like my Jesuit friend, remember Child for one thing that she never did, throwing food from the floor into her dinner.

As funny as the story was, the interview was poignant: America's most famous chef was defending herself self-effacingly against the claim that she cooked from the floor. Certainly the story that she would and did do something like that contradicts the very stuff of her legacy. Still, her predicament was well captured by a contemporary of hers. As President John F. Kennedy noted, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

Falsifying Narratives

I find the story a good example of how the easy change in details falsifies an entire narrative. Replace a detail and you have a new story. Who changed the pancake to a chicken or the table top to the floor? Who gave the first account? Who reported seeing Child on TV drop a chicken on the floor, pick it up, dust it off, and toss it into a pot? And, how many (thousands?) claimed they saw the episode and validated the false account? How easily do we get the details wrong?

As I write this column in the season of presidential primaries, we have multitudinous reports on shifting details in daily narratives. One of the most spectacular is the recurring claim that Senator Barack Obama is a Muslim. Of course, this one, like most others, has no source. There's always a certain anonymity to these stories.

As in a presidential race, it seems, in parishes mythic rumors are a commonplace. Sometimes they are genuinely funny, like the Child story, though often, someone pays for the humor, as did Child. Other rumors are more deliberately vicious, as in the Obama claim.

The narratives in a parish have of course an element of truth in them. Like Child, who did after all toss a pancake, the parish narrative begins with something possible, even probable (at least to the listener). The element of truth gives it its credibility, for a falsehood only has credibility if it has that ring of truth to it.

Of course these narratives are all lies. Truth-telling usually occurs in a narrative; truth-telling is really about getting the narrative right; exaggeration is bending it somewhat, and lying is altering the narrative's purpose. Often it's hard to distinguish when an exaggeration makes the narrative a lie.

Lying and the Moral Tradition

Lying is an interesting phenomenon. It is one practice that differentiates God from us: God cannot, after all, lie; we can. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews (6:13-18; see also Num 23:19, Ps 89:35) tells us that, unlike ourselves, it is impossible for God to lie. Lying, unfortunately, belongs to the human and also to the devil, whom Jesus refers to as the father of lies (Jn 8:44).

From the beginning of the Scriptures, lying is prohibited as in the two accounts of the Decalogue (Ex 2: 16; Deut 5:20). God abhors deceitful persons and destroys those who lie (Ps 5:6; Prov 6:16-19), warns us against taking refuge in lying (Is 28:15), and so forbids lying to one another (Lev 19:11), a command that Paul reiterates in his Letter to the Colossians (3:9).

Like the Scriptures, the moral tradition has always judged lying to be wrong. Aristotle held that lying was never right, and in the Christian tradition Augustine and Aquinas each argued that lying was always a sin.

In his discussion on lying in the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas writes that the "essential notion of a lie" is found when "a person intends to say what is false.” Thomas goes on to say that the lie is not first and foremost the intention to deceive, but rather the simple act of intending to speak a falsehood.

Thomas makes lying easy. Whenever we exaggerate, shift attribution, change context, or alter details, we lie. To the claim that we meant no harm, Thomas gives no hearing. A lie is the intention to not tell the truth.

Here we see that Thomas is also imposing a burden on us: we have an obligation to tell the story as it is. We cannot bypass the truth, but rather are obliged to witness to it; we cannot change the facts, bend the truth, or spruce things up. We have to tell the truth.

Getting Narratives Right

We know that there are people to whom we do not give the benefit of the doubt, people of whom we are not inclined to speak well. Precisely concerning these people we should be most suspicious of our own ability to give a truthful narrative. We need a healthy self-doubt of our own motives to distort accounts pertaining to people whom we do not find credible. Thus we must be vigilant of our own attempt to cast a narrative involving such people. Our inclination to distort is extraordinary, and therefore we must beware of the details whenever we tell narratives about those whom we avoid, dislike, or distrust.

Journalists have a particular responsibility here. They need to make sure that they report accurately. But like us, they need to attend to their biases, as well. Journalists who suspect the truth claims of others must in turn suspect their own ability to depict fairly the persons they suspect.

We live with such irresponsible forms of discourse around us that there must be a greater accountability to the truth. We live in a world where attribution often misses the mark and the specificity of a person's belief on a particular matter is reduced, dismissed, or discarded.

Ironically many misrepresentations are made in the name of ethics. Often, we find that people are accused of positions they never took, but because they spoke positively on an issue, they are said to hold much more extreme stances than they actually took. This is nothing more than crude consequentialism. Perhaps some believe that they have the right to distort the truth of another's position because the other has taken a stand with which they disagree. But there is no merit to this presupposition. While nothing is won by distorting another's position, still, in debates about ethics, truthful reporting is often the first fatality.

Preachers, pastors, and their assistants can help here. I know from my own experience that preachers, pastors, and their assistants can fan untruths and make gross exaggerations. But they undermine their own claims when they do this. How can we preach the gospel if we don’t witness to the truth? How can we ask for honest accountability from our own congregations if we are not witnessing to the details of our opponents with care and concern?

Augustine and Thomas rightly feared that lying corrupts human nature and human discourse. Human discourse depends on the good faith of others. Sometimes in order to maintain that good faith we need to go against our own tendencies. But, we can only do that in the service of truth.

Both of them as theologians see in Jesus the Word made flesh, and in the symbol of the Word the reason to tell the truth. If the entire communication of God in revelation to humanity is through the lens of truth, why in the name of God would we compromise the truth? To lie is an offense to the Incarnation itself; to lie is to falsify the possibility of what God wants us to understand. Truth is the very foundation by which we live in trust with one another. If the truth erodes, the trust does as well; but if the trust erodes, the truth can too. Inevitably truth precedes trust; inevitably the only way we can move forward in trust is in truth.

We know from experience, whatever the case, that lying diminishes trust and credibility. But we know that the foundations that lies destroy are the very foundations that truth builds up.

James F. Keenan, SJ, is Founders Professor in Theology at Boston College, Massachusetts.