Getting our story straight

President Obama has a communications problem, most recently regarding his foreign policy. Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post reports that White House aides have received an earful about how poorly the administration’s Middle East strategy was playing, not only at home but around the world. While flying home from a nine-day tour that included the November global warming summit, the president was troubled by the way world leaders received his game plan.

The consensus seemed to be he had no game plan, or at least not one that held together. He talked it over with advisers on the flight, and they agreed the feedback was “jarring.” “But while many outside the administration found the strategy itself lacking,” DeYoung reported, “Obama felt what they really needed was to do a better job of explaining it. He ordered what [her informant] called an ‘uptick in our communications tempo.’”

The problem, in other words, is not with the president’s strategy, but how his spokesmen and speechwriters have endeavored to get it across to the public. Words and phrases make a plan, not goals and means. We’ve seen this before, many times. When the natives get restless over Obamacare or “climate change” initiatives, it’s not that the policy is incoherent or unworkable; it’s because they just don’t understand how wonderful it is—and that’s the fault of the wordsmiths, not the policymakers. Certainly not Obama’s fault.

This president, more than any of his predecessors, seems unfazed when events slice his narrative to ribbons before his eyes.

It’s a character trait we all share: shaping the narrative, or trying to. It goes way back—all the way back. While starting again in Genesis this month, I notice it in the garden. God asks a simple yes-or-no question: “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” Instead of answering yes or no, both culprits offer context: It was the woman you foisted on me; it was the snake you allowed into our perfect paradise. They are deflecting blame, but they are also trying to frame the truth in a way that makes their sin understandable. It only makes their sin greater. Suppose Adam had replied, “Yes, I disobeyed you. I was weak and greedy and failed both you and my wife. Please forgive me.” I can’t help wondering if, in that case, God might have given the pair another chance. But Adam didn’t.

And we don’t, because we’re addicted to our own story: It’s not my fault because … my parents messed me up, and so. … In the past, this kind of truth-framing was called lying (at least if the perpetrator couldn’t carry it off). Now it’s called my-truth-which-you-have-no-right-to-question. With everyone in the nation busily concocting their own stories, it’s no wonder the practice has worked its way up to the highest levels of leadership. World leaders have always acted on their own version of events, but events themselves tend to correct the narrative. This president, more than any of his predecessors, seems unfazed when events slice his narrative to ribbons before his eyes.

The truth straightens itself out eventually; data accumulate and forces respond to show any policy a success or failure. Meanwhile, though, individual tales multiply on the ground: garbled, conflicting, increasingly incoherent. What this country needs is an overarching narrative.

We used to have one: the Bible, where multiple stories converge into a single great and coherent theme. But like Adam and Eve, we frame its inconvenient truth with “context,” and where the Bible speaks plainly we like to point out its apparent contradictions. An article at Patheos.com explains “Why the Bible’s Errors Are Actually Good News for Christians”: It’s because the paradoxes and inconsistencies revealed in the Bible “are the very things that make Scripture meaningful and compelling.” But not authoritative. We’re free, the article implies, to adapt Scripture to our own story.

In fact, it’s the other way around: Scripture adapts us. It invites complex and contrary individuals to conform their stories to the Great Story that carries them from time to eternity. God has no communications problem; He has His say, and will have His way.

Email jcheaney@wng.org