‘Post-truth’ an appropriate word of the year

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Oxford University Press, publisher of Oxford dictionaries, this week named its international word of the year for 2016: “post-truth.” Oxford defines “post-truth” this way: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

John Stonestreet said the culture has been a “post-truth” environment for quite some time.

“The last 20 years … we were told that truth is relative, especially moral truth, and no one has the right to impose their views on anyone else because that would be intolerant and that would be hard,” he said. He also noted the irony of the timing of Oxford’s announcement after so much one-sided media coverage of the U.S. presidential election.

“Especially given … the number of times I heard media outlets talk about how terrible it was that people were trapped in their own ideological bubble during this election season—from media outlets who completely jumped on a side from the very beginning,” he said. “It’s just a level of inconsistency that is stunning.”

But watching how the mainstream media responds in a post-truth culture can challenge Christians to think through their own positions, Stonestreet said: “If we see this level of inconsistency and hypocrisy on the one side, on the other side, from where we may be, we need to think very clearly. Do we have that same temptation when we feel like ground is being taken out from under our feet? The answer, of course, is, we do. I hope this will give us a more objective place to stand.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on the Nov. 18 edition of The World and Everything in It.