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Spin
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Spin is a diabolical art form. Like opera, as much as I hate it, I still at times cannot hide my admiration. There can be a hideous beauty to it. Spin rightly shares with good writing a blurring of the distinction between prose and poetry. But it wrongly also blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. That is, I love good spin for its ability to say much with subtlety, and with few words. I despise it because what it says is not true. Poetry is the art of saying very much, with very little. It is a form of language that makes use of the fullest extent of the range of meaning in the chosen words. It often evokes more than it communicates. Spin, like good poetry, can leave you guessing, and in that guessing, it gives the answers it wants you to find. A good spinmeister feeds you the conclusion in the same way a good magician feeds you the card you thought you were freely choosing. It is the art of making something look like a completely different thing, while making you think this is always as it has been. Would you rather be frugal, cheap or a tightwad? Each shares a common theme, but these three different notes reach a different conclusion. The joke becomes far too serious in mass media. Gary Condit today is a man who has had marital peaks and valleys. Forty years ago he would have been a philanderer, and a dirty old man. Four hundred years ago he would have been an abominable, dead adulterer. Today he gets his picture on the cover of People. Forty years ago he would have been run out of Washington on a rail. Four hundred years ago the rail he would be tied to would be on fire. Spin is what allowed the National Organization of (Some) Women to cry for the blood of Clarence Thomas based on allegations of a few crude remarks, and cry for compassion when the President was forced by a blue dress to concede an "inappropriate relationship." It is built around the power of words, and their nuances. And the truth of the matter is that we are all guilty, both of spinning and of being spun. We spin when we choose the safe version to describe our own sin, and when we choose to describe those sins which have been not just committed, but perpetrated against us, in the worst possible light. Such a sin is not only against our brothers and sisters, it is also a sin against God Himself. God is the author of language. Language means enough to Him that when His Spirit inspired John to write of His Son, he called Him, "the Word." Our God is a God who speaks, and therefore He is a God of language. He speaks to us, reveals to us His promises, His warnings, His love for us, and His plan for us, all in words. There are few things that are as precious. An assault on the King's English is the same as an assault on the King Himself. When we spin we are liars, but spin ourselves into believing that we are merely learning to be more effective in our communication, and so lie about our lies. When we spin we treat our fellow image bearers as a bunch of animals that must be manipulated. When we spin we treat truth as a tramp. While we would never treat the Word with contempt, we spit on words daily. As highhanded a sin as spinning is, and as strong a temptation as it is, I believe there is still more mischief in our lives that flows out of still a different sin: failing to discern spin from truth. We are in the mess we are in partly because we either can't or won't seek out the truth. We are spoon fed the spin of the Father of Spin, the devil himself. We accept as true and as normal the spin of the world around us. What would happen, for instance, if every Christian in the country used the language of the Bible rather than the language of the serpent? How might our own perceptions change, and perhaps even those of the culture around us, if we refused to ever speak of "alcoholics" and instead called them what the Bible calls them-"drunkards." The spin that is the whole culture of victimization, the spin that turns sin into sickness, has found its way into our language, even though, I pray, we have not adopted the worldview. What would happen if we stopped referring to those who practice a rather peculiar perversion as "gay" and started instead describing them as sodomites? Oh, but the world would howl at us, and we don't want that, do we? If we use their terms, they hear what they want to hear. Gay people are those who were created to love and engage in sexual conduct with members of their own sex. Sodomites, on the other hand, are perverts whose hatred of God has driven them to sexual insanity. Now which one is it? When we use their term we affirm their conclusions. The frightening thing about spin is that the more we accept it, the more we can expect of it. The purveyors of spin just get more and more bold. This past Labor Day holiday the local newspaper cheerily told us that there would be a number of peace officers along the area's roads to perform safety checks. Perhaps you've been through these before. The officer invites you to roll down your window, and for the sake of safety, asks to see your license and registration. Friends, this is not a safety check; this is nothing more than checking to see if our travel papers are in order, the practice of internal passports. But because it is Officer Friendly, and not some Gestapo sadist dressed all in black, we think this is different. Our children, if we send them over to the neighborhood school, will be asked to stand and give a loyalty oath to the state, but we call it patriotism. We call it the pledge of allegiance. If we understood what was happening, surely we wouldn't put up with it, would we? But we have become so spun that when someone speaks the truth to us in plain language, it jars our ears, and causes them to close. Straight talk becomes understood as harsh rhetoric. We have invited the state-and their propagandists, the media-to hypnotize us. Their verbal spin is like a spinning watch that puts us to sleep and removes all our worries. And then we not only believe the spin, we start slinging it ourselves. We not only don't protest when they call socialism "compassionate conservatism", we become passionate compassionate conservatives. How shall we escape? How do we stop our ears, our tongues, our heads from spinning in a spin-crazy world? The answer is simple. First: when we listen, we translate. When the news reports something about public schools, our minds tell us, "government schools." See how easy? We have to understand that they are using a different language, and so do the work of translation. Second: we spend less time immersed in the language that we are trying to escape. The more time you spend immersed in the language, the more you will begin to think in that language rather than in your native tongue. And, of course, the better you will be able to speak the language. Turn off the TV. Avert your eyes from that most persistent of spin, advertising. It, more than any other "art" form, debases the language, creating verbal inflation. But we need also to practice the language of heaven. We need to immerse ourselves in its culture, speak its language, learn its idioms. When we come to the Word of God we find that it is not only true, but trustworthy. That the President had an inappropriate relationship with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, is true enough. But it is not at all trustworthy. Such an admission, while true, conceals more than it reveals. The Bible does not seek to manipulate us but to guide us into all truth. While it makes full use of assorted literary art forms, it does so not to deceive but to enlighten. It is our hope and desire to avoid in these pages this malignant disease, this sin against language. We do speak with vigor. We are not shy about our convictions. But our convictions include the conviction that we must speak truthfully. We do not, when the world smoothes out the edges, instead sharpen them. We do not take that hypnotizing spinning watch, and spin it in the other direction. We try to tell the truth. That is part of what we mean by being simple. We mean what we say, and we say what we mean. There is no need to translate. We don't play games with our readers. (Actually, apart from the teaching we do, we have been playing a game with our readers for about two years; but so far no one has solved the mystery. First one to solve it gets a t-shirt.) To the degree that we succeed, we also have succeeded in being separate. So much of what frustrates us is that the evangelical world has healed its wounds only slightly, that we think we are separate because we use spin in the service of good. Instead we must not only eschew the folly of our enemies but refuse to use their diabolical tools. The church too often tries to tell the truth with lies. We want to tell the truth truthfully. We don't need to manipulate you. We don't want to manipulate you, for to do so is to fight our own cause. To do so is to help you become not only less simple, less separate, but less deliberate. Which is really what we are talking about. We are not deliberate when we allow the unspoken assumptions in our own language and the language of those around us to color our conclusions, our convictions. We are lead around by the nose like children. We are tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, even when we are utterly unaware that the wind is even blowing. We join in our victim culture, and in so doing become victims of our culture. To be deliberate is to have ears to hear, to discern the very lies of the Father of Lies, who is more crafty than any of the beasts of the field. As we are deliberate we find ourselves truly living in that most powerful of words, freedom. We act thoughtfully. We escape the lemming herd. This is exactly what it takes to build the kingdom of God. When Paul speaks of our warfare, he is not using inflammatory rhetoric, but is carefully speaking the truth. And when he tells us that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, he is not only not denying that the war is real but is telling us that our weapons are ideas, and, through those ideas, words. That is what we fight with, which is precisely why what we do here is write, read, and talk. And every failure to use words rightly is not only foolish and wicked but is treason. Our prayer, as with every issue we put out, is that we will be yet another quartermaster in this great war, that we will equip you to be a mighty warrior in the building of His kingdom-not for your glory, not for ours, but for His. Our prayer is that as you read you will be emboldened for that war, not by war propaganda but by the truth. Our prayer is that we will together tear down the strongholds of those principalities and powers that have taken not just our world, but our minds, and our tongues. Our prayer, as always, is that we will help you to take every thought captive.
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Spinning
Wheels