The Lie That Comforts and the Truth That Sets You Free

There is a phrase that has been drifting through our age like incense in a temple, murmured with the solemnity of scripture and passed around with the reverence usually reserved for holy relics. It runs something like this: "I would rather be told a lie that brings a smile than a truth that draws a tear." At first hearing, it sounds like the sort of thing a very wise and very gentle person might say, perhaps a Buddhist monk upon a mountainside, or a grandmother distributing cookies. It has the pleasant fragrance of enlightenment about it, that particular perfume our age adores. And it is, upon closer inspection, one of the most quietly destructive sentences ever composed in the English language.

For the sentiment, however sweetly delivered, amounts to nothing less than a declaration of war against reality itself. It is the polite version of "give me the poison, but sugar the rim." It is the philosophy of the man who, hearing that his house is on fire, requests instead that his brother sing him a lullaby. And, most tragically of all, it is fast becoming the unofficial motto of what we have learned to call political correctness.

The Enlightened-Sounding Lie

Notice first the extraordinary trick this sentiment performs. It dresses cowardice in the robes of kindness. It takes the ancient and not-in-itself-wicked human desire for comfort and elevates it above the ancient and irreplaceable human vocation for truth. It rewrites the moral order and pretends to be doing it out of tenderness. This is the peculiar genius of every modern heresy: it does not attack a virtue head-on, but replaces it with something almost virtuous, something similar enough in the dim light of dusk that we mistake it for the thing itself.

Consider what actually happens when we prefer a smile-inducing lie to a tear-inducing truth. The man who tells us the pleasant falsehood is not our friend; he is merely our flatterer. The friend, in the old and honest sense of the word, was the man willing to risk our displeasure to save our soul. The flatterer risks nothing and saves nothing. He gives us a warm feeling now in exchange for a cold reckoning later. He is, if we are honest, less like a physician and more like a mortician who insists we are looking wonderfully well.

The sentiment sounds enlightened only because we have forgotten what enlightenment used to mean. In older ages, to be enlightened meant to see clearly, even when what one saw was terrible. It meant to trade the flickering torches of comfortable ignorance for the naked sun. Our age has inverted this so completely that we now call it "enlightened" to prefer the shadows, provided those shadows are cast by candles arranged in a pleasing pattern.

The Modern Machinery of Kind Cruelty

Political correctness, in its present form, has erected an entire civilization upon this inversion. It has taken as its foundational principle the notion that certain truths must not be spoken, not because they are false, but because they cause tears. Whole categories of reality are placed off-limits. Whole vocabularies of frank speech are outlawed. Whole classes of citizens are trained from childhood to prefer the pleasant deception to the difficult fact. And the strangest thing about this arrangement is that it announces itself, without embarrassment, as a form of compassion.

Here we stumble upon a paradox that would have delighted the old Greek playwrights, if only they were alive to weep at it. The very movement that promises to shield the tender-hearted from painful truths ends by producing the most anxious and unhappy generation in living memory. It turns out and no one seems to have predicted this, that a diet of soothing lies does not produce peaceful souls. It produces frantic ones. The child raised to believe that every performance is superb becomes the adult who cannot bear the mildest criticism. The society trained to hear only what pleases it becomes a society that cannot govern itself, cannot know itself, and cannot save itself.

This is the great and unadmitted tragedy of our time: that we have tried to build a kingdom of kindness out of the timber of dishonesty, and the whole structure is beginning to sway.

The Old and Terrible Kindness of Truth

Christ, who was so many things the modern world would prefer Him not to be, was above all things a truth-teller. He told the rich young ruler the one thing he did not want to hear. He told the woman at the well things about herself that made her drop her water jar. He called Peter "Satan" to his face when Peter tried to talk Him out of the Cross. He told the Pharisees, in language that would today get Him banned from every social platform ever devised, that they were whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones.

Now these are not the words of a man who preferred smile-inducing lies to tear-inducing truths. These are the words of a man who understood that tears, when they are the right tears, are among the most precious things a human being can produce. They are the tears that break open the hardened heart. They are the tears that wash the eyes clean enough to see. They are the tears of the prodigal at the pigsty, and without them there can be no journey home.

And it was this same Christ, this same relentless truth-teller, who gave us the promise that echoes through every honest soul in every age: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." He did not say, "You shall know the pleasing untruth, and it shall make you comfortable." He did not say, "You shall know the flattering version of reality, and it shall make you calm." He said the truth. And He said it because He knew what our age has forgotten, that the human being is not designed for comfort but for freedom, and that freedom is a strange and demanding gift that must always be received on truth's terms.

Why the Tear Is Trustworthy

There is something we ought to say plainly, for it is being lost in the great fog of soft speech: the truth that draws a tear is trustworthy precisely because it draws one. Tears, in the moral universe, are receipts. They are the body's honest testimony that something real has happened, that a wound has been touched, that a truth has landed exactly where it needed to land. To flinch from such a truth is to flinch from healing itself.

The physician does not congratulate the patient who cannot bear to hear his diagnosis. The general does not commend the soldier who prefers not to know where the enemy is. The father does not admire the son who refuses to be told that his path leads over a cliff. Yet we are being told, day after day, in a thousand gentle voices, that this is exactly what we ought to do, that we ought to shut our ears to unflattering realities, that we ought to speak in the polite dialects of self-deception, that we ought to prize the smile above the sight.

The Christian must reject this with the whole force of his being, and reject it not because he loves harshness, but precisely because he loves. It is counterfeit love that whispers sweet lies. Real love, the sort that hung upon a cross for the beloved, tells the truth even when the truth costs both the teller and the hearer everything.

The Freedom on the Far Side of Tears

Perhaps the strangest thing about the truth that draws a tear is what waits on the other side of it. For those who have followed a hard truth all the way through. Through the wince and the weeping and the wounded pride, often discover that they have arrived somewhere they could never have reached by the shorter road of comfortable lies. They discover freedom. Not the shallow freedom of doing whatever one likes, but the deep freedom of being who one is, before God, without pretense.

The alcoholic who finally hears the truth about himself weeps, and then walks free. The sinner who finally hears the truth about his sin weeps, and then walks free. The nation that finally hears the truth about its own state may weep bitterly indeed, but if it weeps rightly, it may yet walk free. This is the pattern woven into the very fabric of the Gospel, and it is a pattern the whole apparatus of political correctness cannot copy, cannot counterfeit, and cannot forgive. For if truth heals, then a system built on tender lies must ultimately produce a nation of the unhealed, walking about with smiles pinned to unaddressed wounds.

The Choice Before Us

So we are given, at last, a choice. The same choice offered to every generation, though ours has developed unusually sophisticated ways of pretending it does not exist. We may prefer the lie that brings a smile, and we may enjoy that smile for a season. But smiles built on lies are houses built on sand, and the storms of reality are not gentle when they come.

Or we may accept, with the courage of the ancients and the faith of the saints, the truth that draws a tear. We may permit ourselves to be told what we do not wish to hear. We may allow the Physician of souls to name our ailments plainly. And we may find, when the weeping is done, that we have been given a gift far greater than comfort, we have been given liberty. For the truth is not a thing that batters us; it is a thing that frees us. And the tears it draws are not the tears of despair, but of homecoming.

Let us be, then, the sort of people who can bear the sight of what is real. Let us be the sort of people who prefer one honest word to a thousand tender lies. Let us be the sort of people who know that the tear is often the truer companion than the smile, and that the free man is never the flattered one.

For in the end, the world offers us a soft slavery and calls it kindness. Christ offers us a stern truth and calls it freedom. And He is not wrong.

~The Seekers Quill