Discernment Now
The internet has made it both easier and more difficult to find facts but we can still know what is true, so long as we do a little digging. Here’s how we can apply that thinking to the 2020 election results.
“I am aware of my tendency to divide people into good ones and evil ones, as if I could see into peoples’ hearts and know for sure why they act the way they do … Discernment is not about judging other peoples’ motives. It’s about distinguishing good guidance from harmful messages.”
— Henri Nouwen
Henri Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, professor and writer. The passage above is from Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life, a collection of writings collected by Nouwen’s students following his death in 1996.
Growing up in a Christian community I read many books by Christian authors. Henri Nouwen was a favorite. His writing transcended what too often seemed like an echo chamber of Christians writing for other Christians. Nouwen’s messages could inspire anyone, I thought, regardless of their religious or non-religious upbringing.
Discernment is needed today more than ever.
Many folks in my community feel like they can’t actually know what’s true anymore. That there’s too much information (and misinformation) to sift through. It can certainly feel overwhelming.
But we can still know things to be true.
The internet has created anything but a scarcity of information and this only means we must be even more diligent about finding facts and distinguishing good guidance from harmful messages.
President Trump and other Republican leaders have continued their attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election, now, two weeks since the Associated Press named Joe Biden the president-elect. Many of Trump’s supporters believe there was a far-reaching plot spearheaded by Democrats to steal the election. This theory was posited today by Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, though none of Trump’s actual lawsuits allege such a conspiracy.
Let’s discern whether this is good guidance or a harmful message.
It is possible that Trump and company have actual evidence of coordinated, widespread voting fraud efforts. They are within their rights to bring this to the courts and anyone who believes in democracy would have to accept such evidence. It would be a hard pill to swallow; that the 2020 election, which was touted as “the most secure in American history” by a coalition of federal and state officials within the Department of Homeland Security, was stolen by a cadre of Democrats so sneaky that only the president himself is privy to the evidence of their guilt.
What is becoming clear, however, is that there is no evidence of a widespread conspiracy.
In Georgia, where Biden held a narrow lead, just 14,000 votes, a hand recount of the more than 5 million ballots cast in the state revealed a few thousand votes had not been tallied across four counties. Sounds suspect, right? Not so fast. According to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, the missing or unscanned votes were simply the result of human error. The technology itself, according to Raffensberger, worked exactly as it was intended. Furthermore, the corrected vote totals did not affect the outcome. Biden won the state by 12,000 votes instead of 14,000.
Raffensberger — in his own words a “Conservative Christian Republican” — is asking all of us to trust and respect the election process, at least in Georgia.
He also has some advice for us as we discern whether those who are attacking the election results are offering good guidance or harmful messages:
“They say that as pressure builds, it reveals your character, it doesn’t change your character. Some people aren’t behaving too well with seeing where the results are [in Georgia].”
It is right to be skeptical of our leaders and our processes, of course. We’d be foolish to believe that those in power aren’t capable of lies and manipulation. We just need to take a hard look at who is doing the lying and manipulating.
Discernment now, folks.
