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| Series Theme: "Culture Wars" |
| Chapter 10: Warfare Strategy (1) – Emotional Distortion
CONTENTS
Focus Fact & Fiction at the Fall Emotions of the Mob Emotions versus Truth Today More from the Bible The Power of Emotions in Warfare
PART 4.2: Modern Using Emotions to sweep truth away Recent Emotions George Floyd Regular Shootings Context Sarah Everard Conflict & Criticism The Truth Why?
PART 4.3: Calling on the Expert The Question: Public Perception (1) – A Racist Murder Public Perception (2) – Much More than just a Racist Murder Public Perception (3) – Gross Misconceptions Public Perception (4) – The cause & the trigger Public Perception (5) – Snowballing effect Public Perception (6) – The Truth
Introduction: Examining culture wars requires us to consider the strategies being used, in order to expose and refute the work of the enemy more clearly. We start with the use of emotions.
PART 4.1: Emotional Distortion
Focus: Starting to identify the strategies the enemy uses, we observe how manipulated emotions appear in the Bible – and today – to distort the truth.
Fact & Fiction at the Fall: In that instance, recorded in Genesis 3, Satan not only challenged the truth but also appealed to Eve about how she might feel if she did her own thing. Let's eyeball those two things – challenging the truth and appealing to emotions.
Satan's challenge no.1: “He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?” (v.1) i.e., he challenges the truth of what God has said. The woman responds rightly. Her only mistake so far is entering into a conversation with a liar and deceiver.
Satan's challenge no.2: “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (v.4,5) There is a subtle appeal to her emotions here. This is rarely picked up, but he is appealing to her sense of being, of identity, which invariably, is linked to our emotions. Eat this, he is saying, and you'll just be like God with great understanding (and feel good!). The first seeds for pride to grow.
Mt 27:20,23,24 “the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd … they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting.”
Emotions of the Mob: The three verses above take us to the time when Christ has been arrested and taken before Pilate, and the mob, stirred up by the religious leaders (!!!!), bay for Jesus' blood. Truth has been thrown out the window for we see, “the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd.” (Mt 27:20) Mark records, “the chief priests stirred up the crowd.” (Mk 15:11). Luke simply records three times that the crowd ‘shouted' at Pilate (Lk 23:18,21,23). John puts the onus firmly on the chief priests and officials (Jn 19:6,7,12,15). Religion killed the Son of God by overcoming truth with emotions.
Emotions versus Truth Today: Emotions – feelings – have been playing an increasingly important part in today's Western world: • A young man may say, “I've always felt I was a woman.” What is the truth of that? • A coloured person may say, “I feel a victim.” What is the truth of that? • A teenage girl might say, “I feel more comfortable with other girls.” What is the truth about that? • A gay young person might say, “I feel hurt if you suggest it is just a phase.” What is the truth about that? • Students at university might say, “We feel hurt by the views of this potential speaker, so they shouldn't be allowed to come here and speak.” What is the truth about that? • Someone might say, “I feel hurt by the views you Christians espouse.” What is the truth about that? All these things HAVE been said. Beliefs used to produce feelings but today, it seems, feelings drive beliefs – or so it is said.
More from the Bible: The Bible gives us various illustrations of distorted truth, often distorted by emotions: The crowds baying for Jesus to be crucified ( Jn 19:6,15) , we've just seen, driven by the agenda of the religious authorities. Then there is Absalom winning people over to ‘vote for me as king' (2 Sam 15), Jezebel plotting to get a vineyard for her sulking husband ( 1 Kings 21:9-14) , Elisha's servant where greed allowed him to lie to the prophet (2 Kings 5:20), all examples of where wrong thinking stoked the fires of wrong emotion that led to lives being taken down! Very bad, very unhealthy, very common.
The Power of Emotions in Warfare: Perhaps we fail to observe just how much emotions are used by the enemy while at the same time so often shutting out the truth. So for example, in the early days of the church, after Peter & John had healed a man and then preached to the people, we find, “The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees…. were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus.” (Acts 4:1,2) Later, when the apostles are getting known for performing signs and wonders, we read, “Then the high priest and all his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy,” and “they were furious.” (Acts 5:17,33) Subsequently it was Gamaliel who calmed their emotions with truth and logic (Acts 5:34-40)
Thus we see the enemy uses and manipulates emotions to cast aside the truth and make people act unrighteously.
PART 4.2: Modern Using Emotions to sweep truth away
Recent Emotions: As examples of outpoured emotions, we need look no further than two deaths that gained notoriety, one in 2020, the other in 2021. I am using these two examples – both murders, both utterly wrong – here in this context to observe the emotions that were engendered by these two wrongs. So, two murders. Please, again, these were terrible wrongs and there is no excusing them, but the truth is that they were both examples of similar terrible things that happen regularly in western so-called ‘civilization'. So why, suddenly, all the emotion? A boiling point caused by what?
George Floyd: The 2020 case was the notorious killing of 46-year-old, coloured, George Floyd, who was arrested in May 2020 on suspicion of having passed a fake $20 note in a Minneapolis shop. They handcuffed him and instead of bundling him into a police vehicle, pinned him to the ground in the street and one officer (white) then knelt on the back of Floyd's neck for over nine minutes, killing him. One of the other officers also happened to be black. The scene, filmed and uploaded by a young woman, went viral and hundreds of thousands of people poured onto streets across the country and overseas to demand an end to racism and police brutality. Police killing a black man has happened more than once!
Regular Shootings Context: The truth? The London Times records of the USA, “Police shot and killed a record 1,055 people last year despite the nationwide protests after a series of high-profile deaths at the hands of law enforcement…. The overwhelming majority of those shot and killed by police (85 per cent) were armed. About 16 per cent were killed during a police response to a domestic disturbance call, while 14 per cent had known mental health issues.” (Times Feb 22) Recording these large numbers is not to excuse Floyd's killing, merely to highlight the torrent of emotional anger it released, but why then?
Sarah Everard: In March 2021 Sarah Everard was taken off the street while out walking in the UK and murdered in private by a man who happened to be a serving Metropolitan police officer. The emotional outpouring following this brought about a vigil by large numbers of (predominantly) women, despite it being against the prevailing law about the Covid lockdown. In passing we note, one representative declared, “These were women protesting against gender-based violence.” Why suddenly now?
Conflict & Criticism: The police moved in and, despite encountering resistance in some, sought to stop the vigil. The result? A pouring out of anguish over one murder, largely because the victim was a woman, partly because the perpetrator was a police man and partly, one suspects, because the pent-up emotions of Covid lockdowns were just waiting to break loose. (No doubt there was more even than that to it.) The emotional torrent then focused on the police who came in for much criticism for their handling of the difficult crowd. Such were the emotions that it required an official investigation.
The Truth: The truth? No doubt to the chagrin of those who were seeking to capitalize on the emotions, the official report came up with the following: “Condemnation of the Met's actions within hours of the vigil — including from people in positions of responsibility — was unwarranted, showed a lack of respect for public servants facing a complex situation, and undermined public confidence in policing based on very limited evidence. After reviewing a huge body of evidence — rather than a snapshot on social media — we found that there are some things the Met could have done better, but we saw nothing to suggest police officers acted in anything but a measured and proportionate way in challenging circumstances.”
The Times also reported, “One female officer's recorded statement said she was approached by multiple women who said they wanted her to be raped while one told her that “I hope you get murdered and that your face is all over the news once you've been murdered”. The officer was shocked but commented “women, who were protesting to end violence against women, were then wishing severe/fatal harm come to other women”.
Emotions running loose.
Why? The reasons, as I suggested above, may be many and varied but ultimately this was emotion poured out against injustices that had not been properly addressed, but that never justifies distorting truth. Our role is to seek to find truth in this fallen world. In both the above two cases of ‘righteous anger' overflowing, emotions boiled over in ways rarely seen before. The negative aspect of that – and this is the crucial point – is that the emotions overran any possibility of rational consideration of what was really the truth, and that is where many, including many church leaders, fell before the culture invaders!
PART 4.3: Calling on the Expert
The Question: Several times in the above notes we have asked the question about the emotions stirred up about the two killings in 2020 & 2021 - Why? Initially the answers may not have been very clear and so we have resorted to Douglas Murray's 2022 book , “The War on the West” and especially on his 52 page chapter simply titled ‘Race'. Obviously there is too much there to quote but in the light of the subject matter of this page, and his investigations, we will simply refer to a few of his comments surrounding the George Floyd murder (and I have reformatted it for clarity).
Public Perception (1) – A Racist Murder: Let's first take his comments about how the murder was seen first of all: “In the days, weeks, and the months after that terrible event, there was barely an organ or an individual in America or the wider world that did not interpret the appalling video of that death through a single lens. That a white policeman was caught on camera killing a black man and that this was a racist killing.”
Public Perception (2) – Much More than just a Racist Murder: He explains what then happened:
Not content with that explanation, everything about this interpretation was then extrapolated outward. - This was not just an individual racist killing. It was a racist killing that told us about the nature of racist policy policing in America. - From there it went out again. We learned that this racist policing was just one aspect of a wider racist society. - And from there that not just America but all white dominated societies (and societies in which white people simply had a presence) were somehow revealed in that moment. - The interpretation that was popularised across the globe was that what happened to George Floyd told us about a routine injustice. It claimed that black lives were able to be stolen with impunity in modern America and that this was because America and the wider West, was institutionally racist, white supremacist, and otherwise guilty of a no-longer-avoidable bigotry. Public Perception (3) – Gross Misconceptions: Checking what the American population thought about black deaths at the hands of the police, he notes:
Actual public understanding of the issue turned out to be wildly, provably, out of sync with reality. For instant, when US citizens were polled and asked how many unarmed black Americans they believed had been shot by police in 2019, the numbers were off by several orders of magnitude. - 22% of people who identified as ‘very liberal' said they thought the police shot at least 10,000 unarmed black men in a year. - Among self-identified liberals, fully 40% thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. - The actual figure was somewhere around 10. By proportion of the population, unarmed black Americans were slightly more likely to be shot by the police then unarmed white Americans. But as figures compiled by the Washington Post Police Shootings Database confirm, in the years before the death of George Floyd, more police officers were killed by black Americans than unarmed black Americans were killed by the police.
Public Perception (4) – The cause & the trigger: He concludes this part by observing the polls but nevertheless the activists used the public perceptions to trigger the emotional outpouring:.
Almost none of this cut through. But the polls seemed to suggest that increased reporting on this issue in the 2010s may have had the inadvertent effect of causing Americans to imagine that the problem of deadly interactions between unarmed black men and police was exponentially worse than before. Whatever the realities of race in America, a group of divisive activists were ready for this moment, with their pre-planned theories, phrases, claims and demands about eradicated hidden racism. And they got very busy indeed.
Public Perception (5) – Snowballing effect: After noting the variety of people who jumped on this guilt bandwagon – from sportsmen, politicians etc. ‘taking the knee' and a variety of others starting writing disclaimers in magazines, he noted the following: It was a moment when silence in the face of ‘racism' was deemed to be violence. A moment when actual violence was excused as a form of legitimate political speech. A moment an academic could blithely declare that “the state of black America as a whole is probably worse than it was 50 years ago.” It was at this moment, in the days after Floyd's death, that concepts such as ‘white privilege' split out from the fringes of academia, where they had been incubated, and flooded through every part of Society.
Public Perception (6) – The Truth: This was followed by, So it is worth pointing out a potentially unpopular but nevertheless crucial fact about this origin story. Which is that there is still no evidence that the murder of George Floyd was a racist murder. At the trial of Derek Chauvin, no evidence was produced to suggest it was a racist murder. If there had been any such evidence that Chauvin harboured deep animus against black Americans and set out that may morning hoping to murder a black person, then the prosecution chose to make no such evidence available at Chauvin's trial. In fact there is good evidence to suggest that no racial element existed at all.
He continued in the following pages to show how similar police heavy-handed murders occurred but simply because of abuse of power, not racism. The emotional outpouring had been spurred on by the prior working of activists in academia – and we, the gullible public, ever-ready to accept blame and guilt, went along with this emotional outpouring. We did not, at the time, bother to check the facts. We will see more of this sort of thing when we dedicate several chapters to racism later on.
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