Real Wisdom and the Big Lie

By Jessica Greer

From The New York Times to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to AOC’s hysterical recount of her Capitol experience during the insurrection from across the street, The Big Lie has become a favored leftist buzz phrase to refer to Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was riddled with discrepancies and irregularities.

As election results were released, an already divided country erupted almost on cue, each side blaming the other for either a rigged election or a lie about a stolen election that threatened to further destabilize the democracy.

As the mainstream media printed, repeated, and sloganized The Big Lie, they seized on it as a tangible hook for their direct comparison between Donald Trump and Hitler.

This historical reference is to Hitler’s propaganda strategy to lie about the Jews with the goal of dehumanizing them as citizens. In March 2019, Republican representative Mo Brooks used the phrase to refer to the Democrats’ claim that the 2016 election was illegitimate due to collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign.

After a 32-million-dollar investigation by Robert Mueller, those claims came back “unverified,” but Representative Brooks was still scorned for his use of the term The Big Lie in accusing the mainstream liberal media of perpetuating fabricated narratives about the Trump administration.

The Huffington Post wrote: “Republican Mo Brooks of Alabama accuses Democrats of using Big Lie propaganda. Hitler had accused the Jews of employing that tactic.”

CNN reported: “The Big Lie is a reference to the anti-Semitic accusation, propagated by Hitler, that German Jews blamed an anti-Semitic German general for the nation’s loss in World War I.”

Hitler’s initial propagation of The Big Lie took the form of accusing the enemy of telling such a colossal, traitorous lie that it brought justifiable suspicion upon the Jews and projected the telling of falsehoods upon their very nature. It was the assertion that your political and social enemies told a Big Lie.

Now that it has been hijacked, the left will continue to use Big Lie propaganda until every Millennial and GenZ-er reposts Mein Kampf-isms as part of their regular Instagram content.

When studying the rise of despotism and totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century, the fundamental question will inevitably arise: How could so many people choose a dictator?! Whether radical Bolsheviks supporting the complete destruction of Russian society, Fascist students fighting to empower Mussolini, or Germans embracing a deep hatred; there is the tendency to separate ourselves from those in the past – to judge them in retrospect; to create such a distance between their humanity and ours that we feel like students at a zoo trying to analyze an unfamiliar animal.

If there is anything a student of history should be disturbed by, it is the complete commonality of our human nature that seeks to justify the hegemony of our cultures.

Historians often ask three questions: 1. How did these regimes gain power? 2. How did they consolidate power? 3. How did they maintain power? These queries arise from our need to expose the processes by which humans allow evil to gain such a foothold that they themselves become enslaved to the very system they once initiated.

We would do well to ask the same questions about the demonic strongholds which threaten our own lives.

How does the devil gain power over us, commandeering our own will power so that we are too weak to fight back, and maintaining that power over us until our lives end in eternal damnation?

One imperative for the Christian is to remain aware of our enemy and knowledgeable about his nature. The Bible warns us with repeated descriptions of demonic strategies and the devil’s nature.

It warns us that Satan is a deceiver: “But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3).

It warns us that he is a liar: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

The devil hides his lies by manipulating our thoughts and our interpretations of the conditional world to lure us into a trap resulting in death. No right-minded person would voluntarily step into destruction, into death, into torture, into tragedy, into depression, into shame. They must be tempted into it.

“Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand” (Ephesians 6:13).

As the cultural norms have shifted into a secular and humanistic philosophy, one of the greatest depictions of the age is that the moral code has been updated for a more optimized Twenty-first Century experience.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s the Baby Boomers basked in rejecting traditional values. Westernized Christian morality was scoffed at. The Establishment, which represented the entirety of all traditional conventions, was iconoclastically attacked by the pop culture in literature, fashion, politics, and all aspects of the sexual revolution. It was not a campaign to fight for truth and the moral good; it was quite the opposite.

Yet, sixty years later, the doublespeak language that appeals to this culture has morphed from Down with the Establishment to Fight for the Soul of the Nation – and the outright belief that good is evil and evil is good.

Satan, the great deceiver, has not simply enticed sinners to pursue evil and justify their appetites. He has convinced many that the tolerance of any form of godly truth requires a culture of hatred regarding one’s fellow citizens.

The hatred requires the demonizing of a neighbor for oppositional narratives that are labeled bigotry and which must be eliminated in order to achieve a more egalitarian society. The delusion is that it is for the moral good to embrace a culture of hatred, silencing, and the outright persecution of Bible-believing Christians.

The Bible also describes Satan as an accuser. “Then Satan answered the Lord and said, ‘Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land’” (Job 1:9-10).

In Revelation 12:10 it says, “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.”

The devil’s accusations are calculated attempts to detour believers from living righteously in Christ, by continuously condemning them before God. Throughout history, there has been a demonic pattern of false accusations that seek to demonize God’s chosen people so that they become targets of animosity and socially acceptable hatred. This is true not only of the Jews but also of Christians.

Tacitus describes the persecution of the early church at Rome: “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called ‘Christians’ by the populace.”

In Matthew 10:16 Jesus tells us, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

The schemes of Satan never change. He is the Deceiver and Accuser. As Christians, we must be wise and diligent to contend for a faith that is biblically aligned, so that we can recognize demonic temptations, lies, and condemnation.

Today’s cultural Big Lie is that we are not reconciled to Christ. The pseudo-moral movements of our age despise repentance as unnecessary in a changing society. Political persuasions justify abominations before God that result in the annihilation of humanity as the pursuit of justice, and contend that only hatred for truth could accuse it of being lies.

A Bible-believing Christian who contends for the faith has been entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation. “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18).

Satan wants humanity to believe that we have the power within ourselves to mend injustices. He wants to deceive us into believing that we only have to fight what we can see: flesh and blood. He wants to accuse us of not being reconciled to Christ and make the case that we are therefore condemned to striving for an arbitrary moral ruler.

The truth is that there are no human solutions for spiritual ailments.

The strategy of the devil (the prince of this age) is to morally confuse and corrupt our minds, bringing condemnation for our failures rather than conviction leading to repentance. His end game is to separate us from the truth, power, and dominion that reside inside us. Jesus said, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7).

In order to contend for our faith, we must remain in Him so that we do not lose our grasp on God’s Truth and thereby become susceptible to The Big Lie.