In ‘post-truth’ politics, how can we distinguish truth from falsehood?

Politicians lie; that is nothing new. But politicians seem to lie today more than ever before.

With the country divided along party lines, we can’t even agree on the facts, leaving no room for consensus. To cite just one example, CNN aired a special report Nov. 24 hosted by Jake Tapper called “All the President’s Lies.” Laura Ingraham followed Dec. 5 on her Fox show, The Ingraham Angle, with a commentary about the impeachment inquiry called “All the Democrats’ Lies.”

If, to quote John 8:32, “the truth will set you free,” Americans seem stuck in a maze of falsehoods. If Christians don’t know which way to turn in search of truth, there are a few basic principles we can use as a guide. 

But before considering them, we need to understand the cultural forces at work in this election year.

An era of factual relativism

Facts, even when not in dispute, and numbers have lost much of their power to persuade.

The trend has become so pronounced that the Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year. It’s an adjective meaning “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The word is often used in the phrase “post-truth politics.”

Our public square has entered an era of factual relativism, where traditionally impartial sources of information have become suspect, at least in some quarters.

“Journalists, judges, experts, and various other ‘elites’ are under fire today,” Dr. William Davies wrote in Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason. “Fewer and fewer people believe they are independent. Their capacity to reflect the truth in a neutral fashion, whether as scientists, professionals, journalists or policy advisers, is now attacked on the grounds that it is more self-interested and emotional than the protagonists are willing to let on.”

A study last…