French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a US defamation lawsuit against an influencer and podcaster who has said France’s first lady “is in fact a man.” The 218-page lawsuit, filed in Delaware yesterday, accuses Candace Owens of publishing “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions,” among them the claim that Brigitte Macron was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux.
According to the court filing, Owens has also said that the French president and his wife are blood relatives and that Emmanuel Macron is a product of a CIA human experiment or a “similar government mind control program.” People have viewed Owens’s series, Becoming Brigitte, more than 2.3 million times on YouTube.
I, however, am not one of them.
Prior to seeing this story, I had no idea about these allegations. Now, because of the Macrons’ lawsuit, I know about Owens and her assertions on a level I assume the Macrons would wish I did not.
If they remained silent, however, their decision not to defend themselves could be interpreted as a lack of defense. And choosing not to hold their accuser accountable could only embolden and escalate such accusations.
This is the conundrum of digital media. The good news is that this issue leads to news that is good in a new way today.
The “tragedy of modern man” may surprise you
I am old enough to remember when publishing any content required a publisher who would employ fact-checkers and editors before publication.
Years ago, for example, I wrote a book on the most challenging intellectual issues of our day. Included were four chapters on what happens to those who never hear the gospel. My editor insisted on reducing these four chapters into one. This was frustrating for me because this was my book, but she understood her publishers’ audience and correctly knew that I had written more than they would care to read on the subject.
That was then, this is now. I could write anything in this article that I wish, since our ministry owns this platform and can produce what we choose to produce. We don’t do this, of course—my editor is brilliant not only at copy proofing and fact-checking but also at noting any content she finds questionable. And our mission is to provide biblical responses to cultural issues rather than personal commentary or partisan opinion, a calling to which our board holds us accountable.
But my point is that anyone with internet access can now produce content that others can read, hear, or see, no matter how truthful or untruthful it might be.
Artificial intelligence is already making this situation even worse. Because it collates and summarizes online content in answering queries, it depends on the algorithms and analytics with which it has been programmed. And since the ideological positions of many media companies are clearly progressive, AI-generated content often follows suit.
None of this would be what it is if our culture had not decided long before the advent of the internet that truth is itself personal and subjective. Now we have jettisoned not only objective truth but the quest for objective meaning that depends upon it.
As Os Guinness observed, “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”
God will lead us “where we should want to go”
All of this makes the authority of Scripture and the interpretive power of the Holy Spirit wonderful news in new ways.
For much of Christian history, truth was understood to be the product of the Catholic Church’s doctrines as they interpreted the Bible, church tradition, and papal statements. The Reformation narrowed the focus of truth to sola Scriptura (“only the Scriptures”) as our supreme authority and embraced the “priesthood of all believers” as the Spirit leads us to biblical truth.
Now, however, we have shifted from “all truth is God’s truth” to “all truth is your truth.”
Nothing could be more disorienting for humans and for society at large. No wonder anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide rates are so high while trust in our core institutions is so low. We have a cultural case of vestibular dysfunction whereby the central nervous system of society fails to process correctly the information of our lives, leaving us dizzy and confused.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. As C. S. Lewis noted, God will lead us “where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted.”
We can access the omniscient wisdom of Almighty God any time we read and obey his word in the leading and empowering of his Spirit. We can be transformed into the character of Jesus so completely that we manifest his holiness in our broken world (Romans 8:29). We can live the abundant life of Christ so fully that in every circumstance “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (John 10:10; Romans 8:37).
All of this is what God wants for every one of us. Holistic holiness and victorious Christian living constitute what Watchman Nee called the “normal Christian life.”
“The one marvelous secret of a holy life”
My fear is that you and I will settle for vestibular dysfunction as our cultural norm. Like a person whose vision gradually fails until their world dims without their conscious knowledge, we can shrug our spiritual shoulders at the sexual sin and moral confusion that pervades popular media and contemporary society.
This week, my wife and I watched a detective series on television in which the protagonist sleeps with the neighborhood lifeguard whenever she gets depressed. It bothered me when I realized that this did not bother me.
The English philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” This is true not just of our society but of our souls.
So, let’s settle for nothing less than the holistic holiness of Jesus in the transforming power of the Spirit. Our Lord was adamant: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63 NASB). When we yield to his sanctifying power, we experience what Oswald Chambers called “the one marvelous secret of a holy life,” which “lies not in imitating Jesus, but in letting the perfections of Jesus manifest themselves in my mortal flesh.”
If manifesting the “perfections of Jesus” in your life seems too high a goal, your goal is too low.
Quote for the day:
“Sanctification is not drawing from Jesus the power to be holy; it is drawing from Jesus the holiness that was manifested in him, and he manifests it in me. Sanctification is an impartation, not an imitation.” —Oswald Chambers
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