Danny Webster leads the Advocacy team for the UK Evangelical Alliance, which is focused on public policy work: working in the parliaments and the national governments across the United Kingdom. A major focus of the work is on policy and legislation, and seeking to represent evangelicals in that space; but also equipping evangelical Christians to be good news wherever they find themselves.

In 2017, the EA UK published a resource called “What kind of Society”, where you talk about four values: love, freedom, justice, truth. This last one caught my attention because of our new communications topic, “Liberating Truth”. What was the context for you to write this resource? 

That piece of work originated after the Brexit referendum, where we took a step back and said, what kind of society do we want, and how do we as Evangelical Christians want to be contributing? At a time when our country was asking itself all sorts of questions about what its place in the world was, we thought: we can offer some foundations from biblical truth that can provide a connection into society, and then we can help society in terms of how these values are outworked. These four ideas, ‘love, freedom, justice, and truth’, are deeply rooted in Christian scripture and teaching, but also commonly accepted in society, that are not too difficult to talk about.  

How do things stand since you wrote that resource? 

It is very much still relevant. On the truth value, most people would say they want truth to be a strong value in our society. I think that is a difficult thing for people to agree to, but what do we mean by that and how do we get there?  One of the key things that we wanted to bring into that conversation is the need for that truth to be grounded somewhere—that truth needs an anchor point. It isn’t just whatever someone says is true or what someone wants to be true. As Christians, we believe in truth as a founding principle, and we have an objective idea of what that means and then we can build on that. Otherwise, if we float around in a relativist culture, someone can say something is true, someone else can say something else is true, and who can decide who is telling the truth? 

At the time we wrote the resource, “post-truth” was starting to be talked about as a concept, this idea that, maybe truth is not so important anymore, or we have alternative facts, or ‘that is your version, this is mine, you can’t tell what to think’. In this context, being able to have something that we can stand on is important.  

“Both post-truth and fake news show our current awkward relationship with truth.” Could you comment on this quote taken from your resource? 

I think that awkward relationship is important to understand, because people both say they want truth, but then actually resist the idea that there is an objective truth. As Christians, we need to be ambassadors for truth. It is important that we  want to challenge a post-truth culture, but it is important that we don’t get stuck into fake news or conspiracy theories; that, actually, we are not the ones being casual with the truth. There is a really important role for Christians to take things seriously in what we are saying and sharing, particularly with social media, that we are seeking to understand the whole truth of a situation. Yes, we have the truth of the Bible, but, actually, when we talk about something that has happened, are we seeking to fully understand what is going on? Are we just presenting something that is favourable to us? To understand and present the whole truth of a situation — that is important for our integrity, for truth and integrity are very linked. 

In your resource, you also connect “truth” to “trust”, saying, “Because truth is not valued trust is undermined” & “Society wants truth but won’t trust.” If we want to walk back to a climate of truth, we need to do this from a context of trust, right? 

Yes, I think that is crucial. One of the places we see it most evidently lacking is in politics, and in people having no trust in politicians, but also more generally people in authority.  

I don’t think it is easy to rebuild trust. It certainly can’t happen quickly or overnight, it is a much longer work. How we start to rebuild it is often on a smaller level, a local level. Trust is often built in relationships and communities, and it is on the basis of that trust that people will then believe in what you say. That is the challenge for Christians in presenting truth: have we built the relationships? Are we trusted to speak the truth? 

Thinking about politics, it is challenging for a politician to build trust! 

Yes, and again it can happen individually, you can build relationships and trust with individual politicians, with individual people, and that is important. For politicians themselves, it is important that they seek to do that as well. One statistic that has been repeated multiple times is that people don’t trust politicians generally, but they do trust their local politician. So they know someone, or they know who they are, they have had some interaction and they say, yes, politicians generally are corrupt and in it for themselves, but my MP (Member of Parliament), he’s ok, because I know who that is. And that discrepancy we also see with church. People don’t like the church generally, but when you ask them about individual Christians they know, they have much warmer feelings towards them.  

Do you think this post-truth climate makes societies and people within the church more susceptible to ideologies and conspiracy theories? 

I think people are more susceptible to siloed ideas because of the massive diversification of media. People don’t all get their news from the same place. There are many benefits towards that, in terms of opportunities for people to speak freely in many contexts, but the risk is that people can have one idea about one thing, and now it gets linked into something else. And they can get their news and their information particularly from online sources without having that challenged by other sources. Christians need to be wary of that and ask critical questions. Whether it is mainstream news or social media, the same questions need to be asked: what are we assuming, how do we understand that, what agendas are in play?  

And what we have seen in the last 2-3 years, since Covid, is the tendency for ideas to get packaged. Say someone is sceptical and critical of one thing, and then it is latched onto something else, and often these things are not necessarily connected, but people get drawn into a political ecosystem where those ideas are brought together. And I think that is where it is not even ideological, sometimes there is an anti-government ideology there, but I think it gets drawn and people aren’t necessarily critical or scrutinising what they are hearing, what they are believing. 

Drawn into a specific ecosystem, we easily lose the bigger picture, lose the capacity to have conversations, and then just tend to react. 

Yes, something we have encountered is that people have become resistant to challenge: when people are presented with information that critiques what they believe, they become more resistant to it rather than accepting the critique. So how do you help and inform people in a way they don’t react against truth but actually are able to understand it and engage with it in a way that perhaps challenges some of the things they believe and think? 

Another concept I have come across recently talks about the “maximalisation of belief system”, where people go to an extreme. You don’t just think something, you believe it absolutely and very strongly so there becomes less of a middle ground, and I think that can be the case in terms of political, social and moral views. People have less nuanced opinions because there is less space for these nuanced positions, so you get pushed to the extreme, and that then drives conflict and that is the polarisation we often see in society, that people get put into their boxes, like ‘you are for this or against that’. People stay in their boxes because that is the place where they are allowed to believe the things that they believe.  

The challenge for Christians is, in a culture where Christian belief is challenged and is critiqued, the risk is that we stay in our box of things we are comfortable with and the places we are affirmed and encouraged in what we believe, rather than thinking to engage with people who think very differently. 

What do you think are the challenges that led us here? 

To understand our culture at the moment, we have started talking about the “currents” that exist beneath. If you see some of the waves lapping up on the shore, what are the currents that have led us there? The see three particular currents. First, secularisation and, not so much people not believing in God, but the fact that God is not necessary in society. Whereas before it was hard to function in public life without belief in God, it is sometimes hard to function now with belief in God.  

With the secularist trend has come an individualism, and that is something that as Christians, we need to reckon with as well. That we don’t adopt an individualist mentality, where the self is the most important thing. And the third, the tendency to deconstruct, to want to challenge authority. If we have removed God from the centre of the universe, if we have said the most important thing is the self, then actually, all sorts of authority are open to question.  

That then presents this culture where people believe what they want and can find reinforcement for what they believe. I think that is the other thing, that the decentralisation of media means that people can find someone who supports what they say. The challenge in most churches is, if someone comes into a congregation and says, well I think this and these people support me, how does the church leader respond to that? I think there is a role for church leaders in equipping congregations, but there is a role for individual Christians in having the tools to ask good questions.  

Where do you think we are heading as a society? 

I think the polarisation is problematic and the package politics that it leads to is problematic. So the shift local is significant in that people see far greater opportunities for transformation and having a role in society in a local level. Christians see the national level is difficult, it is hostile and challenging, and in the local they see something they can actually do. And I don’t think that is a bad thing, because it comes back to the relationships and the trust. It creates opportunities for Christians to build connections so that they can contribute to the good of their community but also to share the good news of the Gospel as well. I think it is only by building this up that you can challenge the bigger problems, because otherwise, the church just becomes another voice into the debate, and the risk is the church ends up adopting some of the tactics in order to be heard. There is an important place for church to have a confident voice into culture, it needs to be a confident voice that is also alert to what is going on, that isn’t just seeking to capitalise on a cultural trend.  

How can we live out truth today? 

I think it is through a commitment to truth and integrity, so that we are seen to be living out what we believe. I think truth doesn’t hide, so I think there is a role for the Christian just to be open, especially on a local context, saying this is what we believe and this is what we do, so that we don’t create the sacred-secular divide in what we do, because I think often the church can be guilty of that. So when we are seeking to serve the community, whether through practical action, ministries of mercy, or campaigning against injustice, that we are not distant from what we believe, that we are clear about why we do what we do, and I think actually that then provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate the truth that we believe in, that it does have an impact .  

And that commitment to integrity can pay off, but it is not quick fix solution, and I think Christians need to resist quick-fix solutions, but be committed to the long haul, and that long haul is often rooted in a local community and a local church.