On Trials and Truth, Part I

J.K. Rowling, Megan Phelps-Roper, Peter, Pilate, and us

Trials are fascinating, but not so much when they involve us. Image from Pexels.

I love stories about trials. I got into John Grisham in high school, reading his legal thrillers like The Rainmaker, The Pelican Brief, and A Time to Kill fast and furiously, and usually rereading them. The appeal had to do, as with most things, with a combination of winning factors: vivid, often hilarious characters; truly surprising plot developments; and for me, the careful unfolding of a story-within-a-story—essentially, how a well-written novel contained the deliberate, intricate revealing of a courtroom narrative. I loved the legal citations, the relevant events that intertwined with the characters’ foibles, the exhaustive research (of course, the stories could never fully illuminate what hours and even weeks of dusty-basement legal library research prior to computer databases used to be like). Mostly, I loved the tenacious construction of the legal stories that made the bigger stories.   

I still read Grisham, but there are other variations on storytelling and trials in 2023. You may have heard of the audio documentary, or podcast, receiving media attention and commentary lately called The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. It’s a different kind of story about a different kind of trial than the typical courtroom setting. Rowling is the author of the acclaimed Harry Potter series, which first began to be published in the late 1990s. Since then, Rowling has become one of the most famous people in our world. As Megan Phelps-Roper, the brain behind the series wrote with no little irony (I’ll get to that later):

J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God. And Harry Potter was a kind of bible for my generation. Since its publication beginning in the late ’90s, the series has taught tens of millions of children about virtues like loyalty, courage, and love—about the inclusion of outsiders and the celebration of difference. The books illustrated the idea of moral complexity, how a person who may at first appear sinister can turn out to be a hero after all.

As Rowling’s books gained astronomical popularity, so did Rowling herself. Her humble background only increased the public’s respect and devotion. “A broke, abused, and depressed single mother—writing in longhand at cafes across Edinburgh while her baby girl slept in a stroller beside her—she had spun a tale that begat a global phenomenon. If Harry Potter was a bible, then Rowling became a kind of saint.”

Rowling’s books have sold over 500 million copies. Beyond their incredible publishing records alone, Potter has achieved the pinnacle of postmodern success: the series spawned hugely popular movies. Rowling was honored by the British government, spoke at a Harvard commencement, and appeared on numerous “most powerful” lists. Rowling had made it. She’d attained the hallmarks of worldly success. She was a worldwide darling.

That came to abrupt end in 2020.

It started, as controversies seem to in the twenty-first century, on Twitter. Quoting a headline, Rowling mused: “‘People who menstruate’ … I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

She went on. “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

The backlash was immediate and, in some quarters, positively volcanic. Howling, unequivocal denunciations of both Rowling herself and the positions she espoused exploded across the web and media. Now, nearly three years later, Rowling is still damned by many of her former fans, judged guilty of wrongthink and therefore worthy to be cancelled and erased. She’s been banned from her own fan sites, her books have been torn apart and burned, and she and her family have received death threats.

I heart you? A Trans Pride protest march in England (Source)

I’ve listened to the seven episodes of the podcast (there’s an epilogue that will come out in the near future). The title itself sets the background for the conversation. Most of us have heard of historic witch trials, especially those stemming from legitimate Christian fears about Satanic forces that morphed into fear-driven violence and death. They’re essentially religious social contagion gone mad. The parallels to today, particularly Rowling’s experience, are hard to miss. But the reference to God isn’t a little ironic; Rowling admitted way back in 2007 that Harry Potter was a fairly obvious Christian allegory, but she herself struggled with her faith, though she attended a Christian church (I don’t know if she still does).

Though I initially started listening because I wanted to hear Rowling speak to the controversy surrounding her comments, I’ve ultimately become more interested in the woman who developed the series and was able to connect with Rowling. In particular, I’m left wondering less about the rich author who is on trial and more about what truth, exactly, Megan Phelps-Roper is seeking.

Phelps-Roper brings highly relevant personal experience to Witch Trials. She grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church, a marginally Calvinist Christian church founded by her grandfather. Westboro is known, among other things, for making unapologetically rude and hateful comments in public protests, like “God hates fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers.” Until her 20s, Phelps-Roper was totally convinced that her beliefs, and those of her family and church, were true and right. “I spent my days on the receiving end of a tidal wave of hatred and disgust, as I happily warned the world that they were bound for Hell if they didn’t change their ways,” she wrote. Many of her relatives, including her mother, were lawyers, and they spent time and effort shoring up their positions with Biblical proofs. The WBC members were hardly the kind of uneducated rubes that we normally associate with such crass confession and behavior. But Phelps-Roper learned that regardless of intellect or training, even of how deliberately and seemingly conscientiously she studied and argued, the beliefs she long shared could be completely wrong.

---

The ultimate question posed in The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling has to do with truth. What is it? How can we know it? What reassurance can truth provide us? And this week, of all weeks of the church year, we faithful Christians think on the same things.

“What is truth?” Pilate asks Jesus. The prisoner before the judge has likewise been a darling, just coming off of a triumphal entry in Jerusalem among cheering crowds waving palms just a few days before. He is heading toward the worst temporal end of his trial: vicious condemnation and a tortuous, bloody death. Truth ties us to reality, to what is actual, both the tangible and the spiritual. Pilate could know the truth, but he misses or purposely ignores opportunities to do so.  The Gentile governor dismisses his wife’s trepidations about Jesus based on her dream about Him. Pilate questions Jesus himself, and he obviously struggles with the quandary of what to do with Him. But he doesn’t stop to listen when Truth in its incarnate form stands before him.

Andrea Schiavone’s “Christ Before Pilate.” Wikimedia Commons.

And then there’s Peter. Peter knows the Truth and promises to stay by Jesus even unto prison and death. But after he witnesses Jesus’ arrest and stays close to where Jesus goes on trial, Peter becomes afraid of being tied to the Accused. When asked directly if he was with Jesus, Peter denies even knowing Him, not once or twice, but three times, just as Jesus had foretold. There’s that terrible moment in Luke, when after Peter’s third denial, “the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord… [and Peter] went out and wept bitterly.”

We understand both Pilate and Peter’s responses because we’re guilty of both. When trials happen, the weeds of life can choke us. Like Pilate, we fixate on temporal juggling of political factions, practical logistics, and our own social positions rather than on truth. When the Jews threaten Pilate by pitting Jesus against Rome—”If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar”—Pilate ultimately folds. Like Peter, even when we have confessed that Jesus is the Christ, we fear worldly fallout for admitting it. We’re afraid of losing our reputations or our freedoms, even our livelihoods or lives. So we are silent when we should speak, or we actively deny what we know to be true in an effort to protect ourselves from the world. All of these responses, these confessions both active and passive, reject the truth.  

People actually need to believe in something beyond themselves. Our souls yearn for an existential resting place. When we reject Jesus, for any reason, we simultaneously embrace a lie. He said so:

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

The Devil, the Father of Lies, revels in the voids of our ignorance and rejection of God. And he loves when we are afraid.

Phelps-Roper knows the power of fear. She writes at the end of her introduction to Witch Trials:

Regardless of where they stood on the issues, many of the people I spoke with expressed similar concerns about going on the record: the waves of personal attacks that seem to come for anyone who speaks up; the fear that listeners would take them out of context; that they would lose their friends, family, career, safety; that their reputations would be destroyed.

All people, those who know the truth and those who don’t, fall prey to fear. I came away from the series thinking that Phelps-Roper herself is understandably afraid to commit to absolute statements about the world; that is, to an objective truth. She’s been, in her own words, a “zealous believer” who was wrong, and she doesn’t want to make the same mistake again. She now knows one extreme very well: a rigid belief that denies any complexity, or better explained, any mercy. This is a real untruth, and it is a lie that masquerades as truth.

Our culture abhors clear confession. Blame it on viewpoint selectivity, the focus on the awful way humans have treated other humans in the past in the name of truth, or blame it on myopic fear about being wrong, or blame it on the rise of historical criticism during the Renaissance (some further point to the Reformation as the origin, but that’s a discussion for another time and place). Nevertheless, we need clear confession, because we need the truth. If God is not our God, then the Devil is.

We don’t like this kind of absolute statement, even we Christians. We like to think there are soft edges and gray areas in our battleground world, which is torn between good and evil. But either the world is in a spiritual war, and objective truth is the difference between spiritual life and death, or the world is not, and everything goes. This is mistaking subjective truth for objective—what we personally prefer becomes the truth that everyone must confess. We’ve seen how this has played out. Even the most ardent believers of “you do you” become raging zealots, condemning others who don’t worship certain “yous” with unconditional enthusiasm and—this is key—very public proclamation. It’s not hard to see the parallels between bygone literal witch trials and what’s happening now.

It's also not hard to understand our underlying search for truth as a kind of trial itself of what is real and what is not, on what we should stand and on what we should reject. Christians believe absolute truths about God. We confess with the universal, or small-c catholic, church these beliefs in in the three ecumenical creeds. Understanding God makes us understand ourselves and our world. We are at peace in the midst of our brokenness. There’s an entire field of study in Christianity that approaches confessing our faith to others as a kind of methodical presentation, not unlike evidence given in a trial. It’s called apologetics, and another book I first read in high school that I loved was Craig Parton’s The Defense Never Rests, written by—not surprisingly—a Lutheran lawyer giving a Christian apologetic.

As Parton and many others have noted, the confession of this objective Christian Truth should not manifest itself in expressions of fear that lead to coercion. We understand the world as a place irrevocably marked by sin, and we are sinners in it. We know that absent regular gathering around the Word which is Truth, absent deliberate study of Scripture and long-tested and clear expositions of the Word of God in the Lutheran Confessions, we will fall prey to ultimately rejecting the truth. When the wilderness scares us, we will drift into worshipping the golden calf, or stand idly by out of fear. And as we’ve seen, fear itself can become an idol.

But Phelps-Roper’s desire to avoid confessing lies is potentially leading her into the opposite ditch from the one she has known. By fearing to make another clear confession, she mistakes pursuing truth for the truth itself. Her mistake is an allowance for all voices and words to somehow babble toward the truth, a kind of conversational mercy that denies rigid belief. Here are her words:

I remain a believer in the power of conversation. The ones I had for this series challenged my assumptions and showed me that this conflict is even more complex than I had imagined. I don’t pretend to have answers to the deep questions at the heart of this series. But I’m more persuaded than ever that talking—and listening—will help us find the path forward.

Neither rigid belief without mercy, or mercy without clear confession, leave people with the truth. Conversation is certainly powerful, and real listening needs to happen between good-faith participants. But it is not definitive. Phelps-Roper needs caution, certainly, and a good measure of self-doubt that stems from a realization of her own sinfulness. She also needs discernment, and not just based on a series of thoughtful but thoroughly self-generated questions (she discusses these with Rowling in the seventh episode, appropriately titled, “What If You’re Wrong?”). Phelps-Roper knows that not all words are true. But she doesn’t seem to know, or to be willing to admit, what words actually are true. This is yet another iteration of the temptation in the garden: whose words do we believe? Are any words the answer for us? Did God really say what He said?

The Devil likes to converse, too. Part of Girolamo Macchietti’s “The Temptation of Adam and Eve.” Wikimedia Commons.

The devil wants us all to fall into one of two ditches. He wants us to have full confidence in ourselves, making ourselves idols, or he wants us to have full doubt in ourselves, which leads us to despair. Both ditches leave us without Jesus.

This brings us back to Holy Week, and Jesus before Pilate, and Him looking at Peter.

The fact is that we people will be wrong, sometimes awfully so, no matter our best efforts. So when we act like Pilate, waffling before the Truth, and ultimately going our own way, or like Peter, knowing full well who Jesus is but denying Him when we are faced with potential danger, we are dead in our sins and only deserve hell.

But we are not left there. The one Person who never swerved from the Truth, from taking on our sin and bearing it, is the One who confessed before Pilate and taught Peter—over and over again. When they feared, He didn’t. When they stewed and hesitated, He didn’t. When they failed, He didn’t. We have comfort in the Man who was damned for us, who rode before our waving palms and cheers that turned to hatred and revulsion.

The truth that we need more than anything is that our God is a God of mercy. He made us, sustains us, and redeems us. He is the Truth, the Alpha and Omega, and our prophet, priest, and king. All Christians, and all people, need this.

The best place to hear about Truth is where He promises to be—in His church. (If you don’t know where to go, here’s a place to start looking.) These days of Holy Week are the most important of the church year on purpose. We go to hear again what the Truth is and what He brings us. We hear about Jesus’ trial, and we think of our own deserved judgment, and how He has changed the verdict. We continue to grapple with what is true in our world, and we turn to face Truth Himself. We doubt, and we pray, “Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief.”

Blessed Maundy Thursday.

To be continued next week.