Of quacks and peddlars

It was GK Chesterton who famously said that when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing; he believes anything. He was thinking primarily about spiritual beliefs, but it has proved true in the twenty-first century West in more other ways than the great man would ever have imagined possible. So an article in The Guardian – My patient swapped chemotherapy for essential oils – reveals that people are rejecting standard medical treatment in favour of what can only be described as “quackery” (the author is an oncologist, so knows what she is talking about). They come to clinics armed with proposals for alternative treatments and therapies that will do nothing for them at all, except allow the cancer to grow further. These alternatives range from magnets that are supposed to attract cancer cells, to wave therapy, herbs and essential oils, and all come with strong online “evidence” that such treatments unfailingly work. But, of course, they unfailingly don’t.

It would seem obvious that magnets are not going to cure cancer, but, as the article points out, in this era of fake news people are losing the ability to tell the truth from the counterfeit. People get their news increasingly from Facebook, and it has been shown that foreign powers can manipulate that, so it is not surprising if Facebook (and other social media) should become the source for medical falsehoods, too. What is doubly tragic is that people are less equipped to deal with such nonsense. The quacks sound so convincing and their stories so appealing, while traditional cancer treatments seem so uncertain and unattractive. We seem to have returned to the days when miracle powders and potions were sold from the back of a wagon by a huckster showman. The only difference is he doesn’t ride into town in a cloud of dust; he appears in your Facebook feed and offers healing with a click.

Spiritual quacks sound convincing, too, and discerning their errors is not always easy. What they prey on is our very natural bias to reject what God says and look for a way that is more accommodating to our unbelief. We don’t want to hear that God will judge us for our sin when we stand before him, so we reject everything that would remind us of that: we convince ourselves that God will not judge us, or that he will bend his rules to allow us in. We refuse to believe that we were made for God and are accountable to him, so we jettison the Bible’s teaching that we were made in God’s image, that we are made for him, and that he has the right to tell us who we are and what we should do. We cannot accept that we need a Saviour above all, so we turn from Jesus Christ and discover there are plenty of people offering alternative saviours.

The apostle Paul met his fair share of religious con-men and no doubt people found it hard to distinguish truth from error in his day, too. There were people in his day who peddled religious teachings like the huckster salesmen. There were spiritual showmen who glamourised the Christian faith and belittled Paul because he was so unimpressive. Paul’s answer to them is that he renounced secret and shameful ways; he resolved never to use deception or distortion. On the contrary, he said the most important thing was to present the truth straightforwardly and honestly, even if others around him looked more successful. He was not afraid of their celebrity line-ups or their exaggerated claims. It was God who spoke the world into being with a word; God could open people’s eyes to the truth with the word about Jesus.

If we are honest, we feel the temptation that Paul is addressing. We feel that our message is weak when compared with the inflated dishonesty of the religious showmen,

and we long to imitate them because we worry that the truth will not be heard. In the Guardian article the oncologist laments that you would think that good communication would be enough for people to reject the Facebook quackery, but it isn't. We, however, have nothing else. Paul insists that it is “by setting forth the truth plainly [that] we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God”. So we must not fall for the temptation of distorting, exaggerating, bigging up, or sexing up the truth, or doing anything else you care to think of to make it more palatable. It is God’s gospel. If we announce it he will speak through it and open people’s eyes.