Forget Politico.
Assume HRC is a liar and disqualified for President.
I do.
Dr. Ben Carson is still in trouble. His backstory is at times unverifiable and at others times doesn’t fit the memory of any other witness. We know he tells a moving story about a Yale class that did not exist as he described it. I will try to demonstrate why what I found on social media and through Google made me less likely to believe Dr. Carson’s retcon of his biography.
I hope Dr. Carson turns out to be essentially honest. I was giving him a hard second look as the nominee, despite concerns about his qualifications. Dr. Carson was a great neurosurgeon. I have always viewed him as a hero . . . and I don’t think he has to be perfect. However, is it too much to ask people to get the story of their life essentially right? (Was he raised in a horrid neighborhood? Was he a violent or bookish kid or both?) Is it too much for doctors not to tout products that also make false health claims (even if you don’t make them yourself)?
Aren’t we held to a higher standard?
But that is less important than this: we needed the secular community to put things together for us. Our gatekeepers failed us and have for years. Dr. Ben Carson and his unfolding story points to a problem, less with Dr. Carson, and more with a Christian Media Complex* that is harming the cause of Christ and many of our celebrities by failing to hold them to high enough standards of accuracy.
His ghostwriter and editor could have fact checked his book and easily discovered his error about Westmoreland meeting him on Memorial Day. That is a small error and likely the product of the passing of time on the part of Dr. Carson, but the kind of fact that is also easiest to get right in an important book about a man’s life.
Jesus had to throw the moneychangers out of the Temple because they were cheating the people of God. We are slowly learning that not even the most basic fact checking or sourcing was done on Dr. Ben Carson’s biography despite his use of a ghostwriter and the presence of an editor. This should embarrass us. Dr. Carson did not meet with General Westmoreland on Memorial Day. He did not get accepted to West Point. Biographical details are proving hard to verify and some (his angry youth) are contradicted by people who knew him at the time.
Did we accept a narrative that fit our beliefs without fact checking? If so, it would not be the first time.
Shouldn’t we give Dr. Carson the benefit of the doubt? Maybe, but sadly we cannot give books published in the CMC the benefit of the doubt. David Barton was able to publish a book on Jefferson that was horrifically wrong and it took heroic effort by scholars like Warren Throckmorton to get it taken out of print and yet much of the CMC still promotes Barton as respectable. The CMC cannot be trusted to get the facts right.
Does it really surprise any of us that a Christian book coming out of the CMC is lightly edited and fact checked? I personally discovered several classical quotations in a Sarah Palin book were spurious. Her book let her down.
Earlier in her Vice-Presidential run, I defended Palin on air (Hugh Hewitt Show), I wanted to believe in her like I want to believe in Dr. Carson. The CMC totally let her down by incompetent ghostwriting. She let herself down by allowing text to be used that she had not read (since it did not exist) to give the appearance of learning she did not have. Shouldn’t we care?
We now know that Dr. Carson was being touted by the Evangelical establishment (including 700 Club shows) while he was pro-choice. We were not told this important fact. Would your church have invited a pro-choice doctor to speak? We know Dr. Carson made an ad for a pro-life group and then claimed he was “deceived” by them into making the ad. Everyone agrees he is personally pro-life now. According to the highly reputable people who made the ad, Dr. Carson was not deceived in making the ad.
Since I personally know one of the people who made the ad, and trust her integrity, I believe that Dr. Carson continues to lie about his “backtracking” on the advertisement. That disqualifies him for me. The problem is not that he changed his mind on abortion, that is good, but that he lied and continues to lie about his relationship with the makers of the commercial. The best thing you can say is that he believes his own spin from the time and that is not comforting given questions about his account of his life.
If you don’t think we have a problem, ask yourself this. Did your church invite Dr. Carson to speak? If so, did his agent tell you he was pro-choice? Would you have paid him to come and fill your pulpit and bought his books in your church lobby if you had known? Shouldn’t you at least have been given that information? Why do you think you were not?
The other problem we have discovered is the widespread tendency of Christian celebrities in the Christian Media Complex (CMC) to endorse dodgy supplements and products. Listen to Christian radio on Saturday where stations sell their time (for money) to dodgy companies making dubious claims. They say they are not responsible, but aren’t you responsible as a Christian not to sell your airtime to fraudsters selling products (royal bee jelly anyone?) known to be hype?
Shouldn’t we expect our leaders to avoid selling their name to such companies?
Mike Huckabee did this. Dr. Carson did. His defenders keep telling me he refused to “read the bad parts” of an endorsement commercial and ran out his contract with the disreputable supplement Mannatech.
Note the ethics of the CMC: you can take money from a group that is making false claims touting them if you don’t make the false claims yourself. Here is a better idea: when you find that the company is dodgy, quit, give them back their money, and withdraw your endorsement. Our name should matter.
Does it always in the CMC?
People write “back of the book” endorsements in a quid pro quo world where too few bother to even Google the qualifications or claims of the writers. For years, young earth creationism has been burdened by “doctors” with diploma mill degrees ruining the reputation of more reputable scholars.
Churches keep hiring the fraudsters assuming any attack on them is from the “liberals.” It isn’t. Our kids grow up to discover that Pastor X had a dodgy degree he kept touting, that a favorite “historian” had no training in history, and that some of our leaders were paid insanely large amounts of money to “minister.” Magically, ministry after ministry discovers the best next-leader is the child of the current leader. Simony and nepotism were hard to root out of the Medieval Church, but we now ignore it altogether.
The Christian Media Complex (CMC) is an interlocking web of for profit and not for profit businesses. It is an industry that will publish books by a fabulist like David Barton and continue to hire him for conferences despite the fact that he lies about his own life and Thomas Jefferson. As one academic friend put it regarding the field of Christian apologetics: “Unfortunately, this lack of ethics is also true within apologetics circles. Plagiarism runs rampant among many looking for celebrity.” He pointed out that this includes many well known people. I sat in a creationist conference where people bemoaned a lack of ethics, but a (fortunately) few defended the tricksters because they were “doing good.” This group worked to clean up the conference, but local churches never really got the word.
One guy went to jail before his road show was stopped.
Should this be so?
Before you buy a book: Google the author. Before you hire a speaker: check out basic claims about his life. Keep an open mind. Dr. Carson’s errors aren’t made better because of the real double standard at play on the Left. When parts of Obama’s biography turned out to be hard to verify, we read that some communities are allowed biographical fictions. We all rightly said: “no.” We are Christians and called to a higher standard.
The sad truth: we cannot trust any world of celebrity: secular or Christian. We cannot trust the spin of agents: secular or Christian. We cannot trust the product, because that is what we are buying: not ministry.
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*The CMC is not one company, but my term for the nexus of companies (for profit and not for profit) to work to serve the people of God. Nothing wrong with that . . . if we are on guard for the corrupting power of money. Many good people and companies work in the CMC.
I have not endorsed any candidate. I am a Republican and will vote for the nominee against HRC.
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